A group of over 25 scientists from 17 institutions in the United States and Europe has urged the adoption of a legally binding global treaty under the United Nations to regulate the production and use of chemicals.
Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers highlighted the urgent need for rigorous pre-market testing of synthetic chemicals and plastics to safeguard children’s health against chronic diseases.
The proposed treaty would mirror stringent regulations applied to prescription drugs, requiring chemical manufacturers to prove safety before releasing their products into the market. The researchers argued that prioritising health protection over the unchecked production of chemicals and plastics is essential.
Unlike pharmaceuticals, which undergo extensive long-term testing and post-market surveillance for impacts on the body before they are sold in the market, industrial chemicals often bypass such scrutiny.
In contrast, the chemical industry merely informs regulators of chemical usage, Richard Wielechowski, senior investment analyst at Planet Tracker, previously told Down To Earth in an interview.
“Still, these chemicals end up in our bodies in the same way as drugs do. If anything, industrial chemicals like plastics are probably more permanent in our bodies than medicines,” Wielechowski said.
The researchers in the new paper stressed that new laws should reverse the presumption of harmlessness for chemicals. “Instead, chemicals and chemical-based products should be allowed to enter markets and remain on markets only if their manufacturers can establish through rigorous, independent, premarket testing that they are not toxic at anticipated levels of exposure,” they added.
Post-market surveillance, similar to that conducted for pharmaceuticals to monitor longer-term adverse health effects, should also be mandatory for chemicals and plastics, the paper noted. The surveillance is a set of activities conducted by manufacturers to identify and collect information regarding drugs after their approval.
The scale of the problem is immense; a 2020 study estimated that 350,000 chemicals are registered globally. However, fewer than 20 per cent of them have been tested for toxicity, and even fewer for toxic effects in infants and children, the paper pointed out.
Research has shown that brief, low-level exposure to toxic chemicals early in life can result in lasting health problems, increasing the risk of disease and disability throughout a person’s life.
The production of synthetic chemicals, most of which are fossil fuel-based, has expanded 50-fold since 1950 and is projected to triple by 2050. Studies linking chemicals to diseases in children have risen sharply, from approximately 1,000 in 1998 to nearly 12,000 in 2022.
To address this crisis, the researchers called for a fundamental transformation of the chemical industry’s structure and business model. This includes reducing reliance on fossil carbon and energy, and developing safer, more sustainable molecules and manufacturing processes.
“Pollution by synthetic chemicals and plastics is one of the great planetary challenges of our time,” Landrigan, the director of Boston College’s Observatory on Planetary Health, said in a statement. It not only endangers the world’s children; it also threatens humanity’s capacity for reproduction, the expert added.