Halloween is just around the corner, and proper fire safety can ensure your spooky festivities don't go up in smoke. According to the National Fire Protection Association, decorations catching fire are the primary reason for about 900 home fires each year. And as children run around neighborhoods alight with candles and jack-o-lanterns, it's especially important to ensure their costumes are fire-resistant. This week and through Halloween, our chief science officer Dr. Joseph Perrone is raising fire safety awareness in newspapers across the nation. You can read one of his letters below, or on the Naples Daily News website: I get it. You were...

This morning, the Consumer Product Safety Commission decided on a party-line vote to ban organohalogen flame retardants from children’s products, furniture, mattresses, and electronics. Surely it would make sense to ban them if every organohalogen flame retardant (try saying that five times fast) were more dangerous than the fires they prevent. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that’s not the case. But first, what are “organohalogen flame retardants” anyway? Their name is pretty revealing - they’re a class of organic compounds that contain a halogen molecule (fluorine, chlorine, bromine, or iodine) attached to a carbon atom, and they prevent the spread of fires. Materials...

A recent study from the from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health was the first to find an association between a group of chemicals called organophosphate flame retardants (PFRs) and the number of successful fertilizations, implantations, pregnancies, and live births among women receiving in vitro fertilization. Most of us (we’re talking 90 to 100 percent) regularly encounter PFRs because they’re used to prevent fires in tech gadgets and furniture. PFRs were developed to replace polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), an earlier type of flame retardant that manufacturers began phasing out in the early 2000s after studies indicated they may be having an...