Household Hazards

Those old public service messages about the brain on drugs and the visual of the egg sunny side up in the frying pan came to mind when I saw a CDC report about eye injury hazards from “foam parties.”

The same day this week two different two companies announced recalls for similar toys: Be Amazing!’s Monster Science Growing Spider and Eco-Novelty’s Cosmo Beads (in the jumbo size). One thing they had in common was being made of a superabsorbent synthetic material that swells dramatically when exposed to water.

Even against a backdrop of heightened vigilance over potential domestic terrorism, sounding an alarm over school-age “pranks,” even if they get out of hand, may seem to be overdoing a bit. But it is exactly the scenario of explosive adolescence that is raising concern at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a branch of the federal CDC.

There is a general perception (or misperception) that gratuitously toxic products are more or less kept in check. Here is a cautionary tale of a toxic hair product countering that Panglossian view: not a parable of a pricey Brazilian blow-out, but rather a humbler narrative about a basic black dye called paraphenylenediamine.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has been closely tracking the new variant of avian flu emerging in the bird markets of China. But the CDC has more than that on its plate of course. One of the other emergent problems it is concerned with is a homegrown epidemic of “Valley Fever.”

A major story “broke” in the New York Times this weekend. It reported on a group of North Carolina workers with serious neurological injury from a widely used industrial chemical called n-propyl bromide. The article correctly emphasizes the broad nature of this occupational problem. But a word or two about the consumer market might also have been warranted.

For those of you planning a home-cooked Valentine’s menu of delights – if this includes a pureed soup or a velvety chocolate pudding – your hand may be more likely to be pierced by a blender blade than your lover’s heart by Cupid’s arrow.

A New Year’s Day story eclipsed by the budgetary brinksmanship in Washington DC highlights a different sort of precipice. 1300 miles from the Capitol, in Gun Barrel City Texas, Linda and John Rigo decided to operate their new Telfon-coated self-cleaning oven. Not long after, their two pet macaws stopped breathing. One simply fell dead off his perch.

Two days before Thanksgiving the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission released a Safety Alert pithily titled “Single-Load Liquid Laundry Packets: Harmful to Children." Well, maybe not so pithy. This relatively new-on-the-U.S.- market product is better known as “detergent pods.”

A recent disastrous factory fire in a Pakistan poses the difficult moral question of what our own personal responsibilities are as consumers in a globalized economic marketplace. Asked another way, is it a household hazard if the danger was borne by others far away rather than by the purchaser who brings a product home?

The CDC welcomed the summer season with a sobering warning about the potential hazards of grill-cleaning brushes. All-in-all they tolled 6 cases of adults who went to emergency departments either because of severe pain swallowing or terrible abdominal pain.

This past week I was asked to consult on a patient regarding a possible snake envenomation because of severe inflammation of the forearm after working in the garden. The problem was infection, not snakebite. The suspected source was a rose thorn prick.

Last month, the Centers for Disease Control highlighted an arcane household hazard. It’s a virus-caused infection which typically affects a finger or the palm and looks quite a bit nastier than it actually is. The name this infection goes by is “Orf.”

This past week, a major environmental victory went by barely noticed. A Japan-based pesticide giant, Arysta LifeScience announced withdrawing from the U.S. all of its methyl iodide-containing fumigant formulations. What this means is that this toxic-chemical golden-touch will never be reaching out to grab hold of California’s strawberry fields or any other U.S. crop.

California recently issued a “hazard alert” following an occupationally-related death from methylene chloride poisoning. Though it's restricted in Europe, this chemical is still widely used industrially in the U.S. Methylene chloride is also commonplace in a number of consumer products available for use in the home.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama stated “I will not back down from protecting our kids from mercury poisoning.” Why?

Despite all of the hubbub about Iowa, in particular the influence of religious activism in presidential politics, one fundamental (as opposed to fundamentalist) characteristic of the state that is rarely mentioned is that it is the heartland for home environmental radon gas exposure.

A study on Parkinson Disease has raised disturbing questions about the role that certain common chemical solvents may play in leading to this potentially devastating neurological disease. The chemical solvents, trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene, are used commonly in a number of workplaces abd are allowed on the market in household consumer products.

Drywall construction should be familiar to anyone who has watched at least one episode of any of the ubiquitous reality shows featuring remodeling to live in, move in, sell, sell better, or flip. The downsides of drywall are not highlighted in these paeans to the glories of gypsum sandwiched between paper sheets.

I recently had a call from a junior health reporter doing a story on household toxins. An editor had assigned her the topic and was keeping the cub reporter on a fairly short leash: she was supposed to come up with a list of top hazards to worry about, but also a matching list of worries that were “overblown.”