Chemical exposure

This article discuses the challenges women claimants experience due to sexism.  Illustrates how The Workers Compensation Act responds to claimants work at home vs outside of the home. Shows how sexist systems work together to create more stress for women post injury in the workplace,  via the medical and the legal systems. 

Interview with Saskia Post, a mother who gave birth to a child with multiple deformities due to the chemical environment she was exposed to while working at English Plastics in Brampton Ontario. Saskia launched a law suit against her former employer. 

This article discusses dangers of tampon use; under researched and lack of information available from companies; chemicals, toxic shock syndrome; government inaction; alternatives to tampons.

The Push to Prescribe: Women & Canadian Drug Policy discusses the complexity surrounding women and pharmaceuticals and uses the best evidence to argue for changes that better reflect women's needs in public health policy and that ensure those who are best suited to make these determinations are included in policy-making.

This chapter looks from a public health perspective at the trace amounts of pharmaceuticals and personal care products that have been detected in Canadian water, with particular attention to women’s relationship to this issue.

The Push to Prescribe, edited by Anne Rochon Ford and Diane Saibil and published by Women’s Press, is available at your local bookstore or can be ordered online at www.cspi.org.

This chapter is being made available by National Network on Environments and Women's Health. Please note that this chapter is for individual use only and distribution is prohibited.

Presenter Sharyle Patton explores the uses of biomonitoring – the testing of one’s body for chemical exposure – and looks at how the experience of knowing one's body burden (the total amount of chemicals present in the human body at any given time) can help inform personal choice and political engagement. While the findings from biomonitoring may be devastating to some on an individual level, Patton suggests that if the information is used with sensitivity and respect for tradition, it can be quite powerful in helping groups work for change in toxic chemical policy. A storyteller, Patton illustrates her message with the experiences of women she has encountered through her work.

With evidence from other NNEWH reports, calls on the federal government to strengthen the management of chemicals in Canada in order to prevent chronic low-dose exposures to toxic substances that may be having a wide-range of effects on the health of Canadians, and are disproportionately affecting women. Exposes the critical shortcomings of the Chemicals Management Plan (CMP), a federal initiative aimed at improving the degree of protection against toxic substances in Canada.

The goal of Canada's Chemicals Management Plan created in 2007 is to improve the degree of protection against hazardous chemicals. It includes a number of new, proactive measures for managing chemical substances.

This article describes the dangers of chemicals that the public has exposure to on a daily basis.  The researchers use a sex and gender-based analysis to look at the need for a speedy implementation of Canada's "Chemicals Management Plan".

Discusses the film Toxic Trespass, produced by Dorothy Goldin-Rosenberg, about Canada's "chemical valley" around Windsor and Sarnia and the impacts of environmental toxins presented through the stories of young children with asthma, cancers such as Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and leukemia, as well as other debilitating conditions linked with early exposure to toxins.