Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

The Independent Online asks "How Toxic is your bathroom?"

On average, we each use nine personal care products a day containing 126 different ingredients. Such "safety" testing as exists looks for reactions, such as skin redness, rashes or stinging, but does not investigate potential long-term problems for either humans or the environment. Yet the chemicals that go into products such as shampoos and hand creams are not trace contaminants. They are the basic ingredients.

Absorbed into the body, they can be stored in fatty tissue or organs such as the liver, kidney, reproductive organs and brain. Cosmetics companies complain of unfounded hysteria, but scientists are finding industrial plasticisers such as phthalates in urine, preservatives known as parabens in breast-tumour tissue, and antibacterials such as Triclosan and fragrance chemicals like the hormone-disrupting musk xylene in human breast milk. Medical research is proving that fragrances can trigger asthma; that the detergents in shampoos can damage eye tissue; and that hair-dye chemicals can cause bladder cancer and lymphoma. An even greater number of substances in personal care products are suspected to present potential risks to human health from this known effect on animals.

The discussion regarding the unknown consequences of the "cocktail effect" made me think of "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" where exposure to Galaxy Glue on top of shampoo, laundry detergent, orange juice, etc. makes Lily Tomlin shrink to miniature proportions.

Say, maybe they could market it for weight loss!

Seriously though, this is a perfect example of the problems that can be caused by a lack of animal testing! As horrible as animal testing can be, is it really worse than not testing at all? Or testing on people, who will almost exclusively be poor people participating for the money? *shrug* It's a difficult problem.

Oh, and this month is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but even though it's not typically a problem getting men to be breast aware, they may be looking in the wrong places!

The cancer fund's Amanda Mullins says while men make up a very small percentage of new patients each year, they have to understand that it can happen to them. "Breast cancer can occur in men as well, men at any age can develop breast cancer... So male breast cancer makes up less than 1 per cent of all cases of breast cancer, but we still very much encourage men to be breast aware."

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