#womens-issues

So what does it mean for those who use them….long-term? (Photo: iStock/Getty Images Plus)

American women spend over $2 billion a year on feminine hygiene products—which makes sense, when you consider that there are roughly 67 million women of reproductive age living in the U.S. And since at least half of those women use tampons, it would also make a whole lot of sense for tampons and other related products to be independently tested—as in, not just by the manufacturers who have a vested interest. But the crazy truth is that the FDA has been approving products that are only privately tested (like tampons) or not tested at all (see: powders, douches, and vaginal wipes), which means that women are literally inserting products into their bodies without anyone knowing for sure if those products have potentially harmful long-term effects.

That’s why Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney is reintroducing the Robin Danielson Feminine Hygiene Product Safety Act, a bill that would require the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—which funds more than $30 billion in medical research every year—to independently investigate whether or not chemicals found in many feminine hygiene products pose risks to women. Those potential risks include gynecological cancers, as well as infertility, pelvic inflammatory disease, toxic shock syndrome (TSS), endometriosis, bacterial and yeast infections, and immune system deficiencies. The bill, named for a 44-year-old woman who died from TSS in 1998, also calls on the FDA to to publicly disclose any potentially hazardous chemicals found in feminine hygiene products.

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As Maloney wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian:

This lack of data on cumulative tampon use, feminine hygiene product toxicity, and the chemicals present in all such products is not at all surprising. Women’s health has been perennially under-represented and overlooked when it comes to clinical research and studies. Until the 1980s, women were largely left out of medical research—which meant that almost no health data was collected on women—and most medical trials only included male subjects. Even when scientists studied diseases that largely impacted women (such as breast cancer), women were left out of research.

The NIH does not comment on pending legislation, but it’s true that the organization did not require women and minorities to be represented in clinical research until 1993. What’s more, the NIH only starting asking researchers to consider sex in pre-clinical research (where cells and animals are tested) in October of last year. The change came under the direction of Janine Clayton, M.D., the NIH associate director for research on women’s health and director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health, who recognized the need for women to be fairly represented in the early stages of research—not just in the clinical phase, where drugs and treatments are tested on humans. In an interview from June 2014, Clayton said, “You absolutely have to think of sex. Sex is a fundamental variable in biological research, in biomedical research and it really must be considered from the very start…. Right now, that’s not happening uniformly, so we’re kind of treating this unisex person. Nobody is a unisex person, each of us is male or female, and we need to have information that’s relevant to each of us.”

While some products are avoidable—the vagina naturally cleans itself with mucus, so feminine wipes and “cleansers” are highly unnecessary and just prey on some women’s insecurities that their lady parts are somehow smelly or dirty—tampons and sanitary napkins are a real need. And yet Congress has shut down Mahoney’s bill nine times since she first introduced it in 1997, when it was called the Tampon Safety and Research Act. As a result, women’s health organizations have looked into the safety of feminine hygiene products themselves. Alexandra Scranton, director of science and research for Women’s Voices for the Earth, which published its own report on the issue, stated in an article published on the NIH website: “People have been shocked, saying things like ‘I’ve never really thought about [the vagina] being an important internal link to your body. Although it is well known that the vaginal ecosystem is more sensitive and more absorbent than typical skin, there is surprisingly little research out there on feminine care products.”

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The FDA has released information that there are “trace amounts” of dioxins in tampons, and asserts on its website that “state-of-the art testing of tampons and tampon materials that can detect even trace amounts of dioxin has shown that dioxin levels are at or below the detectable limit. No risk to health would be expected from these trace amounts.” That may be true for one tampon, but what about decades of use? Philip Tierno, a microbiologist at New York University and TSS researcher, told RH Reality Check: “There is no research taking place on things like dioxin except at the hands of the manufacturers [during the FDA’s pre-market approval requirements], which is like the fox taking care of the henhouse. They aren’t looking at long-term effects. We need data to be able to glean information that can serve as the basis for predicting what can occur.”

“American women deserve the ability to make informed decisions when buying feminine hygiene products,” said Maloney in a released statement. “Given the sheer number of women who use these products it’s time we have definitive answers on their potential risks to women. Although the FDA requires tampon manufacturers to monitor dioxin levels, we still don’t know enough about the health risks of other chemical contaminants contained in these products. The Robin Danielson Feminine Hygiene Product Safety Act would enable research and a better understanding of additives in these products so that women can live healthy lives.”

By Caitlin Moscatello

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