Except of course, they aren’t. Our world is chemicals, our life is chemistry.
This rant is brought to you by yet another TV talking head rabbiting on about
“natural remedies, not those chemical ones”
Sorry Kochie, all those natural remedies are full of chemicals too. Chemicals don’t only come from factories, where they are not created but refined from naturally occurring raw materials and recombined to form new compounds.
Chemicals are also combined, recombined, recycled and recombined again every time you, me and every other animal breathes and eats, just for starters. Chemicals also gad about when every plant respires and photosynthesises – every plant and every animal is made of chemical elements and every natural remedy consists of active ingredients that have consistent conventional chemical names e.g. vitamins.
This idea that chemicals are nasty and unnatural and dangerous is rampant. Why? Is it because of the many signs and images like these?
It’s as if people see HazChem signs about “dangerous chemicals” and think that the message is “dangerous CHEMICALS” instead of “DANGEROUS chemicals”. “Dangerous” is a modifier there, not an absolute descriptor – like DANGEROUS dogs, or DANGEROUS rocks, or DANGEROUS intersections, or DANGEROUS goods – everybody understands that not all dogs or rocks or intersections or goods are dangerous, so why the difference with chemicals?
Mind you, having once rolled my eyes until I got a migraine while listening to a horrendously smug motivational speaker (<= oxymoron alert) describe how he just loved "new car smell" and actually sold his cars to underlings as soon as they didn't smell that way any more, I cannot resist doing a Muntz.
Tangent the First:
While on the topic of the Lacking of Clue, I’m not quite enough of a meanyhead to actually send the Conspicuously Clueless to this link (yet, anyway) but I have to say I love it deeply.
Tangent the Second:
While searching for images of chemicals, I also found this shot taken in an abandoned chemical factory. Straight out of Blade Runner, what?
I also found this cool shot (which I’d seen before and may have even blogged already (yonks ago) of scale models of our Solar System. The Sun and the planets are all made of chemicals too, natch.
Images credit: images on this post originally uploaded by skycaptaintwo, szlea, soldiersmediacenter and Mike Licht, made available under a Creative Commons Attribution License
crossposted from Hoyden About Town
Poor old Kochie!!
Another VERY scary chemical has been investigated here: http://www.dhmo.org/
it’s a story the MSM just won’t touch….. ummm then again, maybe Kochie would??
Good post.
A related issue is the “yuk factor” which makes some people reluctant to drink recycled water, and many politicians reluctant to argue for this measure, even though all the water ever drunk on the planet was once mingled with toxic hydrocarbons and dirt in comets, and in the subsequent billions of years has been recycled countless times through bodies, corpses, bodily fluids of various kinds, digestive processes and excretions, mud, impure acqueous solutions and mixtures, etc., etc.
Ambigulous, I should definitely have included that link in the post. Thanks for remembering it.
Paul, agreed on the recycled water. I don’t have any problems with the idea of water recycled through a treatment plant rather than through the ecosystem, but many others obviously do.
It reminds me of the absurd terror and disgust people have about “germs”. What are germs anyway? Do they mean bacteria? Every human on earth – even the cleanest germ-phobic hygiene freak – has a mouth and a digestive tract literally teeming with micro-organisms. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to digest food. Like the hysterical distrust of “chemicals”, I suspect this fear of “germs” has been drummed up specifically as a way for advertisers to sell their products. And, as usual, the MSM is more than happy to go along for the scare-mongering ride.
No worries tigtog,
I was hesitant to post it because I thought it might be old-hat to many readers. It’s just so horrid and troubling, that site. And still no Govt action!!! Even the UN and WHO are sitting on their hands. Deary-me.
Oh thank God I’m not the only person around who gets driven absolutely spare by this kind of ignorant ‘Eewww, chemicals’ nonsense. I have been aggressively shoving this argument down the throats of friends-and-relations since forever and all they ever do is look at me sideways. It’s times like this I get a glimpse of why so many of the science-minded despise the arts-minded.
On a distantly related point, I howled with laughter for several minutes at a commenter on (I think) this very blog not long ago when he proudly described his terrible hangover and then said that he wasn’t going to take painkillers for the headache because he didn’t like taking “tablets” unless he absolutely had to. Yep, alcoholic poisoning is perfectly all right but you mustn’t pollute the sacred temple of your body with mild medicinal pharmaceuticals.
The corollary to “chemicals” are bad is “natural” is good, which is equally stupid.
If anyone disagrees, I presume that next time you are at the dentist getting a tooth extracted, you’ll want it done naturally, as opposed to with an anaesthetic (that is, with chemicals).
Most pharmaceuticals are developed from plant and other ‘natural’ sources too. Natural is an almost meaningless word, unless someone is importing substances from an extraterrestrial source.
Amen to mindlessmunkey. In our bodies, bacterial cells outnumber our own cells by 10 to one and many of us have these little critters living on our skin.
Chemicals keep me alive. I like ‘em.
But I have to say I prefer Kochhie to the sexist Liberal Party front men on the Today show. Richard Reid always excepted. No matter how silly Kochie can get. Of course, really, I should listen to AM, but I can’t be bothered tuning in the radio.
I feel the same way when people start banging on about ‘organic’ food.
Oh, stupid me. I’ve been eating that inorganic food, made out of rocks and metal.
“Yep, alcoholic poisoning is perfectly all right but you mustn’t pollute the sacred temple of your body with mild medicinal pharmaceuticals.”
Better the devil you know?
There was this old kiddies mystery book (Nancy Drew? Hardy Boys?) where someone or a bunch of people get seriously ill with arsenic poisoning, and everyone tries to work out who and how-dunnit. Turns out they’d all been eating the hotel’s delicious Waldorf salad for days, and the walnuts and apple seeds dunnit.
I think there’s something in that for all of us.
FUCK WALDORF SALAD!
I love this thread. Seriously, when someone says there’s no chemicals in something it drives me spare! And Yes PC, sadly it’s usually arty types. The shame, the shame!
Good post, tigtog. I get exasperated by people who have no faith in prescription medicines, but go for “natural” herbal remedies. Many prescription medicines and other pharmaceuticals have their origin in herbal remedies, the difference being that the active compound has been identified, tested for efficacy and then delivered so that the dose of the active compound is tightly controlled. Herbal remedies give you no dosage control worthy of the name.
Same for medicine vs alternative remedies in general. A remedy established by clinical trial to be safe and efficacious is by definition medicine. And that’s the difference.
Indeed. Anyone want some delicious homemade herbal tea?
Photo uploaded by Minette Layne
Jobby, I share your pain, but the ‘organic’ horse has well and truly bolted.
Mindlessmunkey, ‘germs’ is a pet hate of mine too. Independent test show that your toilet harbours millions of germs.
NOOOO!!!! TEH HUMANITY!!!! GERMS?!?!? Where I go to sit down and squeeze shit out of my arsehole?! SAY IT ISN’T SO!!!!!
Recycling sewerage for drinking is not necessarily a good idea if you can avoid it.
I don’t think it is silly to be wary of processed chemicals. By processing and concentrating naturally occurring chemicals it is possible to make them poisonous, e.g. it is very very difficult to overdose yourself on vitamins by eating fruit and vegetables, but apparently it is easier to do so when scarfing bottles of multivitamins.
It also happens that nature and millions of years of evolution have provided lots of nice empirical evidence about what is harmful and what is not. I’m not advocating using “natural remedies” but I do think this “how silly they are, those uneducated buffoons!” attitude can go too far. Fair enough critique the remedy, it might well be useless, or worse toxic, but you’ve pretty much said everything is made of chemicals so all chemicals are ok. This is not true.
I’ve seen Penn and Teller doing the dihydrogen monoxide prank and I thought it was lame. Basically all they proved were that people were nice and would trust them and take what they said at face value.
Come now, it must have been some comfort to Romeo and (?)Socrates that those draughts were 100% Natural & additive free!
Amen to Mindlessmunkey. Bacterial cells in our body outnumber our own by 10 to one and many of us have microscopic demodex mites living on our skin. Really, the character in MIB who was made of insects in a human skin? -that is kind of like all of us.
As an introductory exercise in science I often give a list of everyday things to my primary school classes and ask them to identify which contain chemicals. Predictably they tend think apples don’t but oven cleaner does. Giving the same list to adults very often produces identical responses.
Good post. I remember the fuss where some idiots claimed white phosphorous was a chemical weapon. Well, it was a chemical AND a weapon, so obviously…
Paul: the thing about recycled water is that it hasn’t dropped out of a cloud, it’s a product of a complex industrial process – a process that’s fallible. You only have to sniff Carrum Downs when someone’s poured something down the drain and killed the friendly bacteria in order to realise that. The natural process of evaporation and precipitation is a great decoupling of the source from the destination, and superior to anything we’re likely to do industrially.
I’d rather see it be sent to farms than fed back into the water system. That’s safer, and mostly what we do here in Melbourne already.
Fabulous post, TT. I’m sure there’s a couple of buzzwords like ‘chemicals’ out there that are used in a similar manner. ‘Radiation’ is one. ‘Artificial’ is another. ‘Germs’, as pointed out by MM, is yet another.
Kochy, the twit, should have known better.
A lack of understanding of chemistry, physics, probability or ratios is the foundation of numerous businesses of most advertisements.
that should have been “and of most advertisements.” Double meh.
No she hasn’t. Read it again.
Yes, that’s exactly what bothers me. Although, living in Adelaide where the
sludgewater (what there is of it) provides all sorts of unspeakable nutrients anyway, one’s stomach has been long hardened to such things.Advertisers also misunderstand basic spelling and grammar. It’s quite amusing, really: here they are, trying to present a particular product or service as iconic, magical, Godlike, and they marshall the collected forces of designers, artists and musicians.
And yet they can’t even get the f*ing spelling right!
The most obvious example that comes to mind at the moment are the ads seen at various points around Melbourne that say:
You don’t have to go to uni,
to go to uni.
Er, no. But learning how to use commas would be a nice start.
Adelaide water tells us nothing about recycled sewage water, Dr Cat. It has yet to be recycled.
Didn’t the Ponds Institute do some ground-breaking work on this during the 1950s?
As I recall, chemicals were found to be 50% more effective when mixed by good-looking women dressed in serious lab-coats.
There’s something in the water here I thought I’d hallucinated my first comment, but teh link held it up. (And again I say Amen)
It is actually quite easy to overdose on natural sources of Vitamin A, Aidan, as kava drinkers, assorted polar explorers and anyone who really loves Paw Paw can tell you.
Katz wrote:
It’s the cleavage exposure that does it. The same physical light bending properties that affect and magnetically draw the eye have a similar effect on the chemicals. It’s just a little bit of naturally added goodness.
As an arts graduate I have to say… bravo… thanks for the link to dhmo.org (love it lol) … and I take umbrage at the assumption that I cannot somehow parse the discourses surrounding the rather dubious dichotomys of chemical/natural, organic/inorganic or even the rather facile science/arts divide.
TimT I suspect that whether Kochy knows better or not is probably not the point… scaremongering and sensationalising sells… always has and sadly probably always will…
DJ …You’re probably right, but once again is probably not the point. Misinformation, playing on fears, offering vague solutions to pique hope… these are all tactics used. A misuse of pyschological understandings of human behaviour that also finds its way into politics (children overboard anyone??) …
Related (in some strange way): there’s a kebab chain that has a wall painted with claims about how ‘natural’ its product is, which includes the gem: “Superfluous in anti-oxidants.”
One of my favourites is that people will ‘never’ put 1,2,3,4,5,6 down as their lotto numbers, as that “could never happen!” as opposed to 5,10,12,22,34,44.
Jobby – that or the Ionica chickens – “processed chemically free”!
This’ll freak ya’ll out.
Apparently all the bacteria found in an average human can weigh over half a kilo just on it’s own.
DJ, I remember reading a fantastic article in the Australian Skeptic some years ago about the superstitions of gamblers. One belief many held was that ‘luck’ could run out of slot machines, and that it was good to change machines every so often. Another was that some machines were always more lucky than others. Another was that luck could be held in some objects (I’m wearing my lucky ring today! etc). I love your example, tho!
Great post tigtog.
cf. The six deadly sins of Greenwashing http://www.terrachoice.com/Home/Six%20Sins%20of%20Greenwashing/The%20Six%20Sins
1. a lot of blame has to lie with the marketers. I had an epiphany in Woolies the other day when looking for washing up liquid. I was confronted with a massive, kaleidoscopic wall of detergents each making claims about its ‘eco friendliness’ or its capacity to keep our lives free from some kind of anthropomorphised ‘nasties’. So much guff. The dreadful ironies are that 1) the eco bottles were made from petro chemicals, and 2) many of the ‘branded’ products probably originated from the same factory (I know, for example, that Home Brand Weet Biscuits are sourced from the Sanitarium facility).
2. it seems to me like all this furious boundary maintenance (self vs. nature/environment) has deep psycho-social roots in, at least, Victorian times – the period that is, not the state (though the 7:30 report last night on transforming the Werribee Zoo into an African Theme Park has conflated the two in my mind). If the amount of money spent advertising Pine-o-Clean and super paper towel wipes is anything to go by (I’d imagine it’s well into the millions) then there is a fair bit at stake maintaining a naive version of these divisions.
Luck and poker machines. I hardly ever play them. A few years ago I was in a pub with my then girlfriend who liked to play pokies with her beer. Anyway, I put a dollar in and got heaps of dollar coins. Instead of putting back thru, I left the pub. Haven’t played pokies since. Now that was a lucky poker machine.
” One of my favourites is that people will ‘never’ put 1,2,3,4,5,6 down as their lotto numbers, as that “could never happen!” as opposed to 5,10,12,22,34,44. ”
Actually, it is better to put a random set of numbers than an obvious sequence. Not because the random set is more likely to win, but because lots of people are likely to put down the sequence, so if you win with a sequence, you’ll have to share the prize.
For the same reason, it’s better to put down numbers higher than 31. Many people choose their birthday, partner’s birthday etc as their numbers.
Maybe yes, maybe no Spiros. Of the people I know that have played Lotto, none have ever used a sequence but rather either had the computer pick them or as you say used ’significant’ numbers with, as you say, birthdays often featuring.
* It’s amusing that many consumers of illicit plant materials (cannabis, opium, magic mushrooms, etc) totally understand the difference in concentrations of active ingredients in such “natural” products, while preferring to choose “natural” medicinal products and discount any claim that the same QA considerations apply to these “natural” products.
* The claims of manufacturers of “natural” cures imply their products have a biological effect.
* These claims have some truth in some cases
* If a product has a biological effect, it can (especially with dodgy doses) have an adverse effect. The greater the biological effect, the greater the need for quality control in “natural” products.
* Poor QA in “natural” products HAS caused a number of deaths, so the EU at least has regulated the “natural” cure industry so their products have the same quality control over the dose as well as the vehicle (which affects absorption rates, etc).
* The “natural cure” industry here in Oz is not as well regulated as in the EU.
* I’d rather take something that reliably contains 500 mg of aspirin or 5 mg atropine than chew on willowbark or belladonna, without knowing that growing conditions of the plants were standardized, and that they did not grow near pollution sources (such as roads with heavy traffic).
Lotto contestants don’t pick numbers randomly. Therefore, you’ll get a bigger payout if the relatively unpopular numbers come up.
Thus 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 may well be a very unpopular combination attracting a very high payout by virtue of the fact that a win would be shared with fewer people.
Su said:
Pawpaw has 87 IUs/100g. Apparently the recommended upper limit of Vitamin A supplements is 10000 IUs/day for an adult. So you’d be eating 10kgs of pawpaw a day. That is a pawpaw lover alright.
The polar explorers ate dog livers. The Innuit have known not to do that shit for thousands of years apparently (see above when I talked about millions of years of experience with naturally occurring substances).
As for Kava, you’d have a hard time finding a BETTER example of what I said previously. Supplements containing extracts of kava were linked to liver damage, but apparently traditional usage has not resulted in such damage.
Thanks, PC. I misses that when I read Aidan’s first comment.
Aidan, not only was I conspicuously not asserting that at all, I hereby emphatically assert the exact opposite. Yes everything is made of chemicals. No, that does not mean all chemicals are OK, hence I actually included a picture of a “Poison” label.
The point is that those who understand that everything is chemicals are actually far more likely to understand which chemicals actually represent a true hazard and which don’t, rather than just assuming that everything that looks “natural” must be good for us, while everything that looks like manufactured chemical products MUST be bad (and vice versa).
Many naturally occurring substances are good for us, while many technologically extracted, refined and recombined substances are good for us. Many naturally occurring substances are bad for us, while many technologically extracted, refined and recombined substances are bad for us.
The trick to knowing which is which is scientific literacy, and the self-correcting nature of the scientific method conducted under peer review.
I don’t think this example proves your point as well as you think. The Inuit only knew because of knowledge passed down generations by those who had seen someone die after eating dog livers. Once polar explorers knew that someone had died after eating dog livers they also knew “not to do that shit” just as well as the Inuit did. Millions of years of experience is not required (edited to add – and just as well, humans haven’t been around quite that long), merely the transmission of knowledge.
Knowledge is the key: not just naturalness, not just technological purity. Actual knowledge.
argh! pet hate alert!
And actually the skin rash from chronic high level of kava intake has nothing to do with vitamin A- I was being very sloppy and making assumptions. No one knows what causes that skin rash, though they think it might be due to disturbance of cholesterol metabolism. On the other hand I do know of someone eating pawpaws daily and subsequently developing the skin rash associated with chronic high vitamin A intake. I had no idea he was eating 10 kg of the stuff. What a pig. Most likely he was taking a vitamin supplement as well and the paw paw put him over the edge – I concede your point.
It is not simply dog livers but seal livers and polar bear livers that are known to cause extreme toxicity. Anyway – you cannot deny that those livers are a natural source!
Btw, good post tigtog!
Similar to the GM food debate…. dangerous GENES.
This blog post even has a song:
When
a bodya collection of amino acids and carbon-based chemicalsMeets a
a bodya collection of amino acids and carbon-based chemicalsComin’ thro
the ryethe collection of amino acids and carbon-based chemicalsCan
a bodya collection of amino acids and carbon-based chemicalsKiss
a bodya collection of amino acids and carbon-based chemicalsCan
a bodya collection of amino acids and carbon-based chemicals?Tigtog said
Yep. My bad, I got carried away with the tone of the first few comments.
I guess my point was excessively sneering at people who conflate “natural” with “safe” leads to sneering at other legitimate concerns like recycled drinking water and GM crops.
(NB: The millions of years referred to evolution of plants and animals as above, that was sloppy writing sorry)
My point was that we have alot of experience of the effects of naturally occurring substances. The whole of human history in fact. Whilst not a controlled trial human experience has value.
su said:
No. But we know not to eat them because we have human experience which knows not to eat them. With an artificial substance, or an natural substance extracted, purified and possibly concentrated, we don’t have any experience of it’s effects.
Some experience – or rather the conclusions we draw from experience — has value and other conclusions we draw from experience have no value. Relying on “experience” alone leads to a great many fallacies — most harmless and inconsequential in the scheme of things, some not at all harmless. Some of the “lessons learnt” over human history are accurate, many others are just confusing correlation with causation, apophenia or whatnot. And of course much of what we think of as “traditional wisdom” was developed over long periods of trial and error, hypothesising and testing, science in other words. In conclusion, this.
Good link, Amanda. So good that I’ll embed the image.
“No. But we know not to eat them because we have human experience which knows not to eat them”
I dispute that claim. I had no idea until I read this thread. If I had been starving I might have been able to overcome my aversion to eating liver and eaten it because I didn’t know it would probably kill me.
“With an artificial substance, or an natural substance extracted, purified and possibly concentrated, we don’t have any experience of it’s effects.”
I also dispute that. Based on your own arguments we now have that knowledge for existing products.
Sorry, couldn’t help myself as you seem to want to have the argument both ways. We know about liver because of past experience but we don’t know about artificail or extracted products because we don’t have experience.
I agree. Which is why it should not be dismissed out of hand.
Whatevs. I don’t think I am making a huge point here.
I dispute that claim. I had no idea until I read this thread. If I had been starving I might have been able to overcome my aversion to eating liver and eaten it because I didn’t know it would probably kill me.
What you don’t know WILL hurt you?
Damn! I had been hoping if I ignored that grand piano hanging over my head, it would go away…
“Damn! I had been hoping if I ignored that grand piano hanging over my head, it would go away…”
Wow! You’ve got a genuine Damocles Bros Grand?
Their tone is second to none!
When life hands you a Damocles Bros grand piano hanging over your head, TimT, you should levitate and play Beethoven on it. No guts, no glory.
In a gold lamé set of budgie smugglers, obviously.
Pollytickedoff, I went to release your comment from the spaminator (which has been hyperactive today) and accidentally clicked the wrong button, deleting both the original and the repeat. Sorry!
That is true for ‘Natural’ or herbal medicines, because they can be released without clinical trials, unlike pharmaceuticals.
This post links nicely with the call for a campaign to increase Health Literacy
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=13933amongst the general and school population.
Well Adelaide draws a lot of its drinking water from the Murray and a lot of communities upstream dump their treated sewerage into the Murray. So those in Adelaide really are drinking recycled water.
Yes, I think I was implying both of those things.
Now excuse me while I look up ‘rainwater tanks’ in the Yellow Pages.
Once upon a time I lived in Deniliquin (on the Edward River, which is a tributary to the Murray), and everyone drank rainwater tank water there. No way would anyone drink the tap water. That’s a long way upstream from Adders!
I think everyone has to get over drinking recycled water. Here in Oz, we’ve just been too spoiled. Europeans are over it.
Yes, great thread. I remember the DHmO page well, I’m glad it’s still surviving, one of the truly great hoax websites! I also remember when I was younger and more naive, and (it must be said) hostage to the perceived need to being “pure” when you’re providing a uterus for the next generation, finding a naturopath to give me a herbal hayfever remedy instead of taking antihistamines (and again it must be said, the antihistammines available from the chemist did pretty much suck in those days. We have to take into account the fact that the Dirty Fucking Hippies didn’t, in fact, have the better choices we have now in regular drugs – the pill, for instance, carried a real risk of thrombosis…Now, where was I?) Anyway, I look at Girlchild now on the other computer doing her Fanfic or whatever she’s on now, and I shudder. Because “bitter herb” concoctions were widely used, I later learned, to procure miscarriages. Well, I escaped that one.
mr tog didn’t even realise that he’d been drinking recycled water while living in London (before he emigrated here) until I told him! Nobody was up in arms about it there.
35dk.au
In fairness to the detergent industry, they have improved their products in recent years by massive reductions in the level of phosphates, sodium etc. A genuine and non-trivial advance in the qualitity of their products.
But the advertising that goes with it is still pretty bad, I agree.
46Andrew
Similar to the GM food debate…. dangerous GENES.
No, it is not about individual genes. It is about potentially dangerous novel combinations of genes, that have not been subject to selection pressure in the evolutionary marketplace.
Important difference.
Props to tigtog and a big round of applause to all the skeptics who have outed themselves on this thread.
It’s nice to have it confirmed what a smart, level-headed, non-moonbat crowd LPers actually are!
(SAFETY NOTICE: This message contains no chemicals – only 100% pure natural photons and electrons)
This post was a lot of fun to put together, finding pics and links and tangential discoveries. I wouldn’t mind doing something similar on a semi-regular basis.
Anyone with suggestions for another topic I can have a little rant about please let me know.
Well, what about them household germs then? And those products that kill 99.9% thereof?
Calculating how long it takes the little buggers to repopulate shouldn’t be all that hard with the resources on the web.
I find this post and thread rather bizarre, a bit like a trip back to the USA in the 1950s to be awash with joy once again on how the Chemical Revolution is going to make our lives perfect.
Yes, a lack of health literacy and general ignorance of science is incredibly irritating, including the marketing-fed obsession/horror with bacteria & germs. Even more irritating is how industries that have bombarded us with synthetic chemicals, having sensed our growing trepidation, have completely co-opted and corrupted the meaning of the word ‘natural’ (and same goes for ‘organic’ for that matter).
But perhaps people would like to have a long read on why the EU introduced REACH; or stop to contemplate the fact that humans have derived/synthesized/extracted and created over 100,000 new chemical substances, of which a bare fraction have been tested for their health effects, and virtually none have been tested in combination with regard to health effects. That’s why we’re seeing fun things like endocrine disruption these days. Annie Leonar’s story of stuff has lots of good links and info.
I don’t want to drink recycled water not because it might have ‘germs’ in it, but because it would expose me to levels of just for one example, female hormones that all the women on the pill pee out into their toilet & which water recycling doesn’t remove. There’s some very interesting (if that’s the right word) evidence from the USA pointing to how the exposure of children to hormones through food and water (drink that GM milk!) is causing young girls to hit puberty earlier and earlier – hooray for chemicals!
So in short, I find this post disappointingly shallow. If the point was to highlight the misappropriation of language as a substitute of general health/science literacy, knock yourself out, tigtog. But to act as if we only need to worry about the chemicals we’ve worked out are poisonous is sensible, is just not, and at best you’ve perhaps accidentally conflated the two.
While snooping around an abandoned farm house I came across a small bottle of DDT labelled as such, sitting innocently on a shelf. It was about half full. There were also countless,emptied bottles of Rabbit Fermicide, the active ingredient, which I later discovered, is chloropictrin, more commonly known as mustard gas. Poor bunnies! Not to mention the farmer who used the stuff. Both these chemicals were once deemed safe by Scientists for the ‘everday’ farmer to use.
Obviously chemicals occur everywhere in nature, we cannot live without them. However I would like to remind everyone that Scientists are some times, completely and devastatingly wrong. The over-use of poisonous chemicals in ‘agribusiness’ is actually doing untold damage to the environment. I really don’t think they ought be considered benign, merely on some Scientist’s say so. I’m not opposed to the judicious use of chemicals but personally I’d rather wait until the ground has softened after rain to pull weeds, rather than spraying them with roundup and I’d just as sooner open the window and usher out the flies than dose them with a substance specifically designed to kill life.
A year or so ago I was required to help backline sheep, with very, very expensive stuff called ‘Vanquish’ I haven’t been trained in the use of chemicals, and stupidly didn’t read the label on the drum, trusting that my coworker or employer, who had asked me to do this would have advised me to take precautions if they thought necessary. So I didn’t tog up in elbow-length rubber gloves, face mask, and goggles, recommended by the manufacturer in fine print on the bottle. Subsequently, I apparently got covered in this odourless substance. That night I could not sleep. My face felt as though it had been burnt, yet when I worriedly peered into the mirror there was no sign of a redness. I had the equivalent of restless leg syndrome in my arms and couldn’t stop fidgeting, this was to my mind a neurological reaction to this stuff and by 3.00am I was in a something of a small state with definitely a lot more sympathy for the sheep who we deliberately squirted this stuff on. I understood more completely why they so feared us. I got up, googled and was duly alarmed.
My point is that the prevailing attitude on this farm and I daresay on the majority of farms in Australia is still one of ’she’ll be right mate’ and wearing gloves or goggles or protective clothing is seen as being completely uncool and unnecessary, because as we all know these things have been tested by Scientists. Most farmers or certainly the older ones, consider any efforts to protect oneself as being ’sissy’ or ‘precious’. As for their stock? Well if they’re not actually dead they must be alright and their land? Well just keep applying the super, pumping the creek dry and praying for rain. All this obviously absolutely sucks for our environment and ourselves because farmers control the major parts of it.
There are many agricultural chemicals being used in Australia that have been banned elsewhere. Perhaps in urban areas there has been an overreaction to the ideas expressed in, ‘Silent Spring’, but in rural Australian the reaction has barely registered, except that nowadays, to insist the first thing anyone going into agribusiness do, is complete is a dangerous chemical handling course.
I apologise if someone has already brought this up, but in (very) mild defence of the many friends who subscribe to the ‘natural, no chemicals’ nonsense — we were all teenagers in the hippie era when this kind of stuff was at its height — the basis of the mistrust is largely political: capitalist exploitation, Big Pharma hand in glove with politicians, that kind of thing. We were (rightly, I still think) suspicious of people trying to sell us things, and particularly suspicious of Establishment people trying to sell us things. Bad logic based on this well-found suspicion is one of the things that led to the obsession with the so-called natural.
I certainly don’t wish to advocate complacency. The ideals of science are all very fine, but where it intersects with the greed of industry and the market its perfectly obvious that nasty stuff slips through cracks. A comment addressing all the points raised by myriad and Caroline would be too long, so I’ll just address two points:
Careful with that factoid, Eugene. Estrogen per se is not water soluble, for a start. Many chemicals exhibit estrogenic activity without having ever been near a woman’s body. The major sources of xenoestrogens are industrial and farm chemicals, then there are the phytoestrogens, from botanical sources (the best-known being vitex, dang gui, American ginseng and cohosh – most of which have long been folk remedies for symptoms of menopause). The contribution of hormonal contraceptives is miniscule in comparison to these sources of estrogenic chemicals, despite the attempted beat-up by anti-contraceptive groups.
You might want to be careful about what else you’re drinking/eating – some of the plastics used to line some soft drink cans and for food storage and drinking bottles have been shown to release estrogenic chemicals when warmed (say, sitting on a pallet in a truck warmed by the sun).
It’s an odd response, isn’t it, considering that actual scientists are very keen on safety equipment and indeed are usually pictured either wearing it or with it conspicuously nearby.
Eg. Florida alligators and their small penises. I think that might have been the first instance of a proven link between pesticide runoff and endocrine disturbance?
You’re kind of proving my point though Tigtog, with your blithe list of the bazillion ways a person gets exposed to not-at-all-safe-but-widely-used chemicals. I’m aware of all you rattled off precisely because I am health and science -literate, and a huge part of that is being deeply suspicious of our rabidly care-free attitude to chemical creation and use, including derivation from natural sources.
The response to known toxins that Caroline documents on farms isn’t odd at all, because we haven’t really ever gone back and corrected the messages from the chemical revolution as a societal exercise; and farmers know they will be over-exposed anyway and are trapped by a large-scale industrialised chemical-reliant monocultural approach to farming to make a living, so a machismo-like fatefulness is a “logical” response on some levels.
Ps -hormones in pee / recycled water. I’ll try find you an online link to the report sitting on my desk that contradicts your sense that they are a miniscule source – basically it’s saying, ‘not in major cities’. And I’m not sure where you got the idea that they aren’t water soluble from?
myriad,
That CSIRO source you linked to gives the solubility of oestrogen in mg/l so while they’re not completely insoluble in the old dihydrogen monoxide, they’re not highly soluble either. Secondly, the reported concentrations of oestrogens in effluent are at most 70 nanograms/litre. Whether that effluent was actually reprocessed into drinking water isn’t stated.
What matters, if that effluent were recycled into drinking water is that the oestrogen content be well below a pharmacologically effective dose. I doubt that one or two ppm of oestrogen in my drinking water is going to give me man-boobs. According to the old uni text I’ve got sitting open beside my keyboard, I’ve been peeing out somewhere between two micrograms and 25 micrograms of oestrogens daily for quite a while. Women pee out a lot more.
By the time that pee has got into effluent, it’s been diluted with a lot of bathwater, storm water (maybe), washing up water, laundry run off, etc, etc. All the same, I’d have fewer qualms about drinking the result of filtering and distilling it than I would about eating a chicken breast that I knew had been plumped up with di-ethyl stilbestrol.
Lots of great points above.
Re Myriad #70 The issue of young girls reaching puberty earlier is well documented, though causal link remains complex. Interestingly it is earlier in african-american girls.
If it occurs earlier than 8 years of age its called Precocious Puberty ( sp – y’all know i can’t spell by now), but the broader shift downward in age in development is also worthy of study.
Factors currently implicated can be found in this paper.
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/040307WA.shtmlNumber one association is weight gain. Chemical exposure is up there as well, as is living in a home without an adult male (single mum family). Another hypothesis is over exposure to artificial light outside the naturally occuring rhythms, which changes the melatoninhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatoninlevels of the body.
AS for drinking recycled water - i've not looked into the estrogen research so i don't know. There does seem to be isolated evidence, however, that if you are a boy and you don't want to grow breasts, you probably should avoid Lavender scented products. On the other hand, teh estrogen stimulating properties, which arguably are responsible for l;avenders anecdotal association with calming, should possibly be made mandatory in football dressing rooms.
Heck a good dose of Lavender might give Sam Newman breasts, and he could spare women the insult and get off on groping himself.
Lavender’s possible link in boy breasts btw
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200702/s1838208.htmWho'da thought?
accidently moderated?
The spaminator is going beserk with rabid glee at the mo, sublimecowgirl. We’re fishing them out as fast as we can.
Gummo,
wasn’t linking to the CSIRO pub. as anything more than as a basis for questioning tigtog’s statement that hormones ain’t soluble. As a baby environmental scientist when first out of uni did lots of work on wastewater treatment plants, tho’ I appreciate you wouldn’t know that, but am well versed in the contents of wastewater. Which is probably also why I’m really skeptical when it comes to recycled water being safe not because engineers are eeevil or some such, but because I’m aware of precisely how many toxic substances end up in it, and have yet to find any technique that removes them all (except distillation).
If you’re happy with hormone levels – I’m not personally – then there’s antibiotics, various other medications being peed out regularly in high density populations, and lots of lovely miscellaneous compounds from our busy industry. Ozonation deals with lots, but certainly not all. Distillation takes it pretty much to the other extreme. And of course there’s more often than not no standards around these substances, or testing, because Denial is a river governments like to recycle and ask us to partake from.
I say this as someone who lives on tank water in the driest part of Tas, currently surrounded by crisp paddocks, and working currently in water policy. I’m well aware we have a crisis on our hands and would be thrilled if recycled water was completely safe, and part of ‘the answer’. But unfortunately our proclivity with chemicals (you can add what qualifiers you like) makes that a very difficult proposition; and perhaps more worryingly, it’s a conversation that governments simply aren’t willing to have honestly.
myriad, the search for a way in which to bind estrogen in a compound that would be water soluble was one of the things which delayed the development of the contraceptive pill after the extraction and isolation of the sex hormones in the 1920s. Eventually a water soluble compound, estriol glucuronide, was recovered from the late-pregnancy urine of women in Canada, was found to become active in the body after hydrolisation, and off we went.
I wasn’t meaning to be blithe about the level of estrogenic agents in our water, I merely reacted strongly to what appears to be the anti-choicer’s party line about how it’s all the fault of them contracepting women. There’s a multitude of sources out there.
I have a friend who will only use “natural” products, because they don’t have chemicals in them. I have tried in vain to tell her that everything is composed of the chemicals of which she is so deeply suspicious, including her beloved naturals. She will have none of it. Go figure.
Kangaroo liver is another toxic liver, which just goes to prove that natural is bad and chemicals is good and as a by-product, liver is a blight upon the earth and should immediately be eradicated along with tripe, kidneys, hearts and any other offal you can think of. Ditto shellfish. I rest my well-researched and unbiased case.
Fair enough Tigtog – in kind, I certainly don’t want you to think me using contraceptives et al as an example in this thread is even remotely related to some “moral problem” with contraceptives. Thanks for that interesting bit on the history of the pill.
Cheers, myriad. Let nuanced and informed thinking about the chemicals that surround us rule the day!
Did anyone notice that Sunrise was at it again this morning?
They had a feature on ‘detox’ cleaning, which was all about how to avoid using ‘chemicals’ in the home.
At one point someone actually said “Chemicals are a relatively new invention.”
I damn near threw up my breakfast.
Meanwhile over on the right-wing blogs folk are going berserk over the idea that “Rachel Carson is worse than Hitler” because she is behind the the “banning” of DDT in the developing world and hence millions of malaria deaths. Bloggers Quiggin and Lambert wrote a very good article on the issue: http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2008/05/13/in-praise-of-rachel-carson/