What is the reason behind California cancer warning labels? Literally everything seems to be causing cancer. I just bought a few s2s maple boards from a local lumber supplier and each one had a sticker saying it’s known to the State of California to cause cancer. A maple board? There’s no treatment or paint on it. It’s just a milled and poorly planed piece of lumber.
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Kind of like how food companies are adding sesame oil to products (and the ingredients list) so they don’t get accused of not listing that allergen.
Proposition 65 was a poorly written law that created the labels.
Basically, the labels have become nothing more than an insurance policy so companies don’t get sued. Attorneys would analyze products, and if even completely biologically insignificant amounts of “listed” chemicals were found, they would sue. Or for any number of other dubious connections that they could manage.
So everybody just slaps a sticker on everything, regardless of the risk factor.
This is actually bad for the consumer because it makes no distinction between things that are actually dangerous and things that aren’t.
Long term exposure to wood dust causes lung cancer & nasal cancers. Wood dust is a Class 1 carcinogen, along with asbestos & alcohol.
If whatever you’re using says to wear a respirator, (like stain, stripper, etc.) wear one!
I was diagnosed with Chronic Myeloid Leukemia 5 years ago. My 9 & 22 chromosomes decided to swap tails. An actual chromosome mutation possibly caused by chemical exposure.
Not so much a science denier in this case: my understanding is that the test in this case is incredibly strict and uses such high doses of the chemicals that many things which ordinarily in reasonable circumstances don’t cause any noticeable risk of cancer get caught up in it. So the science is often murky on whether they are actually a risk – but by the wording of the law they still have to be labeled.
My favorite facet of this is that until about 2003, instead of “this product is known to the state of California to cause cancer..”, it said “this product is known to cause cancer in the state of California…”, which was just *chef’s kiss*.
Proposition 65 effectively requires any product with any amount of any substance with any evidence at all that it causes cancer to be labeled accordingly. This sounds like a good idea in theory but things get a little murky in the real world because science is complicated and 10 studies might say a substance doesn’t have any effect on cancer risk but one study says there is a correlation and you end up with a proposition 65 warning for something that most scientists don’t think actually causes cancer. This leads to the warning being on countless products which almost certainly do not cause cancer which has pretty much completely defeated the purpose of informing consumers, especially when we could be educating people about things that actually cause cancer like ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, and smoking.
>Literally everything seems to be causing cancer.
Pretty much everything *is* causing cancer.
At a very basic level, whenever a cell’s mechanisms interact with pretty much *anything*, they have a slight chance of being thrown off and going wrong, which is what causes cancer.
Some things are much more likely to disturb the mechanisms. At the extreme end you have things like hard radiation.
The “this can cause cancer” labels aren’t actually *wrong* in most cases. Yes, it’s true that companies will slap them on without even testing to check if the “known chemicals” are in there, but it doesn’t really matter; most of the time they’ll be correct. Point at any random thing in your house and say “this increases my chance of cancer” and you will almost certainly be right.
The problem is that this isn’t saying *how much* it increases your chance of cancer.
Let’s say that the baseline for cancer is that in a million people, a hundred will develop cancer every year. A million people touch substance 1 and after a year, five hundred thousand of them have cancer. A million people touch substance 2 and after a year, a hundred and one of them have cancer.
Both substances technically increase your risk of cancer. Substance 1 is a clear and immediate carcinogenic threat. Any reasonable person would want to stay away from it. Substance 2 is not. Most people are not worried about a one-in-a-million chance of getting cancer.
The warning labels, among other issues, have such a low threshold for causing cancer that they are beyond what most people consider a “reasonable threshold”.
You can sell products in the US until they are scientifically tested and proven to be dangerous, the FDC then decides if your product needs a label, or other limitation, or ban. This happens after the fact that people got hurt or scammed. In other nations incl the EU, you need to first have your product tested and proven to be harmless to legally sell it and it gets a CE mark on it. The US laws protects industry first, in EU laws protects the individual/public first.
I’m a chemist, and there is a joke amongst my circle at least stating that according to the state of California everything is carcinogenic. The reality is that these labels are Californias litigation avoidance labels, basically if everything is carcinogenic then you can’t sue California because you’ve been warned. Stupid
I can answer this a little more fully.
Prop 65 is the CA state ruling that requires suppliers to either attest that their product does not contain one of a myriad of compounds known to be bad for us.
It closely follows the European REACH legislation, with roots founded in the 50s and 60s when the chemical industry was growing rapidly and industry didn’t understand the side effect on humans.
It’s intent is to drive industry to find alternatives in manufacturing, often giving years of warning before something hits the books into law.
Is it costly to industry? Yes. Does it make us a healthier nation? Yes. Due to prop 75 we no longer have pthalates in flexible plastics, a very good thing.
When industry cannot or won’t find alternatives, they have to label their products with a prop 65 label. Nobody really wants to do this, hence a drive to comply since CA is a huge (largest US?) market.
I cannot speak to companies labeling everything just in case. In my experience we worked hard to avoid labeling and meeting requirements.
Source, worked in global procurement in plastics/chemicals/construction industries.
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