I write this partially in response to an email that was forwarded to me this past week in which a parent recounted a horrible experience of their child being chemically burned by a common house cleaner. To remove some crayon marks from the wall, the boy was given a “Mr. Clean Eraser”. The chemicals on the sponge burned him badly enough that the parent needed to make a visit to the emergency room. Luckily, with proper treatment, the boy will be OK and no skin surgery was necessary.

As a parent myself, this obviously scares me. The idea that any child can get chemically burned by a household product is frightening. (By the way, the product does have a caution label on it, but nothing that really stands out given the apparent injury potential.)

But as a scientist who works in environmental health (a branch of science that looks at how things in our environment can affect our health), it upsets me that more and more products hit the shelves of major stores without, what I consider, proper warning labels. The ingredients in many of these household cleaners are actually registered with federal agencies because of their known adverse health effects. And if that wasn’t scary enough, some companies disguise the names of recognizable chemicals and use a pseudo name that is unknown to most people. A classic example of this is formaldehyde. It is often called Quaternium-15 (Q 15). Or, how about triclosan which forms chloroform (a known carcinogen) when you combine it with water. Go ahead, check your hand soaps.

So, what are we, as health conscious consumers and parents, to do? Well, we do have a few choices. We can choose not to use any sort of cleaning products and never clean ourselves or our homes. Although that may sound good to some, we’ll have other health problems with that choice. We can continue to buy the same products we always have and hope that we never have a bad experience and simply live with it if we do. Or, another option is to do a little bit of reading and find for ourselves what ingredients to stay away from and look for products that do not contain them, but work well regardless. There are several companies who make safer to use products, which in turn are also safer for the environment (go figure that coincidence!), but as their marketing budgets are much less, it is often harder to find them. Many of these products are unfortunately more expensive and are not chosen by many people who would like to use them but just can’t afford to. Of, course I did say “many of these products”- not all. If you’d like to know what my family uses, feel free to email me at mdlobo@juno.com

Written by: Matt Cross-Guillén mdlobo@juno.com http://www.ahealthywealthyhome.com