by Amy Stewart
Miscarriages and Warnings
In a way, Ms. Rocano, one of the manicurists in the Ridgewood salon, felt herself lucky. Her colleagues seated on either side of her had each lost a pregnancy last year, hoped-for babies whom they separately described exactly the same way: “Like losing a dream.”
She, however, has her toddler, Matthew.
A dark-haired bundle with amber skin when he was born, Matthew was an infant laden with his mother’s hopes. Holding him in her arms, she was reminded of the daughter she had left behind in Ecuador and still has not seen in more than six years. This time, she felt, she could do right by her child.
At one point, his doctor asked her what she did for a living. When she told him, he asked how long she had worked in the nail salon while pregnant. Six months, she responded.
The doctor told her, “When babies are forming in your womb, they absorb everything, and if they are exposed to anything, it can cause them harm,” she recalled.
On a day five years ago, a doctor gave a similar warning to the manicurist who works at the table to Ms. Rocano’s right, as she sat in the obstetrics unit at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn. There she learned she had miscarried a third time.
“I went to the hospital, and I told him, ‘I’m a manicurist,’” said the woman, who declined to give her name because she wanted her medical history to remain private. Her doctor urged her to change jobs. “The chemicals are not healthy for your lungs, your liver, and sometimes they begin cancer,” she recalled. “I was laughing. I said, ‘Who is going to pay my bills?’” She has since miscarried twice more.
In scientific circles, the three chemicals in nail products that are associated with the most serious health issues are dibutyl phthalate, toluene, and formaldehyde. They are known as the “toxic trio” among worker advocates.
Dibutyl phthalate, called DBP for short, makes nail polish and other products pliable. In Australia, it is listed as a reproductive toxicant and must be labeled with the phrases “may cause harm to the unborn child” and “possible risk of impaired fertility.” Starting in June, the chemical will be prohibited from cosmetics in that country. It is one of over 1,300 chemicals banned from use in cosmetics in the European Union. But in the United States, where fewer than a dozen chemicals are prohibited in such products, there are no restrictions on DBP.
Toluene, a type of solvent, helps polish glide on smoothly. But the EPA says in a fact sheet that it can impair cognitive and kidney function. In addition, repeated exposure during pregnancy can “adversely affect the developing fetus,” according to the agency.
Formaldehyde, best known for its use in embalming, is a hardening agent in nail products. In 2011 the National Toxicology Program, part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, labeled it a human carcinogen. By 2016 it will be banned from cosmetics in the European Union.
Cosmetics industry officials say linking the chemicals to manicurists’ health complaints amounts to faulty science.
Dibutyl phthalate, toluene, and formaldehyde “have been found to be safe under current conditions of use in the United States,” said Lisa Powers, a spokeswoman for the Personal Care Products Council, the main trade association and lobbying group for the cosmetics industry. “The safe and historical use of these ingredients is not questioned by FDA,” she continued.
In reality, the responsibility for evaluating the safety of the chemicals as they are used in cosmetics is left with the companies themselves.
Even while insisting they are safe, some polish companies have voluntarily begun to remove certain chemicals from formulations. By 2006 several prominent brands had announced their products would no longer contain any of the three. The new products were labeled “3-free” or “5-free,” referring to the number of chemicals that are ostensibly no longer in them.
But a 2010 study by the FDA and another in 2012 by the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Department of Toxic Substance Control found in random tests that some products, even ones labeled “3-free” or “5-free,” in fact contained those very chemicals.
It was from routine community outreach trips to local nail salons in Oakland that Ms. Liou and her colleagues from Asian Health Services, as well as Thu Quach, a research scientist, became alarmed: almost all of the manicurists interviewed had health complaints; some were terribly ill.
Dr. Quach, with the Cancer Prevention Institute of California, set out to conduct a health survey of nail salon workers in Alameda County, which includes Oakland.
The stories poured in.
Le Thi Lam, a Vietnamese immigrant who came to the United States in 1988 after fleeing the Communist government in her country, was among the first. She had started out in a Sacramento nail salon, becoming proficient in acrylic nails, sculpting them all day long from a slurry of solvent and plastic polymers.
In 1991 she learned she had a thyroid condition. She had also developed asthma. She quit, too sickened to work and concerned about the chemicals she was handling. But she soon returned, unable to find another job with her limited English. Ten years later, she had breast cancer.
“I know that manicurists like me are also going through the same things and having major health problems,” she said, seated in a conference room at Asian Health Services last summer, a blouse hiding a red scar from her breastbone to her armpit. “But they still hang on to their jobs to earn their living.”
Dr. Quach kept going with her research, undertaking several other studies. One found manicurists had an increased risk for gestational diabetes and for having undersize babies. Another, looking at cancer, found no correlation. Both studies were hampered by data limitations. Mostly, they point to the need for further study.
“What we know is what’s reported by the women again and again: that there is something here,” Dr. Quach said. “Those chemicals they are dealing with are chemicals that we know people react to, and we are hearing the stories from these workers that they are reacting to them. It’s all there.”
“Fox Guarding the Henhouse”
The regulation of chemicals in nail products is dictated by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. The part of the law that deals with cosmetics totals just 591 words.
The Food and Drug Administration explains the limitations it faces under the law on its website: “Cosmetic products and ingredients do not need FDA premarket approval, with the exception of color additives.” It continues, “Neither the law nor FDA regulations require specific tests to demonstrate the safety of individual products or ingredients.” In addition, “The law also does not require cosmetic companies to share their safety information with FDA.”
In 1976 the cosmetics industry itself established the Cosmetic Ingredient Review, a panel that is supposed to “review and assess the safety of ingredients used in cosmetics in an open, unbiased and expert manner,” according to its website. But the panel is financed entirely by the Personal Care Products Council, the industry lobbying group. The panel’s offices are also in the same building in Washington as the products council.
Even so, Ms. Powers said the panel was independent. She is the official spokeswoman for the industry lobby, but all questions to the review panel were handled by her.
Since its founding, the panel has reviewed only a small fraction of the substances in use in cosmetics today. Among them were dibutyl phthalate and toluene; the panel determined that they are safe the way they are used in nail products—on nails, not skin.
“It’s a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse,” says Janet Nudelman, the director of program and policy at the Breast Cancer Fund, which has argued for more stringent regulation. “You’ve got an industry-funded review panel that’s assessing the safety for the very industry that’s funding the review panel.”
There have been efforts in recent years to overhaul the 1938 law and more strictly regulate cosmetic chemicals, but none made headway in the face of industry resistance. Since 2013 the products council, just one of sev
eral industry trade groups, has poured nearly $2 million on its own into lobbying Congress.
After talks between the cosmetics industry and the FDA broke down last year, Michael R. Taylor, the agency’s deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, rebuked the industry in an unusual open letter for pushing a measure that would have declared a wide range of potentially dangerous chemicals safe “without a credible scientific basis” and others safe that are known to pose “real and substantial risks to consumers.”
Ms. Powers said the letter mischaracterized the industry’s stance. “The law was created or passed in 1938,” she said. “Nobody is saying that we shouldn’t look at that now and say: ‘Is it a contemporary approach? Does it need to bring us into the 21st century?’ We all agree to that. But that doesn’t make for a sexy headline.”
The council, in fact, said it supported a bipartisan bill introduced in April by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, that would broaden FDA oversight of cosmetics, including giving the agency recall ability. But some health advocates said the bill would continue to permit the industry to largely regulate itself; it would also preempt states’ abilities to create stronger rules.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is the federal agency that sets chemical exposure limits in workplaces. The studies that have examined the chemical exposure levels for manicurists have found them to be well below these standards. Health advocates say the safety administration’s standards are badly out of date and flawed.
Even Dr. Michaels, the head of the safety administration, said his agency’s standards needed revision. Currently, he said, workers “can be exposed to levels that are legal according to OSHA but are still dangerous.”
The agency makes illustrated pamphlets warning manicurists about the chemical hazards they face and urges them to wear gloves and ventilate their shops. These steps and others become mandatory when exposure limits are exceeded. But in practical terms, with the standards set so high, salons are free to do nothing. Dr. Michaels said the agency was hamstrung by its own cumbersome rule-making process.
“Every worker has the right to come home safely at the end of every day,” Dr. Michaels said. “They shouldn’t be coming home and getting sick.”
The debate over the chemicals has also unfolded at the state level. In 2005 lawmakers in California proposed banning DBP from cosmetic products sold or manufactured in the state. Industry lobbyists flooded the State Capitol (some bearing gift baskets of lipstick and nail polish), spending over a half-million dollars fighting the ban, according to state records. Some of the country’s best-known cosmetics companies—Estée Lauder, Mary Kay, and OPI, among others—weighed in against it. The bill ultimately failed. A much more limited measure passed—over the industry’s objections—that required cosmetics companies to disclose certain hazardous chemicals to the California Department of Public Health.
Blocked by an industry with deep pockets, the California advocates say they had to scale back their goals. They introduced a grass-roots program that officially recognizes “healthy nail salons,” those that carry “greener” products and that ventilate. The New York City Council held a hearing this month on a measure that would establish a similar voluntary program.
Today, out of several thousand salons in California, however, there are just 55 salons in the program.
One of them is Lulu Nail Spa, a tiny salon with a dusky rose wall and white-leather pedicure chairs in Burlingame, California. The shop earned the designation in May by switching certain products, using gloves, and opening the doors to sweep out fumes. The owner, Hai Thi Le, a Vietnamese immigrant, said she hoped the new decal she placed on her window would draw green-minded customers.
But she did not make the changes just for business. As a young woman working in her brother’s nail shop, Ms. Le said she breathed in so much acrylic powder that when she kissed her husband after work, he complained her breath smelled of solvent and plastic dust.
Standing in the Breeze
On her days off from the salon in Ridgewood, Queens, Nancy Otavalo ran for a time an ad hoc daycare center at her home a few blocks away with her sister, another manicurist. The sisters would pick up salon workers’ children after school for a fee, entertaining them in the basement apartment the sisters shared with their families.
Matthew, her colleague’s son who can barely speak, got special treatment, spending time curled on the gleaming black leather couch—bought with tips—that is the centerpiece of her home.
After Ms. Otavalo miscarried last year, she lay for hours on the same black leather couch, in silence, the lights darkened, unable to summon the willpower to get up.
A week after a procedure to remove the fetus at Woodhull Medical Center in Brooklyn, she rose, put on the lavish makeup her sister says makes her feel confident, and went back to work at her manicure table.
Clients who stopped by for their weekly manicures knew nothing about what happened; everything appeared the same.
Except every so often, after Ms. Otavalo had painted the last stroke of top coat on a customer’s hand, she scraped back her chair and walked to the front of the shop. She pulled open the salon’s glass door to stand in the breeze for a while.
MADDIE OATMAN
Attack of the Killer Beetles
FROM Mother Jones
THERE IS AN EERIE FEEL to this grove of lodgepole pines that I can’t quite put my finger on as entomologist Diana Six tromps ahead of me, hatchet in hand, scanning the southwestern Montana woods for her target. But as she digs the blade into a towering trunk, it finally hits me: the smell. There’s no scent of pine needles, no sharp, minty note wafting through the brisk fall air.
Six hacks away hunks of bark until she reveals an inner layer riddled with wormy passageways. “Hey, looky!” she exclaims, poking at a small black form. “Are you dead? Yeah, you’re dead.” She extends her hand, holding a tiny oval maybe a quarter of an inch long. Scientists often compare this insect to a grain of rice, but Six prefers mouse dropping: “Beetle in one hand, mouse turd in another. You can’t tell them apart.” She turns to the next few trees in search of more traces. Pill-size holes pock their ashen trunks—a sign, along with the missing pine scent, of a forest reeling from an invasion.
These tiny winged beetles have long been culling sickly trees in North American forests. But in recent years, they’ve been working overtime. Prolonged droughts and shorter winters have spurred bark beetles to kill billions of trees in what’s likely the largest forest insect outbreak ever recorded, about 10 times the size of past eruptions. “A doubling would have been remarkable,” Six says. “Ten times screams that something is really going wrong.”
Mountain pine, spruce, piñon ips, and other kinds of bark beetles have chomped 46 million of the country’s 850 million acres of forested land, from the Yukon down the spine of the Rocky Mountains all the way to Mexico. Yellowstone’s grizzly bears have run out of pinecones to eat because of the beetles. Skiers and backpackers have watched their brushy green playgrounds fade as trees fall down, sometimes at a rate of 100,000 trunks a day. Real estate agents have seen home prices plummet from “viewshed contamination” in areas ransacked by the bugs.
And the devastation isn’t likely to let up anytime soon. As climate change warms the North American woods, we can expect these bugs to continue to proliferate and thrive in higher elevations—meaning more beetles in the coming century, preying on bigger chunks of the country.
In hopes of staving off complete catastrophe, the United States Forest Service, which oversees 80 percent of the country’s woodlands, has launched a beetle offensive, chopping down trees to prevent future infestations. The USFS believes this strategy reduces trees’ competition for resources, allowing the few that remain to better resist invading bugs. This theory just so happens to also benefit loggers, who are more than willing to help thin the forests. Politicians, too, have jumped onboard, often on behalf of the timber indus
try: more than 50 bills introduced since 2001 in Congress proposed increasing timber harvests in part to help deal with beetle outbreaks.
But Six believes that the blitz on the bugs could backfire in a big way. For starters, she says, cutting trees “quite often removes more trees than the beetles would”—effectively outbeetling the beetles. But more importantly, intriguing evidence suggests that the bugs might be on the forest’s side. Six and other scientists are beginning to wonder: What if the insects that have wrought this devastation actually know more than we do about adapting to a changing climate?
Though they’re often described as pesky invaders, bark beetles have been a key part of conifer ecosystems for ages, ensuring that groves don’t get overcrowded. When a female mountain pine beetle locates a frail tree, she emits a chemical signal to her friends, who swarm to her by the hundreds. Together they chew through the bark until they reach the phloem, a cushy resinous layer between the outer bark and the sapwood that carries sugars through the tree. There, they lay their eggs in tunnels, and eventually a new generation of beetles hatches, grows up, and flies away. But before they do, the mature beetles also spread a special fungus in the center of the trunk. And that’s where things get really interesting.
Six focuses on the “evolutionary marriage” of beetle and fungi at her four-person lab at the University of Montana, where she is the chair of the Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences. Structures in bark beetles’ mouths have evolved to carry certain types of fungi that convert the tree’s tissue into nutrients for the bug. The fungi have “figured out how to hail the beetle that will get them to the center of the tree,” Six says. “It’s like getting a taxi.” The fungi leave blue-gray streaks in the trees they kill; “blue-stain pine” has become a specialty product, used to make everything from cabins to coffins to iPod cases.