Chapter 12 Eleven surpasses Polkey family's dream

The pollution of our world is not just a matter of mass spraying.For most of us, this mass spraying is indeed relatively unimportant compared with the countless small-scale poison exposures to which we are exposed day after day, year after year.Like dripping water wears away a rock, the continual life-to-death exposure of humans to dangerous drugs may eventually prove to cause serious harm.This repeated exposure, no matter how slight each exposure, contributes to the accumulation of chemicals in our bodies and leads to cumulative intoxication.Probably no one can avoid contact with this spreading pollution unless he lives in fanciful conditions of total isolation.Deceived by rhetoric and veiled persuaders, the common inhabitants are seldom aware that they are surrounding themselves with these highly poisonous substances, and indeed they may not even realize that they are using them.

The age of the widespread use of poisons has come so far that anyone can buy the far more lethal chemicals of certain medicines in a shop without anyone asking him what to do. problem; but if he is going to buy some poisonous medicine, he may be required to sign the poison register of the pharmacy.A survey of any supermarket is enough to intimidate the most daring shopper, provided he has the least knowledge of the chemical drug he is asked to buy. If a death sign with a skull and crossbones were hung above an insecticide store, shoppers would at least enter the store with the usual awe of deadly substances.Rows of insecticides in such a store are as comfortably and pleasingly displayed as other commodities, and they accompany pickles and olives on the other side of the store aisle, next to bathing and laundry soaps. .Chemicals in glass containers were placed within easy reach of a child's hands.If these glass containers are dropped on the floor by children or careless adults, anyone nearby could be splashed with the drug that made those who sprayed it ill.This danger, of course, follows the buyer directly into his home.For example, a canister of DDT moth repellant is subtly printed with a warning that it is autoclaved and that it may burst if exposed to heat or an open flame.A Jintong household insecticide that has several uses, including in the kitchen, is chlordane.Yet one of the Food and Drug Administration's leading pharmacologists has declared that the dangers of living in a chlordane-sprayed home are "substantial."Some other household insecticides contain the more toxic dieldrin.

Using this poison in the kitchen is both convenient and attractive.Kitchen shelf paper, whether white or any other favorite color, can be impregnated with insecticide, not only on one side but on both sides.Manufacturers provided us with a do-it-yourself booklet on bed bug extermination.One can spray fumes of sardidrin into small rooms, out of the way places, and into the most inaccessible nooks and crannies of wainscoting with the ease of pressing a button. If we are plagued by mosquitoes, sand fleas, or other insects that are harmful to humans, we have a wide choice of detergents, face oils, and sprays to use on our clothes and skin, although we have been warned that these substances Some of these chemicals are soluble in varnishes, paints, and synthetics, but we still have the illusion that these chemicals cannot penetrate human skin.To make sure we're beating bugs of all kinds at all times, a New York upscale store is marketing a pocket-sized bulk pack of insecticide that's perfect for treasury, dry beach and golf courses, and fishing gear.

We can wax the floor to ensure that any insects that move on the floor are killed.We can hang a strip of cloth soaked with acetonitrile in our closets and coat pockets, or keep these strips in the drawers of our desks, and thus save us half a year from worrying about an infestation of moths.When promoting these medicines, it did not also state that HH-666 is dangerous.Nor did the trade show come up with an electronic device to eliminate the smell of HC-66, which we were told was safe and tasteless.The truth of the matter, however, is that the American Medical Association considers HCV nebulizers to be a very dangerous thing, so the Medical Association launched a broad campaign against the use of HCV nebulizers in its journal .

The Department of Agriculture in its Home and Garden Newsletter urges us to spray our clothes with oil-soluble DDT, dieldrin, chlordane, or various other silverfish poisons.If overspray leaves a white deposit of the insecticide on the sprayed object, the Department of Agriculture says it can be brushed off.But it forgot to tell us to pay attention to where and how to brush.All this leads to the fact that even when we go to bed at night we have to go to bed with insecticides - we have a moth-proof blanket impregnated with dieldrin. Gardening is now closely associated with advanced poisons.Every hardware store, garden supply store, and supermarket carries lines of insecticides for every need that gardening work may present.Those A who have not yet widely used this multitude of lethal sprays and powders are simply slow to move, for the garden columns in nearly every newspaper and most garden magazines take their use for granted.

Even acutely lethal organophosphate insecticides were so widely applied to grass and ornamentals that in 1960 the Florida Department of Health found it necessary to prohibit commercial application of insecticides to anyone in residential areas unless he First obtain consent and meet established requirements.Before this regulation was implemented, there had been many deaths due to parathion poisoning. Little has been done to warn gardeners and homeowners who are being exposed to extremely dangerous drugs.However, a steady stream of new devices are making it easier to apply poisons to lawns and gardens, increasing the gardener's exposure to poisons.For example, one can obtain a bottle-type attachment that fits on a garden hose, and by means of this device when one waters the lawn, such highly toxic pesticides as chlordane and dieldrin are dispersed with the water go out.Such a device is not only a danger to the person using the water main, but also a threat to the public. The New York Times found it obliged to issue a warning in its garden column that, unless a special protective device was installed, poison would enter the water supply by backsiphoning.Considering how many such devices are in use, and considering how few such warnings have been issued, should we be surprised at why our public waters are polluted?

As an example of what may go wrong in a gardener, let us consider the case of a doctor.The doctor is an enthusiastic amateur gardener.He started with DDT and later Malathion on his bushes and lawn on a regular weekly basis, sometimes by hand and sometimes with the help of an attachment like the one on the hose by adding it directly to the hose middle.When he did so, his skin and clothes were often soaked with the potion.After going on like this for about a year, he suddenly fell ill and was hospitalized.Examination of a biopsy sample of his fat revealed an accumulation of 23 parts per million of DDT.There was extensive nerve damage, which doctors who saw him believed to be permanent.Over time, he lost weight, became extremely fatigued, and developed a peculiar muscle weakness that is typical of malathion poisoning.All these long-term effects have been severe enough that the gardener can no longer pursue his activity.

Aside from the once innocuous garden sprinkler, the motorized lawnmower is adapted to apply insecticide with some kind of attachment that emits a white steam as the owner mows his lawn. smoke.In this way, finely dispersed particles of the pesticide are added to the potentially dangerous gasoline exhaust that the unsuspecting suburbanite may have been spraying in this way, thus adding to the air pollution over his own land. , its pollution level is so high that few cities can catch up. There is also a point to be made, namely, the dangers of the fashionable fashion for gardening with poisons and for using insecticides in the home; Read it or follow it.One industry firm is now investigating how many people take such warnings seriously.Its surveys show that less than 15 per cent of people are not even aware of the warnings on the containers when using pesticides.

Suburbanites are now used to letting sour applegrass grow, no matter the cost. Bags containing pesticides that can be used to remove unwanted weeds from lawns have become almost a symbol.These weed-killing pesticides are often sold under a pretty name that never leads one to guess its substance and nature.To know whether the bags contained chlordane or dieldrin, one had to read the small stamp stamped in a discreet place on the top of the bag.Technical information on the handling and use of these pesticides, if they involve real hazards, is difficult to obtain in any hardware store or garden supply store.Instead, what was obtained was a typical brochure depicting a happy family: a smiling father and son were about to spray the lawn with pesticides, and children and a dog were rolling in the grass.The issue of pesticide residues in our food is a hotly debated issue.The existence of these residues is either dismissed as a matter of indifference by industry or flatly denied.At the same time, there is a strong tendency to label all those who insist on keeping their food free from pesticide poisons as "followers."In the fog of all this controversy, what is the truth?

It is medically confirmed that as a common sense we know that those who lived before the advent of the DDT era (about 1942) did not contain trace amounts of DDT and other similar substances in their body tissues.As described in Chapter 3, human fat samples collected from the general population between 1954 and 1956 contained an average of 5.3 to 7.4 parts per million of DDT.There is some evidence that average levels have continued to rise to a higher value since then.Of course, the accumulation is even higher for those individuals who are exposed to pesticides for occupational and other specific reasons.

In the general population, which is unnoticed and heavily exposed to pesticides, it can be assumed that all DDT stored in fat enters the body through food.To test this hypothesis, a scientific team organized by the U.S. Public Health Service went to collect meals from restaurants and college cafeterias.DDT was found in the middle of each meal sample.From this, the investigators have good reason to conclude: "There are almost no foods that people can trust that are completely non-DDT." The amount of contaminated food like this is very large.In an independent study by the Public Health Service, analysis of prison meals revealed such problems as 69.6 parts per million DDT in stewed dried fruit, 100.9 parts per million in bread, and more! In the average household food, meat and any food made from animal fat contains significant residues of chlorinated hydrocarbons.This is because these chemicals are soluble in fat.Residues appear to be less in fruits and vegetables, since washing plays a little role, the best way is to remove and discard all outer leaves of vegetables like lettuce, cabbage, peel off the fruit, and Don't use the peel or the outer shell of any kind.Cooking does not remove residual poison. Milk is one of the few foods that is not allowed to contain pesticide residues under Food and Drug Administration regulations.In fact, however, whenever a sample check is carried out, the residual virus will be detected.Residual levels are greatest in cream and other mass-produced cheese products.Assays on 461 samples of such products in 1960 showed that one third contained residues.The Food and Drug Administration described the situation as "far from encouraging." It seems that one must go to a remote, primitive land and forsake the comforts of modern civilization in order to discover food free of DDT and related chemicals.Such lands might exist at least on the fringes of the remote Arctic coast of Alaska, but even there one could see the shadow of the looming pollution.When scientists investigated the native food of the Eskimos in the area, it was found to be free of pesticides.Fresh and dried fish; fat, oil, or meat from beaver, beluga, caribou, elk, polar bear, walrus; cranberries, salmon berries, and wild rhubarb, all completely uncontaminated.There is only one exception here - two white owls from Cape Hope contained small amounts of DDT, probably acquired during migration. Small amounts of DDT residues (0-1.9 parts per million) were found when fat samples from some of the Eskimos themselves were sampled.The reason is very clear.The fat samples were taken from people who had left their ancestral home for surgery at the US Public Health Service hospital in Unchoriji.A civilized way of life prevails here.Just as much DDT is found in the food of most populous cities, so much DDT was found in the food of this hospital.During their sojourn in the civilized world, these Eskimos have been marked by pesticide pollution. Because of the widespread spraying of crops with these poisonous waters and powders, it is a corollary that every meal we eat contains chlorinated hydrocarbons.Provided farmers carefully follow label instructions, the use of pesticides does not produce residues in excess of the standards set by the Food and Drug Administration.Regardless of whether these residue standards are as "safe" as they say, it is a well-known fact that farmers often use more than the prescribed dose of pesticides near the harvest time, and use them there if they want On the other hand, this also shows that people don't bother to look at those small explanatory marks. Even the industry that makes pesticides believes that farmers often misuse pesticides and need to be educated.A leading trade journal in the agricultural industry recently stated: "It appears that many users do not understand that if pesticides are used in excess of the recommended doses, they will lose tolerance. Furthermore, farmers are free to use pesticides on many crops on a whim." Insecticide." Such escapades are documented in FDA dossiers in disturbing numbers.Some examples of disregard for instructions include a lettuce farmer who applied not one, but eight different pesticides at the same time as the lettuces approached harvest.One courier used highly toxic parathion on celery at a dose equivalent to five times the maximum allowable level.Growers use endrin, the most toxic of all chlorinated hydrocarbons, even though residues are not allowed on lettuce.Spinach was also sprayed with DDT the week before it was harvested. There are also instances of accidental and accidental contamination.Large quantities of green coffee in burlap sacks were also contaminated because when they were transported on a ship that also carried some cargo of pesticides.Packaged food stored in warehouses has been subjected to multiple aerial sprayings of DDT, HHC, and other pesticides, which can enter the packaged food in significant quantities.The longer these foods are stored in warehouses, the greater the risk of contamination. "Doesn't the government protect us from these hazards?" The answer to the question is, "There are limits." In its campaign to protect consumers from pesticide hazards, FDA has two are greatly restricted for this reason.The first reason is that the agency has authority only over food that is transported in interstate commerce; it has absolutely no authority over food grown and bought within a state, no matter how many infractions there may be.The second reason is the obvious fact that there are very few clerks in this management office, less than six hundred of them!According to an official of the Food and Drug Administration, only a very small amount of interstate commerce agricultural products (much less than one percent) can be sampled with existing equipment. Statistics are flawed.As for food produced and sold within a state, the situation is even worse, since most states simply don't have complete laws in this area. The maximum allowable limits for contamination (referred to as "tolerances") set forth by the Food and Drug Administration have significant deficiencies.In this climate of pesticide use, the regulation is merely a dead letter, instead creating a completely untrue impression that safety limits have been established and are being adhered to.As to how safe it is for people to allow a drizzle of poison on food, there are many who argue with good reason that no poison is safe or one would want to add to food.To determine the tolerance level, the Food and Drug Administration re-examined the results of experiments with these agents on laboratory animals and determined a maximum tolerance level of contamination that was far less than the amount required to cause symptoms of intoxication in laboratory animals.The series of tolerances used to ensure safety are contrary to a number of important facts.A laboratory animal living in a controlled, highly humanized environment and fed a certain amount of a specific pesticide behaves very differently from a human being exposed to the pesticide.There are not only many types of pesticides that people are exposed to, but most of them are unknown, unmeasured and uncontrollable.Even if 7 parts per million of DDT is "safe" in a person's lunch salad lettuce, the person also eats other foods with the meal, each containing an amount not exceeding Standard residues; in addition, as we already know, pesticide intake through food is only a part of the total human intake, and may be a very small part.The superposition of such chemical drugs from various sources constitutes an unmeasurable total intake.Therefore, it is meaningless to discuss the "safety" of residual levels in any single food. There are also some problems.Sometimes these tolerances are established against the best judgment of FDA scientists.These scientific judgments will be cited later in this book.Or the determination of these tolerances is based on insufficient knowledge about the chemical drug.This tolerance was later disregarded, or even dropped, as more knowledge of the actual situation became known, but that was many months or years after the public had been exposed to the obvious dangers of these literal drugs.A tolerance value was set for heptachlor, but this tolerance value had to be canceled later.Before a chemical substance is registered for use, the detection of residual poisons has failed because there are no practical analytical methods in the field.This difficulty has greatly hindered the inspection of residues of aminothiazoles in the cranberry industry.There is also a lack of analytical methods for a fungicide commonly used in seed treatment.If the seeds are not in the field by the end of the growing season, they may be used for food. In reality, however, establishing tolerances would mean allowing food served to the public to be contaminated with toxic chemicals, which would please farmers and agro-processors with reduced costs and benefits, but would be detrimental to consumers, who would have to increase Pay taxes to support the police department to verify that they will get the lethal dose.However, it may cost more than any legislator's salary to do this verification work to understand the current use and toxicity of pesticides.As a result, hapless consumers pay the tax money and still ingest poisons that go unnoticed. How to solve it?The first is the banning of tolerances for chlorinated hydrocarbons, organophosphate groups and other highly toxic chemicals.This proposal will immediately be opposed, as it would place an intolerable burden on the peasant.However, as is now required, if 7 parts per million of DDT, or 1 part per million of parathion, or 0.1 part of di The requirements of aldrin require the use of pesticides so that they leave only a permissible amount of poison, so why should not more care be taken to completely prevent any residues from appearing?In fact, this is what is now required for some chemicals, such as heptachlor, endrin, and dieldrin, which are used in certain crops.If this can be done for the above pesticides, why can't it be done for all pesticides?But this is not a thorough and final solution.A tolerance on paper is of little value.Currently, as we know, more than 99 percent of food shipped interstate slips through without inspection.There is also an urgent need to establish a vigilant and proactive Food and Drug Administration and expand the force of inspectors.Yet such a system—by intentionally poisoning our food and then imposing judicial regulation on the result—is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "white knight," who contrived to "A plan to dye a beard green and then make him use a huge fan all the time, so the beards are never seen again."The ultimate answer is to use fewer toxic chemicals, and in doing so, the public harm caused by their abuse will be rapidly reduced.Such chemicals already exist: pyrethrin, rotenone, ryanodine, and other plant-derived chemicals.Synthetic alternatives to pyrethrins have also recently been developed so that we don't feel inadequate if we use pyrethrins.There is a great need to educate the public about the properties of the chemicals being sold.The average buyer is completely overwhelmed by the sheer array of insecticides, fungicides, and weed killers available, with no way of knowing which are lethal and which are relatively safe. Furthermore, we should diligently explore the possibility of non-chemical methods in order to facilitate the transformation of these pesticides into less dangerous agricultural pesticides.Experiments are now being carried out in California to study the agricultural application of insect diseases caused by a bacterium highly specific for certain types of insects.Scaled-up experiments with this approach are currently underway.Great other possibilities now exist for effective control of insects using methods that do not leave residues in food. (See Chapter 17.) It will be impossible, by any sane standard, to derive any comfort from this intolerable situation until these new methods have replaced the old ones on a large scale.As things stand, we are not much better off than Borgia's guests.