It's 2005 - Why are We Still Shampooing Children with Pesticides
The continuing use of pesticide treatments for head lice makes Pediculosis a major public health issue affecting children in America today. Shampooing with pesticides has the potential to damage children in the same manner as these chemicals are designed to damage pests. Why are we still shampooing children with pesticides in 2005? Because the pharmaceutical companies invest millions of dollars to convince consumers and health professionals that this is what they should do.
(PRWEB) February 1, 2005 -- The National Pediculosis Association (NPA), a
non-profit health and education agency has as its mission the protection of
children and their families from these potentially harmful chemicals. NPA's
President Deborah Z. Altschuler says you would think protecting children from
such unnecessary direct exposure to poisons would be a given – but it is not.
Lice products containing pesticides and other serious chemicals are readily
available in the neighborhood drug store and continue to be recommended and
prescribed by the pediatricians and school nurses who rely on product marketing
information (www.headlice.org/faq/winning/strangeliceinfo.htm) as the basis
for treatment-centered public health policy.
This scenario is a classic
example of what is discussed in three recently published books addressing how
product driven health policies negatively impact society. They warn of how
Americans as individuals, and the health care system in general, have been
sacrificed to sell pharmaceuticals.
The titles alone speak
volumes.
Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor in chief of the New England
Journal of Medicine in her book The Truth About the Drug Companies, How They
Deceive Us and What to Do About It, dedicates an entire chapter to how
pharmaceutical companies promote their products by masquerading marketing as
education in order to influence consumer and health professionals.
John
Abramson, M.D., a former family practitioner who teaches at Harvard Medical
School, in his newly released book Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of
American Medicine, reports a “changed purpose of medical knowledge – from
seeking to optimize health to searching for the greatest profits.”
In the
third book, On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can
Endanger Your Health, author Jerome Kassirer, Professor at Tufts University
School of Medicine outlines the conflict of interest between “profit-centered
business and people-centered medicine.”
The NPA says the issue isn't just
the pharmaceutical companies promoting their pesticide products for use on kids:
it is how this profit-driven approach permeates the non-profit sector as well.
The same organizations that issue treatment guidelines to pediatricians, family
physicians and school nurses receive support and funding from the lice treatment
manufacturers whose products they recommend and accept as paid advertisers in
their publications. Have these influential organizations become, in effect, the
tax-exempt marketing arm of industry?
Each child shampooed with
pesticides by a mother misguided by a system of “profits first” is a travesty
and a red flag for just how little consideration is given to children’s health
in these supposedly health conscious times.
For information on the NPA
and its non-chemical approach, visit www.headlice.org/downloads/whynonchem.htm
The National
Pediculosis Association is the sponsor of Jesse's Project which addresses yet
another aspect of the ill-effects of pesticides in head lice treatments for the
higher risk children who have already been diagnosed with cancer. With what
these children have to endure to regain their good health – it is vital that all
opportunities are taken to protect it for the future. Jesse was a child whose
mother attributes his death to her having treated him with pesticides for lice
after he had had several bouts of chemotherapy and a successful bone marrow
transplant for leukemia.
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/2/prweb202883.htm