A women's biology puts her at risk from dangerous contraceptives; her work may endanger her with pesticides and the purchases she makes for her family may be contaminated or faulty. But she will probably be the last to know of any hazards.

When I was little,' recalls Salmah, 'I remember my mother putting surma (eye-liner) on my eyes. Later I protested, but many Indian parents apply it to their children and babies.' Mrs Mageswary agrees: 'It's a tradition. We believe it can ward off evil. And I find that it keeps me looking fresh; I feel uncomfortable without it.' But sadly, this eye-liner by whatever name it is known — surma or tiro or al kohl — is dangerous. It contains very high lead levels, according to chemist Michael Healy and pharmacist Mohammed Aslam.¹ They found that women and children using the product tend to rub their eyes and the lead deposits on their fingers are later ingested with food. The lead then builds up in the body and can cause anaemia, kidney disease and damage to the central nervous system.

Horror stories abound about hazardous products, many far more deadly than surma. Gas cylinders may explode in the kitchen; your doctor may prescribe drugs which have been outlawed in another country because of their dangerous side-effects; chemicals sprayed in your garden can contain cancer-causing agents.^{2 3 4} In the US alone, about 20 million people a year are hurt in accidents in and around the home, 30,000 of whom will die, according to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission.⁵ And in many of these cases women — the main purchasers and users of products — are the victims. Each year, over one million of them seek hospital treatment for injuries arising from products like caustic cleaners, lawnmowers, sun lamps and paint.⁶

It's the same elsewhere. Twenty percent of all the alerts sent out in the period 1982-86 by IOCU's Consumer Interpol, a global programme for quick information exchange and action on dangerous products, were about items used exclusively or mostly by women. They included a wrongly-wired iron that could electrocute the user, an eye-lash dye that could blind and a pressure cooker whose lid could fly off.

These are the documented figures. But very few countries have the ability to monitor such accidents. In many parts of the world, even where facts on hazardous products exist, they are sketchy. And there are few on women. But by a process of deduction, of seeing what women are expected to be, how they live and the work they do, a picture begins to build up.

The fashion industry has been luring generations of women into a global beauty culture. But being beautiful has its risks. High-heeled shoes, tatooing eyelids for example, have caused permanent injury to untold numbers of women. Nine different types of skin-lightening face creams were once the target of a remove-and-destroy offensive by Malaysian authorities. These creams had high levels of mercury and lead. They were believed to be widely available in other Asian countries like Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan.⁷ Similar products are widely used in many African countries.

As seen earlier in this book (see Chapter 4), women in their reproductive capacity encounter dangerous substances in the range of drugs, from contraceptive pills and hormone replacement therapy to synthetic oxytocins (a hormone used to stimulate contractions in childbirth). The hazards of many of these are still unknown, and often it take years for the full effects to show.⁸ Such is the case for example with diethylstilbestrol (DES), given to millions of pregnant women over the past 40 years to prevent miscarriage. It was later found to cause a rare form of cancer and abnormalities in both female and male offspring.⁹ DES had been aggressively marketed, with one manufacturer even claiming that it 'makes "normal" pregnancies more normal'.¹⁰ Taking into account those used in their reproductive role, women consume more drugs than men.¹¹ And they swallow large numbers of mood-altering (psychotropic) drugs such as the tranquillizer diazepam, more familiarly known by its makers' brand name — Valium. In the USA, 67 per cent of psychoactive drugs are given to women, and this pattern is emerging in the Third World too.¹²

Other dangers lurk in the home. Wood, charcoal, peat, dung and agricultural waste are widely used for cooking and heating, but the smoke can be dangerous. As many as 400 million people, particularly women, are likely to suffer some ill effects. Domestic fuels can lead to chronic lung diseases, and cancers of the nose and pharynx. In the Kenyan highlands, for instance, where it is cool and cooking is done indoors, the incidence of naso-pharyngeal cancer is higher than in the warmer lowlands, where cooking can be done outdoors.

As women are traditionally the family cooks, they are most at risk. United Nations Environment Programme director Dr Mostafa Tolba confirms this: 'They die prematurely, or their health is impaired by prolonged exposure to the harmful pollutants of cooking fuels,' he states, adding that, 'Exposure to the smoke and toxic gases of cooking fuels is probably the most serious "occupational health hazard" known today.' And as yet there are no solutions in sight.¹³

There is a glimmer of hope on another front though. The hazards of asbestos are well known today, and countries can protect their citizens by acting swiftly to remove asbestos materials in the home. These range from roofing materials, felts for flooring; ironing boards, oven and stove door seals, insulating material in toasters and hairdryers.¹⁴

A tug at women's maternal responsibilities helps the sale of insecticides. An advertisement in a Malaysian newspaper for insect spray shows a mother and her young daughter in loving closeness, with the words 'Love means never having to say you're sorry'.¹⁵ The irony is that spraying your home does not provide an effective longterm solution to mosquito-bearing diseases. Only clearing out stagnant water and treating the breeding places will. The search for a quick chemical fix for such problems led urban Americans to spend nearly two billion dollars on home and garden pesticides in 1984. The market for these toxic chemicals is growing and so are the reports of pesticide poisonings.¹⁶

Exposure to such chemicals continues outside the home for many women plantation workers in the Third World. Women carry out the most menial tasks - weeding and/or spraying herbicides and fertilisers. Accidents occur because the instructions on the labels are few and may well be in a foreign language. Frequently there is no protective clothing. On palm-oil estates in Malaysia for instance women often use their bare hands to scoop out fertiliser or rodenticide powder and scatter it round the trees. Crop-spraying back-packs corrode with age, leaking weedkiller onto the user's skin.¹⁷ At least 40,000 people die out of the two million poisoned each year by pesticides.¹⁸

There are hazardous processes waiting for women who work in factories too. In the microelectronics industries women do the eye-straining work of assembling micro-chips. There is much evidence now that such work has caused rapid deterioration of their eyesight.¹⁹

One study in South Korea found that after only one year of employment 88 per cent of the mainly female workforce developed chronic conjunctivitis (eye infection).²⁰ And although the electronics factories attract women because it seems like clean work, in many plants toxic chemicals and solvents sit in open containers, filling the work area with fumes. At one part of the process, women have to dip the silicon chips into vats of acid, and often the protective clothing provided is substandard.²¹

Another industry whose workforce is mainly female is textiles. The factories can be hazardous: as many as a quarter of India's workforce in this sector are reckoned to suffer from byssinosis, an incurable lung disease caused by breathing in the scratchy cotton fibres.²²

It has been said that no manufacturer sets out deliberately to produce hazardous products, but the tobacco industry gives the lie to this. Death rates from female lung cancer have risen rapidly in the past 20 years particularly in the industrialised countries — by 200 per cent in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK and by 300 per cent in Canada, Denmark and the US.²³

Cigarette advertising is increasingly being directed at women. Philip Morris' Virginia Slims advertisement proclaims, 'You've come a long way, baby,' alluding to the women's 'graduation' to the man's world. Such advertisements, riding on the back of women's emancipation, are influencing young girls in their hurry to seem grownup.²⁴ Of course some will stub out the habit once the glamour wears off. But a large number will continue, finding it hard to make that cigarette the last one.

Women's safety is threatened on all fronts — in the home, at work and by the media. They are more vulnerable than men to hazards for several reasons. Women, particularly in the Third World, often do the most humble tasks, both at home and at their jobs. Because the work is lowly, little attention is paid to the quality and the safety of their environment, their tools and equipment. Then, as employees, they are rarely organised into unions which could help them to collectively negotiate for better working conditions and tighter health and safety measures.

But women are not merely passive victims of hazardous products. They are organising to protect themselves from these dangers. And since the market for hazardous products knows no boundaries, women are organising on an international level. This is all the more important, since in this age of transnational corporations, a product banned in one country is all too often exported for sale or use in another.

Women workers have created their own regional and international networks for sharing information and working for health and safety in the workplace. The Committee for Asian Women (CAW), for instance, is one regional network linking women workers, giving information about health hazards, especially in the electronics and textile industries, and supporting organising efforts of women workers in these industries.²⁵

In the fight against hazardous products, consumers groups and women's groups are more and more joining hands. The Latin American and Caribbean Women's Health Network, which links more than 450 groups in the region, works together with other women's health groups and networks around the globe and with consumers organisations to campaign against the use of unsafe contraceptives, dangerous medicines, pesticides and other unsafe or unhealthy products.²⁶

Women need to know about the dangers of products they may purchase or handle, for useful information is the first step towards better protection. The United Nations now compiles and updates a list of unsafe products that have either been banned or restricted by governments. Popularly called the 'UN Consolidated List'²⁷ it is now in its second edition, and despite repeated attempts by the Reagan administration to stop this work, it continues to be supported by most nations. And to argue the case effectively, more research and more statistics need to be gathered on women's exposure to hazards. And the sooner the better.

Notes

1. Utusan Konsumer. Consumers' Association of Penang, Penang, 15 May 1986, p.3.
2. ibid.
3. McDonnell, Kathleen (Ed.) Adverse Effects: Women and the Pharmaceutical Industry. International Organization of Consumers Unions, Penang, 1986.
4. 'Dumping: The Global Trade in Dangerous Products', in New Internationalist, Issue 129, November 1983.
5. US Consumer Product Safety Commission, Washington D. C.
6. ibid.
7. Consumer Alert, no.17/82, International Organization of Consumers Unions, Penang, 1982.
8. McDonnell, Kathleen (Ed.), op. cit., p.4.
9. ibid., p.41.
10. ibid., p.42.
11. ibid.
12. Cottingham, J. 'Women and Health: An Overview', in Women and Development. Isis Women's International Information and Communications Service, Rome, 1983, p. 144.
13. World Health, Aug/Sept 1986, World Health Organization, Geneva.
14. Mizuma, N. and Nelson, D. 'Asbestos — The Deadly Fibre', in Consumer Interpol Focus, no.11, International Organization of Consumers Unions, Penang, 1985.
15. New Straits Times, 7 February 1986, Malaysia.
16. Los Angeles Times, 12 December 1986.
17. Various documents. International Organization of Consumers Unions, Penang.
18. Development/Environment Trends in Asia and the Pacific. Economic & Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok, 1983.
19. Elson, D. 'Women Working Worldwide: The International Division of Labour in the Electronics, Clothing and Textile Industries', War on Want, London, 1984.
20. Ehrenreich, B. and Fuentes, A. 'Life on the Global Assembly Line', in MS, January 1981, p.56.
21. ibid.
22. Taylor, D. et. al. Women: A World Report. Methuen/New Internationalist, London, 1985, p.45.
23. WHO Press Release, 26 September 1986.
24. Steinfeld, Jesse L. 'Women and Children Last?', in New York State Journal of Medicine, vol.83, no.13, December 1983.
25. Isis International and Committee for Asian Workers. 'Women Industrial Workers in Asia', in Isis International Women's Journal, no.4, 1985.
26. See Isis International Women's Health Journal. Bimonthly, in English and Spanish.
27. Consolidated List of Products Whose Consumption and/or Sale Have Been Banned, Withdrawn, Severely Restricted or Not Approved by Governments. Second issue, UN, New York, 1987.