What the media says ...

January 3, 2004

Detroit News

Religious Leaders Must Beware of Secular Causes

By the Rev Gerald Zandstra

Extract:

Religious leaders are always in danger of being "captured" by someone with a cause. Consider the most recent example. Last month, the Building in Good Faith (BIGF) initiative was undertaken by a group of environmental activists seeking to eliminate the use of vinyl plastics (also known as polyvinyl chloride, or PVC) in all building materials.

According to a recent BIGF press release, the initiative has gained a sympathetic hearing from both the National Religious Partnership on the Environment and the National Council of Churches.

In this case, the Building in Good Faith movement is starting from a largely secular environmental philosophy and seeking to import religious justification.

The campaign to phase out vinyl building materials is just one piece of the greater anti-vinyl movement. The group behind the Building in Good Faith initiative is My House is Your House, which has joined forces with Health Care Without Harm, a group that wants to eliminate all PVC-based products in health care.

But the actions of groups like Health Care Without Harm belie their real interest in patient welfare. Banning vinyl-based products, which pose a very small risk to health, would in effect create new harms by denying patients the use of products that have been proven safe in billions of treatments. The effort also diverts attention from vastly greater health threats.

November 4, 2003

Bangkok Post

  • Treating health care concerns

    There are moves afoot in the United States to ban the use of medical products made of PVC for fear they pose health risks. This will have broad repercussions. PVC is used in all sorts of essential products. 

People go to hospitals to get healthy. But a new study by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reveals that medical injuries at hospitals kill more than 32,000 patients a year in America.It obviously makes no sense to make hospitals more dangerous. Yet the group Health Care Without Harm is campaigning against medical products made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

As we cannot provide a direct link to articles in the Bangkok Post for the full text please go to the Bangkok Post website and enter DEHP in the search box

July 19, 2002

Fox News

  • IV-Bag Scare Drips Junk Science

    Question: When is no data all the data you need for a health scare? Answer: When the driving force is the insidious "precautionary principle."

    The Food and Drug Administration warned us this week about plastic intravenous (IV) bags and tubes made with the chemical di-2ethylhexyl-phthalate (DEHP). Minute amounts of DEHP can leach from the vinyl into liquids.