In the 1980s, the Research Council of the United States found that more than 70% of chemicals widely used for commercial purposes had no evidence of minimal toxicity and there has been no significant improvement to date that puts humans in a high risk. Toxic ignorance emphasizes the lack of knowledge about the effect of pollution from toxins around us, on our systems and how this can lead to poor health in our body.
In the production of many food products, cosmetics, food packaging, and in general most commercial products, synthetic chemicals are used in large quantities and only 2% of the thousands of chemicals have been tested for its carcinogenicity. This means that we are at risk of more toxins than ever, most chemicals have not been tested in the laboratory, although there is a widespread belief that government agencies are protecting our environment and our health from the effects of the products. toxic chemicals, which is false. There is also an unfamiliarity with complex chemical mixtures because most environmental health researchers use animals in laboratory testing and are exposed to one chemical variable at a time, while humans are exposed to multiple mixtures of chemicals that they can have an additional effect on humans and that Long-term exposure to these multiple chemicals can have culminating effects. Laboratory tests that could test multiple variables would incur high costs of time and money and therefore not practical, some would take up to hundreds of years to test only a small number of chemicals. There are a few reasons why environmental health and safety research is limited and these are:
A. Research is limited to one or two variables, while multiple variables are not taken into account, which is common in humans.
B. Most research deals only with the cancer paradigm, whereas there may be other diseases caused by a combination of different chemicals.
vs. The large number of chemicals available for commercial purposes and more new chemicals are introduced each year, making it difficult to keep up with them.
There are some precautions / solutions that can be taken to limit / stop the excesses of toxins in our environment and system and some of them are:
-Simple screening tests by manufacturers, especially those chemicals that are used in large quantities and the results should be available to the public.
-Replacing certain chemicals with safer organic alternatives.
-Reduction of the number of chemical products in the market and used in the production of goods.
-Detoxification.
