Over the past half-century, childhood cancer in the United States is up 35%. Pediatric asthma has tripled. And pediatric obesity has quadrupled.
Source: Public Health Watch, By Jim Morris
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.”
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