Why Do We Worry About Trace Poisons?

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http://www.fplc.edu/RISK/vol7/winter/mazur.htm

Why Do We Worry About Trace Poisons?*

Allan Mazur**

Introduction

I recall as a child in the 1940's, shopping for shoes with my mother. To

check the fit, all of us -- I, my mother and the salesman -- peered down

into an x-ray fiuoroscope while I wiggled my toes inside the new shoes. A

fiuoroscope was also part of routine trips to the pediatrician; the doctor

and my mother would look inside my torso on a glowing screen. In 1944,

physicians shrunk my chronically infected tonsils with x-rays -- a

progressive treatment given to thousands of children that decades later was

found to cause thyroid cancer.1

DDT was widely used in the summers during the 1950's and 60's. Introduced as

a body louse powder during the war, it had successfully controlled malaria,

typhus and other insect-borne diseases among the troops. Later, its

application in the third world saved millions of lives through the control

of malaria, an unprecedented victory over disease which earned its

discoverer, Muller, a Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1948. Now civilians

bought " bugbombs " to destroy insects in their homes and gardens, while

trucks and airplanes sprayed clouds of the inexpensive insecticide over

fields and neighborhoods, often using far more than recommended and

carelessly engulfing animals and people. Most of us didn't care then.

How did we get from there to here? By the 1980's, many had become so fearful

of chemicals and radiation that cynical commentators began to speak of

" chemophobia " gripping America, with apocalyptic images of trace poisons

insidiously seeping though our environment and into our bodies, carrying an

epidemic of cancer.2

Increased scientific understanding of environmental hazards must have played

a role, but, if knowledge alone were sufficient to explain new worries about

chronic poisoning, there would be few smokers today. Historians often point

to Carson's bestselling 1962 book, Silent Spring, as the fulcrum for

these changes and the coalescing event of the modern environmental

movement.3 Carson's warning that the misuse of pesticides, particularly DDT,

would destroy the songbirds -- hence a " silent spring " -- and perhaps kill

people too, brought widespread public attention to the hazard of trace

poisons.

No doubt the book was an important seed, but it did not sprout from

unfertilized ground. America in the 1950's and early 60's experienced

important precursors to Silent Spring. Most salient was the mass protest

movement of the political left against radioactive fallout from atmospheric

testing of nuclear weapons.4 At nearly the same time, but on the political

right, was a mass protest against the fiuoridation of drinking water.

Antifiuoridationists were grassroots activists, usually successfully trying

to infiuence community decision making. The fallout protest had a national

focus, eventually succeeding in changing Washington's policy. It engaged

many elite activists from establishment organizations in Chicago and the

major cities on the coasts, thus attaining far more prestige and legitimacy

than were ever accorded the antifiuoridation protest. Still, the arguments

of both movements against trace poisons were basically the same.

The Radiation Hazard

Within a year after Wilhelm Roentgen discovered x-rays in 1895,

Edison set his assistant, Clarence Dally, to work on the fiuoroscope.

Frequent exposure to the rays made Dally's hair fall out, his hands to

become ulcerated and eventually cancerous, and finally killed him. From such

experiences, it was thought that radiation had to infiict ulceration or

other gross damage to cause malignancy, and so long as, e.g., medical

workers avoided dosages large enough to produce burns or other severe

changes, they and their patients were safe.5 Thus, early workers tested

their machines on their own hands as they began work each day, eventually

accumulating massive doses.

Also in 1896, Henri Becquerel showed that a piece of uranium ore exposed a

photographic plate just as x-rays did, a phenomenon called " radioactivity "

by Marie Curie. She and her husband, Pierre, comparing the radioactivity of

uranium ores with that of metallic uranium, calculated that the ores were

more radioactive than expected from their uranium content. This indicated

other radioactive substances contained in the ores, probably in small

quantities. Laboriously refining a ton of uranium ore, the Curies discovered

by 1900 two new elements, polonium and radium, the latter two million times

more radioactive than uranium and possibly the agent of Marie's death from

leukemia.

By the 1920's, the large number of burns, other skin problems and some

cancers indicated that safety standards were desirable for radiation

workers. A group in Britain led the way by recommending that x-ray and

radium workers limit exposure by keeping distance and lead shielding between

themselves and the radiation source, and that they not work more than seven

hours a day or five days per week, or have less than one month's holiday a

year.6

In 1928, the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) was

formed to recommend limits on exposure. Like a series of groups in the U.S.

with which it operated more or less in tandem, the ICRP eventually became

active and credible in setting standards, but at the outset it simply

adopted the British recommendations. At the time radiation protection was

not considered as important as defining units of measurement. Not until 1934

did the ICRP promulgate a permissible level of radiation exposure, a limit

adequate to prevent overt skin damage and therefore, it was thought, more

dire consequences. After 1937, it ceased to function, an indication that, as

the prewar era was closing, the radiation hazard was considered to be under

control.

The strongest voice of warning in this period of relative complacency

belonged to on Martland who published a series of studies, beginning

in 1925, on what has become one of the most famous cases of occupational

epidemiology -- the radium dial painters. From 1917-24, roughly 800 young

women in New Jersey applied radium-containing paint to watches and clocks so

the faces would glow in the dark. They formed fine brush points by rolling

the bristles on their tongues. Ingesting radium continually over years of

employment, by 1931, eighteen women were dead and others suffered from

anemia, necrosis of the jaw and bone cancer. Often these affiications

appeared years after they had stopped their work as dial painters.

Much of the radium passed out of their bodies, but some was absorbed and

incorporated into bone, which, according to Martland, was lethal in amounts

as small as ten micrograms. " Alpha particles, " he claimed, " are probably the

most potent and destructive agent known to science. " 7 Unlike contemporaries

who regarded radiation as safe if the exposure was kept low, he emphasized

hazards from tiny doses:8 " A milligram of radium bromide is not much larger

than a small grain of sand. One microgram is only one thousandth as large,

is invisible, and cannot be detected by any known chemical method. It is

necessary to have only ten micrograms, or one hundred thousandth of a gram,

distributed over the entire skeleton to produce a horrible death years after

it has been injested. "

The practice of radium dial painting was changed when the hazard became

known, but the lesson that trace doses are worrisome was not widely applied.

The use of x-rays for medical diagnosis and therapy accelerated for

conditions as serious as cancer and as minor as infected tonsils (my own)

and acne, exposing probably millions of people to dangerous amounts of

radiation. In the mindset of the time, these all seemed to be legitimate

orthodox medical treatment, not especially suspect -- compared to unorthodox

uses of radiation that had also proliferated. Even Martland did not focus

his warning on his colleagues' methods but rather on such practices as:9

" the sale, usually by quacks, of radio-active waters for the cure of

everything from ingrowing toe-nail and alopecia areata to the sexual

impotence of senescence, high blood pressure, chronic arthritis and

arteriosclerosis. "

The Manhattan Project brought more attention than ever before to problems of

safely handling radioactivity,10 and the massive irradiation of Japanese

populations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced a terrible natural experiment

on the long-term effects of doses from huge to low levels. By 1950, the ICRP

was reorganized, its focus now on atomic energy and hazards to whole

populations rather than to a relatively few radiologists. The maximum

permissible dose was set in 1950 at half the level adopted in 1934, and, in

1956, it was again lowered by a factor of about 3 as leukemia reached an

abnormally high level among the Japanese exposed to nuclear radiation.11

American reactions to the atomic bombs ranged from wonderment to dread. I

grew up with the science fiction of the 1950's in which mutant monsters,

produced inadvertently by nuclear radiation, were beaten at the end of the

movie by a brave young scientist and a beautiful girl who was the daughter

or assistant of a kind and wise older scientist. Dread came to the fore when

the Soviet Union exploded its first hydrogen device in 1953. The Cold War

reinforced a sharp left-right polarization in American politics, each side

seeking its own symbols and issues with which to carry on the debate.

In 1954, a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, was accidently showered

with fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test, precipitating first in

Japan, then the U.S. and Europe, a leftist political movement aimed

specifically at halting atmospheric testing. More generally, the movement

was an expression of opposition to the arms race and nuclear confrontation.

Adlai son, the liberal Democrat campaigning against President

Eisenhower, endorsed a moratorium on tests of hydrogen bombs, warning the

nation against fallout -- " the most dreadful poison in the world. " 12

Scientists on each side of the debate disagreed not only over moral and

political issues but also over facts. Proponents of atmospheric testing,

e.g., Teller, the " father of the H-bomb, " exaggerated its benefits

and minimized its risks. Opponents did the opposite. Linus ing, an

outstanding chemist and an especially infiuential polemicist, warned of

fission products like strontium 90 that are produced by nuclear explosions

and descend as radioactive precipitation, contaminating grass eaten by cows

and passing in milk to children. He claimed, " There exists a real

possibility that the lives of 100,000 people now living are sacrificed by

each bomb test or series of bomb tests in which the fission products of 10

megatons equivalent of fission are released into the atmosphere. " 13 " There

is no safe amount of radiation or of radioactive material, " he wrote. " Even

small amounts do harm. " 14

The antitesting movement had an enormous effect on perceptions of

environmental radiation, as historian Spencer Weart notes:15

" Fallout was perfectly suited to induce anxiety..., something that rests

upon helplessness and uncertainty, on the feeling that a threat cannot be

escaped nor perhaps even comprehended before it is too late.... Nor was it

just that radiation was invisible, for so were many other hazards from

chemical poisons to viruses, and indeed Geiger counters could detect

radiation at lower levels of danger than the levels at which almost any

other hazardous agent could be detected. The worst uncertainty came at the

next state, when you knew that you had absorbed some radiation but did not

know what the effects might be....

....

Contamination, poison, impurity, pollution, obscenity -- more and more

people were applying such words to fallout.... Revulsion against

radioactivity, a new attitude resembling a primitive taboo, like fallout

itself was settling invisibly into every home. "

The movement ended abruptly in 1963 when President Kennedy and General

Secretary Khrushchev, frightened by their clash the previous year over

Soviet missiles in Cuba, signed an agreement to halt the testing of nuclear

weapons in the atmosphere, easing Cold War tensions. Many activists shifted

their attention to the war in Vietnam. The concern over low-level radiation

went into abeyance to re-emerge in the late 1960's with the rising protest

against nuclear power plants.

Fluoridation

It was noticed in the 1930's that residents of areas where the drinking

water naturally contained fiuoride had teeth which tended to be discolored

but also were relatively free of cavities. Further work showed that if the

concentration of fiouride was as low as one part per million (ppm), the

benefit of cavity prevention was obtained with virtually no discoloration.

In 1945, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) began experimentally adding

fiuoride at one ppm to the drinking water of two cities, intending over the

next ten years to compare their cavity rates to those of control cities. A

group of Wisconsin dentists, enthusiastic over the low rates reported early

on, urged that mass fiuoridation be promoted immediately. The PHS first

resisted, saying it would wait for completion of the ten-year experiment,

but soon yielded. By 1951, the American Dental Association and the American

Medical Association had added their endorsements, urging American

communities to fiuoridate.

Almost immediately, politically conservative groups in Wisconsin protested

against adding a toxic chemical to their drinking water, arguing that it was

used as rat poison and that involuntary fiouridation amounted to mass

medication -- a step toward socialism. The movement spread, gaining strength

from the strong conservative sentiment in the country, which championed

Senator ph McCarthy in the 1950's and Senator Barry Goldwater in the

1960's, and then to other countries. When communities voted in referenda

whether or not to fiuoridate, usually the measure lost.16

From today's perspective, health professionals were reckless to promote mass

fiuoridation as early as 1951. Fluoride is indeed an acute poison, and human

data used to evaluate the risk of adding one ppm to drinking water was more

or less limited to crude comparisons of vital statistics among selected

communities with varying levels of naturally occurring fiuoride in the

water.17 If the proposal to fiuoridate the nation's drinking water were made

today, supported by the kind of risk data available in 1951, I don't believe

it would be approved. Health professionals in 1951 simply were not then as

concerned about chronic exposure to trace poisons.

A popular stereotype of the antifiuoridationist as a kook, a fanatic

right-winger, is captured beautifully by the mad General Jack D. Ripper in

Stanley Kubrick's film, Dr. Strangelove. While some opponents of

fiuoridation might be so described, respectable scientists, physicians and

others were sensibly cautious about chronic toxic effects. Yet, few

" neutral " commentators gave serious consideration to their arguments because

they had been successfully painted by proponents as extremists.

Psychologists called opposition to fiuoridation an " anti-scientific

attitude. " 18 Social scientists studying the controversy often assumed that

informed voters could not rationally oppose fiuoridation and viewed

referendum defeats as " democracy gone astray. " 19 It is ironic to read this

facetious discussion in a sociological study:20

" [Most]... claims against fiuoridation on alleged medical grounds... have

their basis in the fact that in concentrated dosage fiuorine is a poison.

When the proponents... try to argue that one part per million is a highly

diluted dose, the critics reply that the fiuoride will collect in

out-of-the-way corners of the water mains to build up to deadly dosages. The

reputed side effects of fiuoridation run from destruction of teeth to liver

and kidney trouble, miscarriages, the birth of mongoloid children, and

psychological disturbances, incuding susceptibility to communism and

nymphomania. When the public-health officer points out that nearly a tenth

of the drinking water in the U.S. has always had traces of fiuoride in it

without causing ill effect, the critics then charge that fiuoridation

damages car batteries, rots garden hoses, and kills grass. "

It would not sound nonsensical today for someone to express concern about a

" highly diluted dose " of trace poison in their drinking water.

Protests against fiuoridation and weapons testing occupied opposite ends of

the political spectrum. So, few if any activists joined both. Yet, the risk

messages propounded were essentially the same. Both objected to the

involuntary chronic exposure of large populations to low doses of agents

that were known to be very dangerous at higher doses. Both regarded distant

and misguided -- even wicked -- leaders of government and industry as

responsible for placing populations at risk. Both accused those parties of

ignoring accumulating evidence of chronic toxicity from low-level exposure.

Both envisioned poisons from man-made technology as insidiously

contaminating the purity of nature. Both emphasized the process of

bioconcentration, by which some trace poisons become increasingly

concentrated in species higher up the food chain. Both saw chemical

pollution as a symptom of social decay. Both worried particularly about

cancer. The rhetorics against fiuoridation and radiation are often virtually

interchangable.21

Although these elements had long been present in the beliefs of health food

enthusiasts and other small circles, most Americans first learned of them

from the fiouridation and fallout protests of the 1950's and early 60's, if

not by direct participation or sympathy with one of the movements then by

their coverage in the mass media.

These elements constitute the ideology of Carson's Silent Spring,

warning of DDT and other pesticides, produced by corrupt industry and

promoted by misguided government, polluting the purity of nature,

concentrating in animals until they are brought to extinction, lodging in

our bodies, eventually killing us with cancer. Throughout her book, Carson

explicitly compares pesticides with radiation.22 In her brief but famous

opening chapter, A Fable for Tomorrow, a happy and prosperous American town

becomes affiicted with a strange blight that first kills animals, then

humans. Afterward, " In the gutters under the eaves and in the shingles of

the roofs, a white granular power still showed a few patches; some weeks

before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the field and

streams. " This is exactly the imagry of radioactive fallout, now applied to

pesticides. Here are other examples from early pages:23

" In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the

sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very

nature of the world -- the very nature of its life. Strontium 90, released

through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts

down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat

grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being,

there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands

or forests or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms,

passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death.

....

[R]adiation is now the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom.

The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are... the

synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and

having no counterparts in nature. "

If Silent Spring was the font from which fiowed the modern environmental

movement and alarm over trace chemicals, it was well fed by streams of

earlier protest. "

The Delaney Amendment

One more strand from the 1950's deserves attention in tracing the roots of

worries about chemicals. The " Delaney Amendment " in the Food, Drug and

Cosmetics Act bans the addition to processed food or cosmetics24 any

chemical shown to cause cancer in man or animals. It was enacted without

much notice in 1958 but has grown in importance, becoming a focus of

controversy. The reason is the great improvement in methods for detecting

traces of a chemical in food. In the 1950's, chemicals could be detected in

parts per million. Anything of lower concentration was undetectable and

therefore, legally, not present. By the 1990's, analytical methods were a

million times more sensitive, sometimes detecting concentrations as low as

parts per trillion. To appreciate this, consider that one part per million

is equivalent to one drop of poison in 1,000 quarts of water, whereas one

part per trillion is eqivalent to one-thousandth of a drop of poison in one

million quarts of water. Nearly any chemical involved in agriculture or food

processing may leave a residue to be detected at this level and banned if it

has been shown carcinogenic in massive doses to laboratory animals, as is

sometimes the case.

Delaney's prohibition takes no account of possible benefits from chemicals

known to cause cancer in rodents; e.g., pesticides or food preservatives can

control disease and damage to foods caused by bacteria, fungi and insects.

Under the Clinton Administration the Environmental Protection Agency

suggested that the Amendment might be skirted, allowing trace residues in

processed food when the risk of the additive is insignificant and far offset

by its benefit. However in 1993 a court ruled that it must be applied

strictly,25 a position supported by those who worry, like columnist Molly

Ivins,26 that " carcinogens tend to be cumulative -- that is, they stay in

the body, and each trace gets added to the next until cancer is touched

off. "

It seems odd that this first and most absolute protection against trace

poisons carries the name of a conservative Democratic Pol from working-class

Queens. First elected to the House in 1945, Delaney had no interest in

chemicals during the late 1940's until a colleague suggested that pesticide

contamination of food was ripe for investigation. The earliest critics of

DDT had just begun to express concern over its rapidly increasing and often

careless use. Delaney convinced Speaker Sam Rayburn to create the Select

Committee to Investigate Chemicals, Presticides, and Insecticides in Food --

with himself as chair.27

The Committee held hearings during 1950-52, calling experts with diverse

views on the use of chemicals in food, agriculture and cosmetics.

Considerable attention was given to DDT, and after the PHS endorsed

fiuoridation in 1951, to that too. Some testimony reads like a tutorial on

toxicology, emphasizing the difference between acute and chronic effects;

much warns of the potential danger of chronic exposures.28 The Committee

issued reports on different foci of its investigation, the one on

fiuoridation warning communities that the long-term effects of ingestion

were unknown.29 Delaney had become a strong opponent by 1963 if not earlier,

calling fiuoridation " an unnecessary health risk and unwarranted intrusion

on the rights of our citizens. " 30

The amendment did not follow immediately but was introduced a few years

later, when interest in chemicals had grown to the point that others in the

House were then introducing similar bills. All were the subject of new

hearings in which Delaney played little part,31 but in 1958 his version was

the one enacted.

Testifying in both 1952 and 1957 was Dr. Wilhelm Hueper, Chief of the

Environmental Cancer Section of the National Cancer Institute. A crusader as

well as an occupational toxicologist, his activities at the Institute

contentious, he believed that trace industrial chemicals were a major cause

of cancer: " The cancer-producing power of one of these chemicals,

betanaphthylamine, is so high that a daily exposure to a few micrograms for

several months may result in the development of cancer in some exposed

workers some 15 to 20 years later. " 32 According to skeptic Edith Efron,33

Hueper was a participant in a rebellion of scientists within the federal

scientific bureaucracy in the 1960's, promoting the view that industrial

chemicals are the major cause of cancer that could be eliminated through

political action and regulation. Hueper's views are important because of his

infiuence on Carson and, via Carson, on American beliefs about

cancer.

Nearing retirement, in 1964 Hueper published with Walter Conway a treatise

entitled Chemical Carcinogenesis and Cancers, which presents Hueper's long

developed philosophy of chemically-induced cancers. The book opens by

calling attention to the34 " fundamental alterations which modern man has

been making in his environment during the last century by the addition of

numerous... physical and chemical agents.... A new and continuously changing

artificial, man-made environment has thereby been created... superimposed

upon the natural one. Through these events... man is... increasingly exposed

to new harmful inanimate agents against which he neither possesses adequate

natural defense mechanisms nor has sufficient time to develop them....

Of particular significance... are the often insidious chronic and

long-delayed effects resulting from prolonged exposures to small or even

minute amounts of some of these agents and not infrequently becoming

manifest a few-to-many years after such an exposure has ceased. In fact,

some of these man-made pathogens have been shown to exert their deleterious

toxic, teratogenic and carcinogenic action through transplacental

penetration from the maternal organism upon the fetus, or they may be

introduced into the infant with the mother's milk. A disturbingly high

number of these newly introduced radiotoxic and chemicotoxic agents which

form a part of the modern economy and are pollutants of the human

environment, are mutagens and thus may extend their action on members of

future generations....

[Carcinogens are]... an important part of the pathogens responsible for the

development of a new disease panorama during the past fifty years, which

refiects both the beneficial as well as harmful effects related to the

impact of modern industrialsm upon human health, survival rate and

life-span.

Cancers, like all other diseases, are not mysterious phenomena of

spontaneous creation, but are the results of the action of definite chemical

and physical... agents. It, therefore, should be possible to eradicate

cancer hazards and cancers by preventive and therapeutic measures.... "

Hueper and Conway regard the unrestrained and increasing contamination of

the human environment with man-made carcinogens as setting the stage for a

" catastrophic " cancer epidemic.35 They name many substances in the modern

environment as causing cancer in humans, however their evidentiary standard

appears to be weak, and at one point they even suggest that distilled water

is a human carcinogen.36 Their list (Table 5) of " Recognized Occupational

and Environmental Cancer Hazards, " running twenty pages, names several more

chemicals than the 36 regarded in 1980 as " established " human carcinogens by

the authoritative International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World

Health Organization.37 (Certainly, far more than 36 chemicals are

carcinoginic in humans, but for only 36 was there sufficient data to make a

probable assessment.) Dismissing cigarette smoking as the overwhelming

reason for the alarming increase in lung cancer during this centry, Hueper

and Conway instead implicate chemicals that have entered the human

economy.38 They write:39 " exposures of pregnant mothers and infants to

environmental carcinogenic chemicals, including radioactive agents,

sustained to an increasing degree during recent decades, are at least in

part, responsible for the observed rise in cancers and especially of

leukemias, in childhood. "

It is well known that Carson was infiuenced by Hueper's views, including his

belief that DDT is carcinogenic. She sent him portions of her manuscript to

review and interviewed him personally.40 She consulted other experts too but

seems to have had a special affinity for Hueper, writing in 1959 to her

friend Dorothy Freeman:41 " Did you see that " my " Dr. Hueper received the

A.A.A.S. award in Chicago... for distinguished contributions to the study of

cancer? Overdue recognition, but I'm so glad it happened. The chemical

companies won't be happy. As perhaps I've told you, I'm giving a full chapte

r [in Silent Spring] to the subject of cancer -- something I hadn't expected

to do. "

I do not know if Hueper was the primary source for Carson's ideas about

chemical carcinogenesis, but her book frequently acknowledges him as an

authority on the subject, and their views are apparently identical. Her

biographer McCay42 suggests that Heuper's beliefs touched Carson deeply

because she was diagnosed with cancer in 1957, given a radical mastectomy in

1960, and treated for the disease until her death in 1964 amidst the

controversy she had ignited.

It is worthwhile contrasting the Hueper-Carson view of America's

chemically-caused cancer epidemic, which became widely accepted by the

American public during the 1960's and 70's, with a modern mainstream

epidemiological view. It is true that more Americans than ever before are

contracting and dying of cancer, but this is primarily because people are

living longer today than previously and therefore are more likely to die

from one of the major diseases of old age: cancer, heart disease or stroke.

Furthermore, there has been a remarkable decrease in deaths from heart

disease due to improved prevention and treatment, its age-adjusted mortality

rate in 1987 only 55% what it was in 1950. Therefore some elderly people who

once would have died from heart disease now survive long enough to contract

and die of cancer. Still, the overall increase in age-adjusted incidence of

cancer, from 1973 to 1987, was only 14.6%, and part of this refiects

improved diagnosis of cancers that once would have gone undetected. The

age-adjusted increase in mortality from cancer was smaller -- only 5.4% --

refiecting some improvement in treatment.43

Cancer is a catchall term for a variety of diseases, so it makes sense to

look more closely at individual cancer sites. There has been a large

age-adjusted increase in lung cancer, entirely attributable to increases in

smoking after World War II. There are also worrisome increases in the

reported incidence of breast and prostate cancer, in part due to improved

detection, in part unexplained.44 Also, some infrequent cancers show

increases. On the other hand, cancers at other sites (stomach, cervix,

uterus, Hodgkin's disease) show sharp decreases in incidence and mortality.

Overall, there is no general cancer epidemic that can be attributed to

industrial chemicals. Occupational exposures to specific carcinogenic agents

probably account for no more than 4% of cancers in the U.S.45

Furthermore, the emphasis in the 1960's on man-made carcinogens ignored

natural carcinogens in the environment. Today we recognize that of the many

chemicals in the human diet known to be carcinogenic to rodents (and

possibly to humans), far more come from natural sources, especially from

plant toxins and the products of cooking, than are synthetic.46 Carson

mistakenly believed that natural carcinogens " are few in number, " 47 that if

not for synthetics the environment would be nearly free of cancer-causing

agents, leading her to assert -- incorrectly -- in one of her most quoted

passages:48 " For the first time in the history of the world, every human

being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment

of conception until death. In the less than two decades of their use, the

synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed through the animate

and inanimate world that they occur virtually everwhere. "

Silent Spring

Carson's Silent Spring is often and justly ranked with Uncle Tom's

Cabin among the outstanding and most infiuential polemics in American

literature. It has been the primary impetus to changing public attitudes

toward chemicals and to new cautionary policies within industry and

government toward pesticides and other toxics, and it is the seed of the

modern environmental movement. By 1958 when she began serious research on

Silent Spring, Carson was acclaimed as an author of books on the sea,

especially The Sea Around Us in 1951, and success brought financial

independence. Later charged by her critics with being unscientific and

inaccurate, Carson was in fact educated in biology through the masters

degree and a highly competent science writer who had worked for years as an

editor with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Silent Spring contains few

outright errors, given the scientific information of the day.49

One can now fault the book on important points: It is fairly certain that

synthetic chemicals are not a major source of human cancer; no great

increase in age-adjusted cancer rates is seen after smoking and improvements

in diagnosis are considered.50 DDT itself can cause cancer in rats and mice,

but evidence of carcinogenicity in other species or humans is inadequate.51

Excessive use did hurt certain bird populations, especially raptors,52 but

obviously Carson was incorrect in expecting robins -- the symbol of

spring -- to become extinct.

Yet, in an important sense this is beside the point. Carson's primary

claim -- that pesticides were fiagrantly overused, polluting the environment

to a degree that damaged wildlife and possibly threatened human health --

was correct and timely. If she interpreted ambiguous evidence to favor her

thesis, emphasizing lethal effects of pesticides while ignor-ing benefits,

and, if she portrayed overly dire outcomes in alarming prose, appealing to

readers' emotions as well as their reason, that is what successful polemics

are all about. She never claimed to be writing a textbook. She had a message

and conveyed it effectively. In hindsight, her warning was needed and

produced important corrections.

In 1972, the U.S. banned DDT and was emulated by some third world nations

that quickly suffered increases in malaria. Whelan charges that overzealous

followers of Carson, especially the newly organized Environmental Defense

Fund, forced from use one of the most beneficial chemicals ever invented,

one that when applied properly offered little threat to humans or animals.53

Carson herself never advocated a total ban on organic pesticides,

acknowledging the need for pest control. Other federal actions directly

spurred by Silent Spring, and more consensually applauded, were the passage

in 1976 of the Toxic Substances Control Act,54 requiring that industrial

chemicals be tested for toxicity, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery

Act,55 governing disposal of trash and toxics.

Carson was not the first to warn about the dangers of pesticides, so why did

Silent Spring have so large an impact? Certainly her skill as a writer was

helpful, as is apparent to anyone who reads her opening chapters, but,

further in, the text becomes densely technical and -- my students testify --

boring. Her reputation and connections surely helped. Her literary agent and

her editor at Houghton Miffiin were personal friends who promoted her work

enthusiastically. Together, they arranged with the editor of The New

Yorker -- where excerpts from two of Carson's earlier books had first

appeared -- to publish parts of Silent Spring in three weekly installments,

beginning June 16, 1962. The book was released in September.56

The readership of The New Yorker would not then have known a chlorinated

hydrocarbon from a pileated woodpecker, but their interest in the fallout

controversy was high, and pesticides now appeared as a corollary issue. A

July 2 editorial in The New York Times praised Carson's series, suggesting

she was as deserving of a Nobel Prize as was the inventor of DDT, and, on

July 22, in a story headlined Silent Spring Is Now Noisy Summer, the Times

described the uproar in government, chemical and agricultural circles -- all

of this two months before the book was released. The chemical industry was

fighting furiously to discredit Carson, casting among other aspersions that

anyone who questions the widespread use of pesticides can be expected to

oppose fiuoridation.57 Profits aside, DDT had been a boon. Industry saw

itself on the side of the angels, but its efforts succeeded -- primarily in

bringing more publicity to the controversy.

Part of the impact of The New Yorker series resulted from its association

with the thalidomide tragedy.58 A tranquilizer used in Europe but not yet

approved in the U.S., it was found in 1961 to cause birth defects when taken

by pregnant women, babies being born with fiipper-like stumps instead of

arms and legs. On July 15, the same week that Carson's first article

appeared, the thalidomide story became a national sensation with a

front-page story in the Washington Post telling how one woman, Dr. Frances

Kelsey of the Food and Drug Administration, had single handedly stood firm

against great pressure and abuse in denying approval, thus saving America

from the tragedy of armless and legless children.59 The parallels with

Carson's crusade against pesticides were obvious.

The book was released with advance sales of 40,000 copies, its text

complemented with beautiful drawings by Lois and Louis Darling. Selected by

the Book-of-the-Month Club (with Justice contributing an

article on the book in the club's newsletter), the book immediately was a

bestseller. Numerous reviews mirrored the controversy, some raving and

others bitterly hostile. In April 1963, CBS Reports carried an hour-long

television program, The Silent Spring of Carson, ostensibly telling

both sides but actually favoring Carson. The Readers' Guide to Periodical

Literature shows an average of seven articles per year on pesticides in the

two years prior to Silent Spring and an average of over 30 in the three

years after.

Skeptics charge that environmental groups, a few writers and government

regulators seized the issue, exaggerating evidence of harm and repeatedly

quoting a handful of pessimistic scientists (including Hueper) whose views

are rejected by scientific consensus.60 Of part-icular interest is the

claim, popularized in the 1970's, that about 80% of cancers are

environmentally induced, a majority by chemicals. Accord-ing to Whelan,61

this derives from Higginson's research during the 1950's, in which he,

comparing the incidence of certain types of tumors among blacks in Africa

and America, concluded from dispar-ities that roughly two-thirds of all

cancer had an environmental cause. By " environmental " Higginson intended

cultural as well as chemical elements, including smoking and diet which are

especially important -- as well as, e.g., alcohol consumption, sunbathing

and sexual patterns.

His findings have been used incorrectly to imply that chemicals are the

major culprit. But it is too facile to dismiss environmentalists' alarms as

cries of wolf. By the 1970's, it was clear that pesticides and the x-ray had

been used recklessly. Radioactive fallout was a hazard. Toxic pollution of

the air, land and water had reached alarming levels. Wildlife and natural

habitat were being destroyed.

The increasing tempo of concern over trace doses may be seen from Lawless'

survey62 of 45 public alarms and controversies over technology reported in

the U.S. press from the end of World War II until 1973. Twenty-seven

involved a chronic trace poison, either chemical or radioactive. Of these,

only four began in 1945-55 (diethylstibestrol, fiuoridation, shoe

fiuoriscopes and DDT) and five in 1955-65 (tainted cranberries, polio

vaccine hazard, thalidomide, medical x-rays and taconite pollution).

Eighteen began in the eight-year period 1965-73 (including mercury in tuna,

asbestos, nuclear weapons tests and nuclear power).

Therefore it should not be surprising that by the mid-1970's, the hazard of

trace poisons had a firm foothold on the nation's agenda of problems. The

trouble for policy makers was, and remains, to identify and deal with real

problems without wasting resources on false alarms.

Notes

* I appreciate the advice of Professor Bendix.

** Dr. Mazur is Professor of Public Affairs in the Maxwell School and

associate of the Center for Environmental Policy and Administration,

Syracuse University. He holds a B.S. (Physics) from Illinois Institute of

Technology, an M.S. (Engineering) from the University of California, Los

Angeles, and a Ph.D. (Sociology) from s Hopkins University.

1 Allan Mazur, The Dynamics of Technical Controversy (1981).

2 Edith Efron, The Apocalyptics (1984); Whelan, Toxic Terror

(1993) and Wildavsky, But Is It True? (1995).

3 See, e.g., Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire (1993).

4 Maddox, The Doomsday Syndrome (1972).

5 Percy Brown, American Martyrs to Science through the Roentgen Rays (1936).

6 International Recommendations for X-ray and Radium Protection, 1 Brit. J.

Radiology 358 (1964).

7 on Martland, The Occurrence of Malignancy in Radioactive Persons, 15

Am. J. Cancer: 2435, 2438 (1931).

8 Id. at 2439.

9 Id. at 2506.

10 Rhoades, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) and J. Stannard,

Radioactivity and Health: A History (1988).

11 Lauriston , History of the International Commission on Radiological

Protection (ICRP), 1 Health Phys. 97 (1958).

12 Quoted in Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear 202 (1988).

13 Linus ing, No More War! 108 (1958).

14 Id. at 82.

15 Supra note 13, at 206 and 214.

16 Mazur, supra note 1.

17 Hearings of the (House) Select Committee to Investigate the Use of

Chemicals in Food Products, 82nd Cong., 2d Sess. (1952).

By the 1990's it was possible to make a more satisfying case for the safety

of fiuoridation; Bernard Wagner, The Health Effects of Ingested Fluoride

(1993).

18 Bernard Mausner & Judith Mausner, A Study of the Anti-scientific

Attitude, 192 Scientific American 35 (1955).

19 Allan Mazur, Opposition to Technological Innovation, Minerva, Spring

1975, at 58.

20 Crain, Elihu Katz & Rosenthal, The Politics of Community

Confiict: The Fluoridation Decision 4 (1969).

21 Mazur, supra note 1.

22 But not with fiuoridation, despite ample opportunity in her discussions

of the purity of drinking water -- perhaps because she " tried to keep at

arm's length... food faddists, health quacks and other cultists, " among whom

she may have counted the antifiuoridationists; Graham, Jr., Since

Silent Spring 71 (1970).

23 At 6-7.

24 See 21 U.S.C. Secs. 348©(3)(A) and 376((5)(, respectively.

25 Philip Abelson, Pesticides and Food, 259 Science 1235 (1993). See also,

Public Citizen v. Young, 831 F.2d 1108 (D.C. Cir. 1987).

26 Molly Ivins, Deregulation: A Question of Money vs. Health, Syracuse

Post-Standard, July 8, 1995, at A-8.

27 Stalvey, Mr. Delaney Passes a Law, 5 Nutrition Today 29 (1970).

28 Hearings, supra note 17.

29 Delaney, Fluoridation of Public Drinking Water, H.R. Rep. No. 2500,

82nd Cong., 2d Sess. (1952).

30 121 Cong. Rec. 23,729-33 (1975) (Flouridation and Cancer,statement of

Rep. Delaney).

31 Food Additives: Hearings before the Subcomm. on Health and Science of the

House Comm. on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 85th Cong., 1st Sess.

(1957).

32 Id. at 370.

33 Supra note 2, at 83.

34 Wilhelm Hueper & Walter Conway, Chemical Carcinogenesis and Cancers 3-4

(1964).

35 Id. at 17.

36 Id. at15.

37 Efron, supra note 2.

38 Supra note 33, at 145.

Modern estimates attribute 80% or more of American lung cancers to smoking

and most of the remainder to naturally occurring radon; Centers for Disease

Control, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, June 19, 1992, at 417.

39 Supra note 33, at 160.

40 , The House of Live: Carson at Work 255 (1972).

41 Always, 295 (Martha Freeman ed. 1995).

42 McCay, Carson 69 (1993).

43 , Ross & Malcolm Pike, Toward the Primary

Prevention of Cancer, 254 Science 1131 (1991).

44 Eliot Marshall, Search for a Killer, 259 Science 618 (1993) and

sen et al., Incidence of Prostate Cancer Diagnosis in the Eras Before

and After Serum

Prostate-specific Antigen Testing, 274 J. A.M.A. 1445 (1995).

45 Doll & Peto, The Causes of Cancer (1981) and et

al., supra note 43.

Devra et al., International Trends in Cancer Mortality in France, West

Germany, Italy, Japan, England and Wales, and the USA, 336 Lancet 474 (1990)

present a more dire picture that is controversial; see, e.g., Eliot

Marshall, Experts Clash Over Cancer Data, 250 Science 900 (1990).

46 Lois Gold et al., Rodent Carcinogens: Setting Priorities, 258 Science 261

(1992).

47 At 219.

48 At 15.

49 Silent Spring Revisited (Gino Marco, Hallingworth & Durham

eds. 1987).

50 et al., supra note 43.

51 National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Summary, Seventh

Annual Report on Carcinogens (1994).

52 Marco et al., supra note 49.

53 Supra note 2.

54 15 U.S.C. Sec. 2601.

55 42 U.S.C.A. Sec. 6901 et seq.; see Pub.L. 94-580 Sec. 2, 90 Stat. 2796

(1976).

56 Graham, supra note 22; , supra note 40.

57 Graham, supra note 22, at 164.

58 Graham, supra note 22.

59 Lawless, Technology and Social Shock (1977).

60 See references in note 2.

61 Supra note 2.

62 Supra note 59.