The Big Bang of the nationwide “forever chemicals” crisis was the revelation in 2001 that PFOA, a toxic compound used to make Teflon, had contaminated the drinking water for 70,000 people near a DuPont factory in West Virginia. Pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency forced DuPont and other companies to phase out PFOA, and they agreed not to use it after 2015.
It’s been 18 months since the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled its plan to address the crisis of the toxic fluorinated chemicals known as PFAS, which a new peer-reviewed study by EWG scientists estimates have likely contaminated the drinking water of more than 200 million Americans.
As reported by The New York Times today, newly released emails show that in 2015 and 2016, Food and Drug Administration scientists urged the agency to ban toxic formaldehyde in hair-smoothing products, often referred to as “Brazilian blowout” treatments. The communications, obtained by EWG, also document increasing frustration among FDA scientists about the agency’s efforts to regulate toxic chemicals in cosmetics.
For more than a decade, the Food and Drug Administration and the cosmetics industry have known that keratin hair-smoothing treatments – commonly called “Brazilian blowout” treatments – release unsafe amounts of formaldehyde into the air, putting consumers and salon workers at risk.
The Senate will almost certainly vote next week to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Because of the way she sees the role of government, her confirmation could mark the end of modern environmental law as we know it.
This week EWG released an analysis showing that in California’s majority-Latino communities, 5.25 million people drink tap water contaminated with nitrate at levels at or above the federal limit.
More than 22 million American households now qualify for federal food assistance, according to the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service – an increase of almost 3.4 million households since last year. From April 2019 through July of this year, that’s an 18 percent increase in the number of households struggling with hunger.
Seven months into the Covid-19 pandemic, most states still have not issued mandatory protections for farmworkers, even as cases continue to rise, according to an updated EWG analysis of state regulations
Today I wrote to Dr. Robert Redfield calling on him to resign as the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It was not a letter I wrote lightly. But with the events of the past few months, the decision – and the need – to write it could not have been clearer.
The devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic has never been clearer.
One in five American children are struggling with hunger. Thousands of food and farm workers have contracted COVID-19 and hundreds have died. Thousands of small family farms are facing economic ruin.
A study of almost 50,000 births in Minnesota is reportedly the first to establish a cause-and-effect link between high levels of the fluorinated “forever chemicals” known as PFAS in drinking water and higher rates of infertility, premature birth and low birth weight babies.
