I think that broadening the scope is important because each day I read several newspapers, newsmagazines, the Internet news, various blogs, and so on, and each day I see articles about all the “poisons” in our world. Some of the articles point out which pesticides are found as residues on peaches, how much lead is in Barbie’s shoes, what drugs are found in our drinking water, and other facts or nonfacts. Other articles have a viewpoint to share and it seems their raison d’être is to scare the public. As I read them, I can imagine how disturbed a nontoxicologist would be to see all the headlines and not know what to do about these frightening things. The days are long over when we can be comfortable that our food supply, our water supply, our drugs, vitamins, and cosmetics are as safe as we would like. So it is important to increase our understanding of all types of chemicals in our ever more complex world.

Our society has made great strides in controlling the unbridled spread of various chemicals into the environment. From the removal of arsenic from cosmetics and drugs in the early 1900s, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 in order to control the use of pesticides and set standards for air and water quality, up to the empowerment of a modern Food and Drug Agency that monitors our medicines and medical devices, we have taken steps to ensure the safety of many products.

Some of us were lulled into complacency that the world was becoming a safer place. That balloon burst in the 1980s when there were some terrible industrial accidents such as at a Bhopal, India, factory as well as consumer product tampering, all of which led to sickness and deaths of innocent bystanders. Today, with the advent of serious industrialization of nonwestern economies such as China and India, the integrity of our food supply is once again in question and the safety of various consumer products and medicines may be at risk.

Lest we be lulled into a sense of complacency over environmental safety, toxic waste spills still occur with serious impact on both humans and wildlife. For example, two of the headlines in 2009 concerned an ammonia leak that killed someone who drove into the gas cloud and the hospitalization of a worker exposed to a large spill of aniline. As I am finishing this book, I am watching with horror the beginnings of what may be the worst oil spill in U.S. history, namely the sinking of an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and the consequences to our environment and economy from millions of gallons of oil washing ashore along the coastal states. The long-term consequences of wildlife and human exposure to the inhalation of oil fumes and the ingestion of oil residues in our food and water are certain to be discussed for the next decades. This is all the more reason for the public to understand how to assess risk in order to determine when to be curious, when to be nervous, and when to be truly scared.

Because I have spent most of my career working in the area of pharmaceutical development, many friends ask me questions about their medications. My response always starts with “What did your doctor say?” And the answer is usually either “I didn’t ask” or “He/she didn’t know.” Most people are surprised to find that there are side effects from drugs. I tell them that all chemicals have side effects. It is only where on the scale of toxicity a chemical falls. My very simple, on-a-cocktail-napkin scale is:

So where does your medicine, food, water, pesticide fall on this scale?

I hope by the end of this book that you will be able to use the information presented in order to be a more informed consumer of food, water, and medicinal products and to be able to establish your own risk-benefit scenarios for many aspects of your life. In the last chapter of the book we take an in-depth look at how to assess risk while in Chapter 8 we present a variety of case histories that explicate some of the issues surrounding the use of chemicals in our industrial society. Some of these examples are a bit old, but they still have relevance as cautionary tales.

As always with an undertaking such as this, there are many people to thank. First, Alice Ottoboni, whose first two editions laid all the groundwork for this edition, has been a great source of help and encouragement. I also appreciate the input of our editor, Jonathan Rose, and his staff and the critical eye of Barbara Flynn-Waller. Of course, I am grateful to my husband, Jerry, for his thoughtful comments and consistent encouragement, not only for this book but during my whole career.

PATRICIA FRANK, 2010

The laws that govern the toxicity of chemicals do not readily manifest themselves in our daily routines, with the result that we have little knowledge or awareness of them. Thus, at the end of World War II, when the rapidly developing petrochemical industry presented us with a host of new synthetic chemicals, whose names we could not pronounce and with which we were unfamiliar, a certain segment of our population became suspicious; anything man-made was viewed with mistrust. Then, in the early 1960s, when the public media began its intense and continuing focus on private worries and concerns that synthetic chemicals were causing great damage to wildlife, the environment, and even us humans, many people became frightened.

Fear of many synthetic chemicals has not abated, despite a lack of objective evidence that they have been detrimental to the public health. Americans are living longer and are healthier than ever before in our history. Nevertheless, a significant segment of our population still believes that many synthetic chemicals are harming them and threatening them with cancer. Adults who remain resistant to chemophobic fears for their own health are challenged to come into the fold with stories of dire consequences for their children. Recently, claims of immune system damage and loss of reproductive capability from exposure to synthetic chemicals have added to the burden of fear.

This book was written with a firm conviction that fear of certain chemicals, or more specifically fear of certain synthetic chemicals, is the product of a lack of understanding of the naturals laws that govern toxicity and, as a corollary, a conviction that knowledge of what makes a chemical harmful or harmless can help dispel unreasoning fear and aid in our dealing more effectively with some of the real problems related to chemical exposures.

I have found, from my many years of working for and with the public, that most people are intelligent and perceptive individuals who want scientific facts relating to subjects that are vital to their health and well-being. Even without scientific education, they are completely capable of understanding such facts. This book is for them. Its purpose is to provide facts about the toxicity of chemicals and to help people to cope with news and media reporting, preserve their sanity in the face of poison paranoia, and make informed judgments about chemicals in the environment.

The public’s fear of chemicals, combined with increasing recognition within government and industry that people must be protected from harmful exposures to chemicals, has resulted in a dramatic increase during past decades in the number of laws regulating environmental chemicals. There has been little substantive change in these laws, outlined in the section “Regulation of Toxic Chemicals,” since the publication of the first edition of this book. Through the years, there have been numerous challenges to the Delaney Clause, with groups fearful of human exposures to synthetic chemicals lobbying to expand its coverage, and groups concerned that the Delaney Clause excludes scientific judgment in its implementation lobbying to eliminate it. The matter was put to rest for the time being with the passage, in August 1996, of the Food Quality Protection Act, which supplants the Delaney Clause. This change, while of significance to the lobbyists, both for and against the Delaney Clause, will probably have little or no impact on public health. However, the debate has begun anew about the benefits and detriments of the change.

I am grateful to the many friends and associates with whom I have discussed this second edition for their very valuable comments and criticisms. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my husband, Fred. His sharing of his knowledge of public, occupational, and environmental health has been of tremendous benefit to me not only in the preparation of this second edition but in all of my professional activities.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

Many years of service as a public health toxicologist for the California Department of Public Health (now the Department of Health Services) made it disturbingly clear to me that an inordinate fear of chemicals was the rule rather than the exception among the general public. During the same years, participation in training programs designed to teach people how to work safely with the chemicals they contacted in their occupations taught me that people with no science background were not only capable of understanding the basic principles of toxicology but that they could also apply what they learned to work safely and comfortably with some very dangerous chemicals. This book was born of these two observations.

There is a general lack of public understanding about what makes chemicals toxic, and about the word that has become a synonym for toxic. That word, now a part of our everyday vocabulary, is poison. Headlines tell us about the poisons in our food, poisons in our water, poisons in our air; poisons everywhere! People who use the word most freely appear to have the least concept of what poison means. The indiscriminate use of the word has brought us into an era of what might be termed poison paranoia.

Whenever some misfortune occurs for which we have no ready explanation—an illness, a mischance of nature, a declining wildlife species—we look to blame some chemical. This propensity is aptly illustrated by the mystery of the double-yolked eggs, reported in the Consumers Cooperative of Berkeley newspaper, the Co-op News, July 16, 1979: “Science is beautiful, but it can sometimes spoil a good news story.” The story went on to tell that a Co-op member was recently amazed when she found NINE double eggs out of a dozen box. I shared her astonishment, convinced that either the odds against this marvelous happening were billions to one or that some horrible chemical additive fed to a chicken had caused it and that some serious muckraking was needed down at the chicken ranch to protect embattled consumers by eliminating this poison from their diet.

The Co-op home economist checked with the supplier of the eggs and received a reply that took all of the mystery out of the event by placing it squarely in the dull world of young chickens and egg sorting, where neither chemicals nor miraculous odds were at issue.

Young chickens are apt to pop more eggs with two yolks, but it becomes more uncommon as they reach maturity. The reason nine eggs could wind up in the same box is because double eggs are oversized, so they get set aside by the egg sorter because they won’t fit in the egg container. However, there are some borderline ones which the sorter selects from those set aside and allows to pass through. This is why so many were in one box.

Fortunately, in the case of the double-yolked eggs, further facts were sought and the real reason for the apparent anomaly was discovered, thereby avoiding another scare headline. Unfortunately, such dedication in pursuit of truth is often the exception rather than the rule.

There are two diametrically opposed dangers in news media toxicology and its offspring, poison paranoia. One is the cry-wolf syndrome. When an alarm is sounded frequently and without regard to degree of emergency, the alarm becomes meaningless and, therefore, is not effective when a true emergency exists. It is well known that to call everything bad, in effect, is to call nothing bad. If safe and sane use of chemicals in our homes, work, and recreation places is to be furthered, there must be understanding, cooperation, and support on the part of the public. A public blasé about harmful effects of chemicals is a public disinterested in making any changes in use practices relating to chemicals. Such a public attitude would be tragic.

The second danger is that a certain fraction of our population will become victims of a helpless, hopeless fear and terror that chemicals from which they cannot escape—chemicals in their food, their water, their air—are destroying their health, shortening their lives, or dooming them to cancer. Such a fear is a form of stress that can be just as damaging as the chemicals that are feared, and in some cases even more so. Stress can produce vague feelings of illness, such as nausea, headache, weakness, and malaise, as well as actual physical illness. The medical profession now generally accepts the premise that stress can exert a profound influence on the course of many illnesses and appears to trigger or worsen some diseases, such as high blood pressure and Crohn’s disease (a type of colitis).

Poison paranoia already is taking a toll in the mental health and well-being of some people. This conclusion is based on the many thousands of calls, letters, and visits that I have received from people concerned about the health effects of chemicals in their environments. The gamut of their concern extended from calm interest to outright panic. In a few cases, the cause for apprehension was valid because, through some accident, misuse, or lack of knowledge, there had been an actual or potential exposure to a harmful level of some chemical. However, in the majority of cases, the fears or concerns were ill-defined and prompted, in the main, by the most recent scare headline. Among the latter, there were a few people who refused to accept any information that did not support their conviction that they were suffering from some sort of chemical poisoning. People who fall victim to an unreasonable fear of chemicals are literally frightened sick. Frightened people truly suffer. They are victims of distorted information and lack of knowledge.

The great majority of people are seriously concerned about the many chemicals reported to be harming them and the environment, but they do not have a pathologic fear about the effects of chemicals on their health. For the most part, they do not know what to do about the situation, other than to modify their lifestyles to the extent possible. They can live without smoking, but they cannot live without breathing.

This book is not intended as a condemnation of, or an apology for, synthetic chemicals; rather its aim is to present an objective discussion of what makes chemicals harmful or harmless. I feel compelled to make this point so that the reader will understand that I hold no brief for or against synthetic chemicals; they are facts of life with which we must deal. I have learned from many years of contact with people of all viewpoints regarding the risks posed by chemicals that objectivity often invites scorn from both extremes of view. Thus, both pro- and anti-chemical extremists may take exception to all or parts of this book because it is not directed toward reinforcement of their respective “what’s-the-fuss” and “ain’t-it-awful” views. This book is not written for people of extreme persuasions but rather for people who want a real understanding of the significance of their many chemical exposures. Only people with open minds are tolerant of concepts that are new to them or in conflict with their beliefs.

The comfort provided by knowledge was vividly brought home to me many years ago by a young woman who called for information about a chemical. After a rather lengthy conversation, she said, “I feel so sorry for you. You know so much about all the harmful effects of the chemicals that surround us that you must really worry all the time.”

I was surprised by her statement, because such a thought had never occurred to me. I assured her that, on the contrary, the very fact that I do know what makes chemicals harmful frees me from worry. All chemicals follow the same rules: the laws of nature. By knowing the rules, I have a perspective that protects me from needless worry and unreasoning fear. My hope is that this book will give you the same perspective.

M. ALICE OTTOBONI, 1997