‘We Give Manufactured Chemicals More Rights Than We Give Criminal Defendants’

We must do more to protect kids

by Jim Morris

Over the past half-century, childhood cancer in the United States is up 35%. Pediatric asthma has tripled. And pediatric obesity has quadrupled.

Why? An article by some of the world’s top health researchers published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine points a finger at the estimated 350,000 synthetic chemicals and plastics that permeate the planet.

“Production has expanded 50-fold since 1950, is currently increasing by about 3% per year, and is projected to triple by 2050. Environmental pollution and human exposure are widespread,” the paper’s authors write. “Yet manufacture of synthetic chemicals and plastics is subject to few legal or policy constraints … Fewer than 20% have been tested for toxicity, and fewer still for toxic effects in infants and children.”

The law that regulates chemicals in the U.S. — the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, or TSCA — is “broken legislation,” the authors argue, because it puts the onus on the government to prove that a chemical is dangerous rather than on the manufacturer to prove that it’s safe. A comparable law in Europe is “ostensibly more rigorous” by requiring some pre-market screening of new chemicals, they write, but is riddled with loopholes and ultimately “fails to constrain chemical production.”

“We’re calling for stronger laws at the national levels which overturn the presumption that chemicals are harmless until they’re absolutely proven to cause harm,” the paper’s lead author, Dr. Philip Landrigan of Boston College, said in an interview with Public Health Watch. “It’s a wrong-headed approach. We give manufactured chemicals more rights than we give criminal defendants.”

The scientific literature is filled with examples of chemically induced damage among children and young adults: babies born with flipper-like appendages because their mothers took the sedative thalidomide in early pregnancy, children whose IQs were lowered by exposure to fumes from leaded gasoline, young women who developed adenocarcinoma of the vagina because their mothers took diethylstilbestrol, or DES, to prevent miscarriage.

And yet, the New England Journal article notes, “Few associations between manufactured chemicals and disease in children have been addressed by regulatory action. Hazards that have been recognized have typically been ignored or downplayed, and the responsible chemicals allowed to remain in use with no or limited restrictions.”

Wendy E. Wagner, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law and one of the paper’s 23 co-authors, said in an interview that the Environmental Protection Agency has made headway on some of the worst chemicals since TSCA was amended by Congress in 2016. Wagner cited as examples the EPA’s recently announced bans on the carcinogenic solvents trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene.

But the amendments did not address “the larger universe” of untested chemicals, she said.

“The statute is set up in such a backwards, counterproductive way that the ability to do it better is easy to imagine,” Wagner said. “I cannot overstate what a disaster TSCA is with respect to protecting the public from unsafe chemicals.”

As it stands, she said, manufacturers are under no obligation to test chemicals for safety before they reach the market — or even justify the need for those chemicals. Too often, toxicity data is hidden from the public under “trade secrets” claims improperly granted by the EPA.

“There are many ways we could make substantial improvements to the law,” Wagner said. “All we need is the motivation to do so.”

Among the other solutions discussed in the paper: 

• Requiring independent safety testing of, and biomonitoring for, synthetic chemicals.
• Using “chemical footprinting” to track and reduce reliance on harmful substances in supply chains.
• Investing in and promoting “safer molecules, formulations and eco-friendly manufacturing.”

In a written statement, the chemical industry’s main trade group, the American Chemistry Council, said, “We provide data to inform decision-making and continue to work with EPA, [the Food and Drug Administration] and other federal agencies to strengthen our regulatory system and help ensure that policies and decisions are based on the best-available science and the weight of the evidence. In fact, chemicals in commerce are subject to government oversight … under more than a dozen federal laws and regulations. Today, any chemistry introduced or imported into the U.S. must undergo rigorous review and approval processes by federal agencies, such as EPA and FDA.”

The EPA said in a statement that the Biden administration “has gotten our chemical safety work back on track.” Rules put in place “under amended TSCA are protecting millions of people — both workers and consumers — from toxic chemicals,” the agency said. “And, we’ve finally got the infrastructure and policies in place to keep this momentum going with the chemicals we’re currently evaluating … This administration has also made the TSCA risk evaluation process more sustainable. We’re going to prioritize five chemicals per year for risk evaluation because that’s a more realistic and achievable pace for our program given our current resources.”