NPA Press Release
02/01/2005 |
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.
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Contact
Information
Jane Cotter
National Pediculosis
Assoc.
781-449-6487 x109 |
More information on the
NPA's non-chemical approach |
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 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
poison 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.
Information on the NPA's non-chemical approach
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. |
