Only a couple of outlets covered the CHEJ report skeptically. The Canadian Press news service carried an article with the headline, “New concerns about plastic shower curtains may be overblown, experts say.” Amazingly, among the coverage of a report about chemical exposure, it was one of the only outlets to actually to use that word, let alone make clear that the report did nothing to further our understanding of the risks of exposure. Another outlet that was brave enough to do some serious reporting on this was ABC News, which had a wonderful, long piece headlined, “Studies Gone Wild: Death by Shower Curtain?” In it, a team of three reporters critically analyze the CHEJ’s methodology and point out that its report says nothing about actual human health outcomes related to shower-curtain exposure.

Who knows? Maybe the best approach would have been to ignore the CHEJ’s remarks about toxicity entirely and focus on some of the overlooked, but more vital, points it made. The true value of the study, after all, might be the pressure it puts on the federal government to finally come up with a better chemical-regulation scheme. CHEJ argues, quite correctly, that more oversight is needed, including both testing and labeling. The Washington Post had an excellent article on Thursday that was far drier, but perhaps more important than any of the CHEJ coverage. It described the new regulatory scheme being rolled out in Europe where:

The new laws in the European Union require companies to demonstrate that a chemical is safe before it enters commerce—the opposite of policies in the United States, where regulators must prove that a chemical is harmful before it can be restricted or removed from the market.

And that really is the bottom line. Chemical exposure (from consumer products or the daily environment) is one of the most poorly understood facets of modern life, and much needs to be done to change that. Unfortunately, when something like this shower-curtain study is released, the press runs away with the easy, sexy angle of lurking danger, and that distracts reporters from tougher, but far more useful work.

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