Fourteen popular brands of tampons sold in the U.S., U.K. and European Union have been found to contain toxic metals including lead, arsenic and cadmium, according to tests conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University. As reported by Newsweek on Thursday, 16 total types of toxic metals were found in the 30 products tested by public health researchers — but the scientists have not revealed which brands they tested, or which ones yielded the troubling results. Their findings were published Tuesday in the journal Environment International.
“Despite this large potential for public health concern, very little research has been done to measure chemicals in tampons,” said lead study author Jenni A. Shearston, in a university statement. “To our knowledge, this is the first paper to measure metals in tampons. Concerningly, we found concentrations of all metals we tested for, including toxic metals like arsenic and lead.”
The list of metals discovered includes arsenic, barium, calcium, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, iron, manganese, mercury, nickel, lead, selenium, strontium, vanadium and zinc. Concentrations of the metals varied by country of purchase, whether a product was store-brand or name-brand, and whether the product was labelled organic or non-organic. Non-organic tampons contained higher concentrations of arsenic and lower levels of lead, while organic tampons had more lead and less arsenic. Researchers said the metals could have entered the products in any number of ways and that further testing is needed — but made clear that no amount of lead exposure is considered safe for human reproductive health, and none of the brands tested were notably lower than others in metal concentration.
www.salon.com/2024/07/05/metal-tampons-lead-arsenic-uc-berkeley-study-health/