By Susana Fonseca
In the last decades, there have been regular alerts on the risks that different chemical substances found in day-to-day life products – textiles, toys, cosmetics, food, electronic equipment, inks, etc. – pose for human health, particularly when vulnerable groups – among them children and women in childbearing age – are considered.
The research community has been a central intervenient in this debate. In fact, at the scientific level, research conducted on the interaction between some chemical substances and human health started, in a more systematic way, more than a century ago, even if regulatory effects resulting from that work can only be identified in more recent decades. But this is an area of strong controversy, where the strength of evidence necessary to act by anticipation by applying the precautionary principle has been everything but consensual.
