We must assess the impacts of novel entities on human health

Microplastics are in increasing volumes in human brains, placentas and breast milk. They are found from the highest mountains to the deepest seas. PFAS (forever chemicals - linked to cancer) are mounting up in our waters. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals from personal care products are showing up in high levels in children; pesticides and pharmaceutical products accumulating in the environment.

We are on a poisoned planet, as demonstrated by the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s classification of the exceeding of the planetary boundary for “novel entities”. And we are human animals whose bodies are encountering those materials every day, and suffering for it.

But governments, regulators, and most scientists at most focus on one of these problems at a time. What is largely lacking is consideration of how human bodies are being barraged, and penetrated, by these dangerous materials, and how they interact with each other, potentially damage our health, and then make us more susceptible to the impact of other challenges, be it these materials or infectious agents. These substances are not just in our environments, but we don them in the form of clothing every day, we cook with utensils and pans coated with them, we sit of sofas and walk over floor coverings containing them. The effects, are little researched, but certainly multiplicative as well as cumulative.

When I started the discussion of these issues at committee stage Conservative frontbencher Lord Epson of Sharpe acknowledged that it had started him thinking about the non-iron shirt that he was wearing that day, and to wonder what had altered the fibres of the cotton to produce such a result, and what impact it might be having on this health. The answer is, almost certainly, a resin that releases formaldehyde, a known carcinogen and mutagen. It might also be a direct, immediate problem for anyone who suffers from contact dermatitis. That is a substance that the EU has introduced new stricter regulations on - starting from next year - noting that people are likely to be exposed to it from a wide range of sources, from car interiors to furniture, electronics to construction materials.

A demonstration of the ways in which many of the products we are sold - that are advertised at us from every corner and every screen, from which huge profits are made by giant companies - are problematic came in the debate on my private member’s bill addressing biocides - the antimicrobial products frequently unnecessarily put into consumer products intended for human use. At its end, the government minister dealing with the bill, Lord Leong, acknowledged “I shall go back this afternoon and look at every single product and see whether I should keep it in the flat.”

When they tackle the issues at all, government responses are almost invariably siloed. It is great - and world-leading - that the French government has just banned the manufacturing, import and sale of most PFAS-treated products from January next year, and all textiles by 2030. But that is just one of these issues, among many. And cleaning up the universal contamination from this class of chemicals is not feasible - the cost of clean-up for areas of extreme concentration is already enormous.

That reality is something that an amendment I am putting down today to the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill in the House of Lords, which asks the government to commission a review of the impacts of novel entities on human health, considered holistically, and to produce a report on the issue to be debated in parliament.

I will not be putting this to the vote, but it is linked to an amendment addressing one astonishingly unregulated type of products that are exposing people to all of these toxic materials in ways that we have only just started to understand. That is period products, for as the Women’s Environmental Network so clearly puts it, there are more regulations about what are in candles than are in period products.

There are huge issues here for human health and environmental health. There are, I know, serious efforts being made to consider the flood of our world with this dangerous cocktail, but not anything like fast enough. The period product amendment will only tackle one issue among many, but for the user of a tampon, the purchaser of reusable period pants to be confident that they are protected from one more assault from the corporate world on their bodies - safe from this source at least from destructive of their reproductive health or further plastic being added to their body - would be a step forward.