Product Description

This book reveals the hidden health dangers in many of the seemingly innocent products we encounter every day--a tube of glue in a kitchen drawer, a bottle of bleach in the laundry room, a rayon scarf on a closet shelf, a brass knob on the front door, a wood plank on an outdoor deck. A compelling exposé, written by a physician with extensive experience in public health and illustrated with disturbing case histories, How Everyday Products Make People Sick is a rich and meticulously documented account of injury and illness across different time periods, places, and technologies. It presents a picture not of one exceptional or corrupt industry but rather of how run-of-the-mill manufacturing processes and consumer marketing expose workers and the general public alike to toxic hazards. More troubling still, even when such hazards are recognized, calls for their control are routinely ignored. Written for a wide audience, it offers a critical and disquieting perspective on the relationship between industrial development and its adverse health consequences.
Among the surprisingly common hazards discussed in How Everyday Products Make People Sick:
* Glue and rubber cement
* Chlorine bleach
* Rayon and other synthetic textiles
* Welding and other metal fumes
* Wood preservatives
* Gasoline additives

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #156142 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 385 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780520248823
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"A superbly researched and scholarly book that traces the history of the author's selection of relatively well-known occupational hazards."--Occupational & Environmental Medicine

From the Inside Flap
"A superb tool for making our homes, finally, a safe place to raise children."--Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of Crimes Against Nature and St. Francis of Assisi.

"This is the work of a lifetime, one sure to be a classic for future lifetimes. Thirty years ago, Paul Blanc educated me about the threat of cancers caused by corporate and government negligence. Now he tells a great, entertaining and shocking story, based on a vast knowledge of science, government regulation, history and popular culture that shows our personal dependency and the almost-forsaken cause of public health."--Tom Hayden, former chairman, committee on natural resources, California state senate."

"A masterful synthesis of some of the very heated and critical environmental and occupational health issues of our time. Paul Blanc offers a grounded look at the long term history of industrial disease, and the toxic environment in which we now live -- something that has been overlooked in discussions of the rise of the modern environmental movement."--David Rosner, author of Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution and co-author of Are We Ready? Public Health Since 9/11.

About the Author
Paul D. Blanc is Professor of Medicine and holds the Endowed Chair in Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Customer Reviews

Industrial Hazards
This book focuses on industrial hazards, with brief explanations, and reasonably complete histories, of the industrial processes insofar as the history and the knowledge of the process can inform knowledge of the hazard presented to workers and to product users. One key theme is how knowledge of many of today's industrial hazards has been with us for very long periods of time, but that--and I interject here my own view--given the emphasis on economic development concurent with the rise of industrial society--medical and regulatory efforts at controlling or reducing the risks of the hazards have been unsuccessful, due to the inconvenence or costs to the industries so associated. Without actually using the term "externalities," a propensity to assign those costs from industries to their employees, the environment, and to product-users is documented.

Another key theme is that the knowledge of the hazards and their tentatively arrived-at mitigation measures has ebbed and flowed, with populations thinking that effective controls have been implemented when in fact they have not been.

A further point of knowledge is that there is no clear dividing line between exposures in the workplace and exposures in the home. For this reason, and probably because the medical literature from which he is able to draw has dealt more with workplace hazards than with hazards in the home, the focus is on industry, though the writing moves from industry to the home when the hazards move there also. I would recommend the book to a popular audience for knowledge of industrial hazards in the home, but only if the reader is willing to learn the author's lessons regarding how the danger origininates in industry and moves from there to the home, and is willing to also learn the important lesson that the hazards to the workers who produce the products are significant factors in making product choices, as well as the actual toxic effect to the user. He quotes Jerry Garcia on the hellish aspects of vinyl record production. No special knowledge of chemistry is required to understand the text.

Unfortunately I do not have the book in front of me now, but from memory, here are a few of the topics covered:

- mercury fumes
- cotton dust
- carbon disulfide
- chlorine
- metal working fumes
- multiple causes of Parkinsonism

I do not mean to imply that the author appeared to me to be less than comprehensive in his addressing of toxic processes and products, although he did not deal extensively with military industries, nor with the current issue regarding the environmental distribution of uranium munitions. He touched on the shortcomings of the regulatory process under lassiz-faire capitalism, and sees the two most important upcoming issues, besides recovering from recent efforts at governmental deregulation and disassembling and hampering of regulatory agencies, as the toxic effects of additives to gasoline, and the toxic effects of wood preservation chemicals, both of which are throughly reviewed, noting the special dangers to children.

I enjoyed his end-noted documentantion of the most obscure points of his historical reviews, some of which were not even central to what he was saying. I felt he liked doing this sort of extensive research, was expert in his field, and that the writing was a labour of love.

This is actually a brilliant History book, poorly marketed.
Some imbecile at the publishing company gave this book what they must have thought was a trendy title. By doing that, they missed the market for what turns out to be one of the most interesting history books I've read all year--and I read a lot of history.

What this book really is, is a history of how changes in industrial processes have had unintended health consequences. It also documents the political and social forces that have kept the health consequences of these various chemicals from being known and regulated.

All this sounds dry and dusty, but the author writes with a lively, well-documented, anecdote-rich style that modestly cloaks a depth of research far beyond what I've read in history books written by trained historians. It's a pleasure to read, and in the process of reading it you'll learn a great deal about the history of plastic manufacturing, how artificial textiles are made, the uses of industrial bleaching, and many dozens of other intriguing processes which make our world what it is.

What a pleasure to discover that there still are a few highly educated "renaissance" people in the world who can combine expertise in medicine, history, social thought and engineering to come up with such a delightful, well-written read.

If I had the power, I'd nominate this book for the National Book Award in History!

An Exemplar for General Interest Texts in Occupational Toxicology
Given the recent proliferation of pulp-professional books reviewing environmental toxicology, Dr. Paul Blanc's immediate challenge in *How Everyday Products Make us Sick* is to set his work apart from its peers. To anyone who merely browses Blanc's book, it will quickly become apparent that he easily obviates this challenge.


And to anyone who studies his book in depth, it will become clear that Blanc has at once established himself as a member of that rare species called "polymath;" a species populated by the likes of Jared Diamond, Joseph Campbell, and James Burke.


Of all such authors, Blanc's style and scope most closely mirrors that of Burke, whose celebrated "Connections" series on BBC set a new standard for integrated, iconoclastic scholarship. While, as an occupational toxicologist, I am admittedly partial to Blanc's field of study, I am anything but partial to its existing body of literature. Before reading--and re-reading--Blanc's book, I had yet to encounter a model for conveying occupational toxicology to the general public both coherently and charmingly.


Yet Blanc's breakthough compendium is nothing if not both charming and coherent. It will undoubtedly captivate both professionals and non-professionals, although non-professionals will likely gain the most insight from this book. (Professionals, and/or perfectionists, will reap immeasurable reward from Blanc's immaculate footnotes; worthy of separate publication in their own right).


Like James Burke, Blanc inter-weaves science, history, and culture with such electrifying (and refreshingly irreverent) flair as to virtually prove Mark Twain's saw that nothing has been more detrimental to human knowledge than traditional, pulpous modes of education.




Christian P. Erickson, M.D., M.P.H.
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christianerickson@alumni.duke.edu