What’s in Your Tampons? A Closer Look at Metal Content

Tampons are the most used sanitary products in the world, which is why extra awareness about the risks and precautions of their usage should be encouraged. New research has surfaced concerning different kinds of consumer tampons and metalloids present in these products. The presence of metals in tampons is unexplored territory, and determining how this could relate to metals in the body is of high priority.

Research led by Columbia University scientists took place by obtaining 30 tampons from 14 brands, with different kinds of absorbance and materials, to ensure a substantial range of products to compare unfavourable characteristics.

Understanding Research Findings

16 different substances were tested, including the concentration of metals, concentration by region of purchase (US, UK), organic vs inorganic, and store vs name brand. Metals have been observed to cause increased risk to cardiovascular, nervous and endocrine systems, harm maternal related systems and foetal development, damage your brain, kidneys, liver, and increase the risk of various diseases like infertility and diabetes.

The study showed that there was a clear presence of metals in all types of tampons, regardless of where they came from or their chemical makeup. No type of tampon was observed to have consistently lower or higher levels of metals although some types of tampons had certain kinds of metals, with lead concentrations higher in non-organic tampons, while arsenic was higher in organic tampons respectively.

The average concentration of lead was 120 parts per billion (ppb), which is a big contrast to the cadmium at 6.74 ppb and arsenic at 2.56 ppb. This is in contrast to the US Food and Drug Administration’s limit for these metals in bottled drinking water, that being 5 ppb for lead and cadmium, and 10 ppb for arsenic respectively. This does highlight just how much lead there is in tampons, and how this could be a problem with the absorbtion of the dangerous metal into the body.

Is This a Cause for Concern?

The cause for concern assumes the vagina can in fact absorb chemicals in tampons. “Lead isn’t safe in any concentration, but it’s really important we don’t panic,” says Jenni Shearston, environmental epidemiologist from the University of California, Berkeley. “I can’t say that someone should or shouldn’t use a tampon based on our results. We don’t yet know if those metals come out of the tampon and if they do, we don’t know whether they can get into the bloodstream. Our team is continuing to study this.”

Follow up studies are a must if we are to know all there is to know about the health risks regarding tampons. But for how much a tampon does in relation to period care, it can seem like there is more to lose than to gain if quitting or replacing tampons are required actions. Sarah Cady, analytical chemist from Iowa State University, says it’s possible that metals are simply trapped within the tampon and just cannot get out very easily. “Is the lead tangled up in all that? And in the amount of time that a tampon is in the body, is it able to leach out?” Cady says.

This is a first in the efforts to find out the safety and viability of tampons in an era where we are more conscious of what is going in our bodies, and what things are really made up of than ever. While this does bring up cases and instances of sexism in science, “We’re a bit squeamish talking about periods and menstrual products, and I think we shouldn’t be,” Shearston says.

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Sources

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412024004355?via%3Dihub
• https://cen.acs.org/safety/consumer-safety/researchers-found-arsenic-lead-tampons/102/web/2024/07?sc=231026_mostread_eng_cen
• https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/news-media/research-highlights/first-study-to-measure-toxic-metals-in-tampons-shows-arsenic-and-lead
• https://www.smh.com.au/national/are-tampons-toxic-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-20240718-p5juqr.html