What are the Dangers of Toxin?

When I learned that there were products in my home that might be toxic, my first reaction was, "Oh, no! How am I going to be able to tell which products are safe and which are toxic?" I hadn't even taken chemistry in school. This was entirely new to me. but I learned about how toxic chemicals are in household products and how they can affect my health. Hopefully, this information will help you realize that certain products in your home may be harming you and your children. Fortunately, it's a simple and easy matter to replace them with safe alternatives.

How Toxic Chemicals Get Into your Body

There are three ways toxic chemicals can enter your body: by eating or drinking the substance, breathing it, and by absorbing it through the skin.

INGESTION

Ingestion - eating or drinking a substance - is the route of most immediate poisonings that lead to accidental death. Young children are especially vulnerable to household poisonings through ingestion. With their natural curiosity, they learn by putting things in their mouths. This is a fine way to learn, but in a modern household full of toxic chemicals, it's frightening to think of what might happen.

Children cannot tell the difference between lemon-scented toxic furniture polish and lemonade - they both smell the same to a child. Ammonia looks like apple juice. A mothball designed to kill insects is the same size and shape as a piece of candy. In addition to these confusions, children can't read warning labels.

Look around your home and see if there is anything, anything, in a bottle that is within your child's reach. Even things you think are safe, like perfume, toothpaste, bubble bath, soap, mouthwash, can be poison to a child who drinks them. Look for anything that a child might put in her mouth - rat poison, mothballs, drugs, and medicines. Pretend you are a child -- you don't know toxic from safe, and anything might go in your mouth. Anything you wouldn't eat or drink yourself should be out of the reach of children.

When Peter Schwab was one year old, he crawled over to the dishwasher to watch his mother unloading it. Suddenly, he put a finger into the chlorinated detergent and ate a fingerful of wet but undissolved Electrosol. In minutes, his face was red and blistered, and the inside of his mouth and his tongue were burned white. Fortunately, within minutes Peter was being treated in a hospital, and he recovered in a few days. But others that day weren't so lucky. Across the hall was a little girl who, according to Peter's mother, also ate dishwasher detergent and required seven operations to reopen her scarred esophagus.

Another child, three-year-old Jason Whitley, suffered a lingering and horrible death after swallowing only three ounces of hair conditioner. Two weeks after drinking the liquid, which contains ammonia, the little boy died.

Seven-month-old Adrian Gonzales spilled an open bottle of laundry bleach his mother left on the floor, When he crawled through the puddle, the bleach gave him third-degree burns on fifty percent of his tiny body and burned his lungs from the fumes, as well. After four agonizing days he died.14

I know these stories sound frightening, and you may think this could not happen to your child, but each year five to ten million accidental poisonings are reported to U.S. Poison Control Centers. Many are fatal, and the majority of victims are children.15 Among children ages five and under, the most common poison is a household cleaner or personal care product.16

What do you have under your kitchen sink?  Bleach?  Ammonia? Dishwasher detergent?  Window cleaner? and in the bathroom? Hair color? Perfume? Mouthwash?  These common household products could kill your child.

Would you keep a loaded gun under your sin?  of course not! Yet, according to the National Safety Council, more children under the age of four die of accidental poisonings at home than are accidentally killed with guns at home!17  This statistic is shocking to me!  We think of guns as deadly and household products as safe.  Our government requires a license to purchase and own a gun, yet government regulations allow deadly products to be sold freely on supermarket shelves.

INHALATION

Poisoning by inhalation - breathing a substance - is more common, and can be much more harmful than ingestion.  I'm talking about the kind of gradual poisoning that happens over time as children breathe the vapors from toxic chemicals.  Toxic fumes can be released oven when a chemical is tightly sealed in its container. If you doubt this, simply walk down the cleaning products aisle at your local supermarket and notice how strongly it smells of toxic vapors, even though all the containers are sealed tight.  This release of chemical vapors is called outgassing.

When you inhale toxic fumes, the poisons go directly into the bloodstream and quickly travel to organs like the brain, heart, liver, and kidneys.  The results are symptoms such as headaches, muscle aches, and lightheadedness.  Many products give off toxic vapors that can irritate your nose, throat, and lungs, and give you sinus infections.

Children can inhale toxic vapors while you are cleaning, even if you keep the product out of their reach.  Toxic residues from laundry products on bed sheets and pillow covers, as well as finishes on the fabrics themselves, can be inhaled throughout the night, while children, unsuspecting, are sleeping.

ABSORPTION

Absorption - admitting a substance through the skin -- is an often unsuspected route of exposure.

It used to be that we thought of the skin as an impermeable, protective coating.  We now know that any chemical which touches the skin can be absorbed and spread throughout the body.  The sin is so absorbent that nicotine patches and analgesic creams administer medications into the bloodstream through the skin.

Skin absorption of toxic chemicals is obvious when you apply a product, such as cream or lotion, to your skin.  It can also happen when you may not be aware of it, such as when your hands are immersed in a cleaning solution.  Skin absorption can even happen when you come in contact with a surface that was treated with a chemical days, or even weeks, earlier.  This is especially a problem for children, as they may be touching or crawling around on recently cleaned surfaces with toxic residues.

Immediate versus Long-Term Dangers

Not all household poisonings happen instantly.  Some occur only after repeated exposure.

ACUTE TOXICITY

Acute toxicity refers to a one-time exposure that leads to life-threatening effects or death.  Acute toxicity is whey we have Poison Control Centers.  Usually these poisonings are the result of accidental ingestion of common household products that, despite warning labels, are not kept out of children's reach.

CHRONIC TOXICITY

Chronic toxicity refers to poisoning as the result of many repeated exposures to small amounts of a chemical over a long period of time.  The effects of these exposures -- cancer, birth defects, and genetic changes -- may not show up for years.

This is where the effects of toxic chemicals become more difficult to evaluate and more insidious. The different diseases and conditions linked to low levels of chemicals are usually the result of long-term exposure.  Just as smoking one cigarette is not likely to give you cancer, one ordinary exposure to chemicals in cleaners probably won't harm you either.  But, just as smoking every day for years is likely to result in cancer, so too, cleaning your home every day or every week with toxic chemicals is likely to harm your health, and is even more likely to harm the health of your children. Because we don't see immediate effects, we think nothing is happening.  But slowly, day by day, our bodies, and our children's bodies, are being poisoned.

Chronic toxicity also takes into account the combined effects of all the toxic chemicals we are exposed to. Throughout the day, exposure to chemicals in your mouthwash, hair conditioner, cologne, shampoo, toothpaste, bubble bath, soap, cologne or perfume, laundry detergent, window cleaner, and everything else adds up to a chemical soup in your body, the combination of which is virtually impossible to evaluate.

One study clearly demonstrated that chemicals can become more harmful as they combine with each other. Dr. Benjamin Ershoff, at the Institute of Nutritional Studies in California, gave rats different combinations of three common food additives:  Sodium cyclamate, food dye Red No 2, and polyoxyethelene sorbitan monostearate. At first the rats were fed only one of the three additives, and nothing happened.  The, the test animals were given sodium cyclamate and Red No 2, and they stopped growing, lost their hair, and developed diarrhea.  When the rats were finally given all three additives, they lost weight rapidly and died within two weeks.  If this is the result of only three food additives interacting -- which are not nearly as toxic as most cleaning products -- imagine what is going on in our bodies and in the bodies of our children with all the chemicals we are exposed to daily.

Why You Should Be Concerned About Household Toxics

Many people say to me, "I'm not sick, Why should I worry?" You should worry because most household toxics are universally injurious and harmful to even otherwise healthy people.  The long-term health effects of many chemicals are unknown. Remember how many decades it took before scientists discovered that smoking causes cancer?  We do not know the possible cumulative reactions that can occur when chemicals are combined in consumer products, or when, for example, the chemicals inhaled from cleaning products combine in your body with the pesticides you just ate for lunch, and with the chlorine in that glass of water you drank after you went running.

We tend to think of toxic substances as something "out there", separate from us.  Yet, in reality, once toxic substances enter our bodies, they tend to stay inside our bodies, particularly in our adipose fat tissue.  One study showed that 100% of the people tested had toxic styrene in their fat from drinking from disposable plastic foam cups or from eating warm take-out food sold in plastic foam containers.  Number two on the list, gain found in the fat of 100% of the people tested, was 1,4 Dichlorobenzene, a chemical frequently used in household deodorizers.

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