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BARBARA ALLEN
FORUM
environment, health and missing information
| THE WORKSHOP ON "TOXIC BODIES" highlighted an emerging concern with pervasive and persistent environmental toxins at low doses, such as endocrine disruptors. While the study of these chemicals is relatively new, the study of the effects of toxic chemicals on the human body is not. From lead exposure to workplace carcinogens, historians have long documented the many health hazards of increasing industrialization. This research has relied on a variety of sources for information on public health, such as medical archives and government data —all of them important to understanding the historic record of the effects of industrial toxins. My concern for future historians is with the more recent suppression of environmental health data, a trend that is growing in the United States and possibly elsewhere. What data and information on today's chemical exposures will be available in archives and from government sources in the future and what will be missing? |
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My past work on environmental justice and human health has uncovered some disturbing regional and national trends in the transparency of science and the reliability and availability of public health data. These disturbing trends can be broadly placed in two categories: undone science or knowledge gaps, and suppression or secrecy in science. The first trend, undone science, is the consequence of the framing of scientific studies to either intentionally avoid specific areas or questions (see Frickel, pp. 643–650 in this forum) or to answer only the questions of experts, government regulators, or corporate advisers. This often results in not addressing and not answering the questions citizens have related to their environment and health.1 For example, citizens who live near numerous hazardous industries want to know the synergistic effect of a variety of toxins on their bodies, over time, and in small doses. What these communities actually get is quite different—at best, results based on animal laboratory studies of one chemical at a time with regulations based on a chemical-by-chemical standard (see Nash, pp. 651–658 in this forum). Thus the science needed to answer the complexity of their questions remains undone. |
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The notion of knowledge gaps is another way to frame the issue, as Scott Frickel, in this workshop has demonstrated. He questions why the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chose not to do soil samples in certain predominantly African-American neighborhoods in post-Katrina New Orleans, leaving the dis-placed residents without potentially important health information. This "uneven" science, whether due to intentional ignorance or the cost of producing citizen-relevant science, does not bode well for environmental health in a time of in-creasing global industrial production and concern about newer risks from endo-crine disruptors, whose effects on the human body occur even at miniscule doses. |
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