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U.S. (finally) Labels Formaldehyde "Known Human Carcinogen"
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Monthly Archive
Cosmetics Industry To Disavow Hair Straighteners
By David Andrews, Ph.D., EWG senior scientist
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 Group detailed in an April 2011 report, Flat-Out Risky, the personal toll of banishing natural waves can be high. Formaldehyde hair straighteners expose salon personnel and customers to a cloud of carcinogenic, allergenic formaldehyde vapor. EWG's investigation turned up numerous complaints of hair loss, blisters, burning eyes, noses and throats, headaches and vomiting.
The Cosmetics Review Panel's conclusion that formaldehyde hair straighteners are risky is couched as tentative, pending a 60-day comment period and a September meeting to formalize the stand. This panel is not known for bold or forward-thinking action: in more than 35 years, it has only found nine chemicals unsafe for use in cosmetics. Formaldehyde's health dangers have been recognized for decades.
Despite numerous warnings about the chemical's toxic properties, in 2007, a handful of small businesses in the U.S. and overseas began making and marketing so-called "keratin treatments." That year, Allure Magazine reported its own lab tests showing that these straighteners were loaded with formaldehyde. Yet neither the industry nor the federal Food and Drug Administration made a move to disavow these products.
Big companies scramble to avert new rules
Why is the cosmetics industry coming down hard on formaldehyde use? One reason might be a health hazard warning issued to salon workers last April by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (i.e., writing - very clearly- on the wall). Another might be scattered state regulatory efforts. Or the Obama adminstration's June 10 declaration that formaldehyde is a potent carcinogen.
Our money is on politics. We think the mainstream industry is hustling to convince Congress as well as consumers that it can play by safety rules and discipline bad actors. Can it be a coincidence that the industry panel acted just four days after the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2011 was dropped in the hopper by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.). With Congress considering writing rules for cosmetics formulations, the industry's major players apparently don't want to be burdened defending the small, indefensible formaldehyde hair straightener business.
Thank you for smoking for using formaldehyde-based hair-straighteners
Cast out as pariahs and rogues, three hair-straightener makers -- Cadiveu, Keratin Complex and Marcia Teixeira -- have taken a page from the playbook of the tobacco industry and formed their own trade group, the Professional Keratin Smoothing Council. According to its website this group boasts it represents "potentially one of the most lucrative categories to ever hit the industry" and to be "committed to the safety of salon professionals and consumers."
Notably absent is GIB, LLC, the Los Angeles-based maker of Brazilian Blowout, now the target of a consumer protection lawsuit by the California Attorney General's office. The council is looking for new members. You can join at pksc.org and pay dues on a sliding scale from $15,000 for a manufacturer to free if you are a "consumer supporter."
The council's scientific advisor is Doug Schoon, a chemist who has consulted for the industry and argued that the hair straighteners do not contain formaldehyde but rather methylene glycol. The American Chemistry Council, the voice of the American chemical industry, has dismissed this claim as nonsense on grounds that methylene glycol is aqueous formaldehyde, and to measure the formaldehyde content you add both the gaseous and aqueous forms. The Cosmetics Review Panel agrees.
FDA sees no evil, consumers left to protect themselves, again
Yet the FDA remains curiously mute on the issue. At the meeting in March, FDA officials said the agency still did not yet have enough information to go after formaldehyde in hair straighteners.
If you've gotten tired of waiting for the FDA (who wouldn't?), you can look up hair straightening products in EWG's brand-by-brand safety analysis. You'll also find a handy review of all the straightening options when you decide to ditch the formaldehyde.
On Propaganda: Fracking Fun for the Very Young
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 inquisitive people on the planet. My own three-year old peppers me with needling questions constantly, asking follow-ups until she gets the answer she's looking for - like a prosecutor during cross examination.
It's exhausting.
I'm fairly certain that Lily (that's my daughter) would challenge Talisman Terry and Chesapeake Charlie with a withering - and very logical, honestly truthseeking - line of questioning (like: "is it safe?", "how do you know it's safe?", "why do you put dangerous chemicals in the ground?", "why don't you want to tell people what the chemicals are?"). If the opportunity presented itself, I'd happily make her available.
When an industry needs to go after young children to reverse a public relations disaster (and carefully cultivate future customers), it's a pretty clear sign they're getting desperate.
Good things kids aren't that gullible. Were Congress just as withering.
PS - Grab some crayons and download the whole coloring book. It might make you laugh, but it might just as easily make you cry.
Fracking Hearing: Standing room only and plenty contentious
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.
Banner-wielding "fractivists" -- people who oppose shale gas development -- and industry supporters, some of them with expenses funded by the industry group Energy in Depth, shouted at and over each other as policemen stood guard.
Well before the doors of the Washington and Jefferson College auditorium opened, tempers flared when conference organizers told the crowd that the list of people who would be permitted to address the panel was already filled, mostly with fracking supporters. That decision was later reversed, more audience members were allowed to speak, and the hearing, originally scheduled to run from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., lasted past 11 p.m.
People had a lot to say about fracking - much of it heated
The building's front steps became a second a podium from which fractivists told their stories and voiced their fears and frustrations. One man claimed that a gas drilling company had poisoned his water. "Prove it!" shouted a self-identified drilling supporter and gas worker. The pair and their adherents fell into a heated exchange.
Inside the 400-seat auditorium, the standing-room-only crowd bordered on chaos as people rose to fight for their livelihoods, their land and their water. Fractivists chanted "Our water, our land" and "Save Pennsylvania, end fracking now," to be met with a loud chorus of boos. At one point, a bearded man took to the stage and waved a large American flag to protest fracking.
When Deutch and other panel members introduced themselves, members of the crowd began to shout at them to disclose their financial ties to the natural gas industry. Only one, Kathleen McGinty of Weston Solutions, obliged.
Some audience members gave first-hand accounts of the toll fracking has taken on their lives. One woman claimed her 70-acre farm was contaminated by gas drilling and said her family now has to buy bottled water. She held up respirators her children wear because their air has been polluted by nearby flaring emissions.
Other speakers detailed mysterious deaths of pets and animals in areas near active well sites or condemned hydraulic fracturing as an unregulated and dangerous practice. Some called out the panel members for their conflicts of interests.
Supporters of fracking described the economic benefits of natural gas development and its implications for energy independence. A number recounted how they were forced to leave their hometowns for lack of work but returned when drilling created jobs.
A few people said they had leased out their land but now regretted that decision because their property values had plummeted and they were spending large sums for medical care. In the end, they said, they had lost more money than they gained. A mother tearfully recalled moving her children to a relative's home after they fell ill from what she believed to be drilling-related pollution.
Both camps, eager to square off in a public forum, mobilized an impressive show of force. Through it all, the panel members sat stoically, their stony expressions seeming out of place and out of touch.
As fractured as the rock beneath our feet
The scene in that auditorium-turned-battleground is likely to be repeated at the upcoming panel hearings and at public meetings across the country. As one man, who said his family farm has tested positive for drilling contaminants, put it, hydraulic fracturing "has left us as fractured as the rock beneath our feet."
Feel like doing something? Speaking up? If you're on Facebook, you can easily add your name to our request to Secretary of Energy Chu to reconfigure the fracking panel to be more impartial. Do it here, now.
Half-Baked: FDA's New Sunscreen Regulations Fall Short
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 - refers primarily to UVB rays, which burn the skin. It has little to do with UVA rays, which don't burn but are more penetrating than UVB and can inflict sun damage. The FDA has established its first-ever rules for the use of the term "broad spectrum" to indicate that a sunscreen protects from both UVA and UVB rays. Yet on this point, FDA might as well have let industry write its own standard.
As we see see it, the U.S. now has the weakest UVA standard in the world. The FDA's pass/fail system for 'broad spectrum' sets the bar so low that the vast majority of sunscreens clear it with flying colors. Little incentive exists now for improving their effectiveness.
Even worse, products that pass the test are allowed to claim that they reduce the risk of skin cancer. In fact the data show that cancer protection from sunscreens, particularly mediocre sunscreens, is not as strong as you'd think.
Now here's what the rules do NOT do:
• Establish a definitive list of active ingredients considered safe and effective for over-the-counter sunscreens. The FDA is silent about the toxicity of ingredients such as oxybenzone, a suspected hormone disruptor used in many sunscreens identified in EWG's Sunscreens 2011 report, and retinyl palmitate, a vitamin-A derivative that government studies suggest is photo-carcinogenic.
• Approve new sun-filtering ingredients that may be more effective and less toxic than those now on the U.S. market.
• Bar high-SPF claims. The FDA has said that high-SPF sunscreens have negligible benefits and may give consumers a false sense of security, leading them to linger in the sun for too long. FDA is considering what to do about this problem. In other countries with sunscreen standards, SPF values are capped.
The FDA has made some progress here, but it must push ahead and finalize other rules so that consumers know exactly what they're getting when they pay for sun protection.
Try baking something with half a recipe and you won't like the results. FDA's actions are commendable, but the agency must fulfill its promise to establish comprehensive regulations for over-the-counter sunscreens.
U.S. (finally) Labels Formaldehyde "Known Human Carcinogen"
By Paul Pestano, Research Analyst
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 process to determine whether EPA should declare categorically that the chemical causes cancer in humans.
That may change now that the federal government's scientific community has taken a definitive position with the publication of the 12th Report on Carcinogens.
Most of the 4.4 tons of formaldehyde produced in the U.S. annually goes to make adhesives for home construction materials such as plywood, particleboard, fiberboard and laminate flooring. The chemical is also used in embalming fluid and preservatives.
In recent years, a small but troubling market developed formaldehyde-based hair straighteners, the best-known of which is Brazilian Blowout. Environmental Working Group and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration warned hair salon workers and customers last April of significant health risks from exposure to formaldehyde in these hair products.
Regulatory Delay
The EPA issued a draft assessment in 1991 addressing evidence that formaldehyde causes cancer, but the chemical and wood products industries have successfully stalled any final determinations. A 2010 New Yorker article described the industry's substantial contributions to two senators who are largely responsible for the regulatory delay.
In 2004, Senator James Inhofe, R-Okla., then the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, demanded that EPA withhold a definitive statement on formaldehyde while the National Cancer Institute updated its information about incidence of cancer among workers exposed to the chemical.
In 2009, Senator David Vitter, R-La., held up the nomination of an assistant EPA administrator until the EPA agreed that the National Academies of Science should review the cancer assessment.
Both senators received donations from large petrochemical and forest product companies and their lobbyists.
Meanwhile, an amendment to the federal Toxic Substances Control Act signed by President Obama in 2010 set limits on formaldehyde emissions from composite wood products. This rule will go into effect in 2013.
Formaldehyde in Cosmetics
Last April, EWG released a report on the presence of formaldehyde in hair straighteners like the popular Brazilian Blowout. EWG found that these products, including some marketed as "formaldehyde-free," released large concentrations of gaseous formaldehyde inhaled by salons workers and customers. EWG obtained federal Food and Drug Administration "adverse event" complaints through several Freedom of Information Act requests that revealed that numerous individuals have reported severe reactions to these products.
Inexplicably, FDA continues to drag its feet on hair straighteners, even though it has known of the issue since 2007. It has so far declined to take action against companies making deceptive claims about their hair straighteners' formaldehyde content or to address related health concerns. FDA officials have said only that they are studying the situation.
EWG has petitioned FDA to act more assertively on chemical hair straighteners to protect public health.
Arsenic Found in... Chicken
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 drug.
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.
Last Thanksgiving we discussed how industrial and agricultural uses of arsenic products leads to contaminated poultry.
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 parasites, artificially promote growth and stain chicken flesh pink since 1944 when FDA approved its use. Recent research prompted the agency to update its position after finding inorganic arsenic, a known human carcinogen, in edible parts of the birds. The findings prompted Pfizer to pull Roxarsone off the market in the U.S. (the European Union banned arsenic in poultry feed in 1999).
Unfortunately, Roxarsone is just one of the animal drugs and antibiotics routinely used in factory-produced chicken. Alpharma also produces another arsenic-based drug, Nitarsone, which remains on the market.
We stand by our previous advice to minimize your exposure to antibiotics in chicken by seeking out certified organically-fed, humanely raised, antibiotic- and hormone-free poultry.
Still curious? FDA has an FAQ page to learn more.
Chicken image: Copyright © Fir0002/Flagstaffotos, GNU Free Documentation License.
