Banned chemicals found in American shampoo, sunscreen and tampons across major brands
For Tiah Tomlin-Harris, a two-time survivor of triple-negative breast cancer, that lack of transparency was a wake-up call. Diagnosed before age 40 with no genetic predisposition, Tomlin-Harris began asking hard questions: Where is this coming from? Genetic testing came back negative, placing her among the 80–90% of breast cancer patients whose illness isn't linked to family history. Her background as a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry gave her a unique perspective—and a critical eye for labels.
"I started to dig into the causations," she told FOX. "The first thing I did was remove every single product in my house—from hair care to dish detergent. I went back to grandma's remedies—baking soda, vinegar—because I didn't know what was safe anymore." As she researched, she realized just how many widely used beauty and hygiene products are packed with potentially harmful chemicals.
While Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pushed for the removal of toxic additives in processed foods, he has yet to tackle the personal care industry. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary admits the agency is in a "deregulatory mindset," saying, "[We've] been regulating too much."
That mindset has led to an explosion of consumer-driven tools like Yuka and Clearya, apps that scan barcodes and analyze ingredient safety using AI. "Most people are shocked," said Julie Chapon, Yuka's co-founder. "They assume green packaging means safety."
Tomlin-Harris emphasized the disproportionate impact on women of color, particularly Black women. "We spend nine times more on beauty products than any other demographic, yet these products often contain the most harmful ingredients—parabens, phthalates, formaldehyde, benzene. These aren't just linked to cancer. They're weakening chemotherapy drugs. They're disrupting hormones. They're impacting fertility—for men and women."
A Consumer Reports investigation found carcinogens in 10 of the top braiding hair brands, many of which are marketed to Black women and girls.
Janet Nudelman, Director of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics at Breast Cancer Prevention Partners, agrees that consumers are often left choosing "between protecting against skin cancer versus increasing their risk of breast cancer" because of harmful ingredients. Dr. Leonardo Trasande, whose studies highlight the health hazards of common chemicals, called the current system "rigged to produce chemical exposures that are toxic to our hormones." The consequences, he warns, are societal: higher healthcare costs and lifelong reproductive and developmental health problems.
The federal government is slowly responding. The Safer Beauty Bill package, reintroduced in Congress, seeks to ban toxic ingredients, increase ingredient disclosure and protect vulnerable populations like hairstylists, nail technicians, and women of color. But for now, consumers are largely left to protect themselves.
FDA Commissioner Makary insists change is coming: "We're doing an inventory of all chemicals in the food supply to see how we can make it safer." Still, advocacy groups say the U.S. is far behind the EU in regulating cosmetic safety.
Industry representatives push back. The Personal Care Products Council asserts: "PCPC and our member companies are fully committed to upholding the highest standards of safety, quality and transparency."
But for advocates like Tomlin-Harris, promises aren't enough. "This isn't just a women's issue," she said. "It's a people's issue. Men are affected. Children are affected. Our entire population is being exposed to chemicals we didn't consent to, and we're paying the price."
Her message is clear: "We need transparency. We need regulation. And we need accountability from the companies creating these products. It's time to detox our routines, demand safer alternatives and prioritize our health."
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Boston Globe
16 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Dozens killed seeking aid in Gaza as Israel weighs further military action
Advertisement Another escalation of the nearly 22-month war could put the lives of countless Palestinians and around 20 living Israeli hostages at risk and would draw fierce opposition both internationally and within Israel. Netanyahu's far-right coalition allies have long called for the war to be expanded and for Israel to eventually take over Gaza, relocate much of its population, and rebuild Jewish settlements there. President Trump, asked by a reporter Tuesday whether he supported the reoccupation of Gaza, said he wasn't aware of the 'suggestion' but that 'it's going to be pretty much up to Israel.' Of the 38 Palestinians killed while seeking aid, at least 28 died in the Morag Corridor, an Israeli military zone in southern Gaza where UN convoys have been repeatedly overwhelmed by looters and desperate crowds in recent days, and where witnesses say Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire. Advertisement The Israeli military said troops fired warning shots as Palestinians advanced toward them, and that it was not aware of any casualties. Nasser Hospital, which received the bodies, said another four people were killed in the Teina area, on a route leading to a site in southern Gaza run by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American contractor. The Al-Awda Hospital said it received the bodies of six people killed near a GHF site in central Gaza. GHF said there were no violent incidents at or near its sites and that the one in central Gaza was not open on Wednesday. It said the violence may have been related to the chaos around UN convoys. Two of the Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza City, in the north of the territory, killing 13 people there, including six children and five women, according to the Al-Ahli Hospital, which received the bodies. The Israeli military says it only targets militants and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because its militants are entrenched in heavily populated areas. Israel facilitated the establishment of four GHF sites in May after blocking the entry of all food, medicine, and other goods for 2 1/2 months. Israeli and US officials said a new system was needed to prevent Hamas from siphoning off humanitarian aid. The United Nations, which has delivered aid to hundreds of distribution points across Gaza throughout the war when conditions allow, has rejected the new system, saying it forces Palestinians to travel long distances and risk their lives for food, and that it allows Israel to control who gets aid, potentially using it to advance plans for further mass displacement. Advertisement The UN human rights office said last week that some 1,400 Palestinians have been killed seeking aid since May, mostly near GHF sites but also along UN convoy routes where trucks have been overwhelmed by crowds. It says nearly all were killed by Israeli fire. This week, a group of UN special rapporteurs and independent human rights experts called for the GHF to be disbanded, saying it is 'an utterly disturbing example of how humanitarian relief can be exploited for covert military and geopolitical agendas in serious breach of international law.' The experts work with the UN but do not represent the world body. The GHF called their statement 'disgraceful' and urged the UN and other aid groups to work with it 'to maximize the amount of aid being securely delivered to the Palestinian people in Gaza.' The Israeli military says it has only fired warning shots when crowds threatened its forces, and GHF says its armed contractors have only used pepper spray and fired into the air on some occasions to prevent deadly crowding at its sites. Israel's air and ground war has destroyed nearly all of Gaza's food production capabilities, leaving its people reliant on international aid. A new report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN satellite center found that just 8.6 percent of Gaza's cropland is still accessible following sweeping Israeli evacuation orders in recent months. Just 1.5 percent is accessible and undamaged, it said. The military offensive and a breakdown in security have made it nearly impossible for anyone to safely deliver aid, and aid groups say recent Israeli measures to facilitate more assistance are far from sufficient. Advertisement Hospitals recorded four more malnutrition-related deaths over the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 193 people, including 96 children, since the war began in October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Jordan said Israeli settlers blocked roads and hurled stones at a convoy of four trucks carrying aid bound for Gaza after they drove across the border into the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Israeli far-right activists have repeatedly sought to halt aid from entering Gaza. Jordanian government spokesperson Mohammed al-Momani condemned the attack, which he said had shattered the windshields of the trucks, according to the Jordanian state-run Petra News Agency. The Israeli military said security forces went to the scene to disperse the gathering and accompanied the trucks to their destination.
Boston Globe
16 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Lucian Leape, whose work spurred patient safety in medicine, dies at 94
He was chief of pediatric surgery at Tufts University in the 1980s when he noticed frequent mistakes leading to significant patient harm, even death. In a bold move late in his career, Dr. Leape left his full-time surgical practice and began collaborating with colleagues at Harvard University on a study that chronicled for the first time the number of injuries and deaths that resulted from medical error. Known as the Harvard Medical Practice Study, it examined a large population of injured patients in New York state. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up That study led to a landmark report, 'To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System,' published in 1999 by the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine). Advertisement In the report, Dr. Leape and his co-authors estimated that 44,000 to 98,000 Americans died each year from medical errors, a majority of which arose from dysfunctional systems -- not flawed individuals, as the medical profession and public had long believed. The idea of systemic error, though widely accepted in industries such as aviation and nuclear power, was an unfamiliar concept in medicine, and it rubbed against the grain of the dominant medical culture of individual accountability, as well as the malpractice system's tradition of seeking a culpable clinician. Advertisement The report, however, galvanized health care regulators and accreditors to enact tighter standards for hospitals, limit work hours by medical residents, and require public reporting of serious errors. As a result of regulations and public pressure, health care systems around the country began to tackle medical mistakes as a system-level problem, launching patient safety departments and hiring patient safety officers. 'He did more than make some critical insights,' Dr. Atul Gawande, a prominent surgeon and author who was assistant administrator for global health at the US Agency for International Development in the Biden administration, said in a 2023 interview for this obituary. 'He took on the entire medical profession.' Lucian L. Leape (he had no middle name, though the 'L' was included on his birth certificate) was born Nov. 7, 1930, in Bellevue, Pa. His father, Lucian Leroy Leape, was a purchasing agent for a small steel company. His mother, Mildred Grace (West) Leape, was a schoolteacher who later taught piano. After receiving his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Cornell University in 1952, he served as a lieutenant in the Navy, and in 1955 entered Harvard Medical School. He met Martha Kinne Palmer in 1951, when both were undergraduates at Cornell, and they married in 1954. Martha Leape, who held master's degrees in guidance counseling and psychology, became a premedical adviser at Harvard University and later ran the university's office of career services. She died this year. In addition to his son James, Dr. Leape leaves two other sons, Jonathan and Gerald, and seven grandchildren. Advertisement After receiving his medical degree in 1959, Dr. Leape trained as a pediatric surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and Children's Hospital in Boston. In 1973, he became professor of surgery at Tufts University School of Medicine and chief of pediatric surgery at Tufts-New England Medical Center (now Tufts Medical Center). 'Children are the world's best patients,' he said in an interview for this obituary in 2015. 'They're honest, and they don't have an overlay of neuroses.' In 1986, at age 56, Dr. Leape grew interested in health policy and spent a year at the Rand Corp. on a midcareer fellowship studying epidemiology, statistics, and health policy. Following his stint at Rand, he joined the team at Harvard conducting the Medical Practice Study. When Dr. Howard Hiatt, then the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health (now the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), offered Dr. Leape the opportunity to work on the study, 'I accepted,' Dr. Leape wrote in his 2021 book, 'Making Healthcare Safe: The Story of the Patient Safety Movement,' 'not suspecting it would change my life.' The most significant finding, he said in the 2015 interview, was that two-thirds of the injuries to patients were caused by errors that appeared to be preventable. 'The implications were profound,' he said. In 1994, he submitted a paper to The New England Journal of Medicine, laying out the extent to which preventable medical injury occurred and arguing for a shift of focus away from individuals and toward systems. But the paper was rejected. 'I was told it didn't meet their standards,' he recalled. Dr. Leape sent the paper out again, this time to The Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. George Lundberg, then the editor of JAMA, immediately recognized the importance of the topic, Dr. Leape said. 'But he also knew it could offend many doctors. We didn't talk about mistakes.' Advertisement Dr. Donald M. Berwick, president emeritus at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston and a longtime colleague of Dr. Leape's, agreed. 'To talk about error in medicine back then was considered rude,' he said in an interview in 2020. 'Errors were what we call normalized. Bad things happen, and that's just the way it is. 'But then you had Lucian,' he added, 'this quite different voice in the room saying, 'No, this isn't normal. And we can do something about it.'' Dr. Leape's paper, 'Error in Medicine,' was the first major article on the topic in the general medical literature. The timing of publication, just before Christmas in 1994, Dr. Leape wrote in his 2021 book, was intentional. Lundberg knew it would receive little attention and therefore wouldn't upset colleagues. On Dec. 3, 1994, however, three weeks before the JAMA piece appeared, Betsy Lehman, a 39-year-old health care reporter for The Boston Globe, died after mistakenly receiving a fatal overdose of chemotherapy at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. 'Betsy's death was a watershed event,' Dr. Leape said in a 2020 interview for a short documentary about Lehman. The case drew national attention. An investigation into the death revealed that it wasn't caused by one individual clinician, but by a series of errors involving multiple physicians and nurses who had misinterpreted a four-day regimen as a single dose, administering quadruple the prescribed amount. The case made Dr. Leape's point with tragic clarity: Lehman's death, like so many others, resulted from a system that lacked sufficient safeguards to prevent the error. Advertisement The report 'To Err is Human' was released in 1999, noting that the 44,000 to 98,000 annual deaths from medical mistakes were the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every day. That alarming comparison drew significant media attention, and the report led to substantial new federal funding to address the problem of medical errors, along with efforts to educate providers and administrators about the new systems approach to errors. 'There might have developed a patient safety movement in health care without Lucian, but he made it happen years before it otherwise would have,' Berwick said. 'He was probably the first pedigreed specialist from the mainstream of health care to give this problem a name.' Gawande said he believed it was the confidence Dr. Leape had acquired as a surgeon that girded him in the face of strong resistance from colleagues. 'He had enough arrogance to believe in himself and in what he was saying,' Gawande said. 'He knew he was onto something important, and that he could bring the profession along, partly by goading the profession as much as anything.' In 2007, the National Patient Safety Foundation, which Dr. Leape had helped found in 1997 to support the growth of the nascent field, created a patient safety think tank, the Lucian Leape Institute, which is now part of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. This article originally appeared in
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
COVID is rising again in California — just as school and festival season start
As students head back to classrooms, travelers squeeze in last-minute getaways and crowds pack San Francisco's summer festivals, California is experiencing a renewed uptick in COVID-19 infections — part of a broader national trend that health officials say echoes previous seasonal surges. State health data shows that test positivity rates nearly doubled in July, from 3.94% on July 5 to 7.91% by July 26. While still categorized as low, the trajectory is concerning enough that public health officials are watching closely as fall approaches. 'I think COVID is still on the way up in California,' said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at UCSF. 'We should expect to see more community cases, and later in the season than last year, based on Stanford wastewater data.' The virus's current increase, attributed to newer subvariants with nicknames like Stratus and Nimbus, coincides with the late-summer heat that drives people indoors — where respiratory viruses spread more easily. Though highly transmissible, these variants aren't necessarily more dangerous, and Chin-Hong expects fewer hospitalizations and deaths than in previous years. Wastewater data from the CDC and WastewaterSCAN also show climbing virus levels in California, one of only a few states currently reporting 'high' or 'very high' viral activity. Nationally, emergency department visits for COVID remain relatively low but are ticking upward, especially among children under 4 — many of whom remain unvaccinated. Chin-Hong said hospitalizations and deaths are also expected to increase for those over 75 in the coming weeks, 'especially if that group has not been recently boosted or taken Paxlovid.' As of now, California public schools still require standard childhood vaccines, but not COVID-19 vaccinations — a move that reflects recent shifts in federal vaccine policy. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has scaled back vaccine recommendations, including withdrawing guidance for healthy children, despite objections from major medical groups. Meanwhile, federal support for mRNA vaccine research — once central to the pandemic response — is being scaled back. Kennedy announced Tuesday the elimination of $500 million in funding tied to mRNA development, prompting backlash from many scientists who view the technology as essential for responding to future viral threats. An updated COVID-19 booster targeting the JN.1 variant is expected this fall, but uptake may be low. A recent KFF poll found that most adults say they are unlikely to get the new shot. In the face of rising cases and evolving public health guidance, Chin-Hong urges people to stay vigilant. Even mild symptoms like sniffles or a sore throat — ' razor blade or not' — could signal a COVID-19 infection, he said. He emphasized the importance of vaccinating older adults, especially those who haven't had a shot or a recent infection in the past year. For people at higher risk or living with vulnerable individuals, early diagnosis is key. And for older adults who haven't been recently vaccinated and do contract COVID-19, Chin-Hong reminds them not to overlook treatment options: 'Paxlovid or early antivirals are a great option.'
