Toxic Logic

A postgraduate toxicology student tells crazy stories of chemicals and human stupidity.

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Science appreciation post

Reblog if u think science is cool (and deserves some rad funding)

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The pink seeds disaster

Ok, so in the winter of 1971-1972, Iraq imported a bunch of wheat seeds from Mexico and United States. To protect the seeds, they were coated with a fungicide called methylmercury. I hear you ask “Why would you put a toxic chemical on a seed?”. Well, since the methylmercury didn’t pass on to the plants, and the seeds weren’t meant to be eaten directly, they didn’t really see much of a problem with it. It was the 70s. They just marked the bags with something along the lines of “DO NOT EAT THESE SEEDS THEY WILL KILL YOU”, and added a pink coat to the seeds, that was supposed to mean “DO NOT EAT”.

But.

Some “unpredicted” situations occurred.

1. The seeds were distributed late, so the farmers couldn’t sow them anymore. 2. People got really hungry. 3. The marking on the bags was in Spanish. The bags were sent to rural areas. To poor uneducated people. In Iraq. Seriously, look at the bags

So of course, people were like “No hablo español”, washed the pink coating off, and made bread with the seeds.

Over 6000 cases were admitted in hospitals and almost 500 of these people died. This is thought to be a big underestimation, since in rural areas like these people don’t really go to the hospital if they’re sick.

In adults it affected mostly motor function, causing numbness and tingling sensation, clumsy, stumbling gait, weakness and fatigue, vision and hearing loss, leading up to coma and death (depending on how much bread you ate). Even worse, was that if the methylmercury was consumed during pregnancy, it lead to neural damage in the baby. Children were being born smaller, and they had profound mental retardation, seizure disorders, hearing and vision loss and motor impairment or paralysis (again, depending on how much bread was consumed).

All of this because of the bread.

And this wasn't even the first time this happened!

In 1952, a Swedish family accidentally used flour made from methylmercury-treated grain. The mother was not affected, but both a 9 month old baby and a unborn baby were found to be mentally retarded and severely deficient in motor development.

Minamata disease, named after a city in the Kumamoto prefecture in Japan, was first seen in 1956. It describes the symptoms of methylmercury poisoning, released by a local chemical factory, from 1932 to 1968. 2,265 have had been officially recognised as having Minamata disease, 1,784 of whom had died.

Nowadays, mercury (and methylmercury) levels are controlled, as we are aware of the dangers of contamination. However, there is still a lot of concern about the levels of methylmercury in fish and shell fish.

To read more about methylmercury and mercury, you can visit the following pages:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs361/en/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2366407/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2366389/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2366390/

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A real story about cows and vultures

Right, so back in the mid-80s, some people started noticing that the vultures in the Indian subcontinent were all suddenly dropping dead. Someone went “Awwww… I mean, they look a bit weird and all, but surely this isn’t good”.

JK, they’re majestic, look at this one.

So people started looking into it and they couldn’t really figure out what was happening to these vultures.

They thought maybe someone was killing the vultures. Nope

Maybe there is less food and the vultures died? Nope.

Ok so maybe it’s a disease? Nope.

How about some chemicals in the environment, like pesticides or heavy metals?  Nope.

Maybe these vultures ate something weird? Well, they feed on dead cattle that is left out in the open (you know, since some Hindus don’t eat cows), but these cows didn’t die of anything weird and vultures have digestive systems that are basically the Rock of digestive systems. They would have to eat something REALLY weird. Like weirder than what us regular humans (or even most animals) consider weird.

All they knew was that the vultures were dying from kidney failure, and none of these reasons were causing it.

So people started looking into these cows that the vultures were eating. What were they up to before dying (or rather what their owners were up to, because cows don’t really have very active lives you know)?

They didn’t find anything particularly weird, but they did notice that a lot of these cows were in pain before dying (awww), and since their owners were Hindu and they really liked their cows (<3), they gave then an anti-inflammatory drug called diclofenac to reduce their pain.

Now you may have heard about diclofenac, might have even taken it (I have). Don’t go freaking out thinking you’re going to die, diclofenac isn’t dangerous for humans. Or cows. Or most animals. But guess who it turns out it’s terrible for.

Vultures.

In the 90s, vultures in India decreased 95%. Some specific species even 99%!

After this. Veterinary diclofenac has been banned in India, Nepal, and Pakistan. However, it’s still available for people, and it’s cheap, so people that own cows just buy the human one and give it to cows.

Veterinary Diclofenac is also not banned at all in many countries that have lots of vultures, like Spain.

Sad story I’m afraid.

You can read some more about it on the links below:

http://www.nature.com/news/cattle-drug-threatens-thousands-of-vultures-1.19839

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1351921/

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320702001647

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Lead in Petrol? What a fab idea!

So, I’m assuming we all know that lead = bad.

This has been well known since like Roman times. Back in the first century AD, a book by a dude named Dioscerides, a physician, said 'Lead makes the mind give way'.

So you might wonder, how in the hell did it end up in petrol?

Well up to 1925, public exposure to lead was mostly from household paint.

Enter, stage left: General Motors.

They were getting their asses kicked in car sales by Ford Motors, and they wanted to make a faster car. They had some issues with the petrol in their motors, and they needed to find something to fix the petrol.

Their top dog chemist, Thomas Midgely (who later on also invented CFCs. You know the chemicals that made a hole in the ozone layer. Great dude.) found this old patent for tetraethyl lead (TEL), that would fix the issue.

Back in 1925, many experts warned that adding lead to petrol would be a really bad idea. A Professor of Physiology at Yale, Dr. Yandell Henderson, warned that lead was a public health menace as serious as infectious diseases. He actually said:

“Conditions will grow worse so gradually, and the development of lead poisoning will come on so insidiously ... that leaded petrol will be in nearly universal use ... before the public and the government awakens to the situation”.

Like, “you have been warned”.

They could also just have used an alcohol-based additive, which would have been cleaner, but they didn’t because money and oil and yadda yadda.

So this TEL would actually make them more money, so they decided to go for it in the US, and then exported to the rest of the world.

For ages, the only research coming out about lead was done by industry and industry-sponsored scientists, which as you can imagine is a problem. No independent research was done until like the 60s and 70s when some scientists showed that the levels of lead were not 'normal', as industry claimed, but hundreds of times higher than before the industrial revolution. This, of course, was not good. Meanwhile, people who worked with the TEL were actually going crazy and dying.

By mid-70s, leaded petrol released about 200 000 tonnes of lead into the atmosphere annually in both the US and Europe.

Only in the 70s, public funding was made available to look at the effects of such high levels of lead in children. Professor Herb Needleman found that the higher the lead content, the greater the negative impact on IQ and that the average IQ of a group of 2000 children had fallen by 5 points.

Scientists were like

To what the industry answered

You have to understand that IQ follows a normal distribution (most people are “average smart” and there are extremes towards both ends of very gifted and very handicapped people). A 5 point IQ decrease means that you will have double the amount of severely mentally handicapped people, and half the amount of gifted people. That’s a lot of people being severely impacted for the whole of their lives.

Guess what the industry did? They basically said this scientist was “fake news” and continued to do what they wanted.

In 1977, another study came out linking lead in air to brain damage. This finally triggered new rules about lead concentrations in air. Cars running on leaded fuel started to be retired and the levels of lead in the air started to decrease.

Between 1976 and 1980, the amount of lead used for petrol production decreased by 50% and the lead level in the average American dropped by 37%.

Although nearly all countries worldwide had phased out leaded petrol by 2012, the lesson remains.

Think of all the brilliant minds lost. It’s a whole generation affected by something that could have been easily avoided. Money spoke louder than science.

Nowadays, lead concentrations in soil remain high. Electronics wastes containing lead are still a concern.

There’s a lot more that could be said, but if you want to learn more, I advise you to read the chapter about Lead on the book Late lessons from early warnings. It’s a report by European Environment Agency, and it’s free to download. The link is below. The chapter on lead in Part II, chapter 3.

http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/late-lessons-2

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Hello world!

I’ve noticed that people really like to hear about all the crazy chemicals that have been used at some point in the history of humankind.

The reactions to these stories, usually well-known case studies in the fields of toxicology and ecotoxicology, are a mixture of surprise and

Which I get, cause same.

With all these crazy stories in mind, and considering all the confusion and misconception about some chemicals (like, I bet you’ve wondered why is everyone so upset about BPA), I thought “Hey, someone should make a blog that explains all this crazy stuff in terms people can actually understand, instead of a bunch of gibberish that you would need 3 days, a dictionary and intensive research to understand.

Well, here is a blog about crazy toxicology stories.

There’s also loads of juicy scientist drama that would make a great reality show that might come up at some point. Honestly. Real Scientists of the EU would be something I would totally watch.