Exposing The Game That Industry And Government Play On Toxins
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The Game That Industry And Government Play On Toxins
Date:
Mon, 9 Dec 2002 07:47:02 -0500
From:
Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide
Regulation
cc: Christine Whitman whitman.christine@epa.gov
Saturday, December 7, 2002 - Print Edition, Page D21 - The Globe and Mail
Killer Air, Killer Book - By Andrew Nikiforuk
When Smoke Ran Like Water - By Devra Davis
HarperCollins, 316 pages, $39.50
In 1948, a smoky cloud descended on the steel mills and zinc works of Donora, Penn. The inversion made it impossible for workers to see across the street or even catch a glimpse of the town's smokestacks. In the darkness, fluoride and sulfur gases efficiently reduced people's lungs to a bloody pulp. In three days, 18 people died: All were down-winders. After the inversion lifted, another 50 died. Hundreds more finished the rest of their lives with damaged lungs and hearts. But another 40 years would pass before the whole truth about Donora's bad air made public-health history.
Devra Davis, one of the world's most forthright epidemiologists, grew up in Donora and never forgot the the experience. In fact, she has spent most of her adult life exposing deception and denial in industry with all the outrage and passion of a midrash storyteller.
So reader beware: Davis is a refreshing public-health crusader who doesn't believe that government should wait for piles of dead bodies or wards of ill people before acting on toxic air. Her explosive and powerful book, When Smoke Ran Like Water, is probably the most readable expose' of the hidden costs of pollution since Silent Spring. Like Rachel Carson's barn-burner, it's chock full of square science, damning details and arresting tales involving immoral lawyers, quisling researchers and infertile males.
Davis begins her compelling tale with a graphic and personal description of Donora's undoing and official attempts to keep it quiet. She then revisits the London killer smog of 1952 (more than 7,000 died) to show how the government of Harold Macmillan, hobbled by an economic reliance on domestic coal, lied like hell and attributed the deaths to influenza.
In fact, speaking the truth about bad air has never been a popular activity.
Consider the remarkable career of Mary Amdur, the mother of modern toxicology. Like Davis, she had first-hand knowledge of pollution: Her father, a Donora worker, died of lung cancer at the age of 40. The trailblazing Amdur developed a test for exposing guinea pigs to sulfur mists, proving that low doses -- even one 10th of a lethal amount -- could cause irreparable damage such as heart disease or asthma.
She followed up that unwelcome study with a test to measure low levels of lead in the atmosphere. In 1923, the auto industry came up with the bright idea of adding lead to gasoline, billing it as an economy booster. Amdur's research proved the industry was . . . well, assaulting the brains of children.
For her pioneering efforts, Amdur was denied tenure at every major U.S. public-health school. Even The Lancet caved in to political pressure and refused to publish her research. As Davis notes, she ended her career "the loneliest of long-distance runners." Yet everything she studied has been validated a hundred times over. And when industry finally removed lead from our gasoline, guess what: The economy did not collapse.
Davis does an excellent job of exposing the game that industry and government play to avoid being accountable for killing people. As soon as good science implicates a toxin, industry pays experts to delay and block studies. The car industry did this with emission standards (Lee Iacocca threatened to shut down the industry) and the oil and gas industry has played the game with sour gas and Kyoto. Davis notes: "The effort to establish the science of environmental epidemiology has been plagued by a sophisticated and completely legal disinformation campaign, the full extent of which is not appreciated even by those who have been its chief victims."
Halfway into her book, Davis calculates the cost of inaction on public-health air-pollution studies, and wonders why government won't use them to make decisions about public transport, light, heat and energy. If industry had just used clean-air technology available in the 1980s, she reckons, more than a million North Americans would have been spared early deaths. "How much expense, how many missed quarterly profit projections, how many inconvenienced or even downright angry lobbyists are a million lives worth?"
Her chapter on breast cancer is equally damning. Nearly 40 years ago, it afflicted one in 40 women. Today the figure is one is eight. The one common link appears to be a greater exposure to hormones or chemicals that mimic hormones. The crap in nail polish (phlthalates) behaves like estrogen and can trick the body into early puberty. Hair products used by African-American women may explain why half of all black girls develop breasts by the age of 8 -- something unheard of in Africa. Neighbourhoods with high rates of breast cancer also tend to use twice as many pesticides around their homes. To Davis, the key question stills remains unanswered: "What avoidable factors cause 19 out of 20 cases of the disease?"
Nor does Davis ignore pollution's ball-breaking legacy for men: a 50-per-cent increase in testicular cancer and a sharp rise in infertility. Meanwhile, the size of testes and trends in male sex ratios are all pointing down.
Add to this grim picture rampant sexual confusion in male fish and bears (one out of every 100 polar bears is now hermaphroditic). Not surprisingly, Davis wonders if men aren't becoming canaries in the mine of reproductive health.
The people who should read this book (anti-Kyoto fanatics such as Gwyn Morgan and Ralph Klein quickly come to mind) probably won't. They don't understand that emission reductions are as apple pie as debt reductions.
But for fresh-air lovers, Davis's troubling book will stand as a stark reminder that the right to search for truth in a world warped by industrial and political lies is never easy. Or quick.Contributing reviewer Andrew Nikiforuk recently won the Governor-General's Award for non-fiction for his industrial crime thriller Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig's War Against Big Oil. He lives in Calgary.
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