September 2016 News Bulletin: Sofa safety fears; concerns raised over lax safety testing for cosmetics

September 2016 News Bulletin

Safety fears over sofa fire resistance heighten after study shows tests are inadequate. Fire tests used to demonstrate the safety of sofas and beds are inadequate with the result lives are being put at risk, it is claimed. The key test, which involves putting a lit match against the fabric, is said to be no guarantee a product is safe. (Daily Mail)

Is Your Lipstick Bad for You? You can’t legally buy a drug in the United States that hasn’t undergone rigorous testing, mandated by Congress, to prove that it’s safe and effective. By contrast, that lipstick, shampoo, or deodorant you use every day may have undergone no such testing. (New York Times)

You Asked: Can My Couch Give Me Cancer? Cancer is just one of many health concerns linked to the chemical treatments used in furniture. (TIME)

Researchers find unsafe levels of industrial chemicals in drinking water of 6 million Americans. What they found: 194 of 4,864 water supplies across nearly three dozen states had detectable levels of the chemicals. Sixty-six of those water supplies, serving about six million people, had at least one sample that exceeded the EPA’s recommended safety limit of 70 parts per trillion for two types of chemicals — perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). (Washington Post)

Post-Consumer Flexible Polyurethane Foam Scrap Used In Building Products. Most post-consumer flexible polyurethane foam (FPF) collected for recycling today contains highly toxic flame retardants. The vast majority of this scrap material is recycled into one type of new building product: bonded carpet cushion. While the practice of diverting vast amounts of FPF from landfills represents a recycling success story, the potential health hazards to vulnerable populations make us question whether the benefits of recycling are worth the risk. (HealthyBuildingNetwork)

Commission’s endocrine disruptor plan is illegal, inadequate and woefully late. European Commission draft rules to identify and ultimately ban endocrine disruptors are illegal because they clash with existing pesticide and biocide regulations, Alice Bernard writes. The environmental lawyer warned that EU judges could throw out the changes to the long-awaited scientific criteria for the chemicals. (Euractiv)

September 2016 Science Bulletin: Pesticides and wheeze; the value of investigating air pollution and still birth

September 2016 Science Bulletin

Pesticides, allergies | Pesticides Are Associated with Allergic and Non-Allergic Wheeze among Male Farmers. In models evaluating current use of specific pesticides, 19 pesticides were significantly associated (p<0.05) with allergic wheeze (18 positive, 1 negative) and 21 pesticides with non-allergic wheeze (19 positive, 2 negative); 11 pesticides with both. Seven pesticides and a fungicide had significantly different associations for allergic and non-allergic wheeze. In exposure-response models with up to five exposure categories, we saw evidence of an exposure-response relationship for several pesticides including the commonly used herbicides 2,4-D and glyphosate, the insecticides permethrin and carbaryl and the rodenticide warfarin.

BPA, obesity | Perinatal BPA exposure alters body weight and composition in a dose specific and sex specific manner: the addition of peripubertal exposure exacerbates adverse effects in female mice. Both perinatal exposure alone and perinatal plus peripubertal exposure to environmentally relevant levels of BPA resulted in lasting effects on body weight and body composition. The effects were dose specific and sex specific and were influenced by the precise window of BPA exposure.

POPs, obesity | Early-Life Exposures to Persistent Organic Pollutants in Relation to Overweight in Preschool Children. Maternal serum concentrations of HCB, PFOS and PFOA were associated with increased BMI z-scores and/or overweight risk (i.e. BMI z-score≥ 85th WHO percentile). No clear association was found for maternal serum-PCBs, p,p’-DDE, PFHxS, PFNA and PFDA. In cross-sectional analyses, we observed a pattern of inverse associations between child serum-POPs and BMI z-scores at age 5, perhaps due to reverse causation that requires attention in future prospective analyses. Findings in this recent cohort support a role of maternal exposure to endocrine disruptors in the childhood obesity epidemic.

Air pollution, still birth | Is it still important to study if ambient air pollution triggers stillbirth? Stillbirth is one of the most neglected tragedies in global health today, and the existing evidence, summarised by Siddika et al, deserves additional investigation. Although the reported summary effect estimates were relatively small, the ubiquitous nature of ambient air pollution exposure suggests that exposure to ambient air pollution may have a large population-attributable risk for stillbirth.

BPA, potential alternatives | Wreaking Reproductive Havoc One Chemical at a Time. New variations on bisphenol A seem an awful lot like the original. New results are confirming that suspicion.