Knowing the Risks Can Help You Protect Yourself
Today, it seems almost everything is bad for us. In the past, eating hamburgers rare, getting a suntan or sitting in a restaurant’s smoking section was not considered a health hazard. Now studies suggest such seemingly benign activities can put us at increased risk for E. coli poisoning, skin cancer and lung cancer.
Yet, while a lot of substances make their way into the news because of their links to cancer or other diseases, or what reporters deem attention-grabbing, many remain lost in the reams of reports issued by the various government agencies charged with protecting society and the environment.
“The sound bite is obviously designed to catch people’s interest,” said Ralph O’Connor, Ph.D., assistant director for science at the Division of Health Education and Promotion for the ATSDR or Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta. The ATSDR, along with the Environmental Protection Agency, compiles a priority list every year of 275 hazardous substances, primarily focusing on waste sites and possible chemical spills. And it spells out the top 20 hazardous substances.
“What we don’t want to do, as far as the public is concerned, is to say, ‘Here are 500 chemicals, now have a nice life,’” O’Connor said. “A lot of federal agencies compile lists of hazardous substances. A lot of these lists tend to have the same chemicals, even though they are looking at different parts of the environment.”
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences also releases a biennial list of 200 plus substances — the most recent being the 9th Report on Carcinogens 2000 — dividing them into categories of “known human carcinogens” or “reasonably anticipated human carcinogens.”
“The report is intended to provide data to the public and health professionals so people can have the information [they] need to make choices about what they want to expose themselves to,” said John Bucher, Ph.D., deputy director of the Environmental Toxicology Program at the NIEHS in Research Triangle Park, N.C. “It is not to indicate that these substances will absolutely cause cancer in everyone. It’s really to simply allow people to make informed choices.”
“The problem with science, which the public has little tolerance for, is it is always evolving. The public thinks science should know everything, but, by definition, we cannot know everything,” O’Connor said. “Some of the decisions we made in the past, we made by acting on the best knowledge we had then. The more we learn, the more some of our past decisions have to be revised. But we always try to implement a precautionary principle, which is really erring on the side of caution, especially when it comes to public health.”
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