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Flight Attendants Tell Congress: Airplane Cabin Air May Be Toxic - (Synergism)
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This email was spawned from one from Steve Tvedten about
synergism. The concept of NOAEL use by ATSDR is the cause of this reply.
Before discussing this proposal I suggest some comments on the players.
Like any game until you name the players you cannot have a game. Before
ATSDR's proposal can even be discussed there must be a discussion of how the
proposal will be evaluated. There are four players in my opinion.
a. Environmentalists.
These are the people, usually without specific training, but often with
past exposure, and with past and current concerns about the environment, who
are raising the questions about exposure.
Most researchers and govts ignore them until they get press coverage. I
propose that all who do are making a terrible mistake. A well developed case
in point is the recent revelation from USEPA that malathion formulations of
Fyfanon ULV used in NYC in 1999 for West Nile Virus contained excessive
concentrations of isomalathion, the highly toxic impurity formed in
manufacture and/or at elevated temperature storage.
This "epa news" was not news to the environmentalists of NYC,
Florida, et al who pointed this out in 1999 at public hearings in Tampa in
1997, at the 1999 NYC City Council Dept of Health hearings, in the press, in
2000 meetings with Congresspersons, etc. This incident points out clearly that
environmentalists are not idiots, they can read and that they should not be
ignored and trampled by the other three parties.
b. Govt, particularly feds such
as ATSDR, who never wants to find anything toxic, EPA, who never agrees with
anyone and then secretly does their "own" studies, and Congress who
has only legal experts to guide it and takes too much money from those it is
supposed to legislate. To those
hard working govt toxicologists like Brian Dimenti I send my apologies.
c. Industry based Toxicologists,
particularly SOT, who thinks that it is the ONLY toxicologist group that has a
brain, does not even want to agree with information from industry groups such
as CIIT if it is negative, and still thinks that DDT is wonderful.
d. The rest of us
"non-academic and non-industry (even if we were at one time)
toxicologists, environmental scientists and researchers who see "case
studies", which industry loves to reject, raise objections which govt
never wants to hear and who deal with "patients" everyday who are
exposed to not one, not two, but many multiple mixtures of pesticides and
herbicides inside and outside their homes.
As a scientist who has analyzed over 5,000 furnace
filters in America I can conclude that America is a mess of pesticides,
herbicides and other chemicals. People
send me their filters after they are sick, after the incident has occurred,
and sometimes after a water-based cleanup of organic soluble chemicals. We
have see synergism at every turn. Why are these people sick after the
exposure. Because use of
organophosphates and synthetic pyrethroids absorbed into the body together
give you a synergistic response. Can we calculate this in these cases? No,
because the PCO did not tell us ahead of time what he was doing.
Can we calculate the dose. Usually no, because it is even difficult to
find out what the PCO used.
But synergism has been around for a long time.
Take an asbestos course and learn about its synergism with cigarettes.
Work at the medical examiner's office and learn about alcohol/drug synergism
that kills. Do I need a NOAEL study to tell me that the person is dead with a
0.05% BAC and a 0.1mg% secobarbital at the age of 33 and as a formerly healthy
young male? If you give a healthy person a NOAEL dose of alcohol and a NOAEL
dose of barbiturates why do they die?
This email may sound rather negative to you, but frankly
I am very tired of SOT, ATSDR, EPA thinking that only they know anything. I am
tired of ACGIH telling me that only academic and govt industrial hygienists
can be "full members". At
the age of 62 I may know a hell of a lot more than all of you put together.
How many times have all of you testified in court? 300+? How many homes have you surveyed? I challenge SOT, industry,
EPA, ATSDR to name a real SAB consisting of hard questioning environmentalists
and environmental scientists like Steve Tvedten and Bob Simon. We will take on
your hypothesis with you. Name all of the academics, industry, govt experts
you want. We are ready to participate in an international panel of experts to
discuss this issue. We will bring real data from the real world. There will be
no pristine labs with pristine mice fed on pristine water and pristine food
here. We will not give you
baselines before the dose because no one told the homeowner that he/she and
their children were going to be poisoned. We will give you the home blasted by
the PCO with the termite hose onto the walls, furniture, floors and ceilings
and see if NOAEL can explain this one. Are you ready doctor?
We are. R. K. Simon, Ph.D., RPIH, CEC, DABB.
A retired toxicologist friend of mine added a few
thoughts on the dangers of multiple exposures to various toxins/agents.
I thought I would pass them on. Steve:
Hi Steve:
The
letter from Dydek represents wishful thinking on the part of toxicologists,
not reality. Let me give you two
examples.
1. In an
article I co-wrote for Environment magazine way back when (about 1984) we
pointed out that exposures to multiple cylclodiene insecticides could easily
result in dangerously high doses. That
is, combining exposure to legal levels of heptachlor, chlordane, aldrin,
dieldrin, etc., is not different from exposure to a 4-fold higher dose of any
one of these. That's because they all have the same mode of action.
The law was written to limit the amount of exposure to any one of them,
but it should have been written to include exposures to any which share the
same mode of action.
2. Exposure
to a "safe" dose of insecticide plus a "safe" dose of a
synergist can easily result in exposure to an unsafe dose of insecticide,
simply because the synergist blocks degradation of the insecticide. So, the mixture is not safe.
3. Toxicology
tests are done with young healthy animals, usually male. This ignores the fact
that all of us (humans, rats, mice, etc.), are less healthy when we get old
and therefore more sensitive. More
importantly, it ignores the fact that females have a more complex life in
physiological terms. Tests should be done with females, not males.
4. Finally,
presently required tests measure only acute and chronic poisoning due to the
toxic effects of chemicals against specific targets. They ignore the more
subtle long term effects associated with poisoning of the immune system.
Even two year or life time tests with rats and mice are insufficient to
test for the long term effects on humans, if we measure only by time to death.
More importantly, there is a great need to measure effects on immune
systems, meaning effects on production of antibodies of several major sources.
This just is not being done.
In
conclusion, Dydek's idea is simplistic in the extreme and would be acceptable
if there was only acute toxicity to measure and if all chemicals acted
independently and if each had a specific target. The reality is that the human body has a very few systems for
responding to stress. The benefit
of this is that each system can do many things.
God didn't put enzymes into our bodies waiting for us to make DDT and
OPs. That isn't what she had in
mind. Rather, she put in one
system which can degrade all poisons that come along.
The evolutionary basis is for dietary poisons associated normally with
food. These also act against what
humans add. The trouble is the
normal system doesn't work too well against organochlorine chemicals since
these don't occur in nature. Enough.
Bill Plapp