If you are interested in this subject, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Deborah Blum’s excellent 2011 book The Poisoner’s Handbook (https://www.amazon.com/Poisoners-Handbook-Murder-Forensic-Me...), which tells the stories of a bunch of different chemical catastrophes from the same period. Radium is covered, as well as such other “what were they thinking?” stories as the introduction of lead into gasoline and the poisoning of industrial alcohol by the government during Prohibition in a misguided effort to keep it from being turned into bootleg liquor. It’s full of fascinating case studies, and Blum has an engaging writing style that makes it a good read.
If you prefer to watch your history, PBS’ American Experience documentary series did an episode based on Blum’s book (see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poisoners ); it can be streamed via a bunch of different video services.
In the EU at least the denatured alcohols sold to the general public (e.g. as cleaning products) don't have enough actual poison in them to cause much damage.
The main thing they shove in there to stop you drinking it is denatonium benzoate ("bitrex"), which will make you _regret_ putting it in your mouth, but won't kill you because you'll immediately want to spit it out instead. The other ingredients are mostly to stop you trying to get the bitrex back out and then selling it as bootleg booze (thus evading the tax).
If you go to the Wikipedia Article for Radium Girls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls - You'd see it's an exact mirror of much of the text that's reposted on theatlantic.com article.
I did, and I searched for several random 4-6 word phrases in the Atlantic article from the Wikipedia one, and I didn't find anything making it obvious much of the content is an exact mirror.
When you think people had learned their lesson by the 1930s, don't forget about watching atomic bomb tests from the side of the road in Nevada in the 50s: https://allthatsinteresting.com/atomic-tourism
Same here. While I sincerely hope nuclear weapons will never again be used against humans, I dream to be able to see a real nuclear detonation with my own eyes, from as close as safely possible.
You know where I’m going with this, right? To pick a random example, go look up saccharin. Whether or not it is “not harmful” depends on when in the last 100 years you ask the question.
That seems like a terrible idea because people forget why useful regulations where needed.
Lead is never going to be safe. Julius Caesar's engineer, Vitruvius, reported, "water is much more wholesome from earthenware pipes than from lead pipes.“Lead was added to cheap wine illegally in the 18th and early 19th centuries as a sweetener.. Note the illegal bit because we knew it was toxic.
But fast forward and... In the late 1950s through the 1970s Herbert Needleman and Clair Cameron Patterson did research trying to prove lead's toxicity to humans.[231] In the 1980s Needleman was falsely accused of scientific misconduct by the lead industry associates.[232][233]
Read the history and we just keep discovering the same issues over and over again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning Yet, we still keep adding it to various products today and people still get significant exposure.
Really interesting that the Romans already knew that lead pipes were bad. To be fair, though, they had a lot of other spurious beliefs, and I can understand why people would have assumed it was just superstition. Especially since the toxicity is very slow.
> That seems like a terrible idea because people forget why useful regulations were needed.
To me that seems to indicate that we need to keep a record of why laws are made, so that the case is simply ready to be made when the sun is due to set.
Neither contemporary recordings nor history books are hard to find.
But the people who have something to gain by unwisely rolling back regulation, and who have money to buy themselves platforms, are deliberately not talking about the reasons the laws exist, so short of something more akin to state control of media, what are you going to do?
> To me that seems to indicate that we need to keep a record of why laws are made
Whether and why a practice is useful generally has little or nothing to do with people's understanding of whether and why it is useful. The arguments people advance for everything, including valuable things, are almost uniformly nonsense and easy to disprove.
So, a record of why laws are made wouldn't really serve any purpose.
An alternative would be if instead of sunset provisions laws are made to explicitly include testable goals, and a process for challenging them by proving they don't achieve their intended goal.
On the other hand, what about autism and vaccines? Or wifi emissions?
and I wonder what they will say about cellphone radiation in 30 years? (or some time in the future where there's not a strong litiginous cellphone industry)
We already have an example of how sunset provisions work in the US: the federal budget and tax ceiling. What ends up happening is that some politicians hold the sunsetting provision hostage to get their pet issue. Imagine if instead furloughing federal workers, we had the Purge.
We gleefully use all sorts of new things. Most of them turn out like sliced bread, and we stop thinking of it as "gleefully using them" and just accept them as part of our lives. It's only the odd occasion when things go wrong that confirmation bias kicks in and we think of all the other times that something hasn't worked out.
Most people have no idea malaria was endemic in the USA as far north as New York State. The advantage of the DDT saturation was that it wiped out the disease reservoir completely, precisely because it persisted in the environment. Modern "responsible" DDT usage (treated nets, wall spraying, etc) is just breeding resistant mosquitoes.
How long until will it be until we find out the effects of 5G radiation?
The real point of my question is not to raise conspiracy theories about 5G, but to illustrate a point. Our regulatory organisations operate under a “let’s do it and ban it later if some people die” kind of attitude.
There's no such thing as "5G radiation". It's just RF, at frequencies that are already widely used. We are very confident about the safety of low-dose exposure to RF energy.
We have saturated lab animals with immense amounts of energy from every part of the RF spectrum; at the frequencies used by 5G, the only effect we've reliably identified is heating of tissues at extremely high exposure levels. We have conducted hundreds of epidemiological studies and found no clinically significant effects. We know of no plausible biological mechanism for significant adverse health effects from normal levels of RF exposure. The exposure limits for user devices and base station equipment are set at extremely conservative levels on a precautionary basis, just in case there's some very subtle effect that we haven't yet been able to identify.
Things have changed enormously from the "let's put radium in everything" era. Nowadays there's a good case to be made that we've swung too far in the opposite direction and we're letting people die because the FDA is too conservative in approving new medications (and old Russian medications with a proven track record that's impossible to patent therefore nobody has the incentive to spend millions on getting through the FDA vetting process, but that's a different issue).
I think sadly we may live in the worst of both worlds. Overly burdensome regulation on medical innovation, yet free hand in other areas like lead in gasoline, microbeads in our hair gel, and who knows what else.
A cynical take might be that they are two sides of the same coin. Regulation meant to protect big business and at the same time choke out any competition.
> Nowadays there's a good case to be made that we've swung too far in the opposite direction
No. Absolutely not. Maybe in a few particulars, but not in the general case.
The reason that FDA approval is difficult is because we aren't discovering any more wonder drugs. The low hanging fruit has all been picked.
In the meantime, we are stuffing our farm animals with antibiotics, growth hormones, covering our fields with pesticides and herbicides that have not proven to be safe, stuff our furniture with all sorts of wonderful fireproof substances that, twenty years down the road, we discover to be carcinogenic, and in general, rely on victims to prove that what they have been sold is dangerous.
If we were actually prudent about this sort of thing, we'd require producers of goods to prove that what they are doing is safe - instead of waiting for people to be hurt or killed, followed by decades of studies and litigation.
We can't even effectively hold companies accountable for selling dangerous product, when they know their products are dangerous. There are barely any controls for harm that they inflict out of ignorance.
I'm getting downvoted a lot on this and I'd love to know why. To be clear, I'm not for the anti-vax movement. My point is just to say that this topic is very similar to that movement.
How do you verify the content of a vaccine? It's not much different to using proprietary software. Yes, it seems to be good for us, but can you trust it fully without being able to verify it's contents and confirm that it wasn't tampered with along the way?
It's not reasonable to expect every individual to have the time, resources or expertise to personally run a full chemical analysis on every dose of vaccine or medicine that enters their body.
So... you don't. You don't verify it, because you can't. You can't verify all of science from first principles. You can't inspect every building you enter and verify that it meets code. You can't inspect every electronic device for NSA taps. You can't inspect all of your food, drinking water, or even all of the FOSS code you use. Society is too large, and the domains of knowledge and expertise that feed into it are too complex for any individual to fully comprehend.
You can't eliminate risk or trust from life. As far as vaccines go, you just have to trust that they work and are not likely to be poison and take the shot.
IMO this a consequence of Capitalism. At some point, when companies get to large, buying regulations becomes the new ball game. This can go both ways, once u buy your regulation, making it harder for others becomes the next ball game...
What you described is called "corporatism", and we can agree that it's a major problem. Assigning the flaws of corporatism to all of capitalism is to miss all of the good capitalism has done for the world.
We called what we have today capitalism before we realized the bad parts. Now that we've realized the bad parts, we need to change things to address those bad parts.
The more logical recipient of a new name is the new, fixed-capitalism you should be pushing for. Saying "oh the bad parts aren't capitalism, that's corporatism, that's different" is just playing word games to try to hide the fact that what we're doing isn't working as-is.
"Corporatism" is a new word to me, so I'm inclined to agree that it's probably not a good idea to push for its use.
On the other hand, there are some much better established words for a close partnership between the state and a set of established major businesses: "crony capitalism" and "fascism".
"Fascism" isn't really a good idea either; in modern use it appears to be nothing more than a synonym for "badness".
> Assigning the flaws of corporatism to all of capitalism is to miss all of the good capitalism has done for the world.
At what cost, though? Sure: us Westerners are way better off than 50 years ago, but the effects that capitalism has had on the environment (especially global warming and natural resource exploitation) are on the best way to totally wreck the planet for our children, and I don't want to get started on the plight of those in the poorest regions of the world that have gotten even poorer in the same timeframe.
Have you ever looked at the sad state of African textile and agriculture industry? All but wrecked thanks to Europeans dumping old cloths and overproduced food in Africa disguised as "help".
There have been studies that showed some results when testing microwave (transmission) radiation on animal models but they have not showed anything close to a smoking gun. These results may be statistically significant (Which is not the 5 sigma used in HEP, but still), but no study I have seen attempts to contextualize any potential risk i.e. There is a reason why 5G is in the same WHO cancer risk band as working as a carpenter
Imagine the same but with the radium: The Animals would have obviously got cancer or Aplastic Anemia (Or more acute symptoms of radiation sickness). If there was clear evidence that 5G caused illness in humans, it wouldn't be happening
5G is probably a trigger for many, but imo it is right to call out the repeating pattern where seemingly we can't entertain the idea that there are things we simply are not aware at this point in time, yet confident we are so much better than the fools a couple of generations back, we are sure to get it right and not make a mistake.
Simultaneously there are regular articles posted on this very same site about fake news, selective reporting and irreproducible scientific studies. It is hard not to be skeptical.
If you prefer to watch your history, PBS’ American Experience documentary series did an episode based on Blum’s book (see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poisoners ); it can be streamed via a bunch of different video services.