Healthy World Watch - August 1st, 2008

Friday, August 01, 2008
Posted by Janelle Sorensen

The biggest news this week is that the Safe Toy bill passed overwhelmingly in Congress! Hopefully, similar changes are in store regarding chemicals in food packaging, children’s fluoride exposure, BPA in bottles and cans, and children’s exposure to cell phone radiation – the topics of our other headlines this week.

• Grab some champagne, it’s time to celebrate as the Senate Sends a Sweeping Product-Safety Bill on to Bush that includes banning six phthalates and lead from toys. Hooray!
• Consider chemicals in food packaging the next time you make some microwave popcorn or cook a frozen pizza. The packaging of many of these products contains a chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency considers potentially carcinogenic and wants businesses to voluntarily stop using by 2015.

• An expert panel commissioned to study the risks of fluoride exposure says children’s fluoride exposure should be reduced by cutting the recommended amount in drinking water, encouraging the use of low-fluoride toothpaste by children and having makers of infant formula reduce levels in their products.
• Six Southern California families have filed separate consumer fraud class actions against makers of baby formula and baby bottles containing Bisphenol-A. The cases claim that the companies engaged in unfair, unlawful and fraudulent business practices by carrying out false and deceptive advertising and selling of BPA-containing products which they knew or should have known to be unsafe.
• Children are much more vulnerable to cell phone radiation. According to a new French study, the brains of young children absorb twice as much radio frequency energy from cell phones as adults. Even more striking, the study found that children's bone marrow absorbs ten times as much radio frequency energy as adults.