carcinogen
egrossman | June 26, 2013In 1989, Massachusetts enacted a remarkable and landmark law known as the Toxics Use Reduction Act (TURA). Supported by both environmentalists and industry, and passed unanimously by the state legislature, TURA established toxics use reduction as Massachusetts’ preferred strategy for pollution prevention, and for reducing public, occupational and environmental exposure to hazardous chemicals. The law requires in-state businesses to report on their use of toxic chemicals. It also established programs to support state industries’ toxics use reduction efforts. In the two decades since the bill’s…
egrossman | April 11, 2012By Elizabeth Grossman
While the US Supreme Court was debating the Affordable Care Act, the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee Health Subcommittee held a hearing to examine the current federal oversight of cosmetics and personal care product safety. The hearing revealed that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency that oversees the more than eight billion such products now sold annually in the US, knows astonishingly little about these products' ingredients. This data gap - perhaps better described as a data chasm - is compounded by the inadequacy…
egrossman | June 22, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
On June 10th the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Toxicology Program released the department's 12th Report on Carcinogens, adding eight new substances to the overall list that now includes 240 compounds (or classes of compounds) known or reasonably anticipated to be human carcinogens. Two of these eight - the industrial chemical formaldehyde and the botanical compounds known as aristolochic acids - are listed as known human carcinogens. Six others - styrene, certain inhalable glass wool fibers, o-nitrotoluene, captafol, cobalt-tungsten…
jgoldman | April 21, 2010This seems to have become unofficial volcano week, here at ScienceBlogs. If you haven't been following the coverage of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption at Erik Klemetti's Eruptions blog, you should consider doing so. Also, Dr. Isis has a post on how the eruption has fouled up all nuclear imaging plans at her place of research, and Ethan explains how volcanic lightening works.
Our benevolent overlords have further commented: "Eyjafjallajökull's ill temper has been an unexpected object lesson in the complexity and interconnectedness of our environment, technology, and social networks." To that I…