The President's expert Cancer Panel announced today that Americans face "grievous harm" from chemical exposure in the environment and workplace, and called for a new national strategy that focused on safety in those two areas in particular. The panel believes that many harmful chemicals have gone unregulated, ignored, and without any sort of comprehensive national plan, and have as such leaked into food, air, and water. The panel called the current set of workplace chemical regulations outdated, and stressed the need to realize that the compounded effects of multiple chemical exposures are largely unknown, and that small exposures can manifest themselves negatively years down the road. There are approximately 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States; due to slow processes, and 'impossibly' high standards, only about 200 have been assessed for safety.
See "Cancer panel: 'Grievous harm' posed by unchecked chemicals in U.S.", Lyndsey Layton, The Washington Post, May 5, 2010