A team of researchers are studying to see if low doses of chemicals considered safe individually can be dangerous when combined together.

Researchers have been testing chemicals to see if they cause cancer. But in the new study, researchers looked at if small amounts of chemical considered to be safe cause cancer when mixed together.

William Goodson III, MD, lead author of the report said, "We're swimming in this chemical soup ... and we really don't know what it's doing to us. We're pushing for the idea that the chemical testing has to basically go back to step one. Instead of looking at individual chemicals, look at chemicals in mixtures. We live in a mixture every day."

The report was written by a team of international scientists from 28 countries.Linda Birnbaum, PhD, director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program, which helped fund the report said that researchers must take the challenge of evaluating mixtures and not just evaluate one chemical at a time.

Experts said that a range of commonly used chemicalsare likely to cause cancer even in very low amounts.