OCA & CPC: It's Time to Protect Babies from Dangerous Body Care Products

Posted 4/28/05

With the greatest of love, parents tenderly wash and pamper their babies with soaps, shampoos, lotions, creams, and powders. Yet how would parents react if they found out that most of these products are dangerous? Hopping mad would be an understatement.

Yet, baby care products contain a wide range of labeled ingredients which are irritant, allergenic, carcinogenic, and hormonal. Worse still, these ingredients are readily absorbed through skin.

Sodium lauryl sulfate is a harsh irritant. A single application to adult skin, let alone highly sensitive baby skin, damages its structure, making it highly susceptible to penetration by other toxics.

Dusting a baby with talc powder inevitably results in its inhalation. Talc can cause acute or chronic lung irritation, and is also a known cause of lung cancer.

Fragrances are commonly used in baby products, for the parent¹s, not the baby¹s, benefit. They contain dozens of unlabeled ingredients. Some are acute irritants, 25 are known allergens, others are carcinogens, while most have never been tested.

Of additional concern are paraben preservatives, which are well known to be hormonal. Following application to the skin of infant male rodents, they produce genital abnormalities, and decreased testosterone levels. Parabens have also been identified in breast cancers.

Of greatest concern are carcinogenic ingredients, to which babies are about 100 times more sensitive than adults.

* The largest group includes dozens of detergents, particularly PEGs, laureths, and ceteareths, all contaminated by potent and volatile carcinogens (ethylene oxide and dioxane). These carcinogens could readily be stripped off during ingredient manufacture, if the industry just made any effort to do so.
* Diethanolamine and triethanolamine are other detergents which are precursors of highly potent nitrosamine carcinogens.
* Another group includes quaternium and diazolidinyl urea preservatives which break down to release the carcinogenic formaldehyde.
* The final group are DDT-like carcinogenic pesticides, which are common contaminants in sheep¹s wool lanolin.

Most disturbingly, this information has been known for decades. So, why does the multibillion-dollar industry still fail to protect our babies, besides the rest of us? The answer is that the overwhelming priority of the industry¹s trade association is ³to protect (its) freedom to compete in a fair marketplace,² while pursuing a highly aggressive agenda against ³unreasonable or unnecessary labeling or warning requirements.² As Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D.MA) warned, at 1997 Hearings on the FDA reform bill, ³The cosmetics industry has borrowed a page from the playbook of the tobacco industry by putting profits ahead of public health.² In spite of FDA¹s authority, under the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, the Agency still fails to require warning labels or recall toiletry and cosmetic products with dangerous ingredients. The FDA has become the industry lap dog, not watchdog.

Responding to growing concerns, last February expressed commitment ³to taking the appropriate actions and steps to ensuring that cosmetic products currently being marketed in the U.S. remain safe.² However, this was qualified by assurances that FDA would continue to rely on industry¹s ³expert panel determination of safety.² Worse still, the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society are guilty of reckless failure to warn the public of the cancer risks of baby care products, in spite of the sharply escalating incidence of childhood cancers since the 1970¹s. However, the American Cancer Society silence is hardly surprising considering its over $100,000 annual donations from each of about a dozen giant cosmetic and toiletry companies.

So, what can we all do? Fortunately, safe alternative products, particularly those with certified organic ingredients, including Dr. Bronner¹s Magic Soap, Dr. Hauschka, and Terressentials are gradually becoming increasingly available. These initiatives are likely to receive strong backing at the Organic Trade Association¹s annual All Things Organic Conference and Trade Show in Chicago this weekend.

Samuel S. Epstein, MD, Chairman, The Cancer Prevention Coalition, Professor
emeritus Environmental & Occupational Medicine, University of Illinois at
Chicago School of Public Health, and Recipient of the 2005 Albert Schweitzer
Golden Grand Medal for Humanitarianism, and author, the 2005 book
Cancer-Gate: How to Win the Losing Cancer War. Contacts, epstein@uic.edu;
312-996-2297.

Ronnie Cummins, National Director, Organic Consumers Association. Little
Marais, MN. Contacts, ronnie@organicconsumers.org; 218-226-4164.