Dr. Tracey J. Woodruff, PhD, professor and director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment and the Center to End Corporate Harm at UCSF issued the following statement upon release of the Make America Healthy Again Commission report.
We welcome the MAHA Commission report’s recognition that toxic chemicals and corporate influence on science harm children’s health. Yet, this administration’s actions will make the problem worse. You can’t protect children from harmful chemicals while gutting EPA, cutting funding to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and rolling back or eliminating environmental rules that protect people from toxic exposures.
The Commission report’s recognition that toxic chemicals play a role in increasing childhood chronic illness is an important update from the Clinton Executive Order on children’s environmental health. One glaring oversight is a failure to acknowledge how fossil fuels are harming children’s health. A recent WHO report finds that toxic chemicals and pollutants from fossil fuels are major drivers of chronic disease and contribute to 24% of global deaths annually.
