Some Chemicals More Toxic Than First Thought

Back in the 1950s, when I was about nine, I had an itch one day to be a chemist. I went out to the garage where my father kept cans and jars of various paints, oils, paint removers, shoe polishes and a dozen other chemical concoctions that hadn't been touched in several years. I found a chipped bowl my mother was throwing out and started putting different 'chemicals' into the bowl, mixing them up as I went along. Soon I had a foul-smelling brownish-yellow sludge that I didn't know what to do with. It was obvious I was no chemist so I found some plastic wrapping and then paper sacks to wrap up the sludge in its bowl and I dumped it all in the trash barrel thinking I had taken care of the problem.

Perhaps a nine-year-old can be excused but there is no such excuse for chemical companies, the oil giants and pharmaceuticals who would rather not know what their chemicals are doing downstream or in the nation's water table. Scientific American has an article that suggests things are even more complicated than we thought:

One chemical alone may do no harm in low doses, but in conjunction with a few of its peers, even in doses that are individually safe, it can inflict serious harm. New research in frogs shows that a mixture of nine chemicals found in a seed-corn field in York County, Nebraska, killed a third of exposed tadpoles and lengthened time to metamorphosis by more than two weeks for the survivors.

Biologist Tyrone Hayes and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have spent the past four years testing four herbicides, two fungicides and three insecticides commonly used in American cornfields. Individually, the chemicals had little effect on developing tadpoles at low concentrations, such as about 0.1 part per billion. But when Hayes exposed them to all nine at the same low level in the laboratory--the lowest level actually found in the field--the future frogs fell prey to endemic infection. Those that survived ended up smaller than their counterparts raised in clean water--despite taking longer to mature into adults. "In humans, this is like saying, 'The longer you are pregnant, the smaller your baby will be,' which means the womb is no longer a nurturing environment," Hayes notes.

Now some might wonder why we should care about frogs but that's like asking coal miners who used to take canaries down into the mines why they cared what happened to their birds. Later in the Scientific American article, there's a discussion of studies that show rats start having problems with some of these unintended mixtures. The physiology of rats starts getting uncomfortably close to that of humans. We need to think a great deal more about pollution and how the effects can be minimized. The United States should be leading the world in environmental technology and polllution control, but that would require leadership and vision and there's too little of that in Washington at the moment.