Blog

On average, women use 12 products containing 168 unique ingredients every day. Men, on the other hand, use 6 products daily with 85 unique ingredients according to the Environmental Working Group. Their study shows that some of the chemicals in personal care and cosmetic products have been linked to health problems, including cancer and infertility.  Hundreds of chemicals including, phthalates, ...

By Sophia Harrison  As a new freshman at the University of California, Berkeley in 2017, I was required to undergo a week-long orientation. Most of the activities involved icebreakers and course overviews, but one presentation in particular lingers in my mind. On the fifth day of orientation, we took a tour of the health center to ...

By Maggie Gorini We smartphone owners volunteer countless bits of information into the apps that rule our lives. Do we all carefully read the privacy policy for a new app before clicking the “agree” button? Probably not. Some information is hardly sensitive, from recipe searches to cat videos. Some information, however, is incredibly private: passwords, bank ...

With few exceptions, current federal law does not require makers of cosmetics and other personal care products sold in the United States to get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before their products go on the market. In fact, manufacturers aren’t required to list all of their ingredients, test their products, use ...

  Cross-posted from our joint Raising Women’s Voices campaign Today, the Senate is set to pass the two-year budget deal announced last week, clearing it for the president’s signature. The House passed the measure last Thursday, 284-189. The deal will suspend the debt ceiling through July 2021, eliminate the deep automatic spending cuts (known as “sequestration”) set ...

By Maggie Gorini Based on an informal poll of 9 staff members, 4 of us admitted to having an old bottle of unfinished opioids on the shelf at home, gathering maybe its 10th year of dust. But how could that be? Aren’t we all knowledgeable health advocates that follow every single up-to-date health recommendation? We try, ...

By Julia Kagan Just under 37 million people worldwide are HIV positive, and the toll on the LGBTQ+ community is disproportionate to that of the general public. The odds of living with a positive diagnosis for transgender women can be up to 49 times that of someone in the general population, and gay/bisexual men make up ...

With few exceptions, current federal law does not require cosmetics manufacturers to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration before their products go on the market. In fact, manufacturers aren’t required to list all of their ingredients, test their products, use good manufacturing practices to prevent contamination, or even recall products they know are ...

In response to the confirmation of two hard-right Supreme Court justices and an increasingly hostile judiciary that threatens women’s access to clinic-based abortion, the NWHN has been working hard to demystify medication abortion for the public and push back against medically unnecessary restrictions imposed by states and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). We want ...

By Tessa Ruff On March 26 and 27, the FDA convened a meeting of the General and Plastic Surgery Devices Panel to investigate the safety of breast implants following a reported link between textured implants and lymphoma, as well as a range of reported systemic autoimmune symptoms following implantation, collectively known as breast implant illness (BII). ...