Word: cadmium
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...States. The main problem, asserts the Nader group, is the federal program's failure to control industrial effluents. They account for at least 50% of the oxygen-consuming wastes handled by municipal water-treatment plants, many of which are thus overloaded. They also include very dangerous contaminants (arsenic, cadmium, mercury), which few treatment plants can remove from drinking water. Even advanced plants, says the report, may be unable to handle the estimated 500 new chemicals that industry develops each year...
...Takako became a lathe operator at a cadmium smelter near her home in Annaka, a city on the main island of Honshu. When she began suffering mysterious pains in 1961, no one even thought to blame cadmium. As protection against the toxic metal, which is widely used for electroplating, she wore special rubber clothing. Doctors diagnosed her ailment as "intestinal ulcers." But even eight years after she switched to clerical work, the pain continued. Two summers ago, it got so bad that Takako, 28, leaped from a speeding train and into a river...
...complaining of a strange disease called, for lack of a medical term, itai-itai (ouch-ouch). Seeking clues, health officials finally exhumed Takako's body last month and performed an autopsy. The results shocked the nation. By current Japanese standards, a reading of one part per million of cadmium is harmful to humans. Takako's liver contained 4,540 p.p.m., her kidneys 22,400 p.p.m. Scientists speculated that she breathed cadmium particles and fumes generated by the plant's smelting process, and pointed out that a major symptom of such poisoning, decalcification of bones, is not detectable...
Spirit and Suicide. Prime Minister Sato has ordered health checks on all workers in the more than 1,000 Japanese plants that use cadmium-a crucial step, since only a handful of those plants take adequate safety precautions. Last week health officials reported that cadmium has tainted much of the country's rice. Farmers around Takako's city of Annaka, for example, have been urged to stop raising wheat and Chinese cabbages; samples have been found to contain as much as 17.8 p.p.m. of cadmium...
...body has functions to discharge foreign wastes," declared Masuo Araki, chairman of the National Public Safety Commission, in a recent speech that startled his audience. "We must have the spirit to eat contaminated rice." But in Nagano City, the owner of a paint factory was so depressed over the cadmium scare that he committed suicide. "I would like to stop using cadmium," he said in a farewell note, "but I cannot. I am assuming full responsibility and choosing death." Some U.S. scientists now rank cadmium ahead of lead as a dangerous pollutant. It is a prime candidate for a list...