In a typically misguided effort, the organization Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), which purportedly advocates for public health, testified to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that there should be more stringent regulation of the supposedly dangerous chemicals in our environment. In a hearing yesterday regarding the Safe Chemicals Act, which would substantially amend the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), HCWH claimed that chemical exposure has had an increasingly adverse impact on health throughout the country.
According to HCWH, chronic disease rates have been on the rise for decades as a result of environmental exposure to chemicals. Among the evidence they cite: Leukemia and other childhood cancers have risen over 20 percent since 1975, breast cancer diagnoses increased by 40 percent between 1973 and 1998, and asthma rates doubled from 1980 to 1995. Yet ACSH's Dr. Ruth Kava quickly points out the flaws in this reasoning, noting that those years over which breast cancer diagnoses were increasing were the same years where mammograms were becoming available; it simply became easier to diagnose the disease. Further, with a hundred or so different types of cancer, observing an increase (however slight) in one or a few does not represent a cause-and-effect situation. These groups never note that cancer rates have actually been declining across the board for many years now, she concludes.
When these activist spokesmen trumpet such statistics, they know they're talking to the public and not the scientists, who would quickly see the flaws in their arguments, notes ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. The main reason they want to reform TSCA is because it s 35 years old, so they assume it must be obsolete. Yet they re not specifying what it is that needs to be changed, or identifying anyone who has actually been harmed by these chemicals because there aren t any such people.
