Health/Toxics: Kid-Safe Chemicals

The human race is now polluted with hundreds of industrial chemicals - with little or no understanding of the consequences. Babies are born pre-polluted with as many as 300 industrial chemicals in their bodies when they enter the world.

Our current federal chemical law is clearly failing us. We need reform of the national chemicals regulatory system to protect human health from the thousands of toxic industrial chemicals on the market today.

The current law, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), was passed in 1976 and has never amended since. It is widely regarded as the weakest of all major environmental laws on the books today.

The Act declared safe some 62,000 chemicals already on the market at the time it was passed, even though there were little or no data to support this assumption. Since that time another 20,000 chemicals have been put into commerce in the United States, also with little or no evidence on whether they are safe.

Testing by Environmental Working Group has identified 455 chemicals in people, and again, no one has any idea if these exposures are safe.

We are at a tipping point, where the pollution in people is increasingly associated with a range of serious diseases and conditions from childhood cancer to autism, ADHD, learning deficits, infertility and birth defects. Yet even as our knowledge about the links between chemical exposure and human disease grows, the government has almost no authority to protect people from even the most hazardous chemicals on the market.