Word: toxicants
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...other centuries, doctors have known that miners, stone cutters and lens grinders (including the philosopher Spinoza) often developed respiratory disease from inhaling large quantities of dust; hatters suffered brain damage and went mad from absorbing toxic vapors from the mercury used in making felt. A London surgeon named Percivall Pott reported in 1775 that the soot-covered sweepers who cleaned Britain's chimneys had a far higher rate of cancer of the scrotum than the rest of the population...
...live near freeways, where auto exhausts pollute the air. High arsenic levels have been detected in children living near a copper smelter in Ruston, Wash. High levels of lead and other heavy metals, such as arsenic and mercury, are potentially lethal. Mercury poisoning, caused by industrial dumping of toxic compounds into a harbor, killed an estimated 300 people in the area around Minamata, Japan, and crippled almost 1,000 more...
...acceptable risk for cancer?" asks Dr. Selikoff. "One out of a hundred? More? Less? With cancer, any risk is too high." To reduce these hazards even further, Selikoff and his colleagues are urging enactment of even stricter new regulations on the manufacture and use of substances known to be toxic (see box) and better screening to keep those suspected of causing cancer or other illnesses out of the environment...
What can be done to prevent new toxic substances from entering the environment? Answer: screen out dangerous chemical compounds before they are used in products or manufacturing processes. Easier said than done. Some 2 million chemical compounds are known, and an estimated 25,000 new ones are developed every year. Of the total, about 10,000 have significant commercial uses, and most of them are not dangerous. Even so, to test those that might cause birth defects, cancer or other diseases would be time consuming and costly...
Congress seems ready to go even further. Of four proposed toxic-substances bills now being considered, one is strongly backed by a combination of environmentalists and labor leaders. It would force manufacturers to prove that all their products are safe before they are put on the market, and make the Environmental Protection Agency responsible for screening that proof for "unreasonable risk" to human health and the environment. The chemical industry, claiming that such a measure would duplicate existing laws, favors a weaker bill requiring manufacturers to notify the EPA only about products containing compounds that the agency has listed...