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Speaker 5: Oh hey, it's the bouncer who comments on your out
Speaker 5: of state license because he has a cousin who lives there.
Speaker 5: Ali Ward back with a fresh and a timely episode
Speaker 5: of ologies that as an episode and as a species,
Speaker 5: this one is really long overdue, but it was finally
Speaker 5: driven by some recent events in Ohio and Jarret and
Speaker 5: I went to our neighbors to eat dip for a
Speaker 5: quarter or two during the Super Bowl, and we were
Speaker 5: pretty shocked to learn how few of our neighbor's friends
Speaker 5: had heard of this trained derailment in eastern Ohio. Same
Speaker 5: thing with my family chat, Everyone's like, what derailment? So
Speaker 5: I said, Ward, let's talk to an environmental toxicologist about
Speaker 5: their whole life and this.
Speaker 6: So we did so.
Speaker 5: I asked around for the best person to chat with,
Speaker 5: and y'all delivered. So many arrows pointed right at this
Speaker 5: ologist who did an undergrad degree in environmental science, got
Speaker 5: a master's in public health and environmental and Occupational health,
Speaker 5: including a very fancy environmental health Risk Assessment certification, and
Speaker 5: then earned their doctorate in environment mental, and Occupational health.
Speaker 5: They're now doing a postdoc at Northeastern Universities Social Science,
Speaker 5: Environmental Health Research Institute in Boston, and they've studied anthrax
Speaker 5: in Alaska, potential antidotes to lethal phosphine poisoning Sneaky p foss.
Speaker 5: Much more on those later, they studied how climate change
Speaker 5: impacts epidemiology and mitochondrial poisons. Their work is just this
Speaker 5: beautiful soup of environmental toxicology, public health, and environmental justice.
Speaker 5: They're perfect for this. But before we get to the interview,
Speaker 5: a quick thank you to everyone who's sponsoring on Patreon
Speaker 5: at patreon dot com, slash ologies, I love you a
Speaker 5: dollar or more a month lets you lob questions at
Speaker 5: our guests. It also keeps show running and for zero dollars.
Speaker 5: If you like, you can just help us out by
Speaker 5: telling friends or reviewing, or making sure you're subscribed, or
Speaker 5: leaving a rating or a review.
Speaker 6: I do read all the reviews.
Speaker 5: And as a thanks, I highlight a fresh one each week,
Speaker 5: like this one from Nikki Drinks, who wrote Ali Ward
Speaker 5: put her whole alla jusse into this show. I tell
Speaker 5: everyone I know about it. I'm obsessed. Much love to you,
Speaker 5: Queen Nikki Drinks. I would like to buy you a
Speaker 5: drink for that. Ala jusse god I hope I said
Speaker 5: that right. I loved it. Also, Anna Kate Thora hugs
Speaker 5: to you. Okay, Environmental toxicology and a little bit of
Speaker 5: fun trivia. So toxicology comes from the word toxin, which
Speaker 5: means poison, which was from a Greek word for poisoned arrows,
Speaker 5: which came from an older word taxa, meaning archery, which
Speaker 5: came from an older word meaning a yew tree, which,
Speaker 5: in a weird roundabout way, there's a compound from the
Speaker 5: Pacific yew tree that was approved in nineteen ninety three
Speaker 5: as a chemotherapy called taxol for breast cancer among other cancers.
Speaker 5: And chemotherapy is a type of well administered poison to tumors.
Speaker 5: So much more on that whole philosophy coming up. You're
Speaker 5: gonna love this. So I made this ologist get on
Speaker 5: the horn to talk about their work and chemical spill,
Speaker 5: historical disasters, water quality, airborne toxic events, clear gases, white noise,
Speaker 5: dead fish, dark clouds, chemistry tests, raincoats, lawsuits, and lead.
Speaker 5: So take a deep breath if your air is fresh,
Speaker 5: and get ready to love environmental toxicologist. Doctor Kimberly k Garrett.
Speaker 7: Sure, Kimberly Garrett.
Speaker 6: She's and doctor, right, oh yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and you can also call me Kim so that's
Speaker 7: fine too. It's been quite a week.
Speaker 6: It has been quite a.
Speaker 7: Week toxicology land.
Speaker 5: Dang, is there any part of you that's like, Wow,
Speaker 5: people finally care about environmental toxicology?
Speaker 7: Oh? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm sad that it takes
Speaker 7: an emergency or a disaster for people to be interested
Speaker 7: in the field that I love so much. But you know,
Speaker 7: there's the room for everybody in the in the toxicology train,
Speaker 7: so so welcome.
Speaker 6: No, but intended on the train. Oh my gosh, we
Speaker 6: have trains on the brains. What can you say?
Speaker 7: Well, I'm from Pennsylvania and my partner, who is not
Speaker 7: from Pennsylvania, is convinced that every Pennsylvania has a genetic
Speaker 7: disposition to love trains. I can't escape it.
Speaker 6: And how did you decide what to do your PhD In?
Speaker 7: Well, when I was an undergrad, I became really interested
Speaker 7: in chemical toxicology. I initially wanted to go to undergrad
Speaker 7: for chemistry, but I have really bad test anxiety, and
Speaker 7: so the testing of the you know, weed out classes
Speaker 7: at the beginning, really they weeded me out, and so
Speaker 7: I ended up going into environmental science, and I'm so
Speaker 7: glad that I did, because I took a toxicology class
Speaker 7: and I learned about all different kinds of ways that
Speaker 7: chemicals impact our bodies. And from then on, I was like,
Speaker 7: if it's a chemical, I want to study it and
Speaker 7: how it impacts our health. And so I really got
Speaker 7: into the laboratory science side. I did a lot of spectroscopy, spectrophotometry,
Speaker 7: very molecular analytic methods to start to learn about how
Speaker 7: chemicals impact our bodies and how chemicals interact with each other.
Speaker 7: So even though I didn't have that official chemistry background,
Speaker 7: I really learned a lot through hands on research and
Speaker 7: learning from other colleagues. And then I wrote to a
Speaker 7: professor at pitt who was teaching in an organic chemistry class,
Speaker 7: and that professor was just very wonderful and supportive and
Speaker 7: that class really really impacted the way that I do
Speaker 7: my work.
Speaker 5: And so this professor, doctor Jill Millstone, at the University
Speaker 5: of Pittsburgh's Department of Chemistry, ended up changing the course
Speaker 5: of Kim's life life and on the topic of the past.
Speaker 5: Let's go way back environmentally toxicologically speaking, what about when
Speaker 5: this career kind of took a turn. I imagine that
Speaker 5: we've been using way more human made chemicals and forever chemicals,
Speaker 5: and we have better technology to study them. Was there
Speaker 5: even a thing called environmental toxicology like before the nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 5: does anyone even care?
Speaker 6: Well?
Speaker 7: There definitely was toxicology throughout history. One of the founders
Speaker 7: of toxicology a guy that we call Paracelsus. He was
Speaker 7: an alchemist and had some pretty bonkers ideas about how
Speaker 7: the world worked, but he had some good ideas about
Speaker 7: how chemicals work and how poisons work. And so we
Speaker 7: think of historical toxicology as very poison driven, you know,
Speaker 7: mercury in alchemy operations, and cyanide in drinks of rich
Speaker 7: men by their future widows and things like that. But
Speaker 7: I mean, the environment is around and has always been
Speaker 7: interacting with our bodies. And even if there wasn't the
Speaker 7: language to talk about it the way that we do now,
Speaker 7: people knew about associations between what was going on outside
Speaker 7: and what was going on inside.
Speaker 5: So toxicology has existed for thousands of years before the
Speaker 5: Egyptian hieroglyphs that warned of poisons and before socrates death
Speaker 5: by hemlock. But toxicology had its official start on the
Speaker 5: books in the fifteen hundreds with yes, the Swiss born
Speaker 5: physician and alchemist Paracelsus, whose birth name was actually Philippus
Speaker 5: Eurolius Theophrastus Bombastis von Hohenheim, which I fucking dare you
Speaker 5: to name your next cat Philippus Ariolis Theophrastus Bombastis vaun Hollenheim,
Speaker 5: please anyway, But Paracelsus was actually a pen name for
Speaker 5: his non science writing, but it kind of stuck after
Speaker 5: his death, like Madonna or Real or Beyonce or Share
Speaker 5: or a Dell. But his hot jams included hits like
Speaker 5: figuring out that miners disease or ciliosis was caused by
Speaker 5: inhaling rock dust and was not, according to the prevailing
Speaker 5: medical opinion of the time quote a punishment for sin
Speaker 5: administered by mountain spirits. He's like, no, that's from dust, guys.
Speaker 5: But fast forward a few hundred years to the late
Speaker 5: seventeen hundreds into the mid eighteen hundreds, and there was
Speaker 5: a revolution mechanically and toxicologically.
Speaker 7: That really gained attention in the Industrial Revolution when we
Speaker 7: saw really really gruesome working conditions in factories and people
Speaker 7: were being exposed to chemicals in confined spaces, and we
Speaker 7: can think about things like coal mining too. Is a
Speaker 7: huge kind of start of environmental toxicology and environmental science.
Speaker 7: But a lot of the industrial chemicals that we used
Speaker 7: during the Industrial Revolution made people very, very sick, and
Speaker 7: so throughout public health history people have been looking at
Speaker 7: the ways that those chemicals lead to death and tabulating
Speaker 7: worker's death and things like that. Really, in the environmental
Speaker 7: movement in the nineteen sixties really spearheaded the EPA in
Speaker 7: the formation of some of the occupational safety groups in
Speaker 7: the US, So it kind of follows the general environmental movement. Yess.
Speaker 5: So a few things that contribute to the environmentalism movement
Speaker 5: were not as what I assumed was just absolutely shriven
Speaker 5: balls in a park in the sixties talking to squirrels. Rather,
Speaker 5: it was renowned marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson. She
Speaker 5: released the nineteen sixty two book Silent Spring about the
Speaker 5: dangers of DDT and other synthetic pesticides.
Speaker 6: And plus there was a.
Speaker 5: Massive oil spill off the coast of California, and apparently
Speaker 5: a river in Ohio was so polluted in the sixties
Speaker 5: it's straight up caught on fire. Plus, astronauts started taking
Speaker 5: photos of the Earth from the moon and people were like, yikes, whoa,
Speaker 5: We're on a planet in space and it's really pretty
Speaker 5: from there, and it's just a shame to garbage it.
Speaker 5: So boomers, who were like the gen c of their
Speaker 5: time were like, boy howdy, it would be so groovy
Speaker 5: to save the planet. And so in nineteen seventy, the
Speaker 5: EPA officially launched under history's favorite President Nixon. So to
Speaker 5: this day, if you ask the EPA website what do
Speaker 5: you do, it'll tell you that among its duties are
Speaker 5: working to ensure that Americans have clean air, land, and water,
Speaker 5: and that all parts of society communities, individuals, businesses, local
Speaker 5: and tribal governments have access to accurate information to manage
Speaker 5: human health and environmental risks. They make sure contaminated lands
Speaker 5: and toxic sites are cleaned up by the potentially responsible parties,
Speaker 5: and they review chemicals in the marketplace for safety. Although,
Speaker 5: in a pretty big surprise in June of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 5: the majority conservative US Supreme Court voted six to three
Speaker 5: along political lines in the West Virginia versus the US
Speaker 5: Environmental Protection Agency case, and the Supreme Court blocked the
Speaker 5: EPA for making future broad regulations on greenhouse gas emissions
Speaker 5: from coal fueled power plans. So environmental lawyers say that
Speaker 5: that ruling in June set back renewable and clean energy
Speaker 5: efforts by five or ten years. Nine people in America
Speaker 5: make decisions that affect the world. Oh life, What even
Speaker 5: is it? Who do environmental toxicologists sort of answer to?
Speaker 5: Who's kind of keeping an eye out on this stuff
Speaker 5: to make sure that there's not just like asbestos falling
Speaker 5: from our Christmas decorations, you know, like there used to be.
Speaker 7: Right. So, in the United States, the government authorities on
Speaker 7: environmental and occupational safety, which environmental toxicology and occupational health
Speaker 7: go hand in hand because chemical exposures at work are
Speaker 7: very very important to monitor. In the United States, there's
Speaker 7: the National Institute of Health has NIOSH, which is the
Speaker 7: National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. There's also OSHA,
Speaker 7: which is the Occupational Safety and Health but also the EPA.
Speaker 7: The EPA looks at a lot of environmental toxicology.
Speaker 5: And when you are an environmental toxicologist, do you get
Speaker 5: to decide, Am I going to study forever chemicals like pfos?
Speaker 5: Am I going to study gases? Am I going to
Speaker 5: study microplastics? What kinds of stuff are y'all looking for?
Speaker 7: My gosh, it's a big question literally everything. So I
Speaker 7: guess this goes back to some of the principles of toxicology.
Speaker 7: So our boy Paracelsus problematic fave he came up with this,
Speaker 7: I guess, saying of the dose makes the poison, which
Speaker 7: I actually have tattooed in Latin. I have a poison
Speaker 7: plants tattoo.
Speaker 6: Holy shit, what kind of plants are in there?
Speaker 7: So I have fox glove, and there's poison hemlock and daffodils,
Speaker 7: which are my favorite flower.
Speaker 6: But are those so?
Speaker 7: Yeah, the roots are really toxic.
Speaker 6: I did know that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the bulbs, but they're also being studied for different
Speaker 7: medicines and things like that. So all of these plants
Speaker 7: also have active ingredients that in the right doses can
Speaker 7: be used medically.
Speaker 6: Mm hmm.
Speaker 7: Let's see. So I think I think those are all
Speaker 7: the ones that I have on there. But yeah, and
Speaker 7: it also says a solid dosis fescet venym, which means
Speaker 7: the dose makes the poison. Wow, it's like I'm going
Speaker 7: to be a toxicologist. It's going to be great.
Speaker 6: Everything fine, it's gorgeous. You also could never get away
Speaker 6: with poisoning anyone. Yeah, absolutely, You've got to find a
Speaker 6: different way to kill someone. If you got an enemy, you.
Speaker 7: Know, yeah, they would never suspect.
Speaker 5: But yeah, when it when it comes to deciding, I mean, gosh,
Speaker 5: you could study plants, you could study plastics.
Speaker 6: Well, how do you how do you know? Do they
Speaker 6: roll a pair of.
Speaker 5: Like twenty sided D and D dice and that's how
Speaker 5: you figure it out.
Speaker 7: Basically, So the idea that the dose makes the poison
Speaker 7: means that anything can be a poison and there are
Speaker 7: you know, lethal doses for every chemical and sometimes those
Speaker 7: adverse effects come at such high levels that you get
Speaker 7: sick before you can reach that level and you no
Speaker 7: longer ingest it or things like that. But so that
Speaker 7: means that the limits, there aren't really any limits to
Speaker 7: what you can study.
Speaker 2: The limit does not exist.
Speaker 5: So Kim was interested in endocrine disruptors and also took
Speaker 5: a liking to inorganic chemistry, which means carbon is not involved.
Speaker 5: Organic chemistry just means there's carbon. All living things have carbon.
Speaker 5: Inorganic chemistry thus involves the study of things like metals,
Speaker 5: So organic carbon, inorganic no carbon.
Speaker 6: But don't worry.
Speaker 5: You can study danger and not necessarily work in a
Speaker 5: cam lab at all. There's danger everywhere, yay.
Speaker 7: Really, if you're interested in a chemical or even a
Speaker 7: non chemical exposure of things like noise, exposure to sunlight,
Speaker 7: exposure to workplace violence, you know there's there's a place
Speaker 7: in risk assessment for all of those sinds of things,
Speaker 7: toxicology being just part of that risk assessment.
Speaker 5: What about something like this week? I mean, I believe
Speaker 5: the train derailment out of East Palestine, Ohio was February sixth.
Speaker 6: I want to say it.
Speaker 5: Was actually around nine pm on February third, twenty twenty three,
Speaker 5: and the train of one hundred and fifty cars, which
Speaker 5: is nearly two miles long, was headed from Madison, Illinois
Speaker 5: to a rail yard in Conway, Pennsylvania. So it crashed
Speaker 5: on the third, but the controlled burn came on February sixth,
Speaker 5: which is when most people may have heard about it.
Speaker 5: But I wanted to do this episode because so many
Speaker 5: people I knew, family members, neighbors and friends hadn't heard
Speaker 5: a word about this crash at all, which kind of
Speaker 5: mystified me. And then a reporter was arrested, which caused
Speaker 5: some people to panic, but it turns out it was
Speaker 5: for speaking while the governor was speaking at a press conference.
Speaker 5: It just felt like I needed to get a professional's
Speaker 5: opinion on what is happening.
Speaker 6: When did you first hear about it?
Speaker 7: So I subscribed to a mental newsletter called Above the Fold,
Speaker 7: and it comes into my inbox every day, and I
Speaker 7: received one on Monday, and it said something like train
Speaker 7: derailment in western Pennsylvania, Ohio region. And I grew up
Speaker 7: in that area, and I lived in Pittsburgh for the
Speaker 7: past few years, and I was familiar with the compressed
Speaker 7: natural gas trains that go through the city multiple times
Speaker 7: a day. And some of my colleagues and my friends
Speaker 7: and I have always, you know, said this would be really,
Speaker 7: really dangerous if there was a derailment, and so I
Speaker 7: was afraid that compressed natural gas train had derailed in
Speaker 7: the urban center of Pittsburgh. And it turns out it
Speaker 7: was closer to where I grew up than Pittsburgh. So
Speaker 7: I was familiar with the area, and so I read
Speaker 7: about it, and I, you know, called my parents because
Speaker 7: they were fairly close, and made sure everything was okay.
Speaker 7: And then I looked into what kind of chemicals had spilt,
Speaker 7: and I had seen reports that it was carrying fose gene,
Speaker 7: which is not true. So at first I was like,
Speaker 7: why are they carrying post gene? But it was vinyl chloride.
Speaker 5: More on those in a bit. But meanwhile, Kim had
Speaker 5: tweeted a thread about the hazards of the crash, and
Speaker 5: it opened with as an environmental toxicologist who makes a
Speaker 5: point to hate on Pittsburgh's daily compressed natural gas trains,
Speaker 5: the East Palestine, Ohio vinyl chloride train wreck is breaking
Speaker 5: my brain, she writes. We know that vinyl chloride is
Speaker 5: associated with liver cancer after chronic exposure. That's important to
Speaker 5: consider with any environmental release. But the more acute risk
Speaker 5: in this case is exposure to hydrochloric acid and phose gene,
Speaker 5: which are produced when vinyl chloride burns. She continues, Vinyl
Speaker 5: chloride is the main concern right now because it's explosive.
Speaker 5: So after the derailment, as dark gray plumes filled the skies.
Speaker 5: About two thousand residents within a two mile radius of
Speaker 5: this Appalachian Ohio town were evacuated. Tell me a little
Speaker 5: bit in this particular case what that area of Ohio
Speaker 5: is like.
Speaker 6: Is it really rural?
Speaker 7: Yes, so generally western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio are fairly rural.
Speaker 7: They were more populated during the Industrial Revolution and the
Speaker 7: steel boom up until about the nineteen eighties when steel
Speaker 7: left the area, leading to a bit of an economic depression.
Speaker 7: But I know that train infrastructure is really central to
Speaker 7: the region, and like I said about Pennsylvanians and their trains,
Speaker 7: I think the same could be said for Ohio. And
Speaker 7: it's also an area that has a lot of industry
Speaker 7: that is associated with a lot of environmental pollution. So
Speaker 7: Pittsburgh has some of the worst air quality in the country.
Speaker 7: They have high rates of air pollution associated cancers, and
Speaker 7: it's a big environmental justice issue because those risks aren't
Speaker 7: distributed evenly. You know, there's this this history of industry
Speaker 7: coming in and polluting and then the community is left
Speaker 7: to clean up the ruins. And so this is unfortunately
Speaker 7: just another case in that in that very rich history
Speaker 7: of industrial pollution in the area.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and now phose gene versus vinyl chloride, can you
Speaker 5: tell me a little bit because these are words that
Speaker 5: most of us are not familiar with, but as an
Speaker 5: environmental soxologist, it's probably like one oh one for you.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Absolutely, So vinyl chloride is really volatile. It burns
Speaker 7: I don't want to say a low temperature, but you know,
Speaker 7: on the scale of temperatures that things can burn at,
Speaker 7: it's a pretty low temperature. So when it's exposed to
Speaker 7: air and heat, it will combust into a variety of
Speaker 7: combustion products. So the train derailment started a fire, and
Speaker 7: the heat was rising, the pressure was building in the
Speaker 7: tankers carrying vinyl chloride, and so when vinyl chloride combusts,
Speaker 7: it produces a couple of different products, like carbon monoxide
Speaker 7: and carbon dioxide. But there's also hydrogen chloride, which I
Speaker 7: can talk about in a minute. But there's also phose gene.
Speaker 7: So phose gene is famous for being a chemical weapon
Speaker 7: used in World War One, and it was used purposefully
Speaker 7: in high concentrations because of its toxicity and it disrupts
Speaker 7: the interaction between the lowest parts of your lungs and
Speaker 7: your bloodstreams, so oxygen doesn't get in and so you
Speaker 7: can't breathe. And it's also denser than air, so it
Speaker 7: stays closer to the ground. So if you're ever around
Speaker 7: phase gene, you know you want to get up to
Speaker 7: higher ground. And this was really important in the context
Speaker 7: of World War One, where people were fighting in trenches,
Speaker 7: and so if you have something that stays low to
Speaker 7: the ground, then it gets stuck in trenches and so
Speaker 7: people can't escape. And so unfortunately, it was used as
Speaker 7: a chemical weapon, and so that's how people know it now,
Speaker 7: and so that's produced when vinyl chloride combusts. But it
Speaker 7: doesn't last very long in the environment. It's half life
Speaker 7: in the laboratory scale is under a second, so it
Speaker 7: really depends on how much there is how long that's
Speaker 7: going to last. But my suspicion is that it was
Speaker 7: gone from the area after the controlled release within a
Speaker 7: few hours to maybe a day and a half.
Speaker 5: We'll talk more about that controlled release in a bit,
Speaker 5: because the decision to do it has left people well
Speaker 5: fuming and now everything else that was a product of combustion,
Speaker 5: did that rise.
Speaker 7: For the most part, yes, So that was the other
Speaker 7: interesting titbit about the controlled burn there was a thermal
Speaker 7: inversion coming in. Can I can I geek out about
Speaker 7: thermal inversions? Okay, So, as a loyal Pennsylvanian, I love
Speaker 7: our environmental history and I like to talk about it
Speaker 7: whenever possible. So, thermal inversion is when there's warm air
Speaker 7: on the ground, but then a layer of cold air
Speaker 7: comes over top of it, and it acts like a
Speaker 7: blanket and it keeps all the warm air down on
Speaker 7: the ground. And usually that warm air would rise up
Speaker 7: to the atmosphere. And so because there's that blanket over top,
Speaker 7: things that are close to the ground don't escape, and
Speaker 7: so they're stuck down at the ground. And that happens
Speaker 7: fairly frequently in the western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio area.
Speaker 7: Anyone in Pittsburgh is probably very familiar with the air
Speaker 7: quality warning days and the word inversion. But it was
Speaker 7: really really important to the establishment of the environmental movement
Speaker 7: in the United States.
Speaker 5: So the year is nineteen forty eight, twenty five miles
Speaker 5: southeast of Pittsburgh in a small mill town called Donora,
Speaker 5: which had a zinc smelting plant and.
Speaker 7: They were off gassing all kinds of contaminants. It turned
Speaker 7: out there was a thermal inversion that day, and this
Speaker 7: was in Donora, Pennsylvania. There was a build up of
Speaker 7: the contaminant in that thermal inversion and it lasted for days,
Speaker 7: So people were exposed to this ever increasing concentration of
Speaker 7: toxic chemicals coming from this industrial plant. Unfortunately, a lot
Speaker 7: of people were sickened, and people died, and it got
Speaker 7: a lot of national attention.
Speaker 8: A death bringing fog over Pennsylvania's bustling industrial town of Donora.
Speaker 8: Residents have difficulty in breathing the murky air as the
Speaker 8: town is plunged into darkness. Oxygen tens careful sufferers in
Speaker 8: the local emergency hospital. Twenty people die, four hundred others
Speaker 8: are stricken with respiratory owlents. Investigating the cause of the
Speaker 8: sudden catastrophe, health officials close the local zinc plant, suspected
Speaker 8: of emitting poisonous films.
Speaker 7: This is also what caused the London fog, which is
Speaker 7: another example of an inversion causing contamination to stick around
Speaker 7: in the air.
Speaker 6: I had no idea. I thought London fog was the
Speaker 6: type of trench coat. I had no idea.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it feels a little insensitive. Honestly, I guess, I
Speaker 7: guess London having like water fog is normal. But for me,
Speaker 7: you know that it's I think of the London fog
Speaker 7: as the environmental disaster.
Speaker 5: Okay, So in nineteen fifty two there was a five
Speaker 5: day inversion event known as the Great Smog of London
Speaker 5: that killed around four thousand people. But this metropolitan air pollution,
Speaker 5: it wasn't uncommon, this was not new to them. London
Speaker 5: fog was of long used term for this yellowish or
Speaker 5: pea soupy thick, sulfurous industrial smog that occurred in the
Speaker 5: late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds in industrialized cities.
Speaker 5: Back then, everyone's like smoke six cigarettes with breakfast, Like
Speaker 5: who cares? Look at the air. You shouldn't even see air,
Speaker 5: but look at it. Here we are in this poisonous
Speaker 5: miasma of airborne waste.
Speaker 6: So cheerio.
Speaker 5: But what about London fog. The coat manufacturer, what does
Speaker 5: it have to do with anything? Well, it was established
Speaker 5: long before that fatal London fog nineteen fifty two event.
Speaker 5: They started actually selling trench coats in nineteen twenty three.
Speaker 5: And also, surprise, London fog is an American company. They
Speaker 5: were founded in Pennsylvania two and I spent at least
Speaker 5: two hours digging into the research of London Fog coats
Speaker 5: this week. My brain just would not permit me to stop.
Speaker 5: So now you have to carry the burden of trivia
Speaker 5: that trench coats were named because soldiers in the First
Speaker 5: World War would wear them in the literal trenches, hence
Speaker 5: trench coats. But London Fog really made a name for
Speaker 5: themselves during World War Two. They made like ten thousand
Speaker 5: coats for the US Navy. People loved them. And the
Speaker 5: style that the London Fog founder, Israel Meyers, preferred was
Speaker 5: kind of a less inspector gadgety double breasted look and
Speaker 5: favored the kind of sleek single breasted style based on
Speaker 5: a Scottish coat called a balmacn And Israel liked to
Speaker 5: call his stylish rain jackets main coats and not raincoats
Speaker 5: because he was like, hey, even though we worked with
Speaker 5: DuPont to make these raincoats waterproof, you can wear this
Speaker 5: shit no matter what the weather and you can look good.
Speaker 5: So let's call him main coats, baby. And so London
Speaker 5: Fog coats became wildly successful name another raincoat. But yes,
Speaker 5: given the historical inversion events of London fog, perhaps London
Speaker 5: FOG's slogan of London fog lets you laugh at the
Speaker 5: weather was like a little too soon.
Speaker 6: Oh dear. Yeah.
Speaker 5: And so with these, you know, with these types of concerns,
Speaker 5: with regular weather patterns mixing in with brand new chemicals
Speaker 5: or not used to, how where does remediation even start?
Speaker 5: When I see pictures from this Ohio derailment, there's a plume,
Speaker 5: It's like a column of dark, dark, grayish blue smoke,
Speaker 5: and then it rises and covers so much of the sky.
Speaker 5: Why is it such a column? And where is that
Speaker 5: cloud going?
Speaker 7: So the difference between the controlled explosion versus the other
Speaker 7: options made it so that even though it doesn't look
Speaker 7: like it, it's basically if you shook a can of
Speaker 7: soda and you opened it a little bit at a
Speaker 7: time and let the air go out rather than you know,
Speaker 7: puncturing the side of it. So the images from the
Speaker 7: controlled burn are really striking. And you know, that just
Speaker 7: shows how much energy is contained in those molecules. That is,
Speaker 7: because of the energy that was released when those molecules
Speaker 7: broke up. The height of the plume is unsurprising because
Speaker 7: of the amount of energy that's in there. And if
Speaker 7: you went in with a spectrometer, you could look at
Speaker 7: the plume and see what colors show up, so we
Speaker 7: can see what kind of gases are in there. But
Speaker 7: the really interesting thing about those images is that you
Speaker 7: notice it stops at the top right, it flattens out.
Speaker 7: That's the thermal inversion. Oh yeah, So they were trying
Speaker 7: to do the controlled burn before that inversion got lower
Speaker 7: to the ground, so they could maximize the amount of
Speaker 7: dissipation and minimize the amount of contaminants that were close
Speaker 7: to the ground when the inversion was coming. So shout
Speaker 7: out to meteorologists for being aware of what was going
Speaker 7: on and probably making things a lot less disastrous.
Speaker 5: And now the vinyl chloride, I understand when it mixes.
Speaker 6: With water vapor, does it become hydrochloric acid.
Speaker 7: Yes, vinylchloride combusts forming hydrogen chloride, and that, upon contact
Speaker 7: with moisture, becomes hydrochloric acid. And so if you inhale
Speaker 7: hydrogen chloride, you have a lot of moisture in your
Speaker 7: mouth and your lungs, and it unfortunately will become a
Speaker 7: liquid in your lungs when it reacts, so that's something
Speaker 7: to stay away from. But that reaction happens really quickly,
Speaker 7: and if you know, people are evacuated from the area,
Speaker 7: then it with the first rain or with just reaction
Speaker 7: in the environment, that suffocation or drowning risk is no
Speaker 7: longer an issue.
Speaker 5: Is that what's been happening to people's chickens and dogs
Speaker 5: and foxes and stuff.
Speaker 7: Well, I can't give individualized risk assessment or health advice,
Speaker 7: and I you know, I'm not on the ground to
Speaker 7: do an autopsy. But from what I've read, unfortunately not
Speaker 7: all of the animals were able to be evacuated, and
Speaker 7: so we're likely exposed to phosgene and hydrochloric acid. So
Speaker 7: those reports make me very very sad, and I wish
Speaker 7: that every living thing in the area could be evacuated.
Speaker 5: So there have been reports of pets and livestock dying
Speaker 5: from chemical exposure, and scientists estimate that about thirty five
Speaker 5: hundred fish have died in the streams and the rivers
Speaker 5: nearby so far, which has left kind of a greasy, fatty,
Speaker 5: dead fish rainbowy film on some of the local waterways
Speaker 5: that has been misreported as an oil spill. But why
Speaker 5: did all those fish go belly up?
Speaker 7: I'm not super sure about the fish. I think that
Speaker 7: would have been a change in oxygen in the water
Speaker 7: upon contamination. But my guess is for the animals that
Speaker 7: were unable to evacuate, the exposure to those respiratory toxins
Speaker 7: is probably probably the cause. Now that the vinyl chloride
Speaker 7: and the immediate explosion risk is gone, it's important to
Speaker 7: still monitor your pets if they do become sick. So
Speaker 7: there's definitely a few phases of the environmental disaster. We
Speaker 7: had the key explosion fause gene risk, and now we're
Speaker 7: looking into more long term consequences.
Speaker 6: Did your parents have to evacuate it all?
Speaker 7: No? No, luckily they didn't. But my mom smelled it
Speaker 7: the day after they did the controlled burn. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 7: but I'm very glad that they were. They were safe.
Speaker 6: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 5: Now what about long long term? How long will it
Speaker 5: affect the environment?
Speaker 7: Well, that depends on a few important components. So number
Speaker 7: one is what chemicals are there. P fos, for example,
Speaker 7: last a long time in the environment. And I'm speculating,
Speaker 7: but from what I know about firefighting, fluorinated foams were
Speaker 7: probably used to put out the fire, which I don't
Speaker 7: knock any fire department for using those because they're what's
Speaker 7: available right now and it was a dangerous situation. But
Speaker 7: those chemicals are probably in the environment now and we
Speaker 7: need to be able to address that.
Speaker 5: Let's talk about pfos so. PFOS stands for per floral
Speaker 5: alcohol and polyfloro algal substances. But unlike me in one minute,
Speaker 5: you're never gonna have to say that aloud, probably ever,
Speaker 5: So don't worry about it.
Speaker 6: Just call them pfast.
Speaker 5: But also do worry about it because they're known as
Speaker 5: forever chemicals because their carbon fluorine bonds are so strong.
Speaker 5: Nature just cannot break them down, and that means that
Speaker 5: they can bind to protein and they can bio accumulate
Speaker 5: in your sweet soft body. Do you touch P fast
Speaker 5: Do you think you've been in contact with any?
Speaker 6: Oh? Sweet? Yes, so much, so much.
Speaker 5: They're in everything, nonstick pans, clothing, carpets, fireproof materials, bottle caps,
Speaker 5: anything waterproof. Remember that raincoat and the DuPont collab from
Speaker 5: the nineteen fifties. Well a cancer victim testicular cancer twice,
Speaker 5: just one A forty million dollar lawsuit against DuPont for
Speaker 5: dumping PIFAs in a river in West Virginia kind of
Speaker 5: makes you want to run to the middle of nowhere
Speaker 5: and just subsist on only natural foods and just be naked.
Speaker 5: But I have some bad news for you. Polar bears
Speaker 5: already had that idea, and pfos have been found in
Speaker 5: their brains. Everyone's got them, everyone's got them in them.
Speaker 5: Now what is the danger for all of this human
Speaker 5: made convenience? So A twenty twenty paper published in the
Speaker 5: journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry was titled per and Polyfloral
Speaker 5: alkyl Substance Toxicity and Human Health Review, Current state of
Speaker 5: knowledge and Strategies for informing future research, and this paper
Speaker 5: reports that epidemiological studies reveal associations between exposure to specific
Speaker 5: pfos and health effects including altered immune and thyroid function,
Speaker 5: liver disease, insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, increased cholesterol levels, adverse
Speaker 5: reproductive and fetal development outcomes, and cancer.
Speaker 6: Yikes. Why isn't anyone doing anything about this? Well?
Speaker 5: Ologists are, including Kim, who is currently doing her postdoctoral
Speaker 5: studies at the Social Science and Vironmental Health Research Institute
Speaker 5: at their PFOS Project Lab at Northeastern University, and they
Speaker 5: are helping assess p FAS contamination. They're analyzing the government's
Speaker 5: rules around it. They're working on community activism and environmental justice,
Speaker 5: among other things. She's also working in collaboration with the
Speaker 5: Silent Spring Institute. Marine biologist Rachel Carson would be proud
Speaker 5: and Kim is also a co author on two twenty
Speaker 5: twenty two papers, one Improving Governance of Forever Chemicals in
Speaker 5: the US and Beyond and Presumptive Contamination a new approach
Speaker 5: to pfast contamination based on likely sources. AH another reason
Speaker 5: to love her. She's on the PFOS case.
Speaker 7: So those chemicals can last really long time, but other
Speaker 7: things like the beautiful acrelate that was found in some
Speaker 7: of the downstream areas a few miles from the explosion site,
Speaker 7: those get broken down by enzymes in soil and in
Speaker 7: the water. They're in bacteria and so those are probably
Speaker 7: being chewed up. And there's like a lot of photodegradations,
Speaker 7: so breaking down through the sun and oxidation, so exposure
Speaker 7: to oxygen.
Speaker 6: All of those.
Speaker 7: Factors act to break chemicals down in the environment.
Speaker 6: You know, do you feel like the lora acts a lot.
Speaker 5: Do you feel like your environmental toxicologists are screaming from
Speaker 5: a tree stomp like, becase, I'm gonna pay attention to this.
Speaker 6: Please for the trees, let them grew, let them grew.
Speaker 7: Yes, yes, absolutely, for a lot of chemical contaminants. And
Speaker 7: on the other hand, I find myself screaming for people
Speaker 7: to consider toxicological nuance, which is the thing that I
Speaker 7: complain to my friends about a lot. Right, So, I
Speaker 7: guess this kind of gets into some flim flam. The
Speaker 7: idea that something natural is inherently safer than something that's
Speaker 7: synthetic is something that I yell a lot about.
Speaker 5: I know, whenever environmental toxicologists see something that says there's
Speaker 5: no chemicals in it, you must just ask we want
Speaker 5: to hit.
Speaker 6: Yourself in the face.
Speaker 7: I start, I take pictures of all the labels, and
Speaker 7: I have a little album on my phone where I'm like,
Speaker 7: that's not how that works, my dude.
Speaker 6: That's water is a chemical.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, everyone who's ever diet has had H two
Speaker 7: O in their bodies.
Speaker 6: You gotta watch out for it. I wasn't drinking water.
Speaker 5: Don't actually worry if you have H two O in
Speaker 5: your body. Anything that's made of matter is technically a chemical.
Speaker 5: Water is a chemical, Oxygen is a chemical. So not
Speaker 5: all chemicals are bad. And to say that something doesn't
Speaker 5: have chemicals in it is like saying food doesn't have ingredients.
Speaker 5: But also, if it's a manufactured chemical, maybe I don't know,
Speaker 5: maybe we should test it before selling it. This seems
Speaker 5: like common sense, but when dollars are at stake, sense
Speaker 5: kind of goes out the window and straight into a stream.
Speaker 5: And Kim says that there's a whole area of study
Speaker 5: and a theoretical framework that environmental toxicologists use, and it's
Speaker 5: called the precautionary principle.
Speaker 7: And I'm a big proponent of the precautionary principle, and
Speaker 7: it basically says, assume something is dangerous until proven safe,
Speaker 7: and it's really hard to prove safety, and so there's
Speaker 7: a lot of complexity in environmental toxicology and risk assessment,
Speaker 7: and the precautionary principle basically states that we shouldn't prioritize
Speaker 7: innovation at the cost of public safety, human safety, environmental safety.
Speaker 7: Remembering that people are part of an ecosystem, We're not
Speaker 7: some entity that's separate from the environment around them. The
Speaker 7: built environment is still part of an ecosystem and things
Speaker 7: like that. So the precautionary principle really kind of prioritizes
Speaker 7: safety and knowledge gathering before you know, willy nilly chemical.
Speaker 5: Spring and how do they test safety of things, because
Speaker 5: couldn't it be thirty years before something starts to affect you?
Speaker 5: Or do do you think with quantum commutings they'll be
Speaker 5: better molecular models? Or how do we know how it
Speaker 5: affects animals and humans?
Speaker 7: Right, So, there are so many different methods that you
Speaker 7: can use to study environmental toxicology, and they happen at
Speaker 7: so many different scales. So if we think really really tiny,
Speaker 7: we can look at how molecules are interacting with each
Speaker 7: other and that's what I did a lot in grad school.
Speaker 7: We can look at the ways that they're absorbing light
Speaker 7: or emitting light and see what that means about the
Speaker 7: molecular shape. And then you can go up to cells
Speaker 7: and you can look at how it impacts the cells,
Speaker 7: their respiration rate, any kind of health impact. Pretty good
Speaker 7: methods to assess, and then all the way up to
Speaker 7: population levels. So environmental epidemiologists look at towns, cities, geographic
Speaker 7: areas with high rates of a certain health outcome or
Speaker 7: exposure to something, and they look at health data there.
Speaker 7: If a lot of people are getting sick all at once,
Speaker 7: that's something that you know you want to investigate, And
Speaker 7: so you can go in and ask about people's exposures.
Speaker 7: You know they all smelled a weird smell in their town,
Speaker 7: then that's maybe a clue and you can look into that.
Speaker 7: But you can also do with animal models and cellular
Speaker 7: models and molecular models. You can look at specific toxins
Speaker 7: and how they work. And when we do that, we
Speaker 7: typically do what's called a dose response curve, and so
Speaker 7: that goes back to the principle of toxicology. The dose
Speaker 7: makes the poison. And when you do a dose response curve,
Speaker 7: Let's say you're going to give cyanide to a bunch
Speaker 7: of cells and study how their respiration rate goes, so
Speaker 7: how fast they're turning over oxygen, and cyanide inhibits the
Speaker 7: ability to turn over oxygen, so you can measure the
Speaker 7: amount of oxygen that's in the plate with the cells
Speaker 7: as an indicator of inhibition, right, And you can increase
Speaker 7: the dose and you can plot it on an X
Speaker 7: and Y access with the X being the dose and
Speaker 7: then the Y being the response, and the shape of
Speaker 7: that curve tells us a lot about the poison of interest.
Speaker 7: And something that's really toxic is going to have a
Speaker 7: really steep dose response curve, and something that is not
Speaker 7: so toxic we consider to have a very gentle uh
Speaker 7: dose response curve. And I am biased to saying negative
Speaker 7: outcomes because I love to study poisons, but that's the
Speaker 7: same principle that's used in DIRREUGT development and medicines.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: The response could be something really good, you know, it
Speaker 7: could be increase in oxygen use, things like that.
Speaker 5: And are there different levels of toxins, some that might
Speaker 5: affect your immediate respiration versus others that fuck with your DNA?
Speaker 7: Yes, absolutely, there are so many of those. So that's
Speaker 7: when we get to acute versus chronic exposure. And a
Speaker 7: lot of our information about acute exposures and chronic exposures
Speaker 7: come from the occupational settings.
Speaker 6: I'm at work doing work.
Speaker 7: So if there's an industrial accident like a train derailment, right,
Speaker 7: that's a one time incident. And let's say, for instance,
Speaker 7: you know the workers who are on that train were
Speaker 7: right next to it when it crashed, So luckily I
Speaker 7: haven't heard any reports of any injuries from the derailment.
Speaker 7: But that's a one time acute exposure, but chronic exposure
Speaker 7: we can look at at a workplace. So if people
Speaker 7: are going to the same place every day for a
Speaker 7: series of years being exposed to the same chemicals, then
Speaker 7: that might be a little bit different. And so you
Speaker 7: are exposed over time. We can think about that with
Speaker 7: sun exposure, right, So there's an acute outcome after sun
Speaker 7: exposure unprotected, which is a sunburn, and you can see
Speaker 7: that and you can feel it, and you know, medical
Speaker 7: professionals or researchers could see that. But after a long
Speaker 7: time of sun exposure, sometimes there's a misprint of DNA
Speaker 7: or a miscopy of DNA and then skin cancer arises.
Speaker 7: But that's after a long term exposure. And so soun's
Speaker 7: a good example of something with a kind of multi
Speaker 7: exposure level health outcome.
Speaker 5: And for more on this, you can see last week's
Speaker 5: episode on Melaninology in which we discussed this very thing
Speaker 5: and what kind of sunscreen you need? What about toxicology movies?
Speaker 6: Did Aaron rock.
Speaker 4: You get it right, twenty million dollars is more money
Speaker 4: than these people have ever dreamed of.
Speaker 2: These people don't dream about being rich.
Speaker 4: They dream about being able to watch their kids swim
Speaker 4: in a pool without worrying that they'll have to have
Speaker 4: a hysterectomy at the age of twenty. By the way,
Speaker 4: we had that water brought in special for your folks.
Speaker 6: I actually have not seen you.
Speaker 5: I've not seen I haven't either, But still, do you
Speaker 5: have any interest in seeing it?
Speaker 6: Or you like, never can't do it? Oh?
Speaker 7: No, it's absolutely It's on in my list of movies
Speaker 7: to watch for sure. I just have not gotten to it.
Speaker 7: Let's see, it's a TV show. So Breaking Bad in
Speaker 7: the first few episodes does the best and maybe the
Speaker 7: only example of phosphine toxicology or phosphine toxicity that I've
Speaker 7: ever seen. So, phosphine is a byproduct of methane fetamine production,
Speaker 7: and it's one of the reasons that meth labs explode.
Speaker 7: And so there's a scene in one of the first
Speaker 7: few episodes of Breaking Bad in which they're making meth
Speaker 7: and this adversary of theirs comes in into their trailer.
Speaker 6: A movie homes you got all day and.
Speaker 7: They very strategically release a gas and that gas is phosphine,
Speaker 7: and so it's an explosion hazard. And the reaction is
Speaker 7: is pretty spot on for a mitochondrial disruptor, right, so
Speaker 7: inability to breathe, turning a red. It's pretty good. I
Speaker 7: definitely point that one out. But also more recently the
Speaker 7: movie White Noise on Netflix, which it turns out some
Speaker 7: of the extras for that movie live in the area
Speaker 7: of Ohio. I impacted by this. So basically it tells
Speaker 7: the story of an airborne toxic event of undisclosed toxicity
Speaker 7: chemical makeup. But what I think the movie does really
Speaker 7: well is it shows the existential uncertainty that comes with
Speaker 7: toxicological complexity. So I really related to some of the
Speaker 7: characters who are at this kind of shelter site. And
Speaker 7: Adam Driver comes up and he said, they said that
Speaker 7: I've been exposed to this thing for three minutes. Am
Speaker 7: I going to die? And they very calmly say you
Speaker 7: may die in thirty years and he's like, that's not
Speaker 7: good enough. Right, But in that kind of event, no
Speaker 7: one has any idea. But you know, we can say
Speaker 7: things on a population level, but it's really really difficult
Speaker 7: to bring that down to the individual level, and I
Speaker 7: think that that movie really really summed it up. I
Speaker 7: think my review on Letterboxed was something like finally one
Speaker 7: for the existentialist academic toxicologists.
Speaker 6: I wish there's something that I could do. I wish
Speaker 6: I could outthink the problem.
Speaker 5: I haven't seen it yet, but the timing is impactable.
Speaker 5: So White Noise was released about six weeks before the
Speaker 5: Ohio train derailment, and it was shot just a few
Speaker 5: hours away in several different Ohio locations. Some of the
Speaker 5: film's extras actually live in East Palestine, and if you
Speaker 5: look up the trainler for White Noise on YouTube, one
Speaker 5: of the top comments reads this ag Edd, Well, so
Speaker 5: what does doctor Garrett say?
Speaker 7: I recommend it. It's a fun one. Plus it has
Speaker 7: a new song from LCD sou System, which.
Speaker 6: I really like. Oh that's good to know. Yeah. Did
Speaker 6: you ever listen to the band The Airborne Toxic Event? No?
Speaker 7: I didn't.
Speaker 6: That's right.
Speaker 7: I feel like I'm a bad media consumer.
Speaker 6: No, they were great.
Speaker 5: They were an LA band, and the lead singer ended
Speaker 5: up being like a New York Times bestselling author and
Speaker 5: like a journalists and stuff. So I'm like, wow, this
Speaker 5: whole week has really been right up a sale. But
Speaker 5: can I ask you some questions?
Speaker 6: Oh? Absolutely from listeners, they know you're coming on.
Speaker 5: But of course, before that, let's give some money to
Speaker 5: a good cause chosen by the ologist, and this week
Speaker 5: Kim selected the Southwestern Pennsylvania nonprofit Group Against Smog and Pollution,
Speaker 5: which has the genius acronym GASP. It was founded in
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty nine and GASP has been a diligent watchdog, educator, litigator,
Speaker 5: and policymaker on many environments issues with a focus on
Speaker 5: air quality in the Pittsburgh region. And you can find
Speaker 5: out more about them at the link in the show notes.
Speaker 5: So keep up the amazing work, y'all. And that donation
Speaker 5: was made possible by sponsors of the show.
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Speaker 6: Okay, I know it's on your mind. Let's do it.
Speaker 6: Let's ask. Let's get back to Ohio. I don't know
Speaker 6: if you're with kids.
Speaker 5: Turn it down for the next thirty seconds so they
Speaker 5: don't hear me swear so fucking much. I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 5: gonna ask this one. That is the most asked question.
Speaker 5: How fucked are we v Griffith, are we just fucking
Speaker 5: done for uh r J Deutge? So how totally fucked
Speaker 5: is the region? Rachel Kasha? My only question, what the fuck?
Speaker 5: There's a lot of fucks, a lot of.
Speaker 6: Fucks to be given. Is it Chernobyl scale? No?
Speaker 7: Okay, Well, I will say there are a lot of unknowns,
Speaker 7: and I want to recognize and kind of sit with
Speaker 7: the uncertainty that we have in a situation like this.
Speaker 6: As for.
Speaker 7: How hect are we, I cannot say as an individual
Speaker 7: risk assessor or you know, I'm not directly associated with
Speaker 7: the situation, but the data that I've seen is I
Speaker 7: am not running around screaming, very very scared. So what
Speaker 7: we do know about some of the chemicals that were
Speaker 7: released there is that they don't last very long in
Speaker 7: the environment. And the EPA had a press conference last
Speaker 7: night where they explicitly said where the plume is moving,
Speaker 7: where they've detected it, how fast it's moving, and some
Speaker 7: of the chemicals that are in it, and they also
Speaker 7: really importantly mentioned the points at which they're registering non
Speaker 7: detect So if we think of a plume kind of
Speaker 7: like a perfume, a perfume cloud, right, if you're in
Speaker 7: the perfume department of the department store, you can start
Speaker 7: to smell it, you know, at maybe the entrance of
Speaker 7: the department store, and then finally when you get to
Speaker 7: the perfume counter, it's very smelling.
Speaker 6: It's a lot.
Speaker 7: So the non detect area would be where you can't
Speaker 7: smell it anymore, so at the entrance where you can't
Speaker 7: smell it anymore, And so that really indicates that it's
Speaker 7: being either bio remediated by those little enzymes eating up
Speaker 7: all the chemicals, or oxidized or degraded by the sun
Speaker 7: by the time it gets to that point. And that
Speaker 7: of course is to the limit of detection. So how
Speaker 7: good the technology is it at finding that? But for
Speaker 7: most of the chemicals, the limit of detection is far
Speaker 7: below any kind of concerning health level. So I'm fairly
Speaker 7: confident in the data that I've seen from the EPA
Speaker 7: about those kinds of things. As for individual impacts, you know,
Speaker 7: you can say how bad is it, but we can
Speaker 7: qualify how bad is it to human health, or how
Speaker 7: bad is it to economics in the area, or how
Speaker 7: bad is it to you know, people who their houses
Speaker 7: are filled with soot? That's bad, and so risk can
Speaker 7: be really individualized. And I don't want to say, you know,
Speaker 7: one way or the other that this is really bad
Speaker 7: or it isn't really bad, because that's kind of up
Speaker 7: to an individual's definitions. So as far as the comparisons
Speaker 7: to Chernobyl and to some other historical contamination events, I
Speaker 7: think those are fairly inappropriate because Chernobyl was a radioactive event,
Speaker 7: for example, and so there's a lot of differences between
Speaker 7: these kinds of events, and general fear mongering doesn't really
Speaker 7: lead to action. I think it causes a lot of
Speaker 7: negative outcomes where people feel really really scared. And there
Speaker 7: are lots of scientists working on this, and there's a
Speaker 7: lot of things that we do know from historic events
Speaker 7: and we can learn from those mistakes, and we really
Speaker 7: have an opportunity.
Speaker 5: Some people Anna Elizabeth Susi k mb Nana from Canada
Speaker 5: and Courtney Kudera wanted to know how this might affect
Speaker 5: the water quality. How does something go from an airborne
Speaker 5: toxic event you poisoned aquifer, for example.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so that has to do with the water cycle
Speaker 7: and the weather cycle. So if there's ash up in
Speaker 7: the sky, it might dry deposit, so fall down from
Speaker 7: the sky or be carried by wind. You have dust
Speaker 7: in your house, that can be a similar kind of thing.
Speaker 7: You know, your skin particles float around and get on
Speaker 7: your stuff, So the same thing can be said for
Speaker 7: combustion products. But there's also wet deposition where things react
Speaker 7: in the atmosphere and either dissolve into water or become
Speaker 7: something that it is rained down from the sky. And
Speaker 7: so that's how it really gets into the water system
Speaker 7: in the soil. As for preventing and remediating that kind
Speaker 7: of contamination, there's drinking water, and then there's groundwater like
Speaker 7: surface water that people don't necessarily drink, and so on
Speaker 7: the drinking water level, municipal drinking water systems have a
Speaker 7: lot of filtration in place. And in this case, I
Speaker 7: really hope that the state and federal government and norfolks
Speaker 7: othern when you know, if they're found, when they're found
Speaker 7: responsible for this contamination, I hope that they pay for
Speaker 7: improvements in those technologies in the affected areas, because what
Speaker 7: we've seen with PFOSS, when a community realizes they have contamination,
Speaker 7: the water authority says, okay, we'll we'll get this new
Speaker 7: technology to help take it out, and then they don't
Speaker 7: get support for that funding, and so the cost comes
Speaker 7: back to the bill payer and the community absolutely should
Speaker 7: not be responsible for paying for the negligence of a company.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, I saw that twenty five thousand dollars for
Speaker 5: the five thousand residents, and I could not believe my eyes.
Speaker 6: So the railroad.
Speaker 5: Company Norfolk Southern, is worth over fifty billion dollars and
Speaker 5: has now upped the relief to locals at one million,
Speaker 5: which is less than the cost of a condo in
Speaker 5: La Okay. But initially they pledged twenty five thousand dollars
Speaker 5: to the Red Cross to cover the whole town. Like yeah, like,
Speaker 5: that's not even a sandwich at the gas station. Yes,
Speaker 5: someone who eats a lot of gas station landwiches, I
Speaker 5: can tell me.
Speaker 7: I feel like, for a little audio in that, you
Speaker 7: could get Lucile Blooth saying it's a bananam go.
Speaker 6: What could it cost ten dollars?
Speaker 5: Seriously, that to me is just like Wow, they really
Speaker 5: should have held off and come up with something better,
Speaker 5: because that's that's horrible. A lot of people had questions
Speaker 5: about impacts on wildlife and plants. Whitney Liliana Ramirez, Riley
Speaker 5: Axelf and They Mullen, Natalie J. Curly Fry, Chris West,
Speaker 5: Curly fre Waners. So what are the effects of disasters
Speaker 5: like these on wildlife habitats and what can we do
Speaker 5: to help?
Speaker 7: Okay, let's see, So this is kind of more of
Speaker 7: an ecotoxicology question, but I will answer it to the
Speaker 7: best of my ability. I tend to if you're on
Speaker 7: the public health side of things. But the environmental contaminants
Speaker 7: are sometimes taken up in the soil, and they can
Speaker 7: be taken up in plants. And so I've seen a
Speaker 7: lot of people saying, you know, don't eat food grown
Speaker 7: in eastern Ohio, and I don't think that that is
Speaker 7: the answer, but I think that farmers in the region
Speaker 7: should consider getting crops tested for heavy metals PCBs, VOCs,
Speaker 7: because a lot of environmental contaminants get transformed into other things,
Speaker 7: which for the most part, those tend to be less toxic,
Speaker 7: less harmful, and they also get taken up into plants.
Speaker 5: Just a side note, a PCB is a polychlorinated by
Speaker 5: phenol and they're human made chemicals. They can cause cancer
Speaker 5: and immune system and reproductive harm. They were banned from
Speaker 5: being produced in nineteen seventy nine, but that doesn't mean
Speaker 5: that they're not still around. And a VOC is a
Speaker 5: volatile organic compound that is a gas that arises from
Speaker 5: a solid. Either way, Kim says that when it comes
Speaker 5: to environmental toxicology, the party responsible for contamination should pay
Speaker 5: for testing. It's only polite, and if you're in an
Speaker 5: area where there's been an accident or potential exposure, document
Speaker 5: as much as you can. Go to the doctor, report symptoms,
Speaker 5: take notes, take photos, document, document document.
Speaker 7: I know in Pittsburgh we have a lot of lead
Speaker 7: in the soil, and so it's an issue where people
Speaker 7: who are trying to do urban gardens tend to get
Speaker 7: raised beds with soil from elsewhere because the lead can
Speaker 7: be taken up into the plants. Generally, that's what would
Speaker 7: I would look for in agriculture. For plants generally, I
Speaker 7: really don't know what the impacts will be on the
Speaker 7: plants and of course for wildlife in the area. I
Speaker 7: think the initial acute issue of faust gene exposure has
Speaker 7: already passed, and unfortunately that did take a toll. But
Speaker 7: moving forward, there are ways that communities can come together
Speaker 7: and monitor these kinds of things. And in some of
Speaker 7: the historical examples, we've seen communities come together and map
Speaker 7: where they notice maybe fish are dyeing, or even with
Speaker 7: things like West Nile, if you see a dead bird,
Speaker 7: you report it to someone. For the East Coast, sometimes
Speaker 7: we get West Nile virus outbreaks and birds die from it,
Speaker 7: and so you report them. Coming together and doing community
Speaker 7: science can be really, really valuable in these situations, and
Speaker 7: so I'm definitely recommending that, and I hope that if
Speaker 7: people do community science, I hope they don't find anything bad.
Speaker 5: Yes, A lot of folks and circling back to the
Speaker 5: whys of Emily McLeod, Paul Smith, Nano naturalist, Jackie and
Speaker 5: Isabella wanted to know why burn it? Nano nationalist says,
Speaker 5: I'm a chemical engineer, and I want to know who
Speaker 5: in the fresh hell decided it was okay to set
Speaker 5: vinyl chloride on fire. I live in Ohio. Can you
Speaker 5: tell I'm mad? Was setting it on fire done deliberately?
Speaker 5: Did it just burn it very low temperatures?
Speaker 7: From my understanding, there were three options, well, I guess
Speaker 7: there were four options. The ideal situation would have been
Speaker 7: if there was no fire, and just these tanks of
Speaker 7: vinyl chloride just took little tumble and nothing happened. Then
Speaker 7: you know, has Matt Cruz could come in and sh
Speaker 7: those tanks full of vinyl chloride to a facility where
Speaker 7: they can appropriately dispose of them. That's often number one.
Speaker 6: Which didn't happen.
Speaker 7: Often number two is puncture the tank when there's no fire,
Speaker 7: which would leak vinyl chloride out into the environment. And
Speaker 7: as we've seen with cancer Alley in Louisiana, and it's
Speaker 7: one of the chemicals of concern on Camp La June
Speaker 7: where you may see tv ads asking to participate in
Speaker 7: lawsuits and studies. It's very persistent in the water and
Speaker 7: the soil if it is not broken down right. And
Speaker 7: so vinyl chloride is a carcinogen, and when we think
Speaker 7: of carcinogens typically we think of chronic exposure, and so
Speaker 7: that would be something that's of concern with chronic exposure
Speaker 7: through drinking water, and so that's really really hard to remediate.
Speaker 7: So you can think of that as spilling something into
Speaker 7: a river and the river takes it far away, it
Speaker 7: takes it far and wide, and so that's a lot
Speaker 7: harder to clean up than some of the other options.
Speaker 7: The other two options had to do with fire. From
Speaker 7: what I am understand, there was fire already happening around
Speaker 7: these tanks because of the derailment, right, big train accident.
Speaker 7: Unsurprising that there might be a fire. And as that
Speaker 7: heat rose, the pressure inside of those tanks rose, and
Speaker 7: they knew that they were going to explode. The risk
Speaker 7: of explosion was so high, and so that's why there
Speaker 7: were calls for evacuation. Right. You don't want to be
Speaker 7: around a train tanker full of anything when it explodes,
Speaker 7: and so that's the other option is just wait around
Speaker 7: and see if it exploded. And another component that went
Speaker 7: into that decision, I assume is the thermal inversion coming in.
Speaker 7: So you wouldn't want to wait around and see if
Speaker 7: it was going to explode and then have it explode
Speaker 7: during the thermal inversion. So what they did is they
Speaker 7: punctured smaller holes in the tankers. So this is the
Speaker 7: fourth option, and what they did, so they punctured holes
Speaker 7: in the tankers to do a what's called a contry
Speaker 7: release and control. I mean it didn't really look controlled, right,
Speaker 7: It looked very very just so intense, but knowing you know,
Speaker 7: the burning rate. There's a lot of mas that goes
Speaker 7: into these kinds of things to determine how far something's
Speaker 7: going to move or how fast something is going to react.
Speaker 7: And so they cleared out the area. So that's one
Speaker 7: thing that they were able to control, is getting everyone
Speaker 7: out to a safe distance away from the immediate risk
Speaker 7: of fostene exposure and also just general explosion. And so
Speaker 7: they were able to control that, and they were also
Speaker 7: able to control the time that they did that, so
Speaker 7: they didn't have it waiting around for the thermaline version
Speaker 7: to come in.
Speaker 5: So remember the nineteen forty eight Denor Pennsylvania disaster and
Speaker 5: the Great Smog of London in nineteen fifty two, right,
Speaker 5: So one reason it had to move quickly in this
Speaker 5: case is to avoid more pollutants getting trapped and blanketed low.
Speaker 5: So the inversion in Ohio only let the billowing fumes
Speaker 5: go up so far and then it started to flatten,
Speaker 5: and that's why the plume over East Palestine looked like
Speaker 5: a horrifying atomic mushroom cloud.
Speaker 7: The other component of the burnoff that's really interesting and
Speaker 7: I think saved a lot of grief from later You know,
Speaker 7: I don't want to say officially, you know that this
Speaker 7: has been a really beneficial thing, but the breakdown of
Speaker 7: vinyl chloride turning into some of those other combustion products,
Speaker 7: those breakdown in the environment really easily into less toxic products.
Speaker 7: Vinyl Chloride doesn't break down as fast when it's not combusted,
Speaker 7: so by burning off a lot of that vinyl chloride,
Speaker 7: they reduced the amount that got into the waterways, so
Speaker 7: it was transformed into other products which were acutely very
Speaker 7: toxic but didn't last long in the environment.
Speaker 5: So that's the good news. That definitely made me feel better.
Speaker 5: And Kim was interviewed in Newsweek a few days ago
Speaker 5: and explained to them that yes, a controlled burn might
Speaker 5: have been the best of two bad options, and that
Speaker 5: the health risk of vinyl chloride is greater once it's
Speaker 5: in the water supply, which is likely what nudged official
Speaker 5: to burn it before the weather and version and before
Speaker 5: it leaked into the water. But once a hazardous chemical
Speaker 5: is out, and about how does one unring that bell?
Speaker 5: So patrons including Kate Munker, Joe Porfito, Elena Krusen, Shelby
Speaker 5: Mills meg Shooter asan first time question asker Ross Banerjee,
Speaker 5: Eleanor Stevenson and Ed nog All wanted to know about bioremediation,
Speaker 5: and some folks asked about pharmaceuticals in the water supply,
Speaker 5: and for that, I'm going to direct you to the
Speaker 5: Environmental Microbiology episode about testing sewers for COVID, and we
Speaker 5: also discuss pharmaceuticals in the water, so I'll link that
Speaker 5: in the show notes. Other cleanup questions were asked by
Speaker 5: Gina Grimm, Omeximore, Christina Kunz, Lisa Emrich, Bubrie, Catherine Fox,
Speaker 5: Emily P. Kelsey Simpson, Alisha Henning, Leah Anderson, Darme, marx
Speaker 5: orbach Mia and Hayley Kennerley. What about other ways to
Speaker 5: clean things up environmentally, things like sending fungi that want
Speaker 5: to gobble certain chemical compounds that we don't want in there.
Speaker 6: What's the best way to clean this up?
Speaker 7: Yeah, so that again depends on the chemical. I'm important
Speaker 7: think about the specifics of toxicology, but it really depends
Speaker 7: on the chemical. And so you know, I'm glad that Norfolk,
Speaker 7: Southern and the EPA released the manifests so we know
Speaker 7: what chemicals were there and even if those chemicals break
Speaker 7: down into other products. You can look up data about that.
Speaker 7: There's a really cool resource called pubcem where you can
Speaker 7: type in the name of a chemical and find out
Speaker 7: more information than you would want to know about it.
Speaker 7: And it's my favorite website, and so you can look
Speaker 7: those up on there. But it's also important to take
Speaker 7: into consideration, you know, how much was there. One thing
Speaker 7: that I see that's missing from the manifest and some
Speaker 7: of the other documents is how much was released? Right,
Speaker 7: so the EPA documents that have been made public for
Speaker 7: the environmental sampling, but it would be really really interesting
Speaker 7: to know how much was released, and so then we
Speaker 7: can start to look at things like how fast is
Speaker 7: it being degraded, Like if if we started with this
Speaker 7: much and if we're this far away and this amount
Speaker 7: of time from that release, that can tell us a
Speaker 7: lot about what's happening in the environment.
Speaker 5: Kind of like one of those math problems where if
Speaker 5: Tommy boards a train from Pittsburgh at sixty four miles
Speaker 5: per hour and Susie's train is headed east, what time
Speaker 5: will they meet in a combustible ball of cancer smoke?
Speaker 5: But also where is that plume headed? With how much
Speaker 5: vinyl chloride. But really the fallout from the crash is
Speaker 5: being tracked through the Ohio River and experts say that
Speaker 5: it's flowing at a rate of about a mile an hour.
Speaker 5: And as for that oilychene on the creeks that we
Speaker 5: mentioned earlier, the jury's still out. Some say it could
Speaker 5: be natural or bacterial from the fishkills, but the Pennsylvania
Speaker 5: Department of Environmental Production was quoted as saying that a
Speaker 5: bacterial machine will typically break into small platelets when disturbed,
Speaker 5: while a petroleum machine will quickly reform. And another way
Speaker 5: to tell them apart, they say, is by smell. Natural
Speaker 5: machines don't smell like petroleum. But as a precaution, Cincinnati
Speaker 5: and other locations that draw water directly from the Ohio
Speaker 5: River are using different intake systems for a few days
Speaker 5: or urging water customers to use bottled or filtered water.
Speaker 7: So with that in mind, I think that one of
Speaker 7: the best ways is going to be through municipal drinking
Speaker 7: water filtrations. So things like granular activated carbon reverse osmosis,
Speaker 7: those technologies are very good at getting your everyday contaminants
Speaker 7: out of your water. As for maybe airborne dust, things
Speaker 7: when you go back to your house, you might find
Speaker 7: a lot of soot on your items. I had an
Speaker 7: apartment fire a few years ago, and luckily nothing was damaged,
Speaker 7: but there was soot everywhere and it lasted for so long.
Speaker 7: So when you're looking at soot, you want to make
Speaker 7: sure that you spray it down with like a little
Speaker 7: soap solution with water, because those dry particles are respiratory,
Speaker 7: your atints, and they're larger particles. So the N ninety
Speaker 7: five's will help with the soot exposure. They might not
Speaker 7: help with really small molecules right like they could get
Speaker 7: through that very small filter. But with the soot, you'll
Speaker 7: probably sneeze less and you know, be able to smell
Speaker 7: less while you're cleaning your house with the soot, But
Speaker 7: be sure to spray that down before wiping it up.
Speaker 5: Am I asking for early death if I burn incense
Speaker 5: while I work?
Speaker 7: I am of the opinion that breathing anything other than
Speaker 7: air is not ideal.
Speaker 6: Okay, that's good to know, that's really good to know.
Speaker 7: So basically the idea is, if it's not air, don't
Speaker 7: breathe it. Your lungs are so cool and so good
Speaker 7: at their jobs. They're The lungs are incredible. They're my
Speaker 7: favorite organ. They have all these really cool defenses to
Speaker 7: keep things that are not air out of your body.
Speaker 7: So we have something called a mucociliary escalator, which is
Speaker 7: a bunch of tiny cells with tiny little hairs on
Speaker 7: them that move up up all the time, and they're
Speaker 7: controlled by your neurologic system, and if they encounter something
Speaker 7: that shouldn't be there, they move even faster. And they
Speaker 7: also there are cells that secrete mucus, and so mucus.
Speaker 7: Ciliary escalator comes from like the midpoint in your lungs,
Speaker 7: all the way up and it is why you cough,
Speaker 7: why you get phlegm, and the mucus traps inhaled particles
Speaker 7: and carries them up so you can cough them out.
Speaker 7: Mucus deserves their respect.
Speaker 5: Ah, yes, our friend mucus. I used to bleep the
Speaker 5: word mucus in previous episodes, but I don't anymore. I've
Speaker 5: grown as a person. I hear it still grosses me out,
Speaker 5: but I have a new appreciation for it. And Kim
Speaker 5: asked if she could possibly rant about vaping, and I
Speaker 5: gave her the floor.
Speaker 7: So clearly, your body is saying please, don't put weird
Speaker 7: stuff into your lungs. They're so sensitive. There's a direct
Speaker 7: link to the bloodstream down in the alveoles, which is
Speaker 7: the smallest little part. So the idea that vaping is
Speaker 7: safer than cigarettes is a false comparison. In my opinion.
Speaker 7: Cigarettes are one of the only things that we have
Speaker 7: that we know is a direct link to cancer, to
Speaker 7: specific kinds of cancer, where if you get lung answer
Speaker 7: and you smoke, that's basically the causative agent. Comparing that
Speaker 7: to vaping, you know, there are very few things that
Speaker 7: are more dangerous than smoking. Vaping again, you're inhaling things
Speaker 7: that are not water, and they're fairly unregulated in the
Speaker 7: United States. So when I was going through grad school,
Speaker 7: there were fewer regulations on vaping and it was seen
Speaker 7: as this big, you know, revolutionary thing. But the issue
Speaker 7: is that you're inhaling vaporized particles. Your lung doesn't want
Speaker 7: any liquid that you don't want to put liquid in
Speaker 7: your lungs, and even a vapor you can get dermal
Speaker 7: exposure to things. You can get it stuck on your
Speaker 7: lips and get burns and different things that way. But
Speaker 7: the real issue is the flavoring agents. So the tobacco
Speaker 7: that's in cigarettes has a little danly atom coming off
Speaker 7: the molecule that irritates the back of your throat, and
Speaker 7: so that limits the amount that you can smoke comfortably. Right, Oh,
Speaker 7: Vaping tobacco has been developed so that it doesn't irritate,
Speaker 7: so you can get a much higher dose with fewer
Speaker 7: adverse immedia adverse effects. And so that's a problem that
Speaker 7: we see with kids and teens vaping. They're getting these
Speaker 7: huge amounts of nicotine, which is a carcinogen and just
Speaker 7: really overall, really bad. And then you get the flavoring agents.
Speaker 7: And there's a chemical called diaceteal which is a really
Speaker 7: good example of this. So it gives butter it's flavor.
Speaker 7: It's also produced on coffee roasts, and it's associated with
Speaker 7: something called popcorn lung. So are you familiar with that.
Speaker 5: I eat way too much rack way popcorn, or at
Speaker 5: least I used to, and so I was familiar with
Speaker 5: people who worked in popcorn plants, right.
Speaker 7: Yes, So workers in popcorn facilities were coming down with
Speaker 7: this very specific lung disease and it was attributed to
Speaker 7: the butter flavoring, which is fine to eat, so this
Speaker 7: is another principle of toxicology is exposure roots. So it
Speaker 7: was fine to eat, but to inhale was a huge
Speaker 7: problem and it resulted in this really bad lung disease.
Speaker 7: And so there have been cases of diaceteal being in
Speaker 7: vape juices right, butter flavored vapes. There's also so a
Speaker 7: cinnamon flavor called cinnamide, which is of concern for a
Speaker 7: very similar reason. And so I would be very very
Speaker 7: careful with vaping. And I do not condone breathing anything
Speaker 7: other than air.
Speaker 5: This might change my lights and incense right as I
Speaker 5: sit down to work have it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, And of course you know that's an individual
Speaker 7: risk thing like I have asthma, So I wouldn't do it.
Speaker 5: So in a twenty twenty one study titled the Adverse
Speaker 5: Impact of Incense Smoke on Human Health From Mechanisms to Implications,
Speaker 5: my heart was broken as researchers reveal a shit show
Speaker 5: of health problems that can come from habitual incense burning,
Speaker 5: including lung disease, eye issues, throat irritation, lead poisoning, disrupted
Speaker 5: fetal development, dementia, heart disease.
Speaker 6: And cancer, all kinds of cancer.
Speaker 5: It also noted that burning a lot of incense is
Speaker 5: just comparable to secondhand smoking. So there goes my hobby.
Speaker 5: What about candles, Well, the wicks may contain lead and
Speaker 5: the soot is bad for your lungs and for your house.
Speaker 5: But if you're burning pair candles, those are made from
Speaker 5: byproducts of the petroleum processing industry. And one twenty thirteen
Speaker 5: Polish study concluded that sitting next to a burning paraffin
Speaker 5: candle is like being adjacent to a combustion engine. So
Speaker 5: I guess we got to slow our roles on the candles.
Speaker 5: Maybe open a window at least look into an air purifier,
Speaker 5: try to find joy in something else, as impossible as
Speaker 5: that sounds. And yes, I am as sad as you are.
Speaker 5: But listen to the twenty twenty two recap I did
Speaker 5: around New Year's Maybe get an LED lantern on your desk.
Speaker 5: We talk about those. It's visually pleasing. I use it
Speaker 5: as a productivity tool. Led lanterns, they flicker, They're worth it.
Speaker 5: What else can we do in the future? Patrons Rachel Genteel,
Speaker 5: Timothy Huang, Noel Dietz, Chris Brewer, Jennifer Piacente, Curly Fry
Speaker 5: Bubbery and Isabelle all asked about environmental toxicological prevention. What
Speaker 5: about for the future. What are some things that people
Speaker 5: can do to keep themselves safe in general from environmental toxins?
Speaker 6: What should they worry about? What shouldn't they worry about?
Speaker 7: Well, I guess it's kind of my duty to say
Speaker 7: don't smoke, don't smoke, don't be But a lot of
Speaker 7: our chemical messaging is very individualized, and the chemical regulation
Speaker 7: in the United States puts the burden of proof on
Speaker 7: communities and individuals to bring these issues to attention. So
Speaker 7: precautionary regulation, especially of new and emerging chemicals, is really important,
Speaker 7: and we really need to reassess whether or not we
Speaker 7: should give companies free rain to put these chemicals into
Speaker 7: the environment. But on an individual level, I really recommend
Speaker 7: checking out the Green Science Policy Institutes Consumer Resources, so.
Speaker 5: A wonderful site for the cautious consumer. This Green Science
Speaker 5: Policies Institute site. So it warns against furniture manufactured before
Speaker 5: twenty fifteen because it may contain added flame retardants, older
Speaker 5: immersion blenders because they may leak chlorinated paraffins, which is
Speaker 5: a type of chemical found in flame retardants. They advise
Speaker 5: to look for fragrance free personal care products since the
Speaker 5: ingredient's fragrance or perfume or perfume often mean thalates are present,
Speaker 5: and I was like, what's a thalate?
Speaker 6: I don't even know.
Speaker 5: Those have been linked to testosterone disruption liver toxicity, and
Speaker 5: we mentioned this in the Melaninology episode last week. But
Speaker 5: be careful too with imported skin lightning or anti agent
Speaker 5: creams unless you're certain that they don't have mercury in them.
Speaker 5: You can avoid food that comes in contact with greaseproof
Speaker 5: packaging because that may have pifos, like microwave popcorn and
Speaker 5: some fast foods. This fact makes me very sad and
Speaker 5: also hungry to avoid pifos. Also, you can use cast
Speaker 5: iron or glass or ceramic cookware rather than non stick taflon.
Speaker 5: And so for the patrons who asked about pifos, you're welcome.
Speaker 5: Catherine Brignak, analysta young Emily staffer Boreal, Becca rob marriage
Speaker 5: keyd to Cure and wells how.
Speaker 7: I use their PFUS guide to pick out new outdoor equipment.
Speaker 7: So I got a new rain jacket and I used
Speaker 7: their little tool to figure out which one was PFOS free.
Speaker 6: Oh good.
Speaker 7: Other than that, like, I want to emphasize that just
Speaker 7: because a chemical is associated with adverse health outcomes in
Speaker 7: one particular setting doesn't mean that we need to be
Speaker 7: really really afraid of it. Or on the other hand,
Speaker 7: just because there's no evidence available that something is dangerous,
Speaker 7: we shouldn't assume that it's safe. So it's really important
Speaker 7: to consider that nuance. I think paying attention to exposure
Speaker 7: root is important, and I think that the tide Pod
Speaker 7: challenge actually really exemplifies that. So again, kind of like
Speaker 7: similar to diacidel landri. So you know, unless you're allergic
Speaker 7: to some of the ingredients, it's usually pretty okay to
Speaker 7: get on your skin. You can wash it off. Your
Speaker 7: skin has a whole bunch of defenses that protect the
Speaker 7: insides of your body, just like your lungs do and
Speaker 7: your GI tracked i'll have different defenses, and so getting
Speaker 7: it on your skin no big deal. However, you don't
Speaker 7: want to eat it. You don't want to eat it
Speaker 7: because your GI tract has totally different defenses compared to
Speaker 7: your skin and your respiratory system. So it's really important
Speaker 7: to consider what the chemical is and the exposure route.
Speaker 5: Good advice from doctor Garrett. Yeah, And what about the
Speaker 5: hardest thing about your job? The hardest thing ab having
Speaker 5: an environmental paxologist.
Speaker 7: I honestly think it's the amount of flim flam that's everywhere,
Speaker 7: you know. I I think there's there's so much misinformation
Speaker 7: about that, and it's easy to be very scared of
Speaker 7: about chemicals. Right, there's you know a lot of examples
Speaker 7: of a very terrible things happening after people are exposed.
Speaker 6: What about the best thing?
Speaker 7: Oh, the best thing I think is getting to solve
Speaker 7: complicated puzzles and also help people understand what is going
Speaker 7: on around them and how their body interacts with the
Speaker 7: environment and how we're not so separate from the environment
Speaker 7: as we'd.
Speaker 6: Like to think. Is that behind you? Is that a
Speaker 6: periodic table? Oh?
Speaker 7: Yes, yes, I have, I have that. I have an
Speaker 7: estradial molecule.
Speaker 5: And yeah, I love the notion that you like to
Speaker 5: solve puzzles when the periodic table is just kind of
Speaker 5: like one assembled puzzle as it is.
Speaker 6: Yes, right, yeah, absolutely, Yeah.
Speaker 7: It took a lot of problem solving to figure out
Speaker 7: where each molecule goes, or each atom goes.
Speaker 5: Do you think you'll ever get a periodic table tattoo.
Speaker 5: Any elements you would get tattooed on you.
Speaker 7: It's so hard to pick. I don't think I have
Speaker 7: a favorite element. I also have like equilibrium arrows, so
Speaker 7: I feel like I maybe shouldn't get more chemistry and
Speaker 7: toxicology tattoos.
Speaker 5: But you know, did you have to search for any
Speaker 5: kind of non toxic ink for that?
Speaker 6: Fine?
Speaker 7: No, I didn't. I was just like, I'm accepting this risk.
Speaker 7: I definitely have the little thought, you know, each time
Speaker 7: I put on lipstick and like, there's probably lead in here,
Speaker 7: but you know, you can have a little lipstick as
Speaker 7: a treat. Though lead exposure is one where there is
Speaker 7: no safe dose, so you can't just have a little
Speaker 7: lead as a treat.
Speaker 6: Dang it.
Speaker 7: I don't want anyone to think that I'm advocating for that.
Speaker 5: And yes, apparently there is lead in a lot of lipsticks.
Speaker 5: But you can go to the FDA site which I'll
Speaker 5: link on my website, and you can see which lipsticks
Speaker 5: and which shade have the highest amount of lead. And
Speaker 5: topping the charts from an FDA study was Mabelene's color
Speaker 5: Sensational Shade one twenty five in pink pedal. I'm gonna
Speaker 5: look that up right now and tell you what it
Speaker 5: looks like. A wonderful pinky nude shade versatile. Anyone could
Speaker 5: wear this as long as they don't mind seven point
Speaker 5: one to nine parts per million of lead. Laurel owns
Speaker 5: Mabelene and they had some of the highest rates of
Speaker 5: lead on there. But it's not just the drug store
Speaker 5: goodies either. Nars also clocked in with a few high ones.
Speaker 5: But even Bertsby's lip shimmer has some let in it,
Speaker 5: so do some research. The FDA says it should be
Speaker 5: safe at the levels they're at. Anything under ten parts
Speaker 5: per million should be safe. But also remember that the
Speaker 5: world is imperfect in so many ways, and our generation
Speaker 5: and your children have a lot of survival bonuses that
Speaker 5: our ancestors couldn't ever dream of, like, for the most part,
Speaker 5: plumbing and walls, doors, soap, antibiotics, dating apps. So at
Speaker 5: the end of the day, people you will never meet
Speaker 5: are working hard to keep you safer among some environmental
Speaker 5: toxins we're learning about. So thank you to all the
Speaker 5: ologists listening for making the world a cleaner and safer place,
Speaker 5: including kim Oh my gosh, this has been such a joy.
Speaker 5: I'm so lucky that you answered our bad signal.
Speaker 7: Oh thank you. I hope that the things that I
Speaker 7: said makes sense.
Speaker 5: So take calculated risks, ask smart people, not smart questions,
Speaker 5: and keep your eye on the sky, Ohio and everywhere.
Speaker 5: You can follow doctor Kimberly Garrett on social media at
Speaker 5: the links in the show notes, as well as the
Speaker 5: charity of her choosing gap. We are at ologies on
Speaker 5: Twitter and Instagram. I'm at ali Ward with one L
Speaker 5: on both. I'm at ali underscore ologies on TikTok. You
Speaker 5: can say hello. Smologies are shorter, kid friendly versions of ologies.
Speaker 5: They are cleaned up of my filth. Those are up
Speaker 5: at aliwar dot com slash Smologies that's linked in the
Speaker 5: show notes. Aaron Talbert admins Theologies podcast Facebook group, with
Speaker 5: assist from Shannon Felts and Bonnie Dutch. Noel Dilworth does
Speaker 5: the scheduling. Susan Hale handles the merch and they both
Speaker 5: do so much more. Emily White of the Wordery makes
Speaker 5: professional transcripts which are up for free at aliward dot
Speaker 5: com slash Ologies stash extras that's linked in the show
Speaker 5: notes alongside bleeped episodes.
Speaker 6: Kelly R.
Speaker 5: Dwyer works on the website and assistant editing was done
Speaker 5: by Jared Sleeper of mind Jam Media with smologies and
Speaker 5: lead editing done by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, which
Speaker 5: is link in the show notes. I accidentally just texted
Speaker 5: I love you to Mercedes on a group thread with Jarrett,
Speaker 5: but I meant it honestly for both of them. Nick
Speaker 5: Thorburn did the theme music and if you stick around
Speaker 5: until the end of the episode, you know I tell
Speaker 5: you a secret this week. It's one of my favorite
Speaker 5: places in the world is a willow structure in the
Speaker 5: gardens of the Natural History Museum in LA It's been
Speaker 5: there for almost a decade. It was made by an
Speaker 5: LA artist named David Lovejoy, and it's just beautiful little
Speaker 5: willow home, just sitting in the garden. You go in
Speaker 5: there and it's like a dark little nest of twigs
Speaker 5: and it had to be rebuilt once before, and I
Speaker 5: got to go help David rebuild it. And when Jarrett
Speaker 5: and I got engaged the NHM, let us take photos
Speaker 5: in the museum as well as in the willow hut,
Speaker 5: which was magical and not to be too sad. But
Speaker 5: my dad also knew that I loved the Willow Hut
Speaker 5: and he was making me a small model version out
Speaker 5: of some willow branches that grew at the edge of
Speaker 5: the river my parents lived on back in twenty twenty.
Speaker 5: But then he got sick and he never got to
Speaker 5: finish it. And that little model my dad was working
Speaker 5: at my sister's house, and my summer project this year
Speaker 5: is to finish it up. But I got an email
Speaker 5: from the NHM a few weeks ago saying that the
Speaker 5: willow structure was to be dismantled and removed. But they
Speaker 5: knew there how much I loved it, so they saved
Speaker 5: me a branch. And so big thanks to Diana Saldana
Speaker 5: at the Natural History Museum of La County for letting
Speaker 5: me know and for saving me a twig from it.
Speaker 5: Sarah mcattack McNulty was visiting La and visited the museum
Speaker 5: and brought this branch back to my house. So this
Speaker 5: willow twig is now mounted on my wall and I
Speaker 5: stare up at it wistfully every day. And for more
Speaker 5: photos of the Willow Hut, you can go to Instagram
Speaker 5: and look up the hashtag willow hot Wednesdays and you
Speaker 5: can see.
Speaker 6: It in all of its glory when it existed.
Speaker 5: So I hope you get to cozy up in whatever
Speaker 5: your favorite place is. It's nice to have a favorite place,
Speaker 5: even if it's just in your mind.
Speaker 6: Huh okay for.
Speaker 5: Bye Pacaderma College Homeology or doo Zoology, Lithology and zoology, zeurology, parapology,
Speaker 5: the apology, seriology, theology.
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