Review of How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace (Paperback)

This book focuses on industrial hazards, with brief explanations, and reasonably complete histories, of the industrial processes insofar as the history and the knowledge of the process can inform knowledge of the hazard presented to workers and to product users. One key theme is how knowledge of many of today's industrial hazards has been with us for very long periods of time, but that--and I interject here my own view--given the emphasis on economic development concurent with the rise of industrial society--medical and regulatory efforts at controlling or reducing the risks of the hazards have been unsuccessful, due to the inconvenence or costs to the industries so associated. Without actually using the term "externalities," a propensity to assign those costs from industries to their employees, the environment, and to product-users is documented.

Another key theme is that the knowledge of the hazards and their tentatively arrived-at mitigation measures has ebbed and flowed, with populations thinking that effective controls have been implemented when in fact they have not been.

A further point of knowledge is that there is no clear dividing line between exposures in the workplace and exposures in the home. For this reason, and probably because the medical literature from which he is able to draw has dealt more with workplace hazards than with hazards in the home, the focus is on industry, though the writing moves from industry to the home when the hazards move there also. I would recommend the book to a popular audience for knowledge of industrial hazards in the home, but only if the reader is willing to learn the author's lessons regarding how the danger origininates in industry and moves from there to the home, and is willing to also learn the important lesson that the hazards to the workers who produce the products are significant factors in making product choices, as well as the actual toxic effect to the user. He quotes Jerry Garcia on the hellish aspects of vinyl record production. No special knowledge of chemistry is required to understand the text.

Unfortunately I do not have the book in front of me now, but from memory, here are a few of the topics covered:

- mercury fumes
- cotton dust
- carbon disulfide
- chlorine
- metal working fumes
- multiple causes of Parkinsonism

I do not mean to imply that the author appeared to me to be less than comprehensive in his addressing of toxic processes and products, although he did not deal extensively with military industries, nor with the current issue regarding the environmental distribution of uranium munitions. He touched on the shortcomings of the regulatory process under lassiz-faire capitalism, and sees the two most important upcoming issues, besides recovering from recent efforts at governmental deregulation and disassembling and hampering of regulatory agencies, as the toxic effects of additives to gasoline, and the toxic effects of wood preservation chemicals, both of which are throughly reviewed, noting the special dangers to children.

I enjoyed his end-noted documentantion of the most obscure points of his historical reviews, some of which were not even central to what he was saying. I felt he liked doing this sort of extensive research, was expert in his field, and that the writing was a labour of love.

Product Description
This book reveals the hidden health dangers in many of the seemingly innocent products we encounter every day--a tube of glue in a kitchen drawer, a bottle of bleach in the laundry room, a rayon scarf on a closet shelf, a brass knob on the front door, a wood plank on an outdoor deck. A compelling exposé, written by a physician with extensive experience in public health and illustrated with disturbing case histories, How Everyday Products Make People Sick is a rich and meticulously documented account of injury and illness across different time periods, places, and technologies. It presents a picture not of one exceptional or corrupt industry but rather of how run-of-the-mill manufacturing processes and consumer marketing expose workers and the general public alike to toxic hazards. More troubling still, even when such hazards are recognized, calls for their control are routinely ignored. Written for a wide audience, it offers a critical and disquieting perspective on the relationship between industrial development and its adverse health consequences.
Among the surprisingly common hazards discussed in How Everyday Products Make People Sick:
* Glue and rubber cement
* Chlorine bleach
* Rayon and other synthetic textiles
* Welding and other metal fumes
* Wood preservatives
* Gasoline additives



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