The Hidden Perils of Personal Care Products.

• Author: WAGNER, HOLLY
• Position: Health risks associated with particular types of products and ingredients

"... The universal adage remains that no chemical is absolutely safe. Even if an ingredient is `known' to be safe, there is no certainty that it won't have undesirable side effects in a new combination."

COMMON SOAP and shampoo ingredients were linked to cancer in laboratory mice in one study. Hair dyes popped up as suspects in certain rare cancers in another. Studies like these quickly turn into a media frenzy that frightens the public, who then wonder if the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other Federal agencies are doing their job to protect public health.

It is a matter of fact that using practically any cosmetic product brings some degree of risk. The consumer needs to know how to interpret that risk and understand why these goods aren't subject to the same rigorous examination as drugs.

"If you look at the whole range of compounds we're exposed to on a fairly regular basis--about 80,000--the number of those that are known causative agents of human cancer are no more than 100 or so," indicates Gary Stoner, director of the Chemoprevention Program at the Ohio State Comprehensive Cancer Center.

What goes into cosmetics and personal care products such as shampoos, moisturizing lotions, hair dyes, and shaving creams, and how these ingredients are--or are not--regulated for public consumption receive scant mainstream media attention. For instance, Project Censored, a media watchdog group, named the problem as one of 1997's 10 most underreported stories.

A news article on the Project Censored web site points fingers at potentially carcinogenic compounds found in cosmetics and says the FDA has done little to regulate these ingredients. Yet, determining if the ingredients in these products are a direct cause of cancer is difficult at best.

Americans spend $30,000,000,000 on cosmetics annually. More than 5,000 ingredients are used in these products, and no long-term safety data exist for most of these chemicals, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The FDA defines a cosmetic as "a product, except soap, intended to be applied to the human body for cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness or altering the appearance." The definition seems innocuous enough, but certain chemicals used in making various personal care products have raised some researchers' eyebrows. Take hair dyes, for example. Studies have suggested that ingredients in them--specifically coal tar derivatives--cause leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and multiple myeloma.

"Hair dye ingredients are a class of chemicals of which a number are known to be carcinogenic in laboratory animals," notes Aaron Blair, chief of the occupational epidemiology branch of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). "But not all of the ingredients are carcinogenic, and not all the chemicals have been tested."

Sandra Haycook, a beautician for 30 years, doesn't give much credence to studies concerning potential...