Most people are - by now - well aware that overexposure to formaldehyde is unsafe. From the FEMA trailer fiasco (remember Katrina?) to the Obama administration’s recent decision to classify formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen, it’s hard to not know you should avoid formaldehyde-laced products.
On June 28th, the Cosmetic Ingredient Review panel, a self-policing body created by the mainstream cosmetics industry in hopes of averting federal regulation, belatedly declared formaldehyde to be unsafe in “cosmetic products that will be heated.” That’s code for formaldehyde-based hair-straighteners, the best known of which is Brazilian Blowout. Salon workers use hot flatirons and blow dryers to force the chemical mixture to penetrate the hair, where it forms chemical bonds, allowing the hair to be reshaped stick-straight (which people are getting sick for).
EWG investigation details straightener dangers
As Environmental Working…
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By Alex Formuzis, Father of Two and EWG V-P for Media Relations
The natural gas industry has lost much support among adults who live in communities where fracking has left the water undrinkable and home values plummeting, but all is not lost. The frackers have set their sights on children, who are much more trusting. And like coloring books. Brilliant. [That's a friendly "fracosaurus" to the right, from the coloring book.]
“Let’s keep in mind our audience. If you’re talking age 9 or younger, you can’t get into the questions like, ‘What is in fracking fluid?’” said Natalie Cox, Talisman Energy’s head of U.S. communications to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Erich Schwartzel.
“If we were making a presentation to the governor in Harrisburg,” she continues, “we’d get into technical details. But we wouldn’t give him a coloring book, either.”
Too bad. He might like it.
We should test this theory. I know dozens of children between the ages of 3 and 9 who are some of the most…
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By Leeann Brown, Shannon Morgan and Alex Rindler, EWG Staff
Following up on last week’s contentious hearing in Washington, Pa., the U.S. Energy department has scheduled two all-day sessions for Tuesday, June 28, and Wednesday, July 13, to listen to people concerned about controversial hydraulic fracturing operations in the Appalachian shale gas fields.
Longer meeting than expected
The department’s advisory panel, chaired by John Deutch, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, seemed caught off guard by the intense debate that forced last Monday’s field hearing to expand from two to more than four hours.
By: Thomas Cluderay, EWG staff attorney and David Andrews, Ph.D., EWG senior scientist
Imagine grabbing a cookbook to find the perfect recipe for key lime pie to present at your summer barbeque. Thumbing through the pages, you locate an inviting entry. Only there are some problems.
The recipe starts off the way you’d expect. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Attach blades to mixer. But then there’s nothing about what ingredients to use in the filling, let alone the piecrust. Defeated, you head to the frozen dessert aisle.
This pretty much captures the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s new rules for over-the-counter sunscreens - a step in the right direction, but not enough advice to help consumers pick sunscreens that are truly safe and effective.
The new rules ban the use of the misleading terms “sunblock,” “waterproof” and “sweat-proof.” No sun protection product can honestly promise to block all harmful rays or not to wash off.
The term SPF - sun protection factor -…
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After decades of debate, the Obama administration last week classified formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen, a label that is likely to advance regulatory steps to restrict this widely used hazardous chemical. The move came as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released the long-awaited 12th Report on Carcinogens, a Congressionally mandated report assembled by the National Toxicology Program of the National Institutes of Health.
The new report highlights animal and human studies that have produced evidence associating formaldehyde with an increased risk of nasopharyngeal and sinonasal cancers and myeloid leukemia. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, classified formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen in 2006.
The Environmental Protection Agency has expressed concern about formaldehyde’s cancer-causing potential for many years but is still embroiled in a lengthy review…
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By: Margot Pagan and Senior Scientist Rebecca Sutton, PhD
Did you think you were eating a carcinogen along with your favorite chicken sandwich last week? Probably not, but a new Food and Drug Administration study has found arsenic in chickens treated with 3-Nitro® (also known as Roxarsone), a commonly used, arsenic-based animal antibiotic.
Don’t let that completely ruin your appetite — as a result of FDA’s tests, Alpharma, a subsidiary of Pfizer Inc., is voluntarily suspending U.S. sales of Roxarsone for chickens within 30 days.
Keep in mind - arsenic is a widespread contaminant in water, air, soil and other foods. Yes, that’s a bit daunting, but it shouldn’t deter us from seeking to eliminate unnecessary pollution sources, such as arsenic-laced chicken feed.
Roxarsone has been a major contributor to arsenic pollution. It has been used to kill intestinal…
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Every year about this time my friends want to me to tell them exactly which sunscreen to buy. They want the one that works the best to protect skin with the least toxic ingredients. And who can blame them?
The thing is, I recommend a hat, shade, sunglasses and long sleeves, which is not at all what they’re after. Our cultural norm is to slather our (very) bare skin with sunscreen and assume we’re “covered.” But of course we can’t duck and cover all summer - especially with kids who are, and should be - outside playing. So I tell them what EWG discovered when we researched this year’s sunscreen products - the highlights and the red flags:
THE HIGHLIGHTS
More recommended sunscreens
EWG recommends 1 in 5 of more than 600 beach and sport sunscreens, compared to 1 in 12 last year. Not because sunscreen makers are producing more superior products; because you told us you wanted more options for safer, more effective sunscreens, we went out…
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Last year I cut small squares of foam from my sons’ car seats, our glider rocker and my breastfeeding pillow, wrapped them in foil to prevent contamination and mailed them off to Duke University for chemical analysis. What the researchers there turned up is now part of a just-released study that found a startling number of toxic fire retardant chemicals in common baby products.
This isn’t the first time I’ve studied fire retardants and children. A few years ago I documented the presence of these persistent and toxic chemicals in people. Used to slow the ignition of polyurethane foam (which is pretty flammable), these substances (known as polybrominated diethyl ethers or PBDEs) were taken off the U.S. market in 2006 because they were shown to be toxic to lab animals and, ultimately, to people. Studies by EWG and others confirmed that they were in the bodies of every American. We even found them in umbilical cord blood, which supplies…
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Energy secretary Stephen Chu claims that his panel studying the safety
and environmental dangers of natural gas hydraulic fracturing is
“diverse” and “respected.”
Respected, yes. Diverse, hardly. Six of the seven panelists have financial ties to the oil and gas industry. It looks as if the Obama administration has already concluded the fracking is safe and won’t endanger the environment — and is looking for a few prominent people who’ll say so.
Let’s take a closer look:
Panel chair John Deutch is on the board of Cheniere Energy, Inc., a liquefied natural gas drilling company that paid him $882,000 from 2006 through 2009. Schlumberger, Ltd., one of the world’s three largest hydraulic fracturing companies, paid Deutch $563,000 in 2006 and 2007. Deutch is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as a director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Stephen Holditch is an engineering committee chairman at Matador Resources, an oil…
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U.S. pediatricians are putting their considerable muscle behind the calls for Congress to overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a failed federal law that has exposed millions of children, beginning in the womb, to an untold number of toxic chemicals.
EWG President Ken Cook welcomed the pediatricians into this important effort to protect children’s health:
“When the nation’s pediatricians sound the alarm, it’s time for everyone to act. These are the doctors who see and treat more and more children with autism, ADHD, cancer and other health problems that are…
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By David Andrews, Ph.D., EWG senior scientist 
