US cosmetics are full of chemicals banned by Europe
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=H04&yea...
But lobbying is helpful. Consider niche technical issue where maybe 3-4 organisations do reply have established expertise (because they are commercially engaged). There is often on specific policy no established evidence at the moment in time when government has to make a decision, nor is the way forward obvious. Thus it's a matter of hearing everyone concerned and finding a nuanced path forward.
Wonlobbying is legitimately useful. But what has totally spun out of control is the US lobbying machine (which sadly is spreading to other places), which really often is just bribery in many ways.
A lump of coal is a fairly harmless substance. Put it in your garden, on a shelf, sleep with it under your pillow. You'll probably never know a difference. Grind it up and breathe it every day for 10 years and you'll shorten your life by 5-15 years. Burn it and inhale it and you'll shorten it by 30.
This article doesn't concern itself however with how a substance is used. It's merely enough for something to have been harmful for it to be dangerous. Worse yet, there's no evaluation of the quality of the science indicating potential harm. They vaguely hint that a food dye is dangerous because one 2007 study showed it might increase hyperactivity in children? Give me a break. If that's our standard, that one study ever showed a possibility of potential harm we'll have to ban everything.
Again, I totally agree with the sentiment. The FDA should have its funding increased by 10 fold. They should be given the power to regulate supplements. They should be one of the most powerful and effective government agencies. But the standards of evidence are tremendously important. There's no reason to go full California and start serving coffee with a cancer warning.
Harm is also more of a continuum than a binary situation. Ten individual sources of say lead exposure may not be that harmful on their own, but they add up. When talking about public heath we have often gotten it wrong by saying it’s low enough not to be an issue.
Dioxins were not used as an ingredient. Small quantities of dioxins were unintentionally formed as side-products during synthesis.
I support European-style regulations, but I think this is a short-sighted way to argue. Dioxins in cosmetics are bad because of their objective toxicity, not because of emotional associations. Playing up the emotional angle with false information only makes the rest of your arguments look suspicious.
The US recklessly poisoned people; the Vietnam campaign had a disregard for Vietnamese life. The herbicide campaign, initially intended to clear forest cover, spread to deliberate use against crops to starve the population. The use of napalm was similar in its widespread civilian casualties.
https://www.news.com.au/world/asia/vietnams-horrific-legacy-...
"Nearly 4.8 million Vietnamese people have been exposed, causing 400,000 deaths; the associated illnesses include cancers, birth defects, skin disorders, auto-immune diseases, liver disorders, psychosocial effects, neurological defects and gastrointestinal diseases."
"According to the Red Cross of Vietnam, up to one million people are currently disabled or have health problems due to Agent Orange, 100,000 of which are children."
If any of the Nazis had ordered this they would rightly have been put up against a wall and shot.
This bombing campaign was reckless in the extreme, and with complete disregard for human life - if anyone other than the US had done this, they would have been ostracised and declared war criminals.
Some more info on cluster munitions[0], which the US continued to use in more recent times in Iraq and Afghanistan, and AFAIK they still refuse to sign the anti-cluster bomb CCM treaty that around 100 nations have signed.
It doesn't matter if you 'meant to' kick your sister. You're kicking her and you need to 1) stop, and 2) apologize.
So "toxic dioxins created as byproduct and not properly removed creating a health hazard" sounds like a fair comparison, since they share that.
[1]: https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/issues/1044/rbgh/about-r...
And this is just one of hundreds if not thousands FDA mishaps out there. The lobbying influence is BAD.
I went to the article but it mentioned a change was detectable but didn't link to the study.
I also don't think I've ever seen dairy in store that doesn't come from cows "not treated with rBST". I don't buy organic unless the price is roughly the same, and for milk it's easily double, so I don't buy organic milk.
But even if it did boost igf-1 a tad, that'd be freaking great. People would start growing muscle, losing weight, etc.
I bought a new construction house a few years back and have been paranoid about formaldehyde. Prior to moving into it, I bought a formaldehyde detector. I had it on at my old house just for kicks. Once in a while, it would reach high values and flash red with a death symbol (no joke). We realized it flashed red whenever my wife was putting on cosmetics.
It contains an ingredient called DMDM hydantoin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMDM_hydantoin) which is basically a slow release formaldehyde, which prevents bacteria growth on the cosmetics.
You can argue it's minute amount...maybe. But certainly enough for a detector to detect it after dispersion from across the room. Shampoo has it too. I've since checked for this ingredient prior to buying anything, and probably substituting for another bad chemical.
> It is extremely difficult or even impossible to trace problems back to a specific source.
Then why is the EU banning random things without being able to definitively attribute any negative effects to them?
That's easy. It's for two reasons:
1. Trade barriers. The WTO mechanisms are full of holes. The so-called "precautionary principle" is just a justification to ensure that anything new the US invents can be instantly be made illegal in the EU until it can be "shown to be safe", i.e. the EU assumes everything to be dangerous by default until it decides otherwise. Actual science showing it's dangerous is not required. This is a great way to work around WTO rules on tariffs by abusing safety regulation and in particular protect French farming from genetically modified American imports. Americans aren't exactly dying en-masse from eating GM food (except maybe from obesity because food is so cheap), but pretending it's dangerous is a great way to block imports whilst avoiding a WTO dispute.
2. The EU regulatory apparatus is enormous. It has a staff of 32,000 people in the Commission alone, and many more in associated agencies. Many of these jobs are created for political reasons, for instance, countries are theoretically able to appoint one Commissioner each (in practice the head of the commission, Juncker, blocks any proposed appointment he doesn't like - this isn't meant to happen by treaty but does) and each Commissioner needs a staff.
But more importantly, unlike in democratic governments, the Parliament does not create law. The Commission does that, and as a consequence the quantity of regulations the EU creates is staggering compared to any normal government. The throughput of regulations banning things is limited in democracies by the size of the chamber: there's only so much a group of a few hundred people can do after all. But there are so many regulations being churned out by the EU that the Parliament has rubber-stamp votes over 1000 times per week. You can see a video about the deleterious effects this rate of voting has here:
So at least it can be proved that the toxic cosmetics don't lead to a longer life.
You have to remember that the U.K. is very much of the mindset that everything will kill you until they’ve proven, tested, provided warning signs and signals, etc.
The US is the exact opposite. Until there is a problem... go for it (with some caveats, obviously). Sure sometimes that causes a problem, but on the whole the market does work itself out. Case in point? We’re still alive.
Case and point, countless. Pain killers, tobacco, fire proofing chemicals, etc etc. If the us corporations weren't so greedy as to disregard public health completely maybe a black model would be sustainable. But it doesn't seem the case
But we die younger than Europeans: 78.6 years in U.S. vs 82.4 in France or 83.3 in Italy.
I've always thought this was mostly because healthcare systems over there better tackle preventable deaths, but now I wonder if there might be some environmental factors at play too.
Data: https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-birth.ht...
As an aside, I think our “blacklist” approach also really leads to a lot of environmental harm. Our system basically says “use this unless we start to notice harm” which is a clear plan for legalized environmental harm. You can use some pesticide unless after 20-30 years of use a few studies indicate harm, then we will review it. This led to the Slient Spring and DDT being so widespread that the Peregrine Falcon almost went extinct.
Our default view that things are okay until they’re obviously causing problems isn’t the best. I likely wouldn’t want to live under a government that prohibited everything by default either, so I’d hope some middle ground could be reached. And ultimately I have to accept that some things should be prohibited even if I really want to do them. I suppose my policy plan would be to much better publicly fund research and whitelist with a fast initial review period and a collaborative research based initial rollout.
:shrug:
This is not a chart of life expectancy as a result of medical care. When you remove fatalities from car accidents and murders, the US life expectancy is in line with other developed countries.
To play devils advocate, nothing is cost efficient at the top end.
You can buy a Honda Civic that gets you from A to B just fine, a 'vette for under $100k or some super-car that's the absolute limit of what technology can do within the bounds of what's road legal and it costs an order of magnitude more than the 'Vette.
You can buy a rug at Walmart for $100, Ikea for $200 or you can buy some fancy pants oriental rug befitting royalty for a million bucks.
For plenty of maladies the US has the best care as measured by things like five year cancer survival rates for particular cancers.
>Instead it gets the same and only after correcting for murders and car accidents.
If the point is to use life expectancy to compare quality of medical care, then you have to remove causes of death that don't involve treatment. E.g. if I'm a 35 year old person in good health sitting on the steps with my homies and someone drives by and shoots me in the head and I die, how is that a failing of medical care? It should be done from all countries.
Ultimately, life expectancy is a bad metric to use anyway. It treats it as a score for bureaucrats to maximize. In the US, at least, people have the right to live in ways that will reduce their life span.
Sure it didn't decimate the UK population but that's a very low bar to step over.
That's a rather crude metric...
If the whitelist vs blacklist attitude were really as important as everyone in this thread is claiming, wouldn’t there be some mass catastrophic extinction-level event in the US? There’s not.....
Just because it's not killing everyone doesn't mean it's not killing a lot of people or making their health and happiness worse
That logic is faulty. Allowing things until proven dangerous can be both not killing everyone and not killing a lot of people or making anyone's health or happiness worse.
For the precautionary principle to make a detectable difference to people's health, dangerous cosmetics would have to be staggeringly common, and cosmetics firms would have to be staggeringly willing to repeatedly sell cosmetics known to be dangerous. But that doesn't seem to be the case: are there any cases in recent times of Americans being seriously harmed by unexpectedly dangerous cosmetics? I mean, even just one?
HFCS won't kill you even if you drink it in bulk. Spend 40 years eating it and you get a 10% higher chance of, say, dying before 70.
There was a large HN discussion not too long ago about the fact that Johnson & Johnson's baby powder contained asbestos [1]
The free market doesn't really work in this case because issues as a result of known carcinogens, asbestos etc can take decades to show up. By the time that happens, the executives in charge might've already changed, the company might be dead etc and it becomes harder to hold them accountable for essentially poisoning their customers. So yes, we're alive today. But in five or ten years, would you be happy to know your cancer was the result of a specific brand of baby powder?
Are there instances in the past where it has been used? Ok, sure. Are there instances where companies and people have flat out lied to regulators, both US and EU? I’m sure we can all think of at least one, there were criminal charges recently.
Clearly simply having a law doesn’t make it so.
This is an example which directly contradicts your first paragraph.
>A Reuters examination of many of those documents, as well as deposition and trial testimony, shows that from at least 1971 to the early 2000s, the company’s raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos, and that company executives, mine managers, scientists, doctors and lawyers fretted over the problem and how to address it while failing to disclose it to regulators or the public.
>A third verdict, in St. Louis, was a watershed, broadening J&J’s potential liability: The 22 plaintiffs were the first to succeed with a claim that asbestos-tainted Baby Powder and Shower to Shower talc, a longtime brand the company sold in 2012, caused ovarian cancer, which is much more common than mesothelioma.
And to address your second paragraph directly: That is literally why laws and regulations exist. There will be companies that break them yes, and laws exist in order to ideally punish them for doing so. What you're essentially saying is that 'murders still happen even though there are laws against it, therefore laws are useless' but applied at a company scale.
Edit: It's arguably safer because the whitelist should be a subset of what the blacklist allows.
I agree with you that data is important. But yes, it can absolutely be argued about with reasonable arguments without data.
As another comment pointed out, you can never prove something is safe, so the whitelist model is inherently flawed. Asbestos was once considered safe, that’s why it was used as insulation. Turns out not so much under certain circumstances (like when disturbed and released into the air for you to inhale), so now we have to backtrack on that. That’s life.
The rational conclusion there is that you should test more, not move to a blacklist model that allows everything until people drop dead, develop a serious illness or whatever.
It just means you test the common and the reasonably predictable cases first, and compare to other products in the same category if any, so that you can be reasonably confident in it before approving.
Actual data please?
How is it safer? Do we have data on people dying from cosmetics? What is the differential between woman life expectancy in Germany vs. the US? It's about the same in both countries for women. So are we going to argue that European cosmetics are "safer?" What's the actual data say?
The whitelisting model used in Europe is used to ensure that whatever substance causes the least amount of issues possible if released. You know, interactions with skin conditions, maybe breathing complications if inhaled etc.
The basic tradeoff here is potential (minor or not) health hazard vs. profit opportunities of companies.
Characteristically the EU chooses the first and the US the second.
You always tests something extensively and only after a long enough time you consider it safe.
The US should have learnt from DDT and countless other disasters.
I don't know about parabens specifically, but that sounds like a reckless approach, akin to assuming a gun isn't loaded. You have proof it's harmful under X conditions, but you're just going to assume it's benign under Y?
Well, wait till you hear how the US considers gun ownership...
The main concern with formaldehyde tends to be inhalation.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-hidden-air...
Also the claim that the US is not lax in its regulation is a bad joke. Half of the parties available literally made de-regulation their damn group mantra...
HN users have a variety of views on both sides of any divisive topic.
Fair enough though, didn't mean to come across as polemic/whining hahaha.
I'll try to conform to HN netiquette.
All that aside, I think this is an interesting article we can talk about without this. To me it sounds like it might be a symptom of regulatory capture in the US.
And this is going to get down-voted because of the first of fight club.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...
Maybe European regulations are overly strict?
US regulations aren't lax.
"The US has similar rules for new chemicals entering the market but no such precautionary principles for the thousands of potential toxins already in use"
https://www.forbes.com/2010/01/21/toxic-chemicals-bpa-lifest...
That's not possible. What the EU does is allow things which have been used by other people for some time once they feel comfortable that it's probably ok. In other words, they have guinea pigs.