President's Cancer Panel

I regularly read Nicholas D. Kristof's New York Times essays. They are informative and interesting. Recently he had an essay on the President's Cancer Panel. This is a great article, mostly because he has given the panel's report a much wider audience than it otherwise would have had. I've noticed mentions to the report on LinkedIn as well as by Seventh Generation.

So what's the report about? You can Read the Report yourself. Although the report is 240 pages, there is a nice executive summary that's worth taking a look at. Basically, as Kristof point out, the new thing about this report is that they essentially support many of the same things the organic food movement has been advocating. They also suggest testing for radon (you can buy a detector here: Safety Siren Pro Series HS71512 3 Radon Gas Detector, or just get a test kit here: Pro-Lab RA100 Household Radon Gas Test Kit), and microwaving food in glass containers rather than plastic.

The report states: “Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.” This exactly what many organic and green advocates have been complaining about for years.

The report also says that "Children Are at Special Risk for Cancer Due to Environmental Contaminants and Should be Protected." This is one reason that many women first become interested in organic products and green cleaning products when they get pregnant. We know this is true, but it's more than just lead paint that we need to be worried about.

The biggest problem, however, is that these 80,000 chemicals mix in all kinds of different ways that it's impossible to study thoroughly. Even products that are safe in isolation may not be when combined with other chemicals.

However, now the American Cancer Society has come out in criticism of the report. The New York Times covers this side of the story too. The American Cancer Society is right to point out that there is not enough hard evidence for linking a lot of cancers to environmental causes.

However, my mother died of cancer and the doctors never told us what caused the cancer. Sure, there's no conclusive evidence that it was caused by this or that combination of chemicals, but that seems to me to be the point that the President's Cancer Panel is trying to make. We don't know, but we should be trying to find out.

Even though we are not just going to stop using these 80,000 chemicals, we can start to do something now. We know that there are dangerous chemicals in our household cleaners. We also know that there are safer alternatives: Method, Seventh Generation, etc. Besides these commercial products, with a little searching we can find ways to making our own green cleaning products out of common household items such as baking soda, vinegar, salt, and hydrogen peroxide.