Your Body Is a Corporate Test Tube - A hidden epidemic is poisoning America.

A hidden epidemic is poisoning America

 ...Lead, vinyl, formaldehyde, asbestos, Bisphenol A, PCBs, and "thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry..." - "in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them...”

Public health historians David Rosner and Jerry Markowitz’s recent book, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, chronicles the battles that have taken place over lead poisoning for the last half-century. This post originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Your Body Is a Corporate Test Tube

April 29, 2013

by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner

A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name — and no antidote.

A lead warning sign hangs in a window in Lakewood, Ohio, in April 2013. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls(PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry,” but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment.

Today, we are all unwitting subjects in the largest set of drug trials ever. Without our knowledge or consent, we are testing thousands of suspected toxic chemicals and compounds, as well as new substances whose safety is largely unproven and whose effects on human beings are all but unknown. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) itself has begun monitoring our bodies for 151 potentially dangerous chemicals, detailing the variety of pollutants we store in our bones, muscle, blood and fat. None of the companies introducing these new chemicals has even bothered to tell us we’re part of their experiment. None of them has asked us to sign consent forms or explained that they have little idea what the long-term side effects of the chemicals they’ve put in our environment — and so our bodies — could be. Nor do they have any clue as to what the synergistic effects of combining so many novel chemicals inside a human body in unknown quantities might produce.

How Industrial Toxins Entered the American Home..

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