ABSTRACT
I. INTRODUCTION From the time of the Industrial Revolution through much of the twentieth century, man has ignored the conservation of his resources and the contamination of his environment and workplace. Thousands of chemicals exist in the workplace and environment. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 was the first political figure to recognize the importance of this contamination, stating: “Conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life.” Alice Hamilton, the first American physician to devote a career to industrial medicine, would comment in 1943: “American medical authorities had never taken industrial diseases seriously. . . . workers accepted the risk with fatalistic submissiveness as part of the price one must pay for being poor” (1). To this day, our solid waste tends to
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end up in the poor areas of our society because poor people have little political influence. Rachel Carson, in her enlightened book Silent Spring, first drew public attention to this problem (2). Forty years later, roughly 3000 chemicals are produced annually in quantities exceeding 1 million pounds. The National Research Council has concluded that 78% of these compounds lack minimal toxicity information (3) while the Environmental Defense Fund reported in 1997 that such data were lacking for 71% of chemicals produced in large quantity (4). As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. commented during the William J. Taylor Executive Lecture Series at Westminster College in March 2000, “The most devastating impact of the free market is the suspension of laws that protect us.” He would later say, “Investment in the environment is an investment in our infrastructure.” Yet, as the late Dr. Hyman Zimmerman noted, “The issues have been clouded, however, by the incompleteness of the database, and the judgments are compromised by the efforts to balance the potential and proposed adverse effects of many pollutants against the important sociologic, economic and medical benefits. . . . Containment of the risks posed by environmental contamination requires systematic and coordinated epidemiologic, toxicologic and clinical studies to set the stage for the proper control measures” (5). A decade later, fewer than 30% of potentially toxic chemicals have been adequately tested and we have continuing exposure in the environment and workplace to known hepatotoxins such as vinyl chloride (6) and new exposures to yet-to-be-identified chemicals, as recently reported in petrochemical workers in Brazil (7,8).
