Amy Westervelt reports for Forbes:
Less than a month after Johnson & Johnson ranked as the most trusted brand in America in Forbes‘ survey comes a report that could give consumers pause, calling the company out for removing chemicals of concern in its iconic baby shampoo in some countries, but not others. The product currently on shelves in the United States, Canada, and China still contains known carcinogens. In recent years, J&J baby shampoo has become the poster child for the need for chemical reform in the United States; nothing says we need tighter chemical regulation than toxic baby shampoo.
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics came out with the news two years ago that Johnson & Johnson’s iconic baby shampoo contained the formaldehyde-releasing preservative quaternium-15, as well as the chemical byproduct 1,4-dioxane. Formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane are known carcinogens. The federal Consumer Product Safety Commission has reported that “the presence of 1,4-dioxane, even as a trace contaminant, is cause for concern,” and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services added formaldehyde to its list of known human carcinogens in June 2011.
In 2009, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, along with 40 other organizations (including American Nurses Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners) sent a letter to J&J outlining their concerns with the company’s products, particularly its baby shampoo. The American Nurses Association and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics have since met several times with Johnson & Johnson executives to discuss the matter. The content of those discussions is confidential, but it seems as though if progress were being made, the organization would not have been sending around its latest report, under embargo, yesterday.
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