Customer Reviews

How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace

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Some imbecile at the publishing company gave this book what they must have thought was a trendy title. By doing that, they missed the market for what turns out to be one of the most interesting history books I've read all year--and I read a lot of history.

What this book really is, is a history of how changes in industrial processes have had unintended health consequences. It also documents the political and social forces that have kept the health consequences of these various chemicals from being known and regulated.

All this sounds dry and dusty, but the author writes with a lively, well-documented, anecdote-rich style that modestly cloaks a depth of research far beyond what I've read in history books written by trained historians. It's a pleasure to read, and in the process of reading it you'll learn a great deal about the history of plastic manufacturing, how artificial textiles are made, the uses of industrial bleaching, and many dozens of other intriguing processes which make our world what it is.

What a pleasure to discover that there still are a few highly educated "renaissance" people in the world who can combine expertise in medicine, history, social thought and engineering to come up with such a delightful, well-written read.

If I had the power, I'd nominate this book for the National Book Award in History!

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.

I bought and read this book together with Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power and I recommend both of them. This one is written from an occupational health perspective, and provides superb history on "the industrial disease" while "Exposed" is more from a public policy perspective.

The author mentions, and I plan to sign up for if I can, the Center for Disease Control (CDC)"Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report."

The author who started out focusing on workplace toxicity, also covers household toxicity, most alarming of which was paint emitting toxic vapors.

The author laments the manner in which the government, think tanks, and corporations are all doing a slow roll on toxicity, ignoring it, covering it up, or delaying action on it. The The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century: Late Lessons from Early Warnings is nowhere to be found, in part because of The Republican War on Science.

Among the threats covered:

· Acids
· Arsenic
· Asbestor
· Chlorine
· Dyes
· Fibers (Asthma)
· Fumes from Metal (Lung collapse)
· Glue
· Lead
· Manganese
· Oil
· Plastics (Liver Cancer)
· Solvents (Benzine)
· Toxic Gases

The author is authoritative and not at all over-bearing in laying out the case against an ignorances of toxicity that is assuredly not in the public interest. He addresses neurological impacts as the most subtle and most frightening and most cummulative in nature.

His bottom line is that the pharmaceutical, industrial materials, and household goods industries are not doing enough testing and not getting enogh oversight. From this book one can easily see the varied government agencies nominally responsible for public health being phased out as was the Office of Technology Assessment.

The author notes that emerging toxins are of real concern, but that dollars and attention are being consumed by SARS, West Nile, and other biological threats (diseases are coming together and mutating in animal hosts, then jumping to human hosts, and becoming drug resistant more quickly).

Microwave popcorn lung caught my attention. As convenient as it is to use, the microwave evidently enhances toxicity of some substances, and we literally have no menu to follow in avoiding this.

My one disappointment is the lack of a table of toxic products, a lack of dollar figures, mortality and disability figures. I believe that a second edition of this book could be much improved, and as one reviewer notes, the rich history in the book given a higher profile.

The notes and index are superb and the book overall is of sufficient value to the public to warrant five stars. This is an important work.

See also:
Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy
High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health
Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
An Enormous Crime: The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq

The federal government, at the political level in both Congress and the Executive, cannot be trusted to act in the public interest. Wall Street is beginning to realize that that the "true cost" of corrupting the government has been the hollowing out of America's population, and in my view, it will be the fund managers at Wall Street who must recognize the value of public health, just as the rich in NYC realized in the 1920's that disease is indiscriminate.

Excellent book.

Given the recent proliferation of pulp-professional books reviewing environmental toxicology, Dr. Paul Blanc's immediate challenge in *How Everyday Products Make us Sick* is to set his work apart from its peers. To anyone who merely browses Blanc's book, it will quickly become apparent that he easily obviates this challenge.


And to anyone who studies his book in depth, it will become clear that Blanc has at once established himself as a member of that rare species called "polymath;" a species populated by the likes of Jared Diamond, Joseph Campbell, and James Burke.


Of all such authors, Blanc's style and scope most closely mirrors that of Burke, whose celebrated "Connections" series on BBC set a new standard for integrated, iconoclastic scholarship. While, as an occupational toxicologist, I am admittedly partial to Blanc's field of study, I am anything but partial to its existing body of literature. Before reading--and re-reading--Blanc's book, I had yet to encounter a model for conveying occupational toxicology to the general public both coherently and charmingly.


Yet Blanc's breakthough compendium is nothing if not both charming and coherent. It will undoubtedly captivate both professionals and non-professionals, although non-professionals will likely gain the most insight from this book. (Professionals, and/or perfectionists, will reap immeasurable reward from Blanc's immaculate footnotes; worthy of separate publication in their own right).


Like James Burke, Blanc inter-weaves science, history, and culture with such electrifying (and refreshingly irreverent) flair as to virtually prove Mark Twain's saw that nothing has been more detrimental to human knowledge than traditional, pulpous modes of education.




Christian P. Erickson, M.D., M.P.H.
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christianerickson@alumni.duke.edu

If you are looking for how everyday products make people sick (toxins at home and in the workplace) try a book like What's Toxic, What's Not by Ginsberg & Toal, which does a fine job of covering this topic in a style that makes it easy to find just the toxins or areas of exposure that concern you.

If you are interested in the fascinating history of toxins in the workplace, this is your book. In engaging and clever narrative, Blanc tells the stories of toxins that sicken people, the often slow process of uncovering the source of illness, the eventual phasing out of the product (often because another product rendered it obsolete, not due to health concern), and the frequent return of the underlying toxin in a new product.

Blanc brings history alive with stories of individuals exposed to invisible threats. His narrative is supported by scientific analysis, providing a reassuring direction and momentum to a disturbing, sometimes frustrating, topic.


I am the Director of Education for the Foresight Nanotech Institute and the author of Technology Challenged: Understanding Our Creations & Choosing Our Future.

I admit that I bought this book for its title while in the midst of a book buying frenzy, thinking that it would be a run-of-the-mill, toxins in the home primer of sorts. I spent the first 20 or 30 pages thinking, "This book is not at all what I thought it would be. Why does it have this misleading title? Why did it have that misleading product description?" Even the reviewer's quote on the book cover is misleading: "A superb tool for making our homes, finally, a safe place to raise children." As another Amazon reviewer pointed out, this is just colossally crappy marketing.

When I got past the slight disappointment of owning a very different book than I thought I had purchased, I realized, as other reviewers have, that this book is an incredibly well-researched and well-written history of modern chemical development and its consequences. I couldn't put it down. I would recommend this book to anyone who is not only interested in how chemicals in our environment can make us sick, but also in how some of those chemicals came about and how they ended up in our households despite the fact that they are well-known toxins. Read this book along with Not Just A Pretty Face, In Defense of Food, Exposed, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, The Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, etc., to usher in full-blown outrage at the fact that our government doesn't do more to regulate the poisons that corporations are happy to pump into us on a daily basis.

This is an outstandingly readable book despite its sometimes dark and gruesome accounts of things gone badly awry. Dr. Blanc is capable of causing delight even with material that might not be very promising in someone else's hands. He seems to have taken into account Samuel Johnson's adage that "what is read with delight is commonly retained, because pleasure always secures attention."

This might have been an angry and difficult book to read with the horrors it recounts, but the approach reminded me of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" since the focus is widened from medicine and includes medical and chemical history, biography, along with references to arts and literature. Dr. Blanc's knowledge is clearly wide-ranging.

Dr. Blanc frames economic and political problems in a long historical view that makes it obvious that the problems are not new and our society is not much more wise than it has been in the past. The same problems keep happening over and over (literally, the same problems with some of the same substances that have been known to be poisonous since antiquity). Adding to that, new, untested items, some very likely to cause harm, come on the market with little consideration. We should be asking ourselves how it feels to be human guinea pigs.

Any thoughtful reader of the book will be lead to the question: When do we demand something better from the incompetent leaders who say, "Trust us, we know what's best for you" while they give in to economic pressures? When do we tell the people more interested in the bottom line than the value of human life to shove it?

Dr. Blanc presents a detailed and complex story that is well researched and fascinating. He appreciates the details, the personalities, and the discoveries even when telling a story that is a train wreck in slow motion.

Despite the implications from the jacket blurb, this is NOT a book that catalogs all the dangers around the average person. Dr. Blanc mostly limits the number of specific toxins he presents and gives fairly in-depth and interesting discussion of them.

Kudos on a book that is well written, fun to read (!), and insightful.

I am sorry to say this book was not what I expected. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it wasn't interesting, it just wasn't what the title made it to be. I really thought it would give me information on everyday household items that I use. I thought I would know what was good to use and what wasn't. Basically, the information in this book is about industrial hazards and exposure in the workplace from material, things they use, things they must work with. It was well written and interesting, just not what I was expecting. The title should be changed.

Great to see medical symptoms associated with common toxins and when they first start to appear historically. A very thorough study of the general inaction by government and industry to correct a problem even after it is identified by the medical profession. Very informative and well referenced. It would be helpful and useful to see more toxins addressed in a similar manner.

This is a fantastic resource! It is full of meticulous information regarding the recent development of chemicals and toxins in things we encounter on a daily basis. For me it was eye opening to say the least. I had no idea that so many people have died as a result of chemicals in their workplace for example! It was extremely thorough and factual looking at the progression and its effects on humanity.

Here's some points that I noted from it:

Some indoor paints have an additive in them to prevent mildew and that additive is high in mercury poisoning the whole family but particularly babies/children.

Avoid benzene and hexane. Benzene attacks the blood system. Hexane attacks the neuro system as well as other parts of the body. Both are found in lots of stuff still today.

The Nike co-founder Bill Boweman poisoned himself with hexane-laced glue making the shoes!

In artificial nail glue is acetonitrile - the body converts this to cyanide!

Gamma Hydroxybutyrate is in acetone free nail polish and if ingested causes a child to go into a coma

Chlorine is one of the most common causes worldwide of chemical gas poisonings

Chloramine exposure is endemic in heavily chlorinated swimming pools. Nitrogen containing human body sweat and urine in pools combine with chlorine to make chloramines. Chloramine exposure is associated with risk of childhood asthma.

High levels of Carbon Disulfide makes people go insane. It is a solvent and also in widely used insecticides eg metam sodium. It is also in cellophane, bamboo manufacturing and viscose rayon.

Dinitophenol used for weigh loss blocks one of the bodys main metabolic pathways, driving up energy consumption. It induces blinding cataracts!

Avoid wood preservatives. The only safe ones eg Burnettizing have been discontinued and ones such as creosote (known to cause cancer) and Kyanization (contains toxic mercury) and Metam Sodium (as mentioned above in high levels causes insanity and other things) are widely used and growing.

There is so much in this book that I'd probably learn new things every time I read it. I really recommend it if you're interested in an indepth look at the origins of all this through to today.