Better living through chemistry, was the tag-line used by Dow Chemical in the 1950s at the outset of an era when industrial chemicals were introduced on a massive scale into consumer goods, agriculture, and virtually every other sector of modern life.

But the phrase has become hauntingly ironic as environmental health researchers discover more and more evidence of negative long-term impacts from some of what we had long thought to be a purely benign technology. We have met the guinea pigs and they are us.

In the advanced industrial world all of us are unavoidably immersed in a brew of synthetic chemicals most of whose ingredients have never been tested for their long-term impacts on human health. Tens of thousands of chemicals contribute to the comfort and convenience of our lives and the flavour of our foods. But from manufacture to disposal, in their consumption and use and in the environments we inhabit, they accumulate in our bodies to unknown effect.

Health consequences

For poor people, who live closest to the refineries and plants where these chemicals are manufactured, the health consequences are obvious and often severe. The local residents cite cancers and respiratory illnesses throughout their neighbourhoods and extended families. For their part, plant owners and public officials often say the evidence of cause-and-effect is inconclusive.

But even for those who live in more privileged circumstances, everything we use contain a mix of chemicals most of whose effects have never been tested.

Some widely-used chemicals, like phthalates (used to soften plastics in children’s toys and other items) have been found in laboratory tests to contribute to breast cancer, early puberty in girls, reduced testosterone levels, lowered sperm counts, genital defects in baby boys, and testicular cancer.

But given the immense range of variables at play in any individual, including genetic predisposition, personal habits like smoking and drinking, psychosocial factors, and frequency of exposure, it's nearly impossible to prove a direct causal relationship between hazardous environmental toxins and personal illness.

Nonetheless, the circumstantial evidence is often compelling. Until recently public health researchers have had few tools to measure such impacts, but new instruments now enable them to be much more precise.

The new tool

The term “bio-monitoring” is now being applied to scientific techniques used to sample blood, urine, breast milk, and other tissue to assess human exposure to natural and synthetic chemicals.

Using these tools, researchers can now measure an individual’s “body burden”, testing for the presence of specific chemicals known or thought to be hazardous to human health. But the costs of such monitoring are still far too high to be widely administered to whole populations.

There has been little effort in the US either by federal or state regulatory agencies or manufacturers to test the chemicals they introduce into our collective bloodstream at the rate of a thousand new ones per year.

But in the European Union a new set of far-reaching regulations, known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) attempts to gain a handle on the proliferation of untested synthetic chemicals by applying the “precautionary principle: better safe than sorry”.

A major question is whose responsibility is it to test and pay for the testing of the thousands of chemicals currently in use and the thousand more being introduced each year? The costs of testing such a vast reservoir of synthetic chemicals would be huge and one way or another those costs would be passed on to consumers. But the costs of continuing to ignore the impacts would undoubtedly be far greater.

(The writer hosts the award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities.) -IPS