Is the World Making You Sick?
nautil.us
Is the World Making You Sick?
1–10 of 57 posts
Re: Is the World Making You Sick?
#2What makes me sick is this fear-mongering. Go back to the industrialization in England if you want to see real pollution. We have made astonishing advances when it comes to increasing air quality. Catalysts in cars, all kinds of regulations about emissions. We are constantly trying to remove harmful substances from our lives - but that requires evidence, we can't just randomly blame 'chemicals'. It's far from perfect, I know that. But the average lifespan of humans has steadily gone up.
Re: Is the World Making You Sick?
#3There is room for improvement in the modern world. But you know what could be making us sick in our everyday lives? Cholera. Makes bpa a little less scary after all.
Re: Is the World Making You Sick?
#4> There are several types of proof. Nick Ashford and I observed the same patterns of inexplicable new-onset intolerances across very different toxic exposures in over a dozen countries. Sheep dippers using organophosphate pesticides in rural areas of Europe, radiology workers inhaling chemicals while developing films in New Zealand, Gulf War veterans, EPA workers in a remodeled and poorly ventilated office building in 1987, cleanup crews breathing fumes after oil spills. Many would get ill, and a small percentage never recovered. They became exquisitely sensitized, as well as disabled.
This doesn't really sound that crazy to me. People working with industrial chemicals need protection. This is a widely known and accepted fact. It doesn't point to the entire population getting sick from small doses of chemicals in their day to day lives, like the flame-retardants in their mattresses, as the article opens up claiming.
Re: Is the World Making You Sick?
#5The reflexive lay dislike for "chemicals" is a bit weird to me, because everything in this world is made up of chemicals. If anything, the ostensibly healthy foods like fruits and vegetables probably have more chemical complexity and heterogeneity than processed foods.
In terms of pollution and the presence of bad chemicals, it's nothing new. Burning any organic matter releases thousands of chemicals, and for all the romance around wood fires and stoves, those are much more polluting than most industrial processes today.
This isn't to invalidate the core concept of the article, which I can't really evaluate. It seems likely that some of the irritating illnesses people get are due to hypersensitivity to certain chemical agents that, in low doses, most people can tolerate. I just doubt that this is a new problem, given that we've always lived in somewhat of a chemical stew and our air and water have always harbored things that can kill us.
Re: Is the World Making You Sick?
#6I have a new law based on Betteridge's law of headlines:
Any scientist who claims to have produced a paradigm shift hasn't.
You're welcome to call it Monochr Law of Paradigms.
Re: Is the World Making You Sick?
#7I have a new law based on Betteridge's law of headlines: Any scientist who claims to have produced a paradigm shift hasn't. You're welcome to call it Monochr Law of Paradigms.
Mancini's corollary: the robustness of the scientific foundation of an article is inversely proportional to the frequency of the word "chemicals" in the article
Re: Is the World Making You Sick?
#8[deleted]
Re: Is the World Making You Sick?
#9> In 1962, physicist and historian Thomas Kuhn proposed that science makes progress not just through the gradual accumulation and analysis of knowledge, but also through periodic revolutions in perspective.
Kuhn is almost always referred to as a philosopher because he left physics to be a "philosopher of science".
In a nutshell I see an article about a scientist who worships a philosopher, believes she's the leader of the third major revolution in understanding human illness, and has a theory that's plausible yet difficult to test. Doesn't make the idea wrong, but these are not good signs.
In her defense she's published a few times on the subject* still something about the article's rubbing me the wrong way.
* - http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=claudia+miller
Re: Is the World Making You Sick?
#10> There are several types of proof. Nick Ashford and I observed the same patterns of inexplicable new-onset intolerances across very different toxic exposures in over a dozen countries. Sheep dippers using organophosphate pesticides in rural areas of Europe, radiology workers inhaling chemicals while developing films in New Zealand, Gulf War veterans, EPA workers in a remodeled and poorly ventilated office building i…
I see similar complaints about risk to health and personal safety from emergency services personnel, but their life expectancies suggest otherwise.
What I would really like to see is an estimation of the life-expectancy of the workers in these industries. Is it actually lower than average, or does it appear that the exposure has a minimal effect on health?
Do the benefits of working in the industry out-weigh the risks (e.g. good health insurance benefits for treating other diseases out-weigh harms from exposure)?
Are life insurance companies requiring higher premiums?