Chapter 13 Twelve Human Prices

The production of chemical drugs, which began in the era of the Industrial Revolution, has now surged in our environment, and a drastic change has emerged as the most serious public health problem.Before this public health problem arose, it was only yesterday that humanity lived in fear of natural disasters such as smallpox, cholera, and plague, which once swept across nations.Now our major concern is no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent; sanitation, better living conditions, and new drugs have given us a high degree of control over infectious disease.Today we are concerned with a different kind of hazard that lurks in our environment—a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved.

A new set of environmental health problems has arisen from many sources—from radiation in all its forms, and from the constant production of chemicals, of which pesticides are only a few.These chemicals are now spreading into the world we live in, poisoning us directly or indirectly, individually or collectively.The presence of these chemicals casts on us a long shadow, not auspicious because it is amorphous and hazy; Consequences of chemical and physical agents not experienced by humans. Dr. David Price of the U.S. Public Health Service said: "We all live in constant fear that something might worsen our environment so that humans become obsolete creatures alongside the dinosaurs." It has been suggested that our fate may have been decided two decades or more before the onset of overt symptoms of harm.This view makes those who have the previous thoughts all the more disturbed.

Where is the correlation between pesticides and the distribution of environmental diseases?We have seen that they have now polluted soil, water and food, and they have the power to keep fish out of rivers and birds in forests.Man is a part of nature, as much as he hates to admit it.Now this pollution has completely spread all over our world, can human beings escape from pollution? We know that if a person comes into contact with these chemicals alone, he will be acutely poisoned if the total dose ingested reaches a certain limit.But that's not the main problem.Sudden illness or death of farmers, sprayers, airmen, and others exposed to certain levels of pesticides is distressing and should never happen.Pesticides that invisibly pollute our world have a latent period of harm caused by people swallowing a small amount. Therefore, for the sake of all residents, we must pay more attention to this problem and research to solve it.

Public health officials have pointed out that the biological effects of chemicals are cumulative over a long period of time, and that the harm to a person depends on the total dose received over a lifetime.Because of this, the danger is easily overlooked.People have a habit of looking down on things that seem likely to endanger our future.A wise doctor, Dr. Rhine Dabos, said: "People usually only attach great importance to the obvious symptoms of diseases. Because of this, some of the worst enemies of human beings take their time to take advantage of the opportunity." The problem is for each of us, as it is for the robin in Michigan or the salmon in Miramichi, an ecological problem of interconnectedness and interdependence.We poisoned a river of nasty flying insects, and the salmon gradually weakened and died.We poisoned the gnats in the lake, and the poison passed from link to link in the food chain, and the lakeside birds soon became its victims.We sprayed the elms, and the robin song was never heard the following spring, not because we sprayed the robins directly, but because the poison passed through us. The now familiar elm leaf-earth clam-robin was transferred step by step.The accidents described above are documented, observable, part of the visible world around us.They reflect the web of life-or-death connections that scientists study as ecology.

However, there is also an ecological world inside our bodies.In this visible world, subtle pathogens have produced serious consequences; however, it does not usually seem easy to see the connection between these consequences and those pathogens, because the pathogens appear in parts of the body far from where the injury first occurred. Far.A recent summary of the dynamics of current medical research states: "A change in a small site, or even a single molecule, can affect the entire system and cause changes in seemingly unrelated organs and tissues." To a person concerned with the mysterious and wonderful functions of the human body, he will find that the connection between cause and effect is seldom shown simply and easily.They may be completely disjointed in space and time.The discovery of the causes of morbidity and mortality depends on the patient connection of many seemingly isolated and unrelated facts, obtained by a very large amount of research in a large number of unrelated fields. of.

We are used to looking for the obvious, immediate effects and not looking at the others.We must always deny the existence of harm, unless the effect appears abruptly in a manifest form which cannot be denied.Even researchers suffer because there is no proper way to discover the origin of the harm.The lack of sufficiently sophisticated methods to detect harm before symptoms appear is a huge unsolved problem in medicine. Someone will retort: ​​"However, I have sprayed dieldrin on grass many times, and I have never had a convulsion like the World Health Organization sprayer, so dieldrin has not hurt me." It's not that simple.A person who handles such drugs will undoubtedly have the poison build up in his system, although no sudden and noticeable symptoms occur.As we know, the storage of chlorinated hydrocarbons in the human body gradually accumulates through ingestion in very small amounts, and these toxic substances enter all the fat-containing tissues of the body.As long as fat accumulates in the human body, poisons will quickly enter.A New Zealand medical journal recently provided an example of a man undergoing obesity treatment who suddenly developed symptoms of intoxication; his fat was found to contain an accumulation of dieldrin, which had occurred during his weight loss. Metabolic transformation has taken place.The same can happen to people who are weightless due to illness.

On the other hand, the effects of toxicant accumulation may also be subtle.A few years ago, the Journal of the American Medical Association issued a strong warning about the dangers of pesticides that can be stored in fatty tissue.The journal points out that drugs and chemicals that accumulate in tissues need to be treated more carefully than those that do not tend to accumulate.We are warned that adipose tissue is not just a place to store fat (approximately 18% of body weight), but also has many important functions, which may be interfered with by accumulated toxicants; moreover, fat is very widely distributed in In the organs and tissues of the whole body, it is even a component of the cell membrane.It is therefore also important to remember that fat-soluble pesticides can be stored in individual cells where they can disrupt the very active and essential functions of oxidation and energy production.The importance of this issue will be discussed in the next chapter.

One of the most notable facts about chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides is their effect on the liver.Of all the organs in the human body, the liver is the most unusual.In the breadth and necessity of its functions, the role of the liver is unparalleled.The liver controls many vital bodily activities, so even a slight compromise to it can have serious consequences.Not only does it produce bile to digest fats, but it has an important location and special circulation channels, which are gathered in the liver so that the liver can receive blood directly from the digestive tract, and it is thus deeply involved in the Metabolism of all major foods.It stores sugar in the form of bile sugar and releases a strictly quantitative amount of sugar in the form of glucose to maintain normal blood sugar levels.It makes proteins in the body, including some very important plasma components involved in blood clotting.The liver maintains an inherent level of cholesterol in the blood plasma, and when androgens and estrogens exceed normal levels, the liver acts to inactivate the hormones.The liver is the storehouse of many vitamins, and some vitamins in turn help the liver maintain its normal function.

Without a functioning liver, the body is disarmed -- unable to defend itself against the various toxins that constantly invade the body, some of which are by-products of normal metabolism, and the liver is able to quickly and effectively remove these toxins Nitrogen, so that these poisons become non-toxic.But those foreign abnormal poisons may also be detoxified by the liver. The "harmless" insecticides malathion and methoxychlor are less toxic than their relatives simply because liver enzymes process them, by which their molecular structure is altered so that they Poison ability has also been weakened.In the same way, the liver processes most of the toxins we ingest.

This line of our defense against foreign and native poisons is now weakened and is disintegrating.A liver compromised by pesticides not only no longer protects us from poisons, but its entire multifaceted function may be compromised.Not only are the consequences far-reaching, but their variability and their lack of immediate manifestation make it difficult to see the true causes of them. It is interesting to observe the sharp rise in hepatitis due to the almost ubiquitous use of pesticides that cause liver poisoning.The rise in hepatitis began in the 1950s and has continued in waves.Cirrhosis is also said to be increasing.Although it is obviously difficult to prove that cause A produces effect B—even more difficult in humans than in experimental animals—it is generally assumed that there is a simple relationship between the rate of increase in liver disease and the rate of increase in liver is not directly related.Whether chlorinated hydrocarbons are the primary cause seems difficult to ascertain in light of our current exposure to these agents.Since these toxins have been shown to have the ability to poison the liver, they are also supposed to reduce the liver's resistance to disease.

Chlorinated hydrocarbons and organophosphates, the two main pesticides, both directly affect the nervous system, although in different ways, which have been clarified through extensive animal experiments and observations in humans. DDT, as the first widely used new type of organic insecticide, mainly affects the central nervous system of humans; the cerebellum and higher motor nerve sheaths are considered to be the main affected areas.According to a standard toxicology textbook, sensations such as tingling, fever, itching, shivering, and even convulsions can all be brought on by exposure to sufficient amounts of DDT. Our first awareness of the symptoms of acute intoxication caused by DDT was provided by several British investigators who deliberately exposed themselves to DDT in order to understand the consequences of its action.Two scientists at the Royal Naval Physiological Laboratory in the United Kingdom allowed DDT to be absorbed into the skin by direct contact with walls covered with water-soluble paints containing 2% DDT.These DDTs are applied in a thin film of oil. The immediate effects of DDT on the nervous system are clear in their verbal accounts of their symptoms: "Drowsiness, fatigue, and aches in the extremities are very real, and the state of mind is extremely distressing... Irritability, dislike of any work, When it comes to the simplest subjects of thought, the pain of not having enough brains is often quite enormous.” Another British experimenter who applied DDT to his skin in acetone reported heaviness and pain in his extremities, muscle weakness, and "significant spasms of nervous tension."He took a vacation and improved; but when he returned to work, his condition deteriorated again.He then lay ill in bed for three weeks and suffered from persistent pain in limbs, insomnia, nervous tension, and feelings of extreme anxiety.As the shudder shook his whole body, the shudder made the symptoms appear very similar to those seen in birds poisoned by DDT.The experimenter was off work for 10 weeks, and at the end of the year, when his case was reported in a British Medical Journal, he had not fully recovered. (In addition to this evidence, some American researchers who experimented with DDT on volunteers had to deal with subjects' complaints about headaches and "a pain in every bone" that was "obviously of neurogenic origin.") Subjects now have numerous case records in which both the symptoms and the course of the disease point to insecticides as the cause.These typically patients have been exposed to some kind of pesticide, and after treatment measures such as eliminating all pesticides from the environment, the symptoms will disappear.What is even more significant is that as long as there is contact with these evil chemicals again, the disease will relapse.Such evidence is sufficient as a basis for medical treatment of a disease.Such evidence should serve as a warning to us that we would be foolish to take the risk of saturating the environment with pesticides when we know there is a risk. Why don't all people who handle and use pesticides show the same symptoms?The reason for this is a matter of individual sensitivity.There is some evidence that women are more sensitive than men, young people are more sensitive than adults, and those who are often sedentary indoors are more sensitive than those who lead open labor or hard lives.In addition to these differences, there are some objectively existing differences, although they are irregular.What makes a person allergic to dust or pollen, or sensitive to a certain poison, or susceptible to a certain infectious disease, is a medical mystery that has not yet been solved.However, this problem exists objectively and affects a large number of people.One doctor estimates that a third or more of their patients show some allergy symptoms, and the number is growing.Unfortunately, allergies can suddenly and rapidly develop anti-allergic reactions in humans.In fact, some medical practitioners believe that intermittent exposure to chemicals can produce just such sensitization.If true, it could explain why some studies of people exposed to occupational continuation have found few signs of intoxication.These people become desensitized by their constant contact with these chemicals, just as an allergist makes his patients desensitized by repeatedly injecting them with small doses of the sensitizing drug. The fact that man, unlike laboratory animals raised under strict control, is never exposed to only one chemical all the time makes the whole problem of pesticide poisoning extremely cumbersome and difficult to solve.Between several major pesticides, and between pesticides and other chemicals, there are interactions that can have major impacts.Also, when pesticides enter soil, water, or human blood, the chemicals don't stay in isolation; there they undergo mysterious, invisible changes by which one pesticide can alter another. The harmful ability of a pesticide. There is even an interaction between two major pesticides that are usually thought to be acting entirely independently.The ability of organophosphate poisons to act on the neuroprotective enzyme cholinesterase may be enhanced if the body has been previously exposed to liver-damaging chlorinated hydrocarbons.This is because when liver function is compromised, cholinesterase levels fall below normal values; then this additional suppressed organophosphate effect may be strong enough to prompt severe symptoms.And as we know, the interaction of pairs of organophosphates with each other can even increase their toxicity a hundredfold.Alternatively, organophosphorus could interact with various pharmaceuticals, synthetic substances, food additives - who can say anything about the endless supply of man-made substances currently being provided to our world?The action of one chemical, presumed to be nontoxic, can be abruptly altered by the action of another; a prime example is a close relative of DDT called methyl oxychloride, (actually , methyl chloride is not as non-toxic as it is often claimed, and recent studies on experimental animals have shown that it has a direct effect on the uterus and has a blocking effect on some very useful mucous hormones-this reminds us again : These chemicals have great biological effects. Other research work has shown that methyl oxychloride is toxic to the kidneys.) Since methyl oxychloride does not accumulate in the body in large quantities when ingested alone, it We say methyl oxychloride is a safe chemical.but?This may not be true.If the liver has been damaged by other causes, methyl chloride can accumulate in the body up to 100 times its normal level, at which point it can have the same long-lasting effects on the nervous system as DDT does.However, the consequences of causing this liver damage can be so minor that they can easily go unnoticed.It can also be the result of a mundane situation - using another insecticide, using a cleaning solution containing carbon tetrachloride, or taking something called a tranquilizer, which most (not All) are chlorinated hydrocarbons and have the ability to damage the liver. Damage to the nervous system is not limited to acute intoxication; it can also be affected after exposure.Long-term residual damage to the brain and nerves has been reported in association with methyl chloride and other chemicals.In addition to its acute effects, dieldrin has long-term aftereffects, such as "forgetfulness, insomnia, nightmares, and even madness." According to medical findings, HCB accumulates in large quantities in the brain and important organs. liver tissue, and can induce "mysterious long-term aftereffects on the nervous system".Furthermore, the chemical hexachlorobenzene is used in large quantities in vaporizers, devices that continuously pour vapors of volatile pesticides into homes, offices, and restaurants. Organophosphates, generally considered to have only acute, more violent manifestations, also have the capacity to produce residual physical damage to nervous tissue and, consistent with recent findings, can cause neurological disorders.All kinds of residual paralysis have followed the use of this or that insecticide.During the Prohibition era around the 1930s, an extraordinary event occurred in America that foreshadowed what was to come.This miracle happened not because of the insecticide, but because of a substance that belongs chemically to the same class as the organophosphate insecticide.During that time, some medicinal substances were used as alcohol substitutes to get around Prohibition laws.One of these substances is Jamaican ginger.Since "medicinal alcohol and the like" were expensive, packagers came up with the idea of ​​using Jamaican ginger as a substitute.They did it so skillfully that their fakes passed certain chemical tests and fooled government chemists.To give their illicit ginger ale the requisite tang, they added a chemical called triorthocresylphos.This chemical, like malathion and its ilk, destroys the protective enzyme cholinesterase.As a result of drinking the packager's product, some fifteen thousand people became permanently lame from a paralysis of the leg muscles, a condition now known as "ginger paralysis."Along with this paralysis are two other symptoms, damage to the nerve sheaths and cellular degeneration of the original antennae of the spinal cord. About 20 years later, various other organophosphates came into use as insecticides, and, as we have seen, new cases soon appeared that recalled the historical episode of "ginger paralysis".In one case, a German greenhouse worker, who suffered intermittent symptoms of poisoning after malathion administration, developed paralysis a few months after he had experienced these mild symptoms of poisoning.Then, a group of workers from three chemical factories became seriously poisoned by exposure to other insecticides of the organophosphate class.They recovered with treatment, but two of them developed muscle atrophy in their legs 10 days later.The symptoms lasted for 10 months in one of them; another young female chemist suffered even worse. Not only were her legs paralyzed, but her hands and arms were also affected.Two years later, when her case was reported in a medical journal, she was still unable to work. The insecticides responsible for these cases have been removed from the market, although some insecticides still in use may have the same injurious capacity.Malathion, a favorite of gardeners, has caused severe muscle atrophy in experiments with chickens.This symptom (like "ginger paralysis") is caused by damage to the sciatic nerve sheath and spinal nerve sheath. The consequences of organophosphate poisoning, if they do not cause death, are a prelude to further deterioration.Judging by the severity of these effects on the nervous system, these pesticides must eventually be linked to mental illness.This link has been discovered recently by researchers at the University of Melbourn and Prince Henry's Hospital in Melbourn, who reported 16 psychiatric cases.All of these cases had a history of long-term exposure to organophosphate insecticides.Three of them were scientists who checked the effects of spraying; the daimyo had worked in greenhouses; and five were farm workers.Their symptoms ranged from memory loss to early onset dementia and depressive reactions.The pesticides used by these people for a long time hit their own bodies like a boomerang, and before knocking them down, they all had normal medical examination records. As far as we know, similar situations have been reported in various medical literatures, some related to chlorinated hydrocarbons, some related to organophosphorus.Confusion, hallucinations, amnesia, mania—this is a heavy price to pay for the temporary extermination of some insects; and we will continue to be forced to pay this price as long as we persist in using chemicals that directly destroy our nervous system.