Do tampons contain ‘alarming’ quantities of lead and arsenic?
Al Jazeera
Tampons have been around for nearly a century and more than half of all women are thought to use them – but could they be poisonous?
Tampons, which are used by millions of women, may carry “alarming” amounts of toxic metals including lead, arsenic and cadmium, a study by academics in the United States has warned.
The findings by a team of researchers led by Jenni A Shearston at the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) are especially concerning because of the vagina’s greater capacity for absorbing chemicals compared with other parts of the body, experts said.
The tampon was invented by Dr Earle Haas in the US in 1929. Five years later, Gertrude Tenderich bought the patent and founded the company Tampax, making the tampon commercially available. In the early days of the business, she would actually hand-sew the tampons herself.
Today, more than half of all women use tampons at some point in their lives, and estimates are as high as 80 percent in Western countries, according to the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
“Despite this large potential for public health concern, very little research has been done to measure chemicals in tampons,” said Shearston, a postdoctoral scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
