This is the sort of story that causes friends not intimately involved with the environmental movement to throw up their hands and say, "It's hopeless." But it's not. Not if we practice a prevention first approach to the environment -- and someday that will happen.
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Many rivers and streams in the United States are believed to contain a toxic antimicrobial chemical whose environmental fate was never thoroughly scrutinized despite large-scale production and usage for almost half a century, according to an analysis conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The chemical, triclocarban, has been widely used for decades in hand soaps and other cleaning products, but rarely was monitored for or detected in the environment. The new findings suggest that triclocarban contamination is greatly underreported. The study is published in the current online edition of Environmental Science & Technology, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society.
“We’ve been using triclocarban for almost half a century at rates approaching 1 million pounds per year, but we have essentially no idea of what exactly happens to the compound after we flush it down the drain,” said the study’s lead author, Rolf U. Halden, PhD, PE, assistant professor in the School’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences and founding member of its Center for Water and Health.
http://www.beyondpesticides.org/news/daily.htm
Posted by Dave at January 26, 2005 09:29 AM