The Latest in Poisons for Our Children

The news this week that a judge in France found Monsanto's pesticide Lasso to be the cause of a man's sickness is a good example of struggles that persist - as much as those chemicals do in the environment - over time.

Before Lasso, let's look at what persistence means.

Manila, Philippines

Activist Post www.activistpost.com is reporting on a study by a group of Harvard people showing that cadmium is a toxic chemical, especially for kids. Cadmium may be more poisonous than lead, the professors say - an important result if you're handicapping the Most Pernicious Chemical derby.

This study brought my attention back to1979, when my wife Mary got a job in Santa Rosa, California. We were living at the time in San Francisco. As we looked for a place to live, there was one good prospect right next to the freeway that slices through the heart of Santa Rosa. We were interested in having kids, so I put the kibosh on that house because it was pretty well known at least by environmentalists that automobile tires spewed out cadmium, and so there were rules about siting facilities like schools near freeways where the cadmium levels were considered to be unacceptably high for children to ingest.

Hangzhau, China

Aside from complying with the Harvard Professors Full Employment Act, one wonders what this new study contributes past what we knew at least 33 years ago. I suppose it's a lot safer to just keep studying a problem, rather than doing something about it. Nowadays there is ample information about the toxicity of cadmium, for example cadmium at auto tire recyclers, and I even found info about cadmium problems with growing container gardens in old tires.

In that same period, before we moved up north from San Francisco, I was running a modest pot of money from a social change-oriented foundation. We funded the White Lung Association, based in San Pedro. This group consisted mostly of former shipyard workers (San Pedro was a major ship construction port), who had been breathing asbestos and were suffering terribly from asbestosis and even worse, the insidious cancer of the lining around the lung - mesothelioma, now famous from late night TV ads by lawyers who specialize in suing over this disease.

Leh, Ladakh

In staffing the grant I learned about the health effects of asbestos. The illnesses caused by this mineral were well described by Pliny the Elder, who was a contemporary of Jesus. And you could find information over the centuries - and once modern science was invented - studies, showing the cause and effect relationship between asbestos, sickness and death. The dangers of asbestos are ancient history.

So I'm glad the judge in France found in favor of the man poisoned by Lasso, and if the decision survives on appeal, we could even see France joining the other countries (the USA not among them) that already have banned Lasso.

But - I'm not sure how many court decisions, how many studies of essentially the same thing we need. Good activism about scientific controversies can be helped by solid scientific support. But there is a tendency to study things forever, for each study to recommend more study, while the activists who can actually make changes in the world live on handouts and sleep on couches.