Healing Garden Grows in Bhopal
The story of the Sambhavna Clinic, a non-profit holistic health clinic in Bhopal, India, built to treat those injured by the Union Carbide toxic gas release in 1984. enlarge video

The Issue

Health care institutions, like institutions outside the health care sector, regularly use a suprising number of highly toxic materials. These toxins affect patients, hospital staff, and hospital visitors.

Many of these toxins are defined and regulated by federal, state and local laws. Others are used daily but hardly regulated at all. They include carcinogens, materials that damage the skin and organs, and materials that corrode, irritate, or release other toxins in the course of normal use, storage, transportation or disposal.

Toxins with an especially heavy impact in the health care sector may be found in:

take action

Use our Guide to Choosing Safer Products and Chemicals in the Health Care Setting (pdf)

Key Resources

The CHE Toxicant and Disease Database is a searchable database that summarizes links between chemical contaminants and approximately 180 human diseases or conditions
The Human Toxome Project tests blood, urine, breast milk and other human tissues for industrial chemicals that enter the human body as pollution via food, air, and water, or from exposures to ingredients in everyday consumer products
The book Our Stolen Future brought world-wide attention to scientific discoveries about endocrine disruption; this website tracks the most recent developments
This nationwide survey of more than 1,500 nurses suggests associations between the health of nurses and their children from nurses' exposures to hazardous chemicals and drugs in the workplace.
EWG Survey links chemical exposures on the job to diseases in nurses
Common Substances in Hospitals May Cause Asthma: HCWH report (pdf) Read the press release
State of the Evidence 2008: The Connection Between Breast Cancer and the Environment
American Cancer Society, Cancer Facts & Figures 2007 (pdf)