ABSTRACT
From the time of the industrial revolution through much of the twentieth century, man has
ignored the contamination of his environment and workplace. Thousands of chemicals, many
of them untested for toxicity, exist in the workplace and environment. President Theodore
Roosevelt was the first political figure to recognize the importance of this contamination,
stating in 1907: “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 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 one million
pounds. The National Research Council has concluded that 78% of these compounds lack
minimal toxicology information (3). The Environmental Defense Fund in 1997 reported 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 (on the
environment) at Westminster College in March 2000, “The most devastating impact of the
free market is the suspension of laws that protect us.” In November 2005, nearly 100 years after
President Roosevelt’s admonition, the problem continues with the Environmental Protection
Agency frustratingly attempting to make the Clean Air Act rules for coal-fired plants more
industry-friendly. One of the possible implications for hepatotoxicity is an increased release of
mercury which becomes bioconcentrated in the food chain after being absorbed by fish (5).
Mr Kennedy 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” (6). A decade later, fewer
than 30% of potentially toxic chemicals have been adequately tested and there is continuing
exposure in the environment and workplace to known hepatotoxins, such as vinyl chloride (7)
and yet-to-be-identified hepatotoxic chemicals, as recently reported in petrochemical workers
in Brazil (8).
