chemicals

Health Canada is investigating after Canada's National Observer revealed that government officials supported efforts by the pesticide industry to discredit a researcher's findings and overturn a proposed ban on a class of pesticides harmful to bees, the environment and human health.

Canada's pesticide regulator is delaying the release of health and safety data, internal emails, briefing notes and other documents that justify its decision to approve several harmful pesticides, Canada's information commissioner has found.

Rapid global warming due to greenhouse gases linked to fossil fuels is causing the region to warm at about four times the global average. This increases the speed of plastics travelling from other regions in the world.

The link between human rights, human health and an unhealthy planet is clear to us as physicians. The federal government must also make these connections.

B.C. could soon become the first province to partially ban a group of cancer-causing chemicals used in everything from firefighting equipment to makeup. Tabled by BC Green MLA Adam Olsen, the proposed law would ban per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) chemicals in the firefighting equipment used by the province's professional and volunteer fire crews. 

Environmentalists, Inuit and firefighters are urging the federal government to list a group of harmful chemicals as toxic under Canada's environmental protection laws because they can increase cancer risks and other health risks and linger in ecosystems for decades. 

When Diane’s husband, Paul Cotter, was diagnosed with prostate cancer at the age of 55, they were surprised and wondered if it was related to his job as a firefighter. Then, Paul began getting calls from firefighters at his station in Worcester, Mass. — all of them with prostate cancer.

Agricultural chemicals and insecticides, fungicides and herbicides used in tree farming have drawn remarkably little attention, partly owing to a lack of research on the risks to consumers or farm workers.

By illuminating the risks associated with candles, we draw attention to the broader issue of environmental factors frequently overlooked in health care.

Some studies are causing concern about the chemicals in the fabric sheets — but the issue with the laundry product is more subtle.

Eloor smells like it is dying. Once it was an island of rich farmland on the Periyar River, 17 kilometres from the Arabian Sea, teeming with fish. Now, a stench of putrid flesh permeates the air. Most of the fish are gone.

Chemicals that leach out of plastic are shown to cause fatal abnormalities, including a gut developing outside the body.

This 29-year-old is disrupting the beauty industry by using oil from flies that consume food waste to make beauty products. 

When Zhanyun Wang was a kid, his mother told him to avoid the sweet-smelling gases that sometimes drifted across his neighbourhood near Shanghai from nearby plastic factories. Anything that smelled "really nice," the now-researcher at the University of Zurich explained, was "probably very toxic."

Emissions of over 40 highly toxic chemicals in Ontario, Alberta and Quebec have significantly increased in recent decades, potentially exposing millions of Canadians to harmful groundwater and air pollution, a new analysis shows.