Nurses Safer Chemicals Toolkit
- Overview
- Nurses & Chemical Exposures
- Reports
- Body Burden Studies
- Media
- Posters & Presentations
- Organizations
- Nurses in the News
Overview
The Toxic Substances Control Act is the federal law governing chemical manufacturing in the United States. When the law was enacted in 1976, it grandfathered in approximately 62,000 existing chemicals, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was not required to test for the potentially harmful and carcinogenic health impacts. Because of the way the law is written, the EPA's authority is limited in mandating testing and research on chemicals; only about 200 of the pre-existing chemicals have been tested since 1976, and only five have been successfully restricted (PCBs, chlorofluorocarbons, dioxin, asbestos, and hexavalent chromium).
In the past several years, The Centers for Disease Control National Health and Nutrition Exam Study have begun to measure the presence of toxic chemicals in the blood, urine, and breast milk of thousands of Americans and found them to be ubiquitous in all of us. Unfortunately our bodies have become repositories for poisonous environmental chemicals which have been linked to several rising health trends including an increased prevalence of various cancers in both adults and children, doubled rates of asthma in the last 20 years, increases in pediatric neurological disease and disability such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder, and reduced fertility in both men and women.
Because of their science-based practice, nurses understand the connection between the environment, human health, and disease. Workplace exposures handling dozens of chemicals, drugs, and cleaning agents also make nurses increasingly vulnerable to incurring health risks associated with long-term exposure to these chemical agents.
Members of Health Care Without Harm and the Nurses Workgroup have been integral in partnering to address the health risks of hazardous chemical exposures and the need for an updated federal chemical policy. Please review the resources and information below and join the Nurses Workgroup to promote education and policy reform to protect workplaces and communities from harmful chemical exposures.
Nurses & Chemical Exposures
- ANA, Moving Up the Hierarchy of Controls: Proposing a New Chemicals Policy (Wilburn, 2005) (pdf)
- EWG’s Nurses Survey on Health & Chemical Exposures
- Nursing Practice, Chemical Exposures and Right-to-Know (2006) (pdf)
- OSHA’s Updated Hazard Communication Standard - “The standard that gave workers the right to know, now gives them the right to understand.”
Reports
- CDC/ATSDR: National Conversation on Public Health and Chemical Exposures
- National Academy of Science’s Strengthening Toxic Chemical Risk Assessments to Protect Human Health (pdf) (February 2012)
- Regulatory, Institutional, and Market-Based Approaches Towards Achieving Comprehensive Chemical Policy Reform (2005) (pdf)
- Making Medicine Mercury Free (pdf)
- Dioxin, PVC and Health Care Institutions (pdf)
- Reducing PVC Use in Hospitals (pdf)
- Latex Allergy in Health Care Fact Sheet (pdf)
Body Burden Studies
- CDC Report on Human Exposures to Environmental Chemicals
- Hazardous chemicals in Healthcare
- Pollution in People, a study that included environmental health nurse, Karen Bowman
- Physicians for Social Responsibility: Hazardous Chemicals in Health Care (pdf)
Media
- Blue Vinyl - A Toxic Comedy
- A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr
- Food, Inc.
- Gasland
- Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber
- Our Stolen Future by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, John Myers
- Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- A Small Dose of Toxicology by Steven Gilbert
- Vanishing of the Bees
Posters & Presentations
- Chemical Connections:Troubling New Science about pollution’s toll on America’s health. Environmental Working Group’s Jane Houlihan gives a talk at the 2010 ANHE Convention.
- Poster: Greening the NICU: Improving Environmental Health for Patients, Staff, and the Environment (pdf) - presented at the 2006 National Association of Neonatal Nurses Conference
- Poster: The Precautionary Principle: A Progressive Guideline in Occupational and Environmental Health Nursing Decision-Making (pdf) - produced for the Washington State Nurses Association by Karen Bowman, MN, RN, COHN-S
Organizations
- Beyond Pesticides
- Breast Cancer Fund
- Environmental Working Group
- EWG’s Skin Deep Cosmetic Database
- The Louisville Charter for Safer Chemicals
- Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families
- Women’s Voices for the Earth
Nurses in the News
- Concerned Moms, Nurses Launch Stroller Brigades to Protect Children Against Toxic Chemicals. Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families
- Congress Should Prioritize Prevention (2012), by Karen Towne, RN. Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families
- University of Maryland School of Nursing Environmental Health - Safe Products Interview with Robyn Gilden (2009).
- The Urgent Need for Chemical Policy Reform (2011), by Kelli Barber, RN, MN, Op-Ed in The Daily Inter Lake, Kalispell, Montana