Anxiety is a normal part of life in the modern world. Politics, economics, global warming, internet brainwashing, psychotics with easy access to guns, narcissistic world leaders, a failed educational system, diseases...the legacy media just keeps feeding us high doses of potentially traumatic information in quantities too big to properly digest in short amounts of time. If you’re a germaphobe it’s even worse. Paranoia is an understandable response to it all. But for most of us, a lot of that stuff is happening far away and doesn’t directly threaten our safety on a daily basis. Now consider that your home is full of toxic chemicals that can either kill you in the short term, sometimes immediately, or can cause deadly diseases that slowly murder you over a long period of time like cancer. There’s just no escaping from all the hazards wherever you go. Kathlyn Gay’s Silent Killers: Radon and Other Hazards gives you the rundown on some of the things around you that can do you in. What better way to spend a sunny afternoon is there than reading about them?
The book opens with discussions on dioxins and asbestos. Cleaning products, industrial lubricants, herbicides, and plastics all have some of the most deadly chemicals known to humanity. Dioxins are largely a product, and sometimes a byproduct, of industrial manufacturing. The most well-known chemical in the class of dioxins is agent orange or napalm, the chemical used during the Vietnam War to kill vegetation, making the so-called enemies easier to see. It did a sufficient job of killing people too, especially children, and got into the DNA of returning soldiers who passed it on to their offspring. Vietnamese and Cambodian children born after the war often fared no better. If you’ve been to those countries you can recognize its effects when you see young people with malformed or missing limbs. And yet dioxins are used in factories and household products because corporate businessmen care more about profits than people.
Asbestos, on the other hand, has been banned. Due to its flame resistant qualities, it has been used in architecture, especially in low-cost housing and public buildings, going all the way back to the Roman Empire. Studies done by the American Environmental Protection Agency in the 1950s determined that asbestos causes diseases affecting the respiratory system. A decades long effort to remove asbestos and ban it has largely been successful.
The subject of radon doesn’t get taken up until the middle of the book. This nice little colorless and odorless radioactive gas gets stirred up while mining or digging into the ground. When left alone in its hidden underground chambers, it is completely harmless. But when humans go into terrestrial territories without proper safety precautions, this killer escapes into the atmosphere undetected and poisons people who breathe it in.
Other chapters address dangerous metals, lead paint, toxins in drinking water (and no, fluoride is not dangerous), pesticides and weed killers used on farms, and a couple others. One chapter is about my personal favorite poison which is nuclear waste. Nuclear power is cheap and doesn’t contribute to global warming, but the waste it produces can contaminate the land where they bury it over a long period of time. Storage containers and facilities degrade, leak, and poison the atmosphere around them. The Three Mile Island radioactivity leak outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania gets a brief mention along with the Love Canal toxic waste dump disaster in Niagara Falls, New York. I bet the Amish people living near Three Mile Island said, “See, we’re better off with our horse buggies and oil lamps. You people laugh at us, but you’re the ones suffering from radioactivity poisoning now.”
This book is written from a scientific standpoint so there are lots of studies cited along with small amounts of dry technical writing and some occasional counterpoints provided by critics of the studies. The counterpoints come entirely from researchers working for corporations that capitalize from spreading toxic chemicals and other poisons throughout the human genome so you have to keep things in perspective. When it’s cheaper to publish propaganda and bogus scientific studies than it is to follow OSHA, FDA, and EPA government regulations, then it’s obvious what greedy businessmen will do to please their shareholders.
Aside from being dull at times, the biggest problem with this book is that, being written in the 1980s, it is a bit outdated. Some of these problems have been taken care of, like the banning of some aerosol sprays containing chlorofluorocarbons and the near elimination of acid rain for example, while others, like nuclear waste and ozone emissions from cars that cause greenhouse gas buildup, continue to be a problem. The book’s age also shows because of its repetitive warnings about cigarette smoke, another problem that has thankfully been reduced because of government regulation. Now we have newer silent killers like microplastics in everything we eat and chemical additives in hyperprocessed foods that the average person can’t even identify. Even worse, our current president is paying for tax cuts for billionaires by gutting agencies like the EPA, the FDA, and our educational system that should be teaching people how to minimize risks by thinking about what kinds of products they buy. Our government is also deregulating industries to help corporate businesses make more money since safety regulations cut into profits.
Silent Killers isn’t going to make it onto anybody’s bucket list of books they have to read before they die. There are better, and more updated, sources on this subject matter. Still, these are things everybody should be aware of and aren’t. On the brighter side, Kathlyn Gay makes it clear that personal choice plays a role in how much exposure we get to these silent killers. Simple things like keeping windows and doors open while limiting your use of air conditioning makes you a lot safer. Just as well, spending more time outdoors in nature reduces exposure to toxicity. But really, anything can kill you and eventually something will. You can sedate yourself with television, the internet, or drugs. You can deny any of these dangers out of your perceptual existence. You can become a fanatic and take on the impossible task of eliminating all risks from your life. Or you can do what I do: embrace your fears, look at the things that scare you most, evaluate how much of a danger they really are, and do what is within your power to survive while maintaining your sanity. And make jokes about it all along the way. Anxiety and paranoia can make life more stimulating.. Just because existence is grim and hopeless, that doesn’t mean you can’t choose to make it tolerable.
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