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TODAY Monday 15 September 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: The Problem With Health

There is a problem of knowledge at the heart of contemporary environmentalism. The problem is that we cannot predict with any precision the effects on human health of environmental degradation. Medical science is only beginning to assess the implications of disturbances in climate and habitat (see Dr. Paul Epstein's review of Web resources on Health and Global Change). Toxicologists, epidemiologists and researchers of all stripes are poring over mountains of data on synthetic chemicals. For every certifiable bad actor like DDT, there are two dozen compounds whose risks are difficult to assess.

As JP Myers has noted on this site, humanity is conducting a chemical experiment on itself, and no one is exempt. People regarded as remote from contaminants -- Inuits in Arctic Canada, for example -- find themselves bound to industrial society by patterns of the upper atmosphere. For science, this is an enormous headache. There are no control groups. As Myers says, no one -- not a soul -- comes into this world free of synthetic chemicals.

Add to that central difficulty the additional problem of synergy and interactivity. Since everybody contains and is exposed to a spectrum of chemicals, and since hundreds of new chemicals are being introduced into air and water each year, scientific researchers have a difficult time isolating the effects of one particular substance and assessing accurately the combined effect of two or more chemicals reacting with each other.

Faced with these investigative challenges, and secure in the knowledge that certain synthetic chemicals have been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, many environmentalists assume the reasonable posture of the "precautionary principle," i.e., that a manufacturer should assume the burden of proof that a chemical is safe rather than that a society should assume the burden of proof that it is dangerous. The partisans of precaution are troubled with the current approach, wherein government regulators essentially spot-check the self-testing of interested corporations conducting research protocols that in themselves can be controversial. The most recent conspicuous example of this knot of issues was the campaign to set new federal standards on pesticide acceptability based on the health effects of the pesticides on children, not adults. The campaign succeeded.

One reason it did was because of broad public support for a strong government role in setting and enforcing environmental health protections. Another is that the public is easily persuaded that special safeguards for children's health are particularly warranted. The protection of family health is the goal that people most often cite in polls and focus groups when asked for the their ideas of the main purposes of national environmental policy. The rollback environmental legislative program of the 104th Congress was derailed over food safety, not habitat depletion. As a democratic political movement, environmentalism has no choice but to address and appeal to these anxieties about contamination and health. Can it do so credibly, persuasively, and over the long haul?

That's where the knowledge problem comes in. In the United States and other rich countries, concerns about the negative health effects of artificial chemicals comes as the longevity of men and women increases. In the US, life expectancies rise each year, male and female, white and black. Some of this gain is logged by improved infant survival rates, but most comes from people living longer. The life expectancy of a white American woman is now 79.6 years. Historically, that is a mind-blower.

People are living longer but, as everyone knows, many forms of cancer are on the increase. In particular, the incidences of cancers of organs involved in reproductive systems -- ovaries, testes, breasts, brains, prostate glands -- continue to climb (which is one reason there's so much interest in endocrine-disrupting chemicals). Other cancers -- cancer of the stomach, for example -- are in decline. Even where cancer incidences are up, cancer fatalities often hold steady or decrease because of improvements in treatment.

For most of the world, premature death comes from familiar, pre-industrial scourges: diarrheal disorders, malaria, measles, whooping cough, cholera, fevers and influenza. The anxieties of the affluent can seem almost preposterously overblown from the perspective of Dacca or Lagos. But the health preoccupations of the rich -- besides being politically useful to green zealots more interested in ecosystems than cholesterol -- are probably useful to all humanity and its children. Those of us accustomed to chemical-rich lifetimes are the laboratory rats of the species. Just as the atmosphere brought DDT to Inuits, the chemicals of our time and place will surely migrate and accumulate in times ahead and in places far-flung.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Editors tend to be fond of smart writers who flout the conventional wisdom, and so we're delighted today to introduce David Tenenbaum to Liberty Tree. David edits the "Why Files", the best (and drollest) of all the websites designed to make science intelligible to the non-specialist. As you'll see in his piece on sewage sludge, he's an environmentalist happy and secure enough to go against the grain.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

9/12: The Automobile Crisis of 2020
9/11: Gratifyingly Inept Adversary
9/10: The Porkbarrel Works for You
9/09: Climate Change Changes
9/08: More or Less Voluntary Simplicity
9/05: Man Bites Cougar
9/04: Logging
9/03: Fishing
9/02: Our Biodiversity Problems
8/29: Babies

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