Fraught With Danger

Aren't we just the most arrogant lot? As custodians and managers of our environment we haven't done a very good job. We're just so eager to explore, to plumb the depths of experience, to absorb knowledge, to fashion experiments, to manipulate resources, to take unto ourselves all that this earth and our lives and lifestyles can possibly provide for us. We dabble in chemical witchcraft, never quite understanding the end result, but celebrating the perceived successes.

Pandora's box of chemicals, additives, toxins.

So here we are, as living carbon-based tissues, sinews, muscles, synapses and addled brains, polluting and corrupting our environment and in the process and through that ongoing manoeuvre, our very bodies. Our talented scientists have extracted and synthesized all manner of chemicals and they are everywhere around us. In the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. All the commercially products available to us and which we so enthusiastically utilize.

In the space of a half-century, 70,000 to 100,000 various chemicals have been produced and introduced into world markets. Approximately one thousand, five hundred additional chemicals are added to that arsenal each and every year. Aren't we marvellously enterprising? Look at us, we're so clever and industrious, there are no secrets in this world that our scientists cannot unravel.

Thank you so very much. As a result, and surely predictably, our bodies contain unprecedented amounts - not mere traces - of, for example, lead, arsenic, mercury, PCBs, PBDEs (flame retardant banned in many places but not yet in Canada) along with a pharmaceutical dispensary-worth of additional chemicals indisputably linked to cancers, birth defects and neurological diseases. Present in my bloodstream. And yours.

In Dubai in 2006 many governments in the west signed onto an International Strategic Approach to International Chemical Management. As appears usual of late, the European Union is leading the way with their own particular program for regulation named Regulation on Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals, requiring industry to prove the safety of their product before being placed on the market.

Um, makes sense doesn't it? Why is it that we are so trusting that we have always believed our governments, acting in our best interests, have already been doing this kind of thing. That our federal departments of health and public safety have been working within a long established protocol to protect the public from the effects of harmful, toxic substances? Aren't we just so naive, after all!

For it is only now, under our current Conservative-led minority government that Health Canada has been tasked with getting serious about the incredible proliferation of chemicals that circulate within Canada and are available in the marketplace. Health Canada is currently testing five thousand Canadians for chemical contamination. And a recent U.S. study found many of its test subjects testing positive with rocket fuel chemicals in their bodies, among other toxins.

Under the European Union's REACH program, just initiated, every company must register chemicals sold there, and they must reveal the chemical composition and toxicity of their products, financing their own toxicity studies. To be entered into a public registry. And until the producing company can prove the safety of their product, it cannot be placed on the market. In the European Union.

As for us, our umbrella law for chemical regulation is the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, passed in 1999. Under which all new chemicals produced in or imported into Canada since 1994 must be assessed for health and environmental effects. Not by the manufacturer but by Health Canada. The onus is not on the producer, but on the Canadian taxpayer. What kind of logic is that?

It is up to the government to prove the chemical poses a risk to the public before it will be taken off the market. Companies are able to market their product before the tests are completed. We're all guinea pigs. Our government, at present, recognizes no obligation to the public to insist that dangerous chemicals be kept off the shelves. Meanwhile, it has identified over four thousand chemicals requiring further study.

Two hundred of which are assumed to be "high priority"; 66 of which are potentially dangerous to human health, the rest considered to pose ecological dangers. All of these remain on the market. For example, thiourea, used in metal finishing solutions like silver polish, tarnish removers, metal cleaners and in pharmaceutical manufacture and the pulp and paper industry poses a high risk to you and me. And our children, of course.

Meanwhile, our bodies are polluted with this gruesome stuff. What the final impact on us will be is anyone's guess.