I just came across this article from a few months ago. But I think it's still very relevant. ....

Why Poisonous, Unregulated Chemicals End Up in Our Blood
By Mark Schapiro
Harper's Magazine
October 2007 Issue
In the late 1990s, citizens of several European countries learned from newspaper reports that their infants were constantly being exposed to a host of toxic chemicals. Babies were sleeping in pajamas treated
with cancer-causing flame retardants; they were sucking on bottles
laced with plastic additives believed to alter hormones; their diapers were glued together with nerve-damaging toxins normally used to kill
algae on the hulls of ships. When European health officials tried to
look into the matter, they were confounded by how little they actually
knew about these and other potentially hazardous chemicals. Regulators
discovered that they had no way of assessing the dangers of long-term
exposure to everyday products. Some manufacturers of baby goods did not
even know what was in their own products, since chemical producers were
under no obligation to tell them. Such data, if it existed at all, was
secreted away in the vaults of chemical companies and had never been
submitted to any government authority.

In the years since those news reports, the nascent science of
bio-monitoring has provided further insight into how the industrial
chemicals that are in clothes, food packaging, cosmetics, toys,
electronics, and just about every modern convenience are actually
lodging in the human body. Greenpeace U.K. released a study in 2005
that found numerous toxic chemicals in the umbilical-cord blood of
European infants. That same year, World Wildlife Fund International
tested the blood of three generations of women from twelve European
countries. The largest number of chemicals-sixty-three-was found in the

group of grandmothers. Given the number of years they had had to
accumulate exposure, this result was perhaps not surprising. But the
next-highest level was among their grandchildren, aged twelve to
twenty-eight, who in their short lifetimes had amassed fifty-nine
different toxic chemicals. The blood of a nineteen-year-old Italian,
who later sent me her test results, included brominated flame
retardants, which are potential liver, thyroid, and neurological toxins

that are used to coat many electronics; the pesticides DDT and lindane,

the latter of which is suspected of contributing to breast and other
cancers; perfluorinated chemicals, known carcinogens that are used as
stain- and water-repellents on clothing, furniture, and nonstick
cookware; and artificial musk aromas, found in soaps and perfumes, that
scientists claim can reduce the body's ability to expel other toxins.

Bio-monitoring tests in the United States have revealed the same
dangerous chemicals making their way into the blood of Americans. In
2005, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completed
screening for the presence of 148 toxic chemicals in the blood of a
broad cross section of Americans; it found that the vast majority of
subjects harbored almost all the toxins. In the same year, the CDC's
National Survey on Family Growth concluded that rates of infertility
were rising for women under the age of twenty-five, a spike many
scientists attribute, at least in part, to routine exposure to toxic
chemicals. The Environmental Working Group conducted tests on the
umbilical cords of ten newborns in 2006 and discovered that
cancer-causing, endocrine-disrupting, and gene-mutating chemicals had
passed from the mothers to their fetuses through the placenta.

Up until the 1970s, no country had imposed any meaningful
oversight
of the tens of thousands of chemicals that had entered the marketplace
since World War II. Then, in 1976, the U.S. Congress passed the Toxic
Substances Control Act (TSCA), which granted the government the
authority to track industrial chemicals and to place restrictions on
any that proved harmful to humans or the environment. Because the
United States was the world's preeminent economic power, other major
chemical producers-Germany, France, and Britain-soon brought their
national regulations into line with TSCA so as not to lose the U.S.
market. Shortly thereafter, Japan and other countries hoping to conduct
trade with the West also had to adopt the central principles of the law
as their own. Thus, America set the rules for chemical regulation
across the globe.

But TSCA came with an enormous loophole, a caveat leveraged into
it by the powerful chemical industry: every chemical already on the market
before 1979 was exempted from the law's primary screening requirements.

Three decades after TSCA came into being, 95 percent of all chemicals
in circulation have never undergone any testing for toxicity or their
impact on the environment. The extent to which TSCA has failed to
regulate hazardous substances is now evident in the bio-monitoring
results in Europe and America.

Europeans have recently decided to do something about all the
untested chemicals that are ending up in their blood. "The assumption
among Americans is, 'If it's on the market, it's okay,'" explained
Robert Donkers, an E.U. official who was asked to review Europe's
regulatory laws after the baby-product scare. "That fantasy is gone in
Europe." Donkers's efforts were the first steps in what became, seven
years later, a new E.U. chemical regulation called REACH-Registration,
Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals. REACH amounts to a
revolution in how chemicals are managed, and in how production
decisions around the world will be made from now on. Regulations set by

the most powerful countries have quickly become, through trade, the
international standard. And the European Union, with a market of 480
million people stretching across twenty-seven countries, is now significantly larger than the United
States in both population and wealth; Europe's gross national product surged
past that of the United States in 2005, and the gap increased when two
more countries joined the E.U. earlier this year. The E.U. is now the
most significant trading partner for every continent except Australia.
The ripple effects from this shift in economic power have been one of
the great untold stories of the new century.

Indeed, Europe is now compelling other nations' manufacturers to
conform to regulations that are far more protective of people's health
than those in the United States. Europe has emerged not only as the
world's leading economic power but also as one of its moral leaders.
Those roles were once filled by the United States.

When TSCA took effect in the late 1970s, the United States was
seen as a pioneer of health and environmental regulation. The Environmental
Protection Agency had been established only a few years before, and the
government had recently set standards for fuel economy, hazardous-waste
disposal, and many other factors affecting the country's air and water
quality. Currently, some 42 billion pounds of chemicals are produced in

or brought to America each day, but because of TSCA exemptions, fewer
than 200 of all the chemicals on the market have ever undergone any
serious risk assessments. Among the 62,000 chemicals the act excused
from testing or review were thousands of highly toxic substances, such

as ethyl benzene, a widely used industrial solvent suspected of being a

potent neurotoxin; whole families of synthetic plastics that are
potential carcinogens and endocrine disrupters; and numerous other
chemicals for which there was little or no information.

The EPA is actually allowed to place restrictions on the chemicals

grandfathered onto the market if the substances present an
"unreasonable risk to human health." In order to demonstrate this risk,

however, the agency must surmount tremendous legal and administrative
obstacles. The EPA is required to weigh the "costs to industry" of any
regulation, and it is obliged to impose restrictions that are the
"least burdensome" to chemical manufacturers. According to a 2005
Government Accountability Office analysis, the EPA relies too heavily
on industry test data when making safety assessments and allows
companies to keep critical data from the public through
"indiscriminate" claims that information is proprietary. Even for those

few new chemicals brought to market after TSCA, the screening record is

not reassuring. Ninety days before commercial-scale production of a
chemical begins, manufacturers are required to provide the EPA with all

exposure and toxicity data. Theoretically, this information enables the

agency to determine whether regulatory action is warranted before
chemicals hit the market. But according to the EPA's own figures, 85
percent of the notifications submitted contain no health data.

One result of this industry-friendly screening is that the EPA has

banned only five chemicals since its inception in 1970. For a brief
time the banned list included a sixth substance: asbestos. In 1989, the

EPA prohibited nearly all uses of asbestos, which it classified as a
"known carcinogen." The chemical industry challenged the agency,
however, and in 1990 a federal court vacated the ban, asserting that
the EPA had neither met TSCA's requirement that the conclusive dangers
of the chemical should exceed its perceived usefulness nor demonstrated

that the ban was the "least burdensome alternative" for eliminating the
"unreasonable risk" of exposure. The EPA has not acted to ban a
chemical since that decision, even though other countries have outlawed

asbestos and numerous toxins that are still in use in the United
States. (Since 2004, the E.U. has banned entire categories of hazardous

chemicals from use in cosmetics, toys, electronics, and other consumer
goods.) By making it easier to hang on to old chemicals than to develop

new ones, TSCA provides no incentive for manufacturers to create less
toxic alternatives. The absence of even minimal toxicity data insulates

the industry from the normal supply-demand dynamic of the market;
consumers, in other words, have no means of expressing their potential
preference for a less toxic substitute.

Chemical companies have spent lavishly to preserve these lax
standards. Since 1996, the industry has contributed $47 million to
federal election campaigns, and it pays about $30 million each year to
lobbyists in Washington. Lynn Goldman, who served as assistant
administrator for toxic substances at the EPA from 1993 to 1998, told
me that she and her colleagues knew TSCA was largely ineffectual.
"There were thousands of chemicals out there, and we didn't know what
they were. We weren't able to get the data, weren't able to assess the
risks, nothing." Goldman recalls a party held in Washington to
commemorate TSCA's twentieth anniversary. "Someone from the chemical
industry got up to salute TSCA and said, 'This is the perfect statute.
I wish every law could be like TSCA.'"

The primary target of Europe's new chemical regulation is the more

than 60,000 compounds TSCA allowed to stay on the market without
testing. Under REACH, these chemicals will have to be registered,
evaluated for toxicity, and authorized before being permitted to remain

in use. Fifteen hundred chemicals are expected to be placed on a 2008
list of "substances of very high concern." These toxins, which are
known to cause cancer, alter genes, and affect fertility, will be the
first to be removed from the market unless producers are able to prove
that they can be "adequately controlled." In addition to assessing
chemicals in their raw form, REACH

also extends to the endless array of consumer goods that utilize
these compounds; thus, tens of thousands of "downstream users," from
construction companies to tennis-shoe manufacturers and fashion houses,

will be forced to find out and report what chemicals are in their
products and what effects they have on human health and the
environment.

By the end of 2008, the first sets of risk data are to be
submitted
to the E.U. Manufacturers will then have ten more years to complete
what amounts to a scientific cataloguing of the chemical makeup of the
global economy. Whereas U.S. regulators are forced to find
scientifically improbable definitive evidence of toxic exposure before
acting, REACH acts on the basis of precaution. European authorities
consider the inherent toxicity of a substance and, based on an
accumulation of evidence, determine whether its potential to cause harm

is great enough to remove it from circulation. Unlike TSCA, REACH
places the burden of proof on manufacturers, who must demonstrate that
their chemicals can be used safely. The law also proposes to
drastically limit the amount of health-related data that companies can
claim as proprietary.

Critics of stricter chemical regulations have long contended that
the price of compliance would be far too steep. But the E.U. estimated
that REACH would cost European chemical manufacturers about $4 billion
over fourteen years-a figure that amounts to less than 1 percent of
their combined yearly revenue. The E.U. further calculated that these
expenses would be repaid many times over by the resulting health
benefits. According to their figures, REACH would prevent some 4,500
occupational cancer cases each year and reduce European health-care
costs from ailments related to chemical exposure by $69 billion over
the next three decades. Moreover, by establishing what will be the
first open, actually free market in chemicals, in which informed
consumers will be able to make decisions as to what risks they are
willing to take, REACH promotes new research into the development of
safer chemicals. Chemists have already come up with substitutes for
some of the most problematic toxic chemicals on the market, and the
E.U. estimates that its environmental initiatives have spawned billions

of dollars in "green" industries and technologies.

U.S. companies could be put at a serious competitive disadvantage
if they do not acknowledge the changes taking place across the
Atlantic. Americans are already losing ground to Europeans in the
chemical business, having slipped in the past decade from a trade
surplus with European manufacturers to a more than $28 billion deficit.

That deficit promises to increase as environmentally aware consumers
are given the opportunity to choose between European goods with
chemicals that have undergone toxicity screening and American goods
with unscreened chemicals. Because American companies interested in
exporting to the E.U. will also have to supply toxicity data to the
European authorities, REACH does present opportunities for U.S.
consumers. Not only will these chemicals be subject to their first-ever

health- and environmental-impact review but the findings will then be
available on the European Chemical Agency's website. At that point,
U.S. consumers may no longer choose to use untested American goods.

The American public, along with the American media, has so far
been
mostly oblivious to the new chemical regulations coming out of Europe.
The Bush Administration and U.S. manufacturers, however, have been
fixated on it for years. REACH is far more than just another foreign
ban of a specific chemical with which U.S. industry will have to
contend; it strikes at the fundamental belief that the United States
decides what can and cannot be contained in the goods sold all over the
world. So as REACH was being debated in the European Parliament from
2003 to 2006, the U.S. government and the nation's industries teamed up
to undertake an unprecedented international lobbying effort to kill or
radically weaken the proposal.

The assault came from an assortment of government and industry
offices. A memo that circulated at the State Department's Bureau of
European and Eurasian Affairs denounced REACH as too "costly,
burdensome, and complex" for industry to follow. If chemicals were put
through the rigors of review, a Commerce Department brief warned,
"hundreds of thousands of Americans could be thrown out of their jobs."

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick submitted a protest to the
World Trade Organization asserting that REACH amounted to a
"non-tariff" barrier to foreign exporters. A delegation of State
Department officials joined two Dow Chemical executives in Athens to
lobby the Greeks, who then held the presidency of the European Union.
Colin Powell himself sent out a seven-page cable to U.S. embassies
throughout the world claiming that REACH "could present obstacles to
trade" and cost American chemical producers tens of billions of dollars
in lost exports. At the same time, Washington sent emissaries to such
new E.U. members as Hungary, Poland, Estonia, and the Czech
Republic-formerly Communist countries where environmental consciousness
was far less developed than in Western Europe-in an effort to peel off
support within the E.U. by claiming that REACH would hurt European
firms competing in foreign markets. The State Department
also recruited a coalition of allies to oppose REACH from
countries heavily reliant on exports; pleas went out to Brazil, India, Japan,
Malaysia, South Africa, and others to develop a "coordinated outreach"
strategy among "E.U. trading partners." In E.U. parliamentary hearings
on REACH that I attended, I was able to identify lobbyists not only for
the U.S. and European chemical industries but also for such downstream
chemical users as cement, automobile, textile, and pharmaceutical
companies. The U.S. lobbying effort amounted to an historic intrusion
into European affairs. Robert Donkers, who in 2003 was stationed in the
United States to explain REACH to Americans, invited me to consider the
reverse scenario: European officials descending on Washington to lobby
against a bill being considered in Congress. "It wouldn't be
tolerated," he said. "We wouldn't last ten minutes!"

By early 2006, REACH had already undergone a rewrite by the
European Commission and had passed its first reading in the parliament.

Nearly a thousand amendments had been voted on and consolidated.
Environmentalists in Europe felt the standards had already been
weakened in significant ways. Priority had been put on "high-volume
chemicals" produced in excess of a thousand tons a year, with
diminishing data requirements as the volume declined; broad exemptions
were issued for certain plastics. But REACH still retained its core
principles: that thousands of existing chemicals would be reviewed for
their toxicity, that the data from those reviews would be made public,
and that responsibility for demonstrating a chemical's safety would
rest with the manufacturers.

In Washington, however, President Bush signaled that the struggle
was far from over. He sent C. Boyden Gray to Brussels in February as
the new U.S. ambassador to the E.U. A veteran Republican operative and
an heir to the R. J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, Gray had spent a career
in and out of government rewriting the rules of environmental oversight

to reduce the burden on business. As general counsel to the first
President Bush, he helped transform how the EPA and other federal
agencies were managed so that cost-benefit analyses would be given
precedence over risk-based decisions. "This is the beast we have
confined and tamed," he told me, referring to his success in limiting
U.S. regulatory laws.

One of Gray's first public undertakings as ambassador began at
AmCham E.U., an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Brussels.
AmCham E.U. lobbies the E.U. on behalf of 140 U.S. companies, including

Apple, Boeing, Dow, DuPont, General Motors, and McDonald's.
Environmental policies are one of their top concerns. In June 2006,
Gray orchestrated a joint press release, from the United States and
twelve other countries, that objected to REACH's hazard-based system
for assessing risks and called for weakening its registration
requirements. That press release, it turns out, was written at the
offices of AmCham E.U. and sent from the U.S. Mission in Brussels. One
morning that June, I received a leaked copy of the original draft,
which, thanks to Microsoft tracking software, included the editorial
changes that were written into the document as it made its way through
various readers. Where AmCham E.U.'s address had once been now ran the
imprimatur of the United States Mission to the European Union. This
edit and others offered a rare glimpse into the routine merging of the
U.S. government with American corporations. When U.S. Representative
Henry Waxman conducted an investigation into the Bush Administration's
efforts to undermine REACH, he unearthed dozens of pages of diplomatic
cable traffic showing how the government had coordinated its efforts
with those of industry. Talking points, lobbying junkets, statistics
(many of them proven inaccurate) had been shared. Instead of
considering these reforms on their merits, or revising its own failed
regulations, our government demonstrated once again that it puts
business interests ahead of the safety of its own-and the
world's-citizens.

The European Parliament finally voted to approve REACH on December

13, 2006. By February, the U.S. Department of Commerce, which had
lobbied so vigorously against the proposed regulation, was hosting a
seminar in Charlotte, North Carolina, to explain to companies doing
business in Europe how to comply with the law intended to protect
Europeans. It was the first of a series of sessions to be held with
American businesses across the country. In the same month,
representatives from the Pentagon, defense contractors, U.S.
scientists, and California state officials met in Monterey to discuss
the effects REACH would have on military hardware being used on U.S.
bases in Europe. Several major American electronics and cosmetics
companies are already reformulating their products to meet the new E.U.
standards. And DuPont, Dow, and other large U.S. chemical manufacturers
are busy preparing toxicity data to submit to the E.U. In many
instances, smaller American chemical companies and most downstream
manufacturers that utilize chemicals will have to purchase this data
from the big corporations, which now stand to profit from the REACH
strictures.

Many American states, tired of waiting for direction from
Washington, are now looking to Brussels for ideas on environmental
reform. California, Massachusetts, and New York have begun exploring
the possibility of implementing elements of REACH in their state
regulations; Maine and Washington have cited Europe's precedent in
their efforts to ban particular chemicals, such as those
poly-brominated flame retardants found in children's sleepwear.
Elsewhere in the world, governments have worked to bring their own
policies into line with REACH. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce had
REACH translated into Mandarin within days of its passage. European
consultants also traveled to China to show industry and government
officials there what exporters will have to do to abide by the chemical

regulations. The Europeans were willing to aid their competitors in
China, with whom they have a significant trade deficit, because just
about anything made in Chinese factories can end up in the hands of
Europeans. To protect its population, Europe is working backward,
toward the potential sources of future chemical contamination. European
consultants also fanned out to Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, South
Korea, Thailand, and other major players in the world economy. And in
the upcoming year, Robert Donkers, who had long tried to forewarn
American businesses of this tectonic shift in environmental influence,
is expected to be transferred to India, where he will be advising that
up-and-coming economic powerhouse.

The European Union is demanding that its industries take
responsibility for the collateral health damages that its products may
cause, and it is doing so with innovations that are leading the world.
In the process, American consumers are being put in a position that
would have been unimaginable as little as a decade ago. Shortly after
the EPA was founded, the United States imposed domestic restrictions on
some of the most dangerous pesticides and other chemicals, and U.S.
companies responded by exporting millions of pounds of these toxins to
Third World countries, where such regulations didn't exist. The irony
is that our nation's steady retreat from environmental leadership means
it may soon become a dumping ground for chemicals deemed too hazardous
by more progressive countries. Meanwhile, Americans may also be the
incidental beneficiaries of protective standards created by the
government of a foreign country in which they have no say. In recent
years the United States has opposed a multitude of environmental and
human-rights initiatives that have gained international legitimacy
without its participation. Indeed, this country is no longer where it
likes to imagine itself to be-at the axis of influence around which the
rest of the world revolves.

Mark Schapiro is the editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting. His new book, "Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of

Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power," was
published this year by Chelsea Green.