ACSH staffers were disappointed to learn that a report by the non-profit environmental group Michigan Network for Children’s Environmental Health, including veteran chemophobe activist Dr. Ted Schettler, needlessly blames environmental “toxins” for creating nearly six billion dollars in Michigan child health costs. The economic analysis was released in time to “coincide” with hearings for the Toxic Chemicals Safety Act of 2010, intended to amend the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. The analysis assessed the direct and indirect costs of four childhood diseases — lead poisoning, asthma, pediatric cancer, and neurodevelopmental disorders — and concluded that environmental chemicals pose an expensive public health threat.
“Assessing the costs of ‘toxins’ as causative factors in these conditions is fraught with interpretive vagueness,” argues ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. “While lead poisoning is an environmental problem, although a declining one, the other three ailments have minimal links to environmental chemical exposure. Asthma, for example, has only the most tentative links to environmental factors period. And now pediatric cancer is apparently being linked to trace level chemicals without any scientific evidence. The Michigan Network for Children’s Environmental Health has inappropriately conflated everything under the childhood toxin umbrella.”
