Are Cleaning Products Making Your Family Ill?

By Dr. Joyce Schoemaker and Dr. Charity Vitale

Are Cleaning Products Making Your Family Ill?

In this article:
Are Your Cleaning Products Hazardous to Your Family?
Examples of Hazardous Chemicals
What's on the Product Label?
Why Kids Are Especially at Risk
Antibacterial Products: Overkill?
Five Ways to Reduce Your Family's Exposure
Some Easy Do-It-Yourself Recipes
Important Precautions:
Top Ten Tips for Safer House Cleaning
For More Information

Dangers in your home are more widespread than you think. With the growth of strong and potentially harmful household chemicals in the past decades, the potential for illness or worse has greatly increased.

The chemical industry has expanded hugely since World War II and, with consumers always hungry for new products, innumerable strong chemicals have entered our homes and daily routines during the last 50 years.

Unfortunately homemakers don't always realize that products might be hazardous. We may be a little too relaxed about following manufacturer's instructions. When is the last time you opened windows and doors before using a chlorine-containing cleaner? And doesn't opening windows and doors conflict with your need to save energy costs? Surely we shouldn't be letting cooled or heated air escape. In fact, new home construction has for decades been trying to seal up homes, preventing fresh-air circulation.

When you finish using a strong cleaning product, do you remember to clean the container mouth and seal it back to as air-tight a condition as possible? Maybe not always. Have you ever sat back and tried to count every chemical product stored somewhere in your house? What about those products at the back of the top shelves? You know, the ones that have been sitting there for a few years.

Well, what emerges here is the modern equation for indoor air pollution: More hazardous chemicals in the home, plus less ventilation, equals more acute and chronic family exposure to chemicals.

Are Your Cleaning Products Hazardous to Your Family?

Some hardworking homemakers have been caught dramatically unawares exposing young and vulnerable family members to enough household chemicals to make them sick. This was the case of new mother Amilya Antonetti and her baby David, whose story was told in the June 12, 2000, edition of People Magazine. Antonetti discovered that her newborn son became so ill on the days she cleaned the home that he had to be taken to the emergency room. David turned out to be sensitive to the powerful cleaning chemicals used by Antonetti, especially ammonia. Antonetti replaced those cleaning products with non-toxic alternatives, and went on to develop her own line of safer products called Soapworks.

So, what exactly are the chemical culprits present in homes today? The average American home contains 63 regularly purchased hazardous chemical products. (The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines hazardous chemicals as flammable, toxic, corrosive, or reactive.) These chemicals fall into four main groups: cleaners and polishes, paints and solvents, auto products, and pesticides. By volume, these chemicals may total three to 10 gallons per household.

Examples of Hazardous Chemicals

Here are examples of familiar commercial cleaning products and the hazardous chemicals they may contain. Some of these are called volatile organic chemicals (VOCs). They evaporate quickly into air and are easily inhaled.