Samiul Bashar Samin
Look around, and you’re likely to find a burgeoning industry of alternative health professionals, laboratories and containment companies, all formed around the disturbing belief that we humans have become contaminated with metals, plastics, chemicals, hormones and all the detritus and waste of modern life, unfettered and unrestrained.This industrial poison, a product of the past 50 years, is said to be the cause of an upsurge in autism and chronic disease.
We, the environment and its inhabitants, can become contaminated from a wide range of toxins. Most often, we recognize products of industrialization as environmental contaminants, but naturally occurring toxins abound, from ultraviolet light coming from space to compounds created naturally, by plants, for self-defense.The presence of such natural toxins, moreover, should not be frightening. As living organisms, we’ve evolved strategies, such as the liver, to mitigate many of these natural invaders, strategies that can be used in the defense against human-made toxins, too.
Because of the vast diversity and complexity of chemicals and toxicity, regulations and much of the research has historically been reactionary, waiting to see which chemicals accumulate in biological systems or otherwise exert toxicity. This type of approach obscures our ability to answer the question of this opinion, simply because there are too many unknowns.
To better protect human health and the environment, reactionary regulation must be supplemented with proactive research and regulation. Even with the vast number of potential toxicants produced, there is hope for reducing our exposure to emerging and fugitive contaminants. Existing laws protect us from many known contaminants, assuming these laws are properly enforced. For many other contaminants, scientific consensus needs to be pushed into regulations, without the prerequisite of a national headline disaster. Fundamental research needs to continue to uncover the unknown unknowns and to develop computational tools for predicting risk and exposure. Whether or not we are more or less contaminated will probably always be unanswerable, but through proactive research and regulation, we can work to minimize the risk presented by environmental contaminants.