Toxic Circles: Environmental Hazards from the Workplace Into the Community

By Helen E. Sheehan

When men and women who work with toxic materials get sick, everyone needs to worry. The toxic circles of industrial hazards spread in successive waves outward: from the workplace to the home, to the neighborhood, and to the community at large. These compelling essays tell how the links between cancers and working with radium, waxes, and dyes were uncovered and how poisoning from lead, mercury, dioxin, and chromium in and around the factory was detected. They document how corporations, government agencies, courts, unions, physicians, workers, and citizens have tried to ignore, evade, and finally battle the terrible legacy of industrial disease. The book focuses on New Jersey, the heart of industrial America, where three centuries of experience with occupational and environmental disease offer hard-earned lessons to the rest of the country and the world. Many of the contributors bring a direct personal involvement in the stories they have to tell. For example, Michael Gordon and Lynn D. Kelly represented workers and community in a major lawsuit against Diamond Shamrock over dioxin contamination; Ellen K. Silbergeld, Ph.D., a scientist at the University of Maryland, was an expert witness in the trial. Helene A. Stapinski was the reporter with The Jersey Journal who broke the story about chromium contamination in Jersey City. Dr. John J. Thorpe and Dr. John G. Lione, corporation physicians in the oil refining industry, report on their own and their predecessors' efforts to prevent scrotal cancer in wax pressmen. Dr. Richard P. Wedeen has sought better ways to detect and prevent lead poisoning. Other contributors are: David Michaels, Ph. D., M.P.H., William D. Sharpe, M.D., Christopher C. Sellers, M.D., Ph.D., and Francis P. Chinard, M.D. For anyone concerned with the environment, toxic hazards, and public health, this book will be essential reading.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081351990X
• ISBN13: 9780813519906
• Release Date: August 1993
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 290 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

history about workplace hazards in New Jersey

A collection of articles about occupational health hazards or harms from a historical perspective. The focus is on New Jersey, the book being published by the State university press. The first chapter pertains to neurological shakes among hat-workers during the 19th and early 20th centuries. A mercury-containing compound was used to cure furs into water-resistant felt. Workers breathed mercury vapor caused by a hot workspace. Hatters suffered, across many countries. In 1904, New Jersey enacted a law to require better ventilation for hat-workers exposed to mercury vapor. Mercury continued to be used in hat-making in the US until 1942, when the metal was reserved for military priorities. (Similarly, workers making alkyl-lead to reduce auto engine "knocking" suffered neurological harms.) Chapter 3 recounts bladder cancers among workers in the synthetic dye industry during the 1920s-50s. Dupont physicians began to recognize the problem in 1932, about 30 years after this phenomena had been discovered in Germany and many had died. OSHA introduced benzidine dye regulations in the 1970s and production shifted outside the US. Chapter 4 discusses scrotal cancer in petroleum workers who pressed wax, until a new manufacturing technology in 1951 eliminated previous exposure. Chapter 5 recounts the tragedy of women who painted clock faces with radioactive radium so that they glowed in the dark. In the 1920s, radium was considered good for health, sold as a tonic. Horrors. Chapter 7 recounts harms to chromium workers. In general, as a fundamental rule of pharmacology, high exposure to any material can be dangerous. Fortunately, technological evolution has enabled more automation and cleaner workspaces. Occupational health programs have become more advanced and can draw upon vastly more medical knowledge. Protective apparel is more common nowadays. Despite safer workspaces in modern times, it is welcome to have historical perspectives about past tragedies and how some persisted much too long. This book sheds valuable light on past injustices.