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I recently had a call from a junior health reporter doing a story on household toxins. An editor had assigned her the topic and was keeping the cub reporter on a fairly short leash: she was supposed to come up with a list of top hazards to worry about, but also a matching list of worries that were "overblown."
This is the kind of pseudo-balance we have all become inured to, what with Fox News guarding the henhouse and all that flows from that. Needless to say, we hear quite enough that minimizes any and every legitimate public health concern related to toxic risks. Elsewhere, I have referred to this as part of a pattern analogous to the Kubler-Ross "death and dying process" (denial, anger, bargaining, and acceptance), only adapted to nullify public protection from threatening materials. The process can be applied equally well to household hazards, to workplace protections, or to broader environmental concerns. Akin to denial, the purveyor of the hazard in question minimizes and explains away the problem. Next (anger) comes a mean-spirited counterattack against anyone sounding an alarm. Bargaining calls for those who stand to profit (the newly minted "job creators") to seek the best deal to weaken any proposed controls. Unfortunately, the final stage of acceptance usually means the rest of us taking whatever protection we can get.
I decided not to bite on the story hook of overblown household hazard concerns. But I did find the first part of the assignment intriguing. What, after all, would I put at the top of my own list? I started off with combined hypochlorite bleach and acid mixing episodes leading to chlorine gas release, because these mishaps are so common, have the potential for severe injury, and are easily preventable. This seemed to resonate with reporter at the other end of the telephone line: it turned out her own mother had nearly been killed from such an episode, suffering from residual after-effects for the remainder of her life. I urged the reported to tell this personal story in the piece she was working on, but she seemed hesitant to go in that direction.
I mentioned a pair of other household sources of exposure to the reporter as well. Each can be a major threat and both are amenable to protective measures. One is carbon monoxide gas, recognized by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as a leading cause of U.S. unintentional poisoning deaths. Analyzing 10 years of cases based on almost 70,000 poison center case calls, the CDC recently reported that three quarters occur in the home (http://fulltextreports.com/2011/08/06/carbon-monoxide-exposures-united-…). The encouraging statistic is that over recent years, the frequency of carbon monoxide poisoning is falling, attributed in part by the CDC to the spreading adoption of carbon monoxide warning alarms. The second member of the pair is another odorless gas, this one a slow-killer: radon. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has identified home radon exposure as the number one cause of lung cancer among non-smokers and altogether responsible for 21,000 U.S. lung cancer deaths each year (http://epa.gov/radon/). This is not a universal problem, but rather concentrated geographically in certain parts of the country. In exposure-prone areas, homes should be monitored (there are easy and reliable radon detection methods) and, when radon is present, simple interventions usually suffice, for example venting basements where the gas tends to collect.
Bleach misadventure and carbon monoxide and radon gas exposure are each direct threats to individuals in their own homes. Other household hazards act out their major roles on a different stage. For example, three years ago a great deal of publicity was generated by the story that natural granite countertops can, in certain cases, be a source of radon release (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/garden/24granite.html). But the far more salient hazard of natural granite and, much more so, from synthetic stone granite mimickers, is the silica dust inhaled by the workers who take large slabs and cut-up the counter tops to spec. Personal care products can be another hot topic for individual concern, but the alarm bells should really be ringing for the potential environmental havoc that may be wrought by a range of needless additives to such consumer items, including artificial musk to better market by smell and anti-bacterial agents (in particular, triclocarban) to enhance the appeal of hand soap. When I mentioned this critical aspect of household hazards, the young reporter indicated that that wasn't really what her editor was looking for.
