Okay… name something, anything used by people, natural or manufactured, which does not “contain chemicals”
Increasing misuse of chemicals is causing health and environmental damage especially in emerging economies and governments must do more to carry out a promised clean-up by 2020, a United Nations report said on Wednesday.
Production and use of chemicals – from plastics to pesticides – is shifting to developing nations where safeguards are often weaker, the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) said. Unsafe disposal and recycling adds to risks, it said.
Poisonings from industrial and agricultural chemicals are among the top five leading causes of death worldwide, contributing to more than a million deaths every year, UNEP said in a statement of its Global Chemicals Outlook.
“The gains that chemicals can provide must not come at the expense of human health and the environment,” Achim Steiner, head of UNEP, said of its first assessment of chemicals.
The report said chemicals are ubiquitous in modern products, from food to mobile phones, and meant millions of people live “richer, more productive and more comfortable lives”.
Scientists have only assessed the risks of using a fraction of an estimated 140,000 chemicals marketed worldwide, in everything from plastics to pesticides, UNEP said.
Governments promised in 2002, and reaffirmed the promise at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June, to produce and use chemicals by 2020 “in ways that minimize significant adverse effects on the environment and human health.”
“Poisonings from industrial and agricultural chemicals are among the top five leading causes of death worldwide, contributing to more than a million deaths every year, UNEP said in a statement of its Global Chemicals Outlook”
Really? I don’t see much about this rash of “chemical” poisonings. I’m sure they have real data and not made up statistics. This death rate is less than 0.02% of the population. Wonder where they stand on using chemicals for malaria.
Top five? Nope.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index.html
“contributing to more than a million deaths every year”
“Contributing” means that chemicals were NOT the cause of death.
U.N. propaganda. Time to defund them.
A million deaths a year? Really? Show us the bodies.
What about the million of malaria deaths per year that largely are attributable to the banning of a chemical that would have prevented most of those deaths?
“Really? I don’t see much about this rash of “chemical” poisonings. ”
Maybe that’s because you live in a country that has meaningful regulation of some dangerous chemicals. Go to South america, or central Africa.
And DDT is still used in some places, but the bugs have become resistant.
‘Contributing” means that it makes a healthy person less healthy, so they become prey to other things. And it’s hard to farm when your neurological symptoms mean that you can hardly walk.
If you people are lucky enough to breed, your grandchildren will gestate in a thin soup of endocrine disruptors. Any of you have grandkids with developmental problems?
Use of chemical products has become really common. We see chemicals being used today for many day-to-day activities like in cleaning products, in agriculture in the form of fertilizers and pesticides and a lot other purposes. Thus special care should be taken while creating chemical labels for them. The labels should carry all the information regarding the product viz. chemical composition, usage and disposal guidelines, warnings and hazardous symbols so that the users may follow the instructions and handle them properly.