Anyone who slathers on lotions, deodorants, and shampoos can now search an online database to find out how safe those products are for their health. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Sarah Hulett reports:
Transcript
Anyone who slathers on lotions, deodorants, and shampoos can now search an online
database to find out how safe those products are for their health. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Sarah Hulett reports:
The Environmental Working Group looked at the ingredients of more than 14,000
products, and it rated the safety of those products by matching their ingredients with
government listings of toxic chemicals. Consumers can search the database by product
type or by brand name.
Jane Houlihan is vice president for science at the Environmental Working Group. She
says the database is important because federal regulators in the U.S. leave safety testing
up to the cosmetics industry.
“What we have right now is a system where individual companies have the ability to
decide what’s safe enough to sell. We don’t have a national safety standard for cosmetics.
So safety really varies widely.”
Some of the products that have raised health concerns include dark hair dyes – which
some scientists have linked to bladder cancer, and there are concerns that chemicals used
in nail polishes could cause birth defects in baby boys.
For the GLRC, I’m Sarah Hulett.