We hear and read a lot these days about the dangers of “chemicals”—about pesticide residues on our food, toxic wastes on our land, unsafe medicines, and so forth. What’s a person to believe?
Life is not risk-free; we all take many risks each day. We decide to ride a bike rather than drive, even though there is a ten times greater likelihood per mile of dying in a bicycling accident than in a car. We decide to walk down stairs rather than take an elevator, even though 7000 people die from falls each year in the United States. We decide to smoke cigarettes, even though it increases our chance of getting cancer by 50%. Making decisions that affect our health is something we do routinely without even thinking about it.
What about risks from chemicals? Risk evaluation of chemicals is carried out by exposing test animals (usually rats) to the chemical and then monitoring for signs of harm. We all take many risks each day, some much more dangerous than others. To limit the expense and time needed, the amounts administered are hundreds or thousands of times greater than those a person might normally encounter. Data are then reduced to a single number called an LD50, the amount of a substance per kilogram body weight that is lethal to 50% of the test animals. If a substance is harmful to animals, is it necessarily harmful to humans? How can a large dose for a small animal be translated into a small dose for a large human? All substances are toxic to some organisms to some extent, and the difference between help and harm is often a matter of degree. Vitamin A, for example, is necessary for vision, yet it can promote cancer at high dosages. Arsenic trioxide is the most classic of poisons, yet recent work has shown it to be effective at inducing remissions in some types of leukemia. Even water can be toxic if drunk in large amounts because it dilutes the salt in body fluids and causes a potentially life-threatening condition called hyponatremia. Furthermore, how we evaluate risk is strongly influenced by familiarity. Many foods contain natural ingredients far more toxic than synthetic additives or pesticide residues, but the ingredients are ignored because the foods are familiar.
All decisions involve tradeoffs. Does the benefit of increased food production outweigh possible health risks of a pesticide? Do the beneficial effects of a new drug outweigh a potentially dangerous side effect in a small fraction of users? The answers are rarely obvious, but we should at least try to base our responses on facts.
