Environmental-Health Books

Everyone remembers the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Or at least most people do. Like all baby boomers remember about the JFK assassination or Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon. Exactly like the other two history altering events, news of the disaster hit the headlines all over the world. All those who read, saw or heard about it heaved a sigh of despair. In brief, for the benefit of those who are challenged on their recall abilities, the Bhopal gas tragedy involved the release of Methyl Isocyanate gas from a pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, Central India. Forty tonnes of the poisonous cloud, that was released from the factory settled over the low-lying areas of the city. Within minutes innocent people, living in surrounding shanties and squatter camps, were transported into a lethal gas chamber facing a holocaust. It happened around midnight on December the 2nd, 1984. By sunrise of the 3rd over 2000 people lay dead or dying in homes and on the streets.

Morehouse and Subramanium's book on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy is a well-researched study about the Union Carbide and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The book starts with the history of Union Carbide, a company that came to colonial India in 1905. The company started the manufacture of "Eveready Flashlight Batteries" in 1926. "Eveready" and portable lighting became synonymous and was remembered with fondness in households across the cities, towns of villages of India. In 1969 the by now huge multinational corporation started a plant in Bhopal, to manufacture pesticides. By 1983, the company had 14 plants in India manufacturing chemicals, pesticides, batteries and other products. In December 1984, Union Carbide brought permanent darkness to the lives of thousands of residents in Bhopal, maimed and injured several hundred thousands more. The events of that fateful night left a swath of destruction and desolation that has only been rivaled by the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima.

What Morehouse and Subramanium have done is to take us backstage to the events that happened at the plant before the release of the gas, and the response of the various agencies after the disaster. The authors help us get a clearer understanding of what led to the disaster, the chaos and confusion that secondarily led to failure of the relief organizations. Later they explore the tangled web of litigation that followed. The authors critically evaluate the plant and point out the defects in the design of the plant, as well as the failures in the safety devices that led to exothermic chain reaction that caused the accumulation of the large quantities of the poisonous gas, and its final release into the atmosphere.

According to the authors, and this has been substantiated by several other publications, besides the failure of the plant management several other factors compounded the tragedy. Relief measures were botched, disaster sirens not blown, orderly evacuation not planned all leading to chaos and confusion. Later, lack of experience in dealing with mass disasters or knowledge on how to treat the suffering significantly influenced the mortality and morbidity. Political considerations paralyzed the Governments relief efforts while well meaning volunteer efforts were perceived as threats to Governmental stability. The post disaster record keeping and documentation was conducted so haphazardly as to prove worthless. Even today we remain with inadequate scientific evaluation of the disaster to develop preventive scenarios.

In later chapters, the authors describe the jurisdictional battles, the attempts by Union Carbide's Corporate lawyers to disown the subsidiary, transfer the case to India and several other legal maneuverings. The last three chapters answer two important questions (a) Can it happens here in the US? Yes, of course it can happen here, it has happened here at a subliminal level but a major tragedy could strike any chemicals factory in say Thailand or New Jersey, any day. The other question gives very creative information on what can we do to prevent future Bhopal's from happening. The book was written with Subramanium covering the first set of chapters about the situation in India and Morehouse writing the latter half. However, the book reads very seamlessly and has an absorbing narrative. It is eminently readable and extremely thought provoking.

The book is a classic study about the cause and effect of environmental disasters. It is also a clarion call for action by concerned activist groups for legislation on the "Right To Know Laws" about hazardous chemicals that are manufactured, stored or utilized in a community. Despite the numerous reassurances from the chemical manufacturers, occurrence of another Bhopal like tragedy cannot be ruled out with certainty. The authors suggest, preventing a future environmental disaster from happening can only be done by concerned public action, effective legislation and efficient enforcement of safety regulations. As they describe it, the calamity in Bhopal could have been used as an opportunity to revamp the existing imperfections in the hazardous chemicals industry.

Unfortunately the legal maneuvering in the Bhopal case precluded the judiciary from giving the chemical industry a sound warning. Those in the know of the turn of events know that the legal settlement failed in this important aspect, adding insult to injury heaped upon the citizens of Bhopal. Ultimately, the judicial failure in censuring the chemical industry absolved it of responsibility in vaporizing a city. Moreover as it did not serve a punitive warning to Multi-national corporations, it condoned the view that it was okay to place corporate greed above interests of the people and, company bottom line above human dignity. This book eloquently reveals that man really is at the mercy of mammon.

I used this book as a source for a presentation in my undergraduate Spanish class on gold in Central and South America. I am by no means a scientist or expert on chemistry, but as a layperson I found this text to be unique and unsurpassed in breadth of this topic. It is objectively written, and speaks for itself.

this is a collection of essays by two of America's leading biologists. It is generally written for the general public, although some of the essays are a bit more technical. On the whole, Lewontin and Levins succeed in providing a comprehensive picture of some of the leading debates in the field, notably, the relevance of molecular biology and evolutionary thought for issues such as education and other aspects of social policy. Highly recommended.

A retired lawyer has his house treated for termites with Dursban... and develops Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. This well-written book describes his deteriorating condition, his lawsuit to get compensation, and his fight to get his condition recognized as more than psychosomatic. It also is a cautionary tale for the rest of us -- what is the ultimate effect of all the pesticides and chemicals used in our environment? If they're deadly for insects... could they harm humans?

I did not read the whole book, which was quite technical.
There was a section describing the nerve agent soman, and the separation of its four stereoisomers by capillary gas chromatography. There was also research described in which the four stereoisomers were separated and had their individual toxicities determined in animals. This section was fascinating and its contemplation gave me the shivers to think of the danger involved handling this dreadful poison.
One thing I would criticize( as a neophyte in this area of research) is the constant use of acronyms. A glossary would be very helpful.
I noticed one error : the authors characterized dieldrin and aldrin as organophosphates, which they are not.

The reactor at Chernobyl was too large and too well engineered to produce the kind of explosion that is considered typical for weapons, but it was capable of reaching temperatures that were much higher than mere fireman could cool by spraying water on the blaze.

For most of the people involved in fighting the fire, the temperature was a minor problem compared to the radioactive storm of particles and rays released in the reaction. The operators in the control room thought they had some control over the reaction long after two explosions had flipped the concrete lid over the reactor and blew the roof off a large building. Everyone who was not vaporized immediately knew that the reactor core had not exploded in the typical mushroom cloud catastrophe which is so familiar from hundreds of weapons tests. Due to a fire, they did not have access to equipment which could have told them how high the level of radiation being released from the core had grown, but that level was so high, it could have produced panic, so large numbers of people would never be told. Medical science is not really up to date on what people who are subject to such a subatomic particle ambush can expect for the rest of their lifespan, and all the doctors in the Soviet Union worked for the government, which never planned to tell the people much about anything.

The book, CHERNOBYL THE ONGOING STORY OF THE WORLD'S DEADLIEST NUCLEAR DISASTER by Glenn Alan Cheney, makes an honest effort to look at everything that people might learn from studying all the forms of subatomic particle ambushes that took place as a result of the Chernobyl secret circus stunt. The sense of condemnation which drives this book is fought by those who had avoided for so long the question: Who is Oedipus here, and who the Sphinx? The science found itself starting off on a strange foot:

"The victims suffered from radiation and heat burns. Their skin was browned like toasted marshmallow. In some places it was black like burned marshmallow. Their skin cracked, blistered, peeled, hung in strips. . . . Their hair fell out." (p. 43).

"The world outside the Soviet Union knew more about what was happening than the victims it was happening to. On April 28 Sweden registered the first signs of a radioactive mishap. A monitoring station noticed rising levels of radioactivity. Further analysis revealed a bizarre array of rare isotopes, a combination not normally produced by an atomic explosion or a nuclear reactor leak. One of the isotopes was ruthenium, which melts only at 4,050 degrees F (2,250 degrees C)--a temperature found only on the sun, in a melting nuclear reactor, or, for an instant, in a nuclear bomb. An assessment of atmospheric conditions pointed at the Soviet Union. Sweden announced the discovery and made diplomatic inquiries to Moscow. At first Moscow admitted to nothing but later conceded a trifling accident, a quick and minor release of radioactivity." (p. 83).

This book ought to be praised most highly for its attempt to picture what happens when subatomic particles ambush people in a way which the reader can understand. Ruthenium is not a particularly exotic chemical element, with an atomic number of 44 and an atomic weight of 101.07, it appears in the middle of the periodic table of elements in the transition elements, and as a metal it is useful in alloys for electrical contacts that don't wear or corrode. It can be great stuff, if you know how to use it. It was not the first thing that was noticed in Kiev at the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine on Monday morning, April 28, 1986:

"That Monday, officials were surprised to find radiation coming into the building. It was on people's clothes. These weren't people from Chernobyl or Pripyat. They were people who had just ridden city buses to work, as they had every other morning. But this morning, April 28, the buses were radioactive. They'd been to Pripyat to pick up the evacuees. The evacuees had left so much radiation on the buses that people who sat in the seats the next morning were wearing clothes that would qualify as hazardous materials. Dosimeters showed that clothing had radiation levels five times higher than that allowed on equipment used to handle radioactive material, and thousands of times higher than that allowed to come in contact with people." (p. 85).

"The train station was probably the worst place to be. As empty trains came into the city they pulled in clouds of radioactive dust. The trains themselves were radioactive. The crowd at the station was radioactive, with everybody radiating everybody else." (pp. 89-90).

Local effects in the United States varied. "Levels of iodine 131 were lowest in the region around Texas, where the least rain had fallen, and the death rate there remained unchanged from the year before." (p. 102).

"According to information in DEADLY DECEIT, infant mortality also soared in Germany. In the most heavily contaminated regions it rose 68 percent." (p. 104).

Before the incident at Chernobyl, Lyme disease, "caused by a bacteria that was harmless to humans before 1975 . . . first appeared around Lyme, Connecticut, a few miles from the Millstone nuclear power plant. Millstone has leaked more radiation than any other U.S. nuclear power plant besides Three Mile Island, and in 1975 alone released some three million curies." (p. 106).

Living Tree Paper Company is proud to have provided the tree-free Vanguard Hemp™ paper for the Chíc Eco Directory where Delia practices what she prescribes. I can testify to the thoroughness of this book and highly recommend it to eco-fashion job marketeers, as many of the sources are seeking sales representatives. Green retailers should appreciate the no-travel ease to stock their stores. Ecological designers will find this directory imperative for their manufacturing needs and individuals will be empowered by learning where the earth-friendly products they want to purchase are made.

Harry Bondareff, Vice-President, Living Tree Paper Company

This is a step-by-step, easy to follow 10-point, 10-week program of eliminating the environmental toxins that threaten your health. Exciting, enjoyable, eye-opening book!

Clay's Handbook of Environmental Health is a consice guide to the career of Environmental Health, and provides an exellent tool for any Enviromental Health Officer. The handbook covers the main areas of Environmental health, and is useful as a all round guide of the career. Clay's is a good study guide, and reference guide for students studying Environmental Health ,and would be an investment to any student as it acts as a good bookcase filled to aid newly qualified students, and when not using it , it acts as a wonderful doorstop. Clay's handbook of Environmental Health is a very good basebook and is very useful to the new EHO starting out in their career.

This is clearly the authoritative review of asthma and domestic indoor air quality. Not only does it present a (nearly) complete summary of indoor air issues and asthma, but it describes the degree of certainty with which it draws conclusions. While I might have been more interested in some acrylates and urethanes, etc, I think if you are interested in this issue you must read this source.