Letters to the Editor

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, April, 2001

Mary G. Enig, PhD is the author of Know Your Fats: The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils and Cholesterol 2000 (www.BethesdaPress.com), President of the Maryland Nutritionists Association and Vice President of the Weston A Price Foundation, Washington, DC

Chemical Sensitivity Legislation Needs Supporters

Editor:

Thank you for your long-awaited special issue on multiple chemical sensitivity. It is heartening to those of us with MCS to have a respected publication such as the Townsend Letter on our side.

Nova Scotia has also struck a blow for the chemically sensitive, as Lily Casura noted in her article in your January issue, which mentioned Halifax's ban on the wearing of fragrances in public places. Our own Congress now has a chance to pass a law that, if not outright banning fragranced products, will at least tell us if they contain toxic substances or allergens. In September 2000 Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives a bill (H.R. 5238) requiring that fragrances containing known toxins or allergens be labeled accordingly. Known as the Safe Notification and Information For Fragrances Act (SNIFF), the bill offers two amendments to Section 602 of the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which was passed long before most fragrances became made from petroleum instead of flowers and before fragrances became ubiquitous in everything from kitty litter to panty hose. As of December, the bill had attracted one co-sponsor.

Perfumes have been used for centuries; what is new is that since World War II most of them have been made from petroleum, not flowers. The 158-page 1938 Act, which set up the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has only one page on cosmetics. Yet in 1986 the National Academy of Sciences targeted fragrances as one of six categories of chemicals that should be given high priority for neurotoxicity testing. Such testing has not been done. Instead, cosmetics are largely unregulated, with only voluntary testing of safety by industry; which considers fragrance ingredients to be trade secrets. The entire cosmetics industry has slipped through the regulatory cracks.

Last year two women -- one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast- who had been forced by exposures to perfumes to leave jobs they loved, pooled their resources and sent samples of a popular perfume to an independent lab for testing. The lab found the fragrance part of the perfume to consist of 41 synthetic chemicals, of which five are toxic; the rest are of unknown toxicity. A People's Petition has since been filed with the FDA, asking it to observe its own rules, which say that any cosmetic product "whose safety is not adequately substantiated prior to marketing" should bear a warning label. So far the FDA has done nothing. In the meantime, we are all being exposed to countless fragranced products in our workplaces, schools, stores, churches, and other public places -- and even our homes, unless we choose to buy only the unscented products that are now readily available.