Where Did All This Pollution Come From?
By Jim Rue
The temperature outside was down around zero. Playing on the floor with the warmth of the afternoon sun streaming through the living room window, the third-grader felt secure and cared-for. His father was just home from the factory. He was walking through the snow from the car. He shed his hat, boots and coat in the tiny vestibule and told the boy he had a surprise.
What a treat it was on those rare occasions when his father brought something home for the boy to play with from that mysterious, magical place, 'work.' A few weeks ago it was a handful of spent cardboard spools, useless except as toys, but great for building things there on the rug. This time it was a small corked vial with liquid inside. The father gave his son the vial, saying, "Now be careful with this. If you spill it on the floor, it will scatter every place and you won't have it any more." The liquid glittered and quaked inside the tube. The boy pulled the cork and poured the liquid into his hand, and then from hand to hand. His father continued, "Now listen. This is very important. This stuff is poisonous. Don't get it anywhere near your mouth. If you swallow it, it will spread out to coat all the tiny cilia in your intestines so you won't be able to digest food. You will slowly starve to death."
I understood.
He watched my face to insure I comprehended "Do you understand?" I understood. Then my doting dad confided to me that mercury was the same substance that made thermometers work, and pointed to the outside thermometer visible through the window. He briefly explained to me how a thermometer works. Then, leaving me to play with the liquid quicksilver, he went off to raid the refrigerator while we waited for our mom to get home from work.
For all the hurly-burly about toxic substances in the environment today, I have often wondered about that sunny winter afternoon nearly fifty years ago, in the same vein as the old homily, "if you so smart, why ain't you rich?"
In this case it's little different. "If that stuff is so poisonous, why ain't you dead?" It is not that I disbelieve science. Science now says mercury is very dangerous. Pregnant women are warned against ingesting shark, swordfish, and any of a half a dozen other species of fish that contain high quantities of mercury. Not only that - women who may become pregnant are also warned against it, as are those who might feed those polluted species to small children. As if you could get a seven-year-old to eat salmon. Anyway, what became of my own mercury poisoning case?
Could it be that my arguable attention deficit disorder can be traced to the traces of mercury still floating through my bloodstream? If so, that's not so bad. Even if it eventually kills me, my strong constitution and coal miners' genes have allowed me to resist mercury poisoning for a full five decades since my childhood industrial accident.
Feats of Lead
So then, if the mercury didn't kill me, what about the lead? My father also brought home leaden bars a foot long, and I played with those too. They were just the width and thickness of a ruler. I could pretend to be Superman on television, "Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great Metropolitan newspaper...fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way!" I even remember holding a bar between my teeth while I bent it with my hands.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that those children who were between one and five years of age between 1976 and 1980 had a 85%-95% chance of receiving dangerous levels of lead in the household. By 1999, the percentage had almost miraculously dropped to a number between 1% and 5%. As I was five in 1953, my chance of being spared a toxic dose of lead was virtually nil, especially considering my Superman antics. If those weren't bad enough, it is entirely likely that half of the interior walls in the house I grew up in were painted with lead-based paint. To my credit as a sensible boy, I do not recall licking the walls at any point. But who knew?
Asbestos
Speaking of interior walls...unbeknownst to my family, as an adolescent I breached the upstairs wall from my bedroom when I figured out that there was a deadspace beyond. I made a secret panel, concealing the whole thing behind a big dresser, and would hide myself in the dimness of the crawl space. It was just me and those big piles of loose insulation up there in the quiet twilight.
The EPA advises that if you have vermiculite asbestos, ubiquitous as gravel in that crawlspace, and poisonous in any amount and in every form, you are to visit your crawlspace as infrequently as possible and to by no means disturb the piles lest asbestos dust rise up into the air where it can be breathed.
Libby, MT
Vermiculite asbestos, mined from Libby, Montana until 1990, has been held responsible for rates of asbestosis and mesothelioma in that region amounting to sixty times that of the general population. Nationwide exposure to asbestos since 1940 is estimated at 10 million souls. The Libby, Montana area was declared an EPA Superfund site just before Christmas in 2001.
Not Dead Yet, You Betcha
And so here I am a triple threat survivor of the toxic childhood blues: mercury, lead and asbestos. I find from the EPA that the symptoms of asbestosis, felt between 10 and 50 years after exposure, are shortness of breath on exertion, cough, tightness in the chest and chest pain, finger and toenail abnormalities, and club fingers. I may succumb yet to my misspent youth. But no. I will go on, fighting a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way!
Effects of mesothelioma are shortness of breath, chest pain, or persistent cough. Some mesothelioma patients show no symptoms at all, even while a chest x-ray may show a build-up of fluid in the lungs. Oddly, when present, the fluid is almost always concentrated in the right lung. Other less common symptoms of mesothelioma are fever, night sweats, weight loss, pain or swelling in the abdomen, swelling of the feet, nausea, bowel obstruction, and anemia.
I just guess any day I wake up is a good day.