This issue of visibility I think transcends almost everything. I published a paper on GnRH mRNA where the data were completely statistical because the cells are distributed across a large area (from the OVLT caudally) and no single image could capture it. But then when I looked at TRH mRNA, the cells are clustered in the hypothalamic PVN so, while we had statistics, the image told the whole story. The first paper took over a year to get published where the second one went right in. To me, the lesson was the same as what you are saying in this essay. I now live with a person with radiation-induced myosis. It is localized but extremely painful - debilitating. I wonder if the survivors you write about had global elements of myosis. I can't imagine the chronic pain. It is hard to think about. Consider too the IQ deficits in relation to lead, PCBs, mixtures that Andreas Kortenkamp has explored. "Interesting" to think about the science - the exposure estimate strategies, the logistics of reliable outcome measures, the analysis required to do mixture epidemiology. Much harder to think about how we have robbed generations of children of their potential.
Tom: Thank you. The gap between what we can measure and what we can see is exactly why so much of this suffering has been allowed to persist. When the damage is diffuse, statistical, or buried in mixtures, it’s easier to overlook; when it’s visible and concentrated, it’s undeniable. That’s why I keep coming back to Heracles and the Augean stables. The burden we’re carrying isn’t abstract—it’s the accumulated consequence of decades of radiation exposure, air pollution, toxic metals, asbestos, and more. But like your example, much of it doesn’t present as a single, compelling image. It shows up as subtle cognitive loss, chronic pain, diminished potential—real, but harder to “see,” and therefore easier to ignore. Heracles didn’t chip away at the mess; he made it visible and unignorable by redirecting a river through it. That’s the challenge in front of us: not just to measure these harms with ever more precision, but to make their human cost visible enough that we’re finally willing to confront what’s been allowed to accumulate.
Yes, and along these lines, I had a reporter ask me once "what it would take" for regulators to take EDCs seriously. It was at the end of a long day. I said, "when the consequence is visible like with thalidomide". I was disgusted at the thought that that is what it takes, but felt bad that I "used it"...
"Yet the arithmetic does not disappear because it is difficult." Thank you Bruce for a sobering up moment.......We CAN NOT, NOT continue to awakening and mitigating toward peace and sanity and yelling and screaming until everyone and every living thing is safe and cared for humanely and with gentleness and love and understanding..........my muse for the morning. Thanks Bruce for reminding us of our jobs.
Inspiring insight as always, Bruce. I also find that the complexity of many toxins, many routes of exposure and many health impacts is is hard to convey. My current strategy is to focus on the worst first and try to get angry parents into the public eye. The danger is that policy leaders then fix the example and believe the problem has gone away.
Thank you, Tim. One of the challenges with problems like lead poisoning is that they unfold slowly and quietly. Hantavirus—the most recent public health scare—naturally grabs people’s attention because it feels immediate and dramatic. Slow poisons like lead rarely do. I’ve spent more than three decades trying to figure out how to make invisible problems like lead visible, and I still don’t have a simple answer. It usually takes a loose coalition of scientists, advocates, parents, lawyers, journalists, and legislators all pushing in the same direction. And, unfortunately, a crisis often helps.
And the mindboggling thing is, we are seeing the same pattern of obfuscation and deception repeat itself now with other toxins. It's the same playbook, but we apparently have to fight the same fight over and over again, with different chemicals that are continuously poured into our water, food, soils and air.
PFAS, the overapplication of pesticides, microplastics and the list goes on, endangering not only humans but biodiversity as a whole. And complicating the picture is that humans and the environment are exposed not only to a single chemical at a time, but literally thousands daily.
The corporations who are getting rich at the expense of human and environmental health are making the same arguments we heard about tobacco and lead at the beginning. Yet somehow it doesn't seem to change how we evaluate current chemicals.
Thank you Ruth. I’m more optimistic today than I was in the 1990s. More people now recognize the problem. The challenge is to turn that awareness into action—to harness what we know and build regulations that protect us from the thousands of chemicals we encounter every day.
That's good to hear. Perhaps my negativism comes because I live in the U.S., where the federal agency whose mission is, according to its own website, "to protect human health and the environment," is now actively working on behalf of corporate lobbyists.
There are so many competing interests for voters that the environment and their own health often has to take a backseat to more immediate concerns, such as where their next meal will come from, if their kids will be safe, and if they can get a job.
Ruth: I’ve seen the hostility toward environmental research up close. During the Bush II years, I was removed from three scientific committees and lost federal funding. And increasingly, we’re regulating through litigation because our federal agencies aren’t doing the job—though to be fair, their mandates and resources are often inadequate. So why am I still optimistic? Because far more people recognize the problem today than they did 30 years ago. Even with setbacks—including the real rollbacks during the Trump administration—we’re still moving to a point where only an overhaul will suffice.
You've described a process that is repeated again and again: Economic interests can actively resist knowledge for a long time whenever damage is gradual in nature. I expect you'll have a series of articles as you fully wake up to the neurologic toxins other than lead (ex: aluminum, mercury, fluorine). The dirty defense game involves society recognizing their harms narrowly in the transition stage. This permits an extended defense by claiming your application is somehow different. For example, low dosage doesn't matter, our testing reveals, we use a special process, we viciously attack all open questioners, we advertise otherwise, we spew doubt. This often allows insanity to go on for far too long. Trivial examples include mercury in fillings, fluoridation of water, mercury and aluminum adjuvants in vaccines, what we don't understand about cooking, our food processing systems and one that seems to defy attack, medicines often too quickly implemented pharmaceutical cabinet. Thanks for the well thought out articles.
And in 1945 the powers-that-be at the time decided to add an endocrine disrupting, developmental neurotoxin, fluoride, to the public water supply. Have we seen increasing cases of hormonal and mental health problems? Are the American Dental Association (ADA) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) not getting it? Perhaps, and I dare sugge
. . I dare suggest that the ADA’s former CEO, Dr. Raymond Cohlmia, DDS, had a clear enough conscience, after serving as CEO for only several years, to abruptly resign from that position, a mere 4-1/2 months after the overwhelming evidence and expert scientific testimony, including yours, Bruce, convinced a diligent federal judge that the Environmental Protection Agency must eliminate that potential harm to human health and sufficiently regulate fluoride to protect the public from excessive exposure. I wholeheartedly suspect Dr. Cohlmia favored the much needed paradigm shift away from water fluoridation, but was overruled and had no choice but to honor his integrity and ethical and moral principles, and resign. Granted, this is educated conjecture on my part, but I have finally put it in writing.
This issue of visibility I think transcends almost everything. I published a paper on GnRH mRNA where the data were completely statistical because the cells are distributed across a large area (from the OVLT caudally) and no single image could capture it. But then when I looked at TRH mRNA, the cells are clustered in the hypothalamic PVN so, while we had statistics, the image told the whole story. The first paper took over a year to get published where the second one went right in. To me, the lesson was the same as what you are saying in this essay. I now live with a person with radiation-induced myosis. It is localized but extremely painful - debilitating. I wonder if the survivors you write about had global elements of myosis. I can't imagine the chronic pain. It is hard to think about. Consider too the IQ deficits in relation to lead, PCBs, mixtures that Andreas Kortenkamp has explored. "Interesting" to think about the science - the exposure estimate strategies, the logistics of reliable outcome measures, the analysis required to do mixture epidemiology. Much harder to think about how we have robbed generations of children of their potential.
Tom: Thank you. The gap between what we can measure and what we can see is exactly why so much of this suffering has been allowed to persist. When the damage is diffuse, statistical, or buried in mixtures, it’s easier to overlook; when it’s visible and concentrated, it’s undeniable. That’s why I keep coming back to Heracles and the Augean stables. The burden we’re carrying isn’t abstract—it’s the accumulated consequence of decades of radiation exposure, air pollution, toxic metals, asbestos, and more. But like your example, much of it doesn’t present as a single, compelling image. It shows up as subtle cognitive loss, chronic pain, diminished potential—real, but harder to “see,” and therefore easier to ignore. Heracles didn’t chip away at the mess; he made it visible and unignorable by redirecting a river through it. That’s the challenge in front of us: not just to measure these harms with ever more precision, but to make their human cost visible enough that we’re finally willing to confront what’s been allowed to accumulate.
Yes, and along these lines, I had a reporter ask me once "what it would take" for regulators to take EDCs seriously. It was at the end of a long day. I said, "when the consequence is visible like with thalidomide". I was disgusted at the thought that that is what it takes, but felt bad that I "used it"...
"Yet the arithmetic does not disappear because it is difficult." Thank you Bruce for a sobering up moment.......We CAN NOT, NOT continue to awakening and mitigating toward peace and sanity and yelling and screaming until everyone and every living thing is safe and cared for humanely and with gentleness and love and understanding..........my muse for the morning. Thanks Bruce for reminding us of our jobs.
Any country deploying these weapons is a murdering subhuman in my eyes they are wicked to the core and will be judged accordingly
Inspiring insight as always, Bruce. I also find that the complexity of many toxins, many routes of exposure and many health impacts is is hard to convey. My current strategy is to focus on the worst first and try to get angry parents into the public eye. The danger is that policy leaders then fix the example and believe the problem has gone away.
Thank you, Tim. One of the challenges with problems like lead poisoning is that they unfold slowly and quietly. Hantavirus—the most recent public health scare—naturally grabs people’s attention because it feels immediate and dramatic. Slow poisons like lead rarely do. I’ve spent more than three decades trying to figure out how to make invisible problems like lead visible, and I still don’t have a simple answer. It usually takes a loose coalition of scientists, advocates, parents, lawyers, journalists, and legislators all pushing in the same direction. And, unfortunately, a crisis often helps.
excellent.
Excellent post, thank you.
And the mindboggling thing is, we are seeing the same pattern of obfuscation and deception repeat itself now with other toxins. It's the same playbook, but we apparently have to fight the same fight over and over again, with different chemicals that are continuously poured into our water, food, soils and air.
PFAS, the overapplication of pesticides, microplastics and the list goes on, endangering not only humans but biodiversity as a whole. And complicating the picture is that humans and the environment are exposed not only to a single chemical at a time, but literally thousands daily.
The corporations who are getting rich at the expense of human and environmental health are making the same arguments we heard about tobacco and lead at the beginning. Yet somehow it doesn't seem to change how we evaluate current chemicals.
Thank you Ruth. I’m more optimistic today than I was in the 1990s. More people now recognize the problem. The challenge is to turn that awareness into action—to harness what we know and build regulations that protect us from the thousands of chemicals we encounter every day.
That's good to hear. Perhaps my negativism comes because I live in the U.S., where the federal agency whose mission is, according to its own website, "to protect human health and the environment," is now actively working on behalf of corporate lobbyists.
There are so many competing interests for voters that the environment and their own health often has to take a backseat to more immediate concerns, such as where their next meal will come from, if their kids will be safe, and if they can get a job.
Ruth: I’ve seen the hostility toward environmental research up close. During the Bush II years, I was removed from three scientific committees and lost federal funding. And increasingly, we’re regulating through litigation because our federal agencies aren’t doing the job—though to be fair, their mandates and resources are often inadequate. So why am I still optimistic? Because far more people recognize the problem today than they did 30 years ago. Even with setbacks—including the real rollbacks during the Trump administration—we’re still moving to a point where only an overhaul will suffice.
You've described a process that is repeated again and again: Economic interests can actively resist knowledge for a long time whenever damage is gradual in nature. I expect you'll have a series of articles as you fully wake up to the neurologic toxins other than lead (ex: aluminum, mercury, fluorine). The dirty defense game involves society recognizing their harms narrowly in the transition stage. This permits an extended defense by claiming your application is somehow different. For example, low dosage doesn't matter, our testing reveals, we use a special process, we viciously attack all open questioners, we advertise otherwise, we spew doubt. This often allows insanity to go on for far too long. Trivial examples include mercury in fillings, fluoridation of water, mercury and aluminum adjuvants in vaccines, what we don't understand about cooking, our food processing systems and one that seems to defy attack, medicines often too quickly implemented pharmaceutical cabinet. Thanks for the well thought out articles.
And in 1945 the powers-that-be at the time decided to add an endocrine disrupting, developmental neurotoxin, fluoride, to the public water supply. Have we seen increasing cases of hormonal and mental health problems? Are the American Dental Association (ADA) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) not getting it? Perhaps, and I dare sugge
. . I dare suggest that the ADA’s former CEO, Dr. Raymond Cohlmia, DDS, had a clear enough conscience, after serving as CEO for only several years, to abruptly resign from that position, a mere 4-1/2 months after the overwhelming evidence and expert scientific testimony, including yours, Bruce, convinced a diligent federal judge that the Environmental Protection Agency must eliminate that potential harm to human health and sufficiently regulate fluoride to protect the public from excessive exposure. I wholeheartedly suspect Dr. Cohlmia favored the much needed paradigm shift away from water fluoridation, but was overruled and had no choice but to honor his integrity and ethical and moral principles, and resign. Granted, this is educated conjecture on my part, but I have finally put it in writing.