Notes from "Slow Death By Rubber Duck"

Preliminary Outline of Key Points:

- ... 'no separation between environmental issues and health issues'.  Despite billions of dollars spent yearly on medical bills for illnesses that can be traced to 'environmentally attributable causes', the 'link between pollution and human health is a relatively new phenomenon.'
-   Instrumental in focusing attention on the vulnerability of children to environmental pollution :       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Goldman  
-  America's post WWII economic boom and its heavy reliance on petrochemicals for the production of plastic products.
-  Billions of pounds of toxic chemicals are released into the American environment yearly.  In addition, even greater amounts of toxic chemicals arrive in the U.S. for use in industrial products, many of them household products.   The EPA's TRI database tracks this process:  http://www.epa.gov/tri/.
Despite this information, toxicity testing lags behind and some well known offenders, such as asbestos, have yet to be banned.
-  American culture, one of 'success but over-consumption, the culture of abundance but obesity, the culture fueled by petroleum but opposed (until recently) to global warming standard, and the culture of toxic chemicals but now an emerging field of green chemistry.'
-  Revision of our common understanding of pollution as something 'external', smoke from factories and car exhaust, etc., to include the chemicals that seep into our bodies from the everyday use of industrial products and their subsequent links to a host of allergies and diseases. 
-  Ken Cook's epiphany - measuring pollution in peoples' bodies.  The Environmental Working Group:
 http://www.ewg.org/node/8147
-  Bill Moyers as one of the first celebrities to provide a public face for the testing of 'body burdens'.

Historical examples of external pollution: 

-  the Thames River, London, England. 
-  Lake Erie  (I love the revision of Dr. Seuss' 'The Lorax' !)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lorax
- the Broad Street pump.
-  the Cuyahoga River, Cleveland, Ohio.
-  the Meuse River, Belgium
-  the mining town of Donora, Pennsylvania.
-  London, England's Great Smog of 1952 and subsequent U.K. Clean Air Act in 1956.

Historical examples of 'internal' pollution - direct bodily exposure to toxins:

-  1927 New Jersey women's lawsuit against U.S. Radium Corportation
-  the "Lucifer Match"
-  felt hat manufacturing, "carroting" resulting in mercury poisoning
-  arsenic in paint and wallpaper.
- "elixir sulphanilamide" for streptococcal infection released prior to toxicity testing.
-  "torch sweaters"
-  DDT in human breastmilk.
-  "the Tooth Fairy Survey" testing strontium-90 contamination from nuclear testing.

To be continued .  .  .