Joe Thornton
MIT Press, £23.50, pp 596
ISBN 0 262 20124 0
Rating: ***
Since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, the role of organochlorines in infertility, immune suppression, cancer, and developmental disorders in humans and wildlife has been argued among environmentalists, epidemiologists, and toxicologists. These conflicts were accentuated by the controversy surrounding the land disposal of waste at Love Canal, Niagara Falls, in the United States.
Some of the debate has centred around the role of risk assessment. Decision makers want estimates of the health effects predicted to follow a particular action. Risk assessment uses scientific data to provide this type of estimate, which may be quantitative or qualitative. But it has to be recognised that this is not an exact science. The degree of uncertainty is often large, and there are limitations on the types of estimate that can be provided. However, more fundamental than arguments over findings and estimates is whether risk assessment is the correct model to protect the environment.
In Pandora's Poison Thornton argues that the "Risk Paradigm"---- based on managing pollution by permitting chemical production, use, and release as long as discharges do not exceed a quantitative "acceptable" standard ---- does not safeguard the environment. Instead, he proposes an "Ecological Paradigm," which accepts that there are limits to the science and requires that safety and necessity are demonstrated before a chemical is licensed. This, he believes, will shift the focus to preventing rather than managing pollution.
He attempts to weave the science and politics of organochlorines to argue that the public health and environmental problems deserve concern and attention. In propounding this concept, he does not adopt a nihilistic view of the continuing use of these chemicals. He accepts that chlorine "sunsetting"---- the gradual phasing out of chlorines and organochlorines and their replacement with chlorine-free alternatives---- is something that needs to be managed with care. For example, the role of chlorine in residual disinfection of drinking water is not disputed; instead, he identifies methods to reduce the organic load on the water and thereby the total chlorine demand.
Whether the manufacture of organochlorines has been the opening of Pandora's box, causing many of the ills of humanity, and whether they have been released into the environment because people have used the wrong assessment model will continue to be argued. They certainly cannot be returned to the box again. This book is an eloquent contribution to the debate on the effects of a large group of chemicals and on the regulation of chemicals generally.
Donald Campbell, public health medicine specialist. Public Health Protection, Auckland Healthcare, New Zealand
source: http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/322/7284/497 03mar01
Jane Jones,
Campaign Director
National Pure Water Association
We shall certainly be adding Joe Thornton's book 'Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health and a New Environmental Strategy' to our library and promoting it to a wider, public readership.
Chlorination is a highly contentious water treatment - old technology which should have been superceded decades ago when damage to health began to be widely reported. Ultra violet treatment is gaining some ground, but all too slowly, because of the continued, aggressive marketing of cheaper, but highly profitable, chlorine.
Tap water is treated with a cocktail of chemicals in order to provide a safe, aesthetically acceptable product. These chemicals are added with the intent of treating the water.
'Fluoride' or, more properly, silicofluorides (H2SiF6) are added to about ten per cent of UK drinking water with the intention of treating people - which is a very different matter. I know of no other substance which is prescribed wherein the 'dose' is limited only by the degree of thirst of the individual, and compounded with further dosing via ingestion of food prepared with the substance.
H2SiF6, used in artificial fluoridation schemes, is a far cry from the calcium fluoride which occurs naturally in drinking water - at very low levels of about 0.01 to 0.03 mg per litre. H2SiF6 is added to provide 1.00 mg per litre, considered by the DoH and others to be the 'optimal level' for dental health.
1 mg per litre (or 1 ppm) was the notion of H. Trendley Dean, a public health dentist, who said in 1937: " . . . amounts of fluoride not exceeding one part per million are of no public health significance." Dean did not undertake, nor was he qualified to do, any experimental or clinical investigations to support his claim. This central dogma has been repeated parrot fashion ever since by succeeding generations of pro- fluoridationists and even taught in University Dental and Medical Schools!
In December 1995, a leading article in the J. of the American Dental Association said: "More recently, concerns have been raised about the increased prevalence and severity of dental fluorosis in the United States due to the widespread ingestion of fluoride from a variety of souorces. Local and regional studies in the United States and Canada have found the prevalence of dental fluorosis to range from about 20 to 80 percent . . . The optimal level of fluoride intake has never been determined scientifically . . "
The recent York review on water fluoridation,which excluded all animal studies, all biochemical studies and all statistical models, found that the incidence of dental fluorosis in fluoridated areas is 48% (nearly 1 in 2 of the population) and that 12.5% is of a moderate to severe kind.
Dentists and others dismiss dental fluorosis as "merely a cosmetic problem". However, it is recognised by toxicologists as "the first visible sign of fluoride poisoning." Indeed, in a written answer to Lord Baldwin in April 1999, The Baroness Hayman conceded that it is "a manifestation of systemic toxicity."
For the record, the fluoride (silicofluorides) used in artificial fluoridation schemes is a cocktail of captured Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) - toxic industrial waste from the phosphate fertiliser industry. It contains Arsenic, Beryllium, Lead, Cadmium, Vanadium, Silicon, Mercury and radionuclides as well as Fluorine. Arsenic and Beryllium are Group 1 human carcinogens; Lead and Mercury are known neurotoxins.
There is no evidence that these substances benefit human teeth.
All fluorides are poisons which accumulate in the body - mainly in bone, but also in other organs. Fluoride is a heavily-documented thyroid antagonist. How much fluoride have you and other members of your family ingested today - from food, water, beverages (particularly tea!), medicines (particularly psycho-pharmaceuticals), anaesthetics, pesticides, herbicides and even from the polluted air you breathe? Without a base line, the addition of another 1mg per litre to the public drinking water for mass consumption is totally unscientific. Moreover, the forcing of entire populations to consume known human carcinogens at any level, for any reason, is anathema by any standards.
Scientific integrity is of paramount importance. Informed decisions are crucial. Contact me for references published in biomedical and biochemical journals, including many which were specifically excluded from the York review.
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