Maddenation
The Pollution Within
This month’s National Geographic Magazine is excellent. The cover article is on The Places We Must Save. This post, however, is on David Ewing Duncan’s article titled, The Pollution Within. NPR also has a piece on this guy. The author had his blood examined for something like 130 toxins/pollutants to see how contaminated his body is. Overall the news for him was bad. But it makes you wonder - exactly what is bad? 1 part per billion? We all certainly have lots of nasty chemicals in us and they can’t all be killing us. The author had insanely high levels of flame-retardant chemicals in his body. So the question is, do those chemicals save more lives than they harm (possible link to thyroid problems)? NatGeo says yes, they do save more lives (at least for some chemicals). I guess it’s a dilemma that goes along with progress and advances in technology. Like with DDT - malaria deaths decreased substantially with the pesticide, but it had harmful environmental effects. How should you weigh the costs vs. benefits?
Side note: The author had some crazy chemical levels, he says are because he played around in a dump all the time as a kid. Yikes, kinda makes you wonder about our childhood times playing in the clearing and in the Paper Board. Do you remember the massive toxic waste containers that were back there (straight out of Axis Chemicals in Batman)? I mean, I never went swimming in them, but still, playing around back there couldn’t have been good, right?
David • News • 10/08/06 • 1 comments
Comments
Dad • 10/08/06 • 5:04 PM:I’ve heard lots of recent thinking on DDT, and many scientists, including Dr. Ames who developed the Ames test for mutagenicity, now say that the benefits of DDT far outweighed the negative effect on birds. In fact, I heard a commentator say recently that Rachel Carson’s book was an unscientific, purely emotional argument for banning DDT. Like the styrofoam cups vs. washable cups controversy (Which at least taught us that your “shoot from the hip” gut reaction to something might not be right), balancing the cost/benefit of modern technology is often not as easy as it’s made out to be. This suggests that maybe the old adage “300 million Americans can’t all be wrong” is worth considering.
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