Pollution, Profits, and Public Health: How Chemical Laws Fail America’s Children

A new report published in The New England Journal of Medicine argues that weak chemical safety laws in the United States are putting children’s health at risk.

Researchers from the Consortium for Children’s Environmental Health, led by pediatrician and environmental health expert Dr. Phillip Landrigan of Boston College, highlight the growing evidence linking childhood disease to manufactured chemicals. They call for urgent legislative action to strengthen oversight and prioritize public health over industry interests.

“Associations between widely used chemicals and disease in children continue to be discovered with distressing frequency, and it is likely that there are additional, still unknown links,” they write. “Protecting children from chemicals’ dangers will require fundamental revamping of current law and restructuring of the chemical industry to prioritize children’s health.”

The report details how industrial chemicals, largely unregulated and untested for toxicity, have proliferated in the environment. This widespread chemical exposure, the authors argue, is a key driver of rising childhood illnesses, including cancer, asthma, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Production of manufactured chemicals is increasing by about 3% per year and is expected to triple by 2025. Globally, there are an estimated 350,000 manufactured chemicals, chemical mixtures, and plastics, most of which are produced from fossil fuels. As a consequence, environmental pollution and human exposure to it are pervasive.

Despite the large amount of manufactured chemicals and plastics, and increasing production, legal oversight is limited. Whereas pharmaceuticals are assessed for hazard prior to being brought to the market, synthetic chemicals are not. In fact, there is hardly any investigation as to their long-term impacts – less than 20% of them have been tested for toxicity, and even less have been tested for harmful effects in infants and children.

Lack of investigation into the potential adverse impacts of manufactured chemicals and plastics is especially alarming when looking at statistics regarding children’s health over the past 50 years:

“The incidence of childhood cancers has increased by 35%. Male reproductive birth defects have doubled in frequency. Neurodevelopmental disorders now affect 1 in 6 children, and autism spectrum disorder is diagnosed in 1 in 36. Pediatric asthma has tripled in prevalence. Pediatric obesity has nearly quadrupled in prevalence and has driven a sharp increase in type 2 diabetes among children and adolescents.”

Chemical pollution has become widespread as thousands of new chemicals have been introduced into the environment, and are found in food, water, air, and the human body. Given that 80% of them are untested, we do not know their potential harm to human health.

The rise in childhood disease has been connected to the increase in manufactured chemicals in a large and growing body of research. According to a recent study, racial minority and low-income children are especially at-risk due to higher levels of exposure to pollution. Research has shown that even brief and low-level exposures to toxic chemicals during early periods of life are associated with increased risk of lifelong disease and disability in children.

For example, chemicals are being used that are known to cause lasting effects such as brain damage with IQ loss. Other adverse effects of early exposure are not always immediate – they can arise at any point during the lifespan, with some delayed impacts including damage to the reproductive system and lifelong increased risks of asthma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurological concerns, and cancer.

Air pollution has been associated with increased mental health problems in children. A study in Sweden found that childhood exposure to air pollution was linked to the amount of prescriptions of antipsychotic and psychiatric drugs. Another study found that common air pollutants are connected to depression and anxiety. Along similar lines, a study published last year linked ozone pollution to increased anxiety and depression in individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Toxic chemical exposures harm not only people and children, but also cause destruction on a societal level, in terms of the economic impacts of healthcare costs and loss of productivity due to illness or death. The chemical industry does not incur these costs; instead, they are passed along to governments and taxpayers.

The primary factor contributing to environmental destruction and subsequent harms to health is failed chemical law. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) is the current chemical legislation in the United States, which operates under the assumption that manufactured chemicals are harmless and beneficial. Although it promises to protect the public and environment from risk posed by chemicals, the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has never been granted the authority to follow through on that promise.

Due to TSCA’s flaws, the chemical industry is free to do as it pleases. Government regulators are placed with the burden of doing the footwork to identify and thoroughly research potentially hazardous chemicals, resulting in little regulatory action to address the harms they cause children. When hazards are recognized, they’re minimized or ignored, and only a few chemicals have been banned or restricted in the U.S. since TSCA’s passage nearly 50 years ago.

Not only is there a lack of governmental oversight, but the U.S. government gives billions of dollars in subsidies to chemical and plastic manufacturers. They are also granted trade-secret protections, which allows them to assert that any information related to their products is secret – even when there is no legal justification to support it.

What can be done to address these concerns? The authors call for a change in laws to address TSCA’s shortcomings, such as not assuming that chemicals are harmless, engaging in thorough and independent testing before chemicals are permitted to enter the market, and investigating long-term negative effects of chemicals and plastics.

On an international level, they suggest that the United Nations could develop and implement a global chemicals treaty using the U.N. global plastics policy currently being negotiated as a model.

Another path to increased accountability is chemical footprint reporting. It broadly involves documentation and reporting on hazardous chemicals in the business sector and can also be mandated by governments, shareholders, or a combination of both.

The authors conclude:

“Pollution by synthetic chemicals and plastics is a major planetary challenge that is worsening rapidly. Continued, unchecked increases in production of fossil-carbon–based chemicals endangers the world’s children and threatens humanity’s capacity for reproduction. Although a paradigm shift in chemicals management to prioritize human health will require profound realignment of current law, deep restructuring of the chemical industry, and redirection of financial investment on a scale similar to that of the global transition to clean energy, it is essential to preserve our “common home” and safeguard our children’s future. Inaction on chemicals is no longer an option.”

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The Consortium for Children’s Environmental Health (2025). Manufactured chemicals and children’s health — The need for new law. The New England Journal of Medicine, 392(3), 299-305. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMms2409092 (Link)