Saturday, October 28, 2023

Chemical Imbalances

While we were doing our investigations that yielded the books “Circle of Poison” and “The Bhopal Syndrome” in the 1970s and 1980s, I interviewed many scientists researching the long-term effects of agrochemicals like DDT, paraquat and Roundup (glyphosate).

Readers were understandably concerned about either getting poisoned by pesticides, or the possibility of developing cancer, birth defects or other central nervous system damage from exposure.

Inside the U.S., much of the reaction to the books focused on the low but persistent levels of residues in foods. Others, primarily environmental activists, worried about the contamination of the soil, water and air.

Personally, as one of the people doing the reporting, I did not have much concern about the short-term effects on anyone other than farmworkers or the industrial plant workers manufacturing these toxic substances. The dangers to those on the front lines were severe for sure, but to consumers, much less so.

On the other hand, I developed a sense from the many interviews with researchers that the long-term combined effects of multiple chemical exposure might gradually weaken the human immune system.

This would be due to the interactive or synergistic effects of absorbing the virtual cocktail of chemicals all of us unwittingly experienced day after day, year after year.

There were a number of potential consequences, according to those I interviewed:

  • A weakened immune system would make us more vulnerable to mutating viruses. Accordingly, pandemics would occur.

  • Injuries would become more common in competitive activities like sports.

  • Conditions like autism and other mental health problems might increase.

  • Our life expectancy would stop increasing and begin to drop.

Unfortunately, in the intervening decades, all of these complications have come to pass. In retrospect, the cumulative deterioration of our immune systems indeed appear to have been a factor.

It would seem we still have time to react, however. By transforming our agriculture from a chemical-intense mono-cropping system to organic multi-crop system, we may minimize the damage for future generations.

This is how we could break the circle of poison that is slowly weakening us as a species.

And that is my hopeful message for today.

(I first published this piece a year ago.)

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