COMMENTARY

A doctor's view: Issue 5 will improve health and help save lives

by Kathleen M. Fagan, M.D., M.P.H.

As a physician specializing in treating victims of toxic chemical exposures, I believe Issue 5 on the November ballot is the best idea to come along in a long time.

Issue 5, the right-to-know chemical labeling law, would help prevent cancer and birth defects by requiring businesses to notify people whom they expose to dangerous amounts of toxic chemicals. Warning labels would be placed on consumer products, giving consumers the right to choose to buy safer products. And polluting factories would have to notify neighbors who are in danger -- a tremendous incentive to cause companies to figure our how to prevent pollution.

Take, for example, the families of the workers at Master Metals in Cleveland, a plant which has recently been temporarily closed by Ohio EPA after years of contaminating the local environment with lead emissions. Although the workers at the plant were following safety regulations by showering and leaving their clothes at the plant each day, I am aware of three of their children who were hospitalized for lead poisoning.

We wondered how these toddlers had been poisoned if they were not being exposed to their fathers' clothing. Finally, we discovered that their fathers' cars, parked outside the plant each day, were being contaminated with lead inside and out. If Master Metals had been forced by a law like Issue 5 to analyze its emissions and warn people who were in danger, these children might have been saved from painful treatments and serious developmental harm.

Issue 5 requires warnings for dangerous exposures to 458 chemicals which have been designated by the national and international research agencies (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Toxicology Program, International Agency for Research on Cancer, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) to cause cancer, birth defects, or developmental harm. These amount to less than one half of one percent of chemicals used in commerce. It makes good scientific and public policy sense to focus first on those chemicals which we know pose a serious risk to public health

Ohio has the seventh highest cancer death rate in the nation. Despite billions of dollars which have been spent in searching for a cure, we have made precious little progress in curing cancer. And we have made even less progress in properly researching or curing problems caused by exposure to reproductive toxins.

The key to reducing these illnesses lies not in curing them but in preventing them. A law similar to Issue 5 which has been in effect in California for five years has resulted in safer products and pollution prevention. For example, manufacturers eliminated the use of lead solder in food cans, reformulated spot-removers containing perchloroethylene, and took trichloroethylene out of typewriter correction fluids.

When California's right-to-know law was on the ballot in 1986, chemical industry lobbyists there made the same dire predictions they are now making about Issue 5 in Ohio: that thousands of jobs would be lost, plants would move elsewhere, prices would skyrocket, and agriculture would collapse. But none of these horror stories have come to pass.

In fact, a five-year review of the California law completed by the California EPA in March 1992 found that it has reduced toxic exposures in the state and that businesses have learned to live with it, some big corporations like Chevron, who fought the law, have even admitted that it has caused them to figure out how to make their operations safer.

A couple of years ago, a mother in the Cleveland area brought her four year old son, who was suffering from severe asthma, in to see me. His mother had figured out that the asthma got worse every time she could see air emissions from the nearby Day-Glo manufacturing plant. His asthma was clearly being aggravated by formaldehyde exposure, which we were able to trace to the plant emissions. When the boy's family moved to a safer area, his asthma significantly improved. Once again, if this plant had to warn people of these exposures, the managers might have decided first to clean up their emissions.

Children in Ohio should not be forced to suffer the consequences of harmful exposure to toxic chemicals. Let's vote for our children's health and safety by voting yes on Issue 5.

Kathleen M. Fagan is an occupational medicine physician in Cleveland, Ohio.