Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945 ed. by Soraya Boudia, Nathalie Jas (review)

Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas’s Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945 is an important book that asks the hard questions about public health and political reform in the post–World War II era. They acknowledge that over the past seventy years there have been many government regulations aimed at reducing environmental hazards within nation-states, enhanced systems of analysis and control of these toxins by an increasing array of international agencies, and ever more research on, and analysis and management of, toxins in our workplaces and our communities. Moreover, international environmental activism has expanded dramatically. Yet, despite these positive forces for change, the ecological and health problems we are faced with have only gotten worse. In short, we have created, and are living in, what Boudia and Jas call a “toxic world.”

In a brilliant introduction to the volume, the editors lay out how and why the systems of regulation of toxic substances that were developed in twentieth century have failed, and each of the individual essays develops and expands upon their analysis from a variety of national, international, and transnational perspectives. The result is a coherence that is achieved by the editors and the chapter authors reinforcing the overarching theme of the book.

This volume provides a scathing critique of the field of public health for having abandoned its early twentieth-century mission of protecting populations from chemical and biological harm. Instead, in the post–World War II era, governments sought to reduce people’s exposure to toxins by regulating the increasing number and quantity of chemicals that were finding their way into the world’s water, food, and air. But this shift from preventing harm to reducing harm has helped “to naturalize the presence of an increasing number of toxicants in everyday consumer products and in the environment” (p. 8). As Christopher Sellars explains in his chapter, this was the same process that led to the development of threshold limit values for workers in factories. Public health officials and government regulatory bodies came to implicitly accept what was a major industry rationale for their polluting practices: that ordinary people needed to learn to live with a contaminated environment as the price that society had to pay for industrial progress. A classic statement of that position was the view of one oil company executive who opined that since tetraethyl lead was a “gift of God,” the industry should not stop its introduction into gasoline just because it might cause health problems in the future. As a result, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of children were permanently impaired before it was eventually banned in the 1980s.

The tools that public health and industry developed as part of this regulatory structure were the labeling of toxic substances, the production of lists that specified how toxic substances could be used, and, most important, the development of threshold limit values and later permissible exposure limits. These TLVs and PELs were based on the premise that it was possible to arrive at an exposure below which there would be no danger to people. This may have been possible for many substances (although, as Christopher Sellars makes clear in his contribution to the volume, the number arrived at was often the result of sociopolitical considerations, not scientific certainty), but it was not possible for most carcinogens. Carcinogenic chemicals should have been banned—and indeed efforts were made in the United States and elsewhere to prohibit their use—but, as Jas shows, international organizations refused to totally exclude carcinogens from foods, for example, for economic reasons. In different ways “the regulation of toxic chemical substances was based on numerous compromises to suit the needs of industry” (p. 7).

The editors argue that the essence of post–World War II regulatory era is the separation of scientific evaluation and decision making regulations, although one could argue that this...