Word: cadmium
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...runaway expansion largely because they blame it for causing intolerable pollution. Great palls of deadly, eye-smarting smog from factory smokestacks settle over the cities and their increasingly restive inhabitants. Last week pollution protesters staged a lie-in at government offices in Tokyo. Most were victims of pollution-induced cadmium poisoning, a painful bone complaint that the Japanese call itai itai (ouch ouch). One day recently, Tokyo's Haneda Airport was so socked in by pollution that planes had to be diverted to another city. Industrial waste and sludge have also poisoned the streams and rivers and are choking...
...Cadmium poisoning, which affects the liver and kidneys and painfully softens the bones, has claimed over 100 lives since its symptoms were discovered in the early 1950's. But the government appears unconcerned. Although last spring officials did move to quarantine some 300 acres of pasture land and rice paddies around the Nippon Mining Company's zinc refinery, refining goes on unabated...
Those substitutes, unfortunately, seem to be more dangerous than phosphates. One of the chemicals, nitrilotriacetic acid (NTA), was substituted because it cleans well and usually decomposes soon after use. But it has been found to combine with heavy metals like mercury and cadmium in drinking-water supplies, producing chemical compounds that have been linked to birth defects in animals. Thus the compounds may affect human beings as well. At the Surgeon General's request last year, manufacturers removed NTA detergents from the market...
...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...
...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...