Environmental-risk

Environmentally Induced Illnesses is written by teacher of Medical Ethics and Philosophy Professor Thomas Kerns. His background provides the reader with the means and insight to ask important questions, weigh the humanitarian aspects and uncover truths that may be unfamiliar to us. Not only does the author have this applicable knowledge but he has also personally experienced the devastating effects of chemicals within the environment with the onset of his diagnosed multiple chemical sensitivity which occurred in mid life. This book is a shocker. The author lets us in on how massive chemical exposure really is in our every day lives. In the introduction he provides a window for us to see what has been previously invisible to most all of us. Three chemicals are realized, Formaldehyde which is prevalent in our beds, clothes, furniture and carpets. This alone comprises almost every environment we find ourselves in. He goes on to discuss the dangers of fragrances, found in lotions, fabric softeners and various hygiene products. He then introduces Pesticides, which he discloses are not only in homes, offices and schools but many public places one would never consider. Within the first few pages much is discovered and the reader gets a sense that the statistics in the rest of the book will be staggering, and they are. Kerns says that 35 billions lbs. are released yearly. A plethora of chemicals and how they live around and effect us is explained. The problem with these exposures is examined, improper documentation, the human health factors (illnesses) and human rights, policies, ethical dilemmas, the economic role and legal aspects. Kerns provides sounds suggestions for ways of dealing with these issues. He believes the public should be informed and that should be applied to and required of corporations, by law. He stresses product safety and avenues of proof before they are released to the market. He underscores the importance of research in the area of toxicants and their effects. After you read how dominating and dangerous they are, you will agree with him. This book is an amazing expose of truth and an eye opener of awareness. You will look at the world around you differently. We are provided with a new understanding and empathy of those who endure the effects, concern for own safety and for what can be done.

There are a growing number of illnesses which are chemically induced from long-term, low-dose exposure to toxicants around the world, and Thomas Kerns' Environmentally Induced Illnesses covers the ethical dimension of managing environmental health and such toxicants, from perfumes to solvents. The latest medical literature on chronic health effects from such exposure is presented, along with recommendations for overall public and social policy changes. Environmentally Induced Illnesses is a far-reaching guide which blends both risk assessment and human rights issues under one cover.

The facts are in and this book clearly points out that Enviromentally Induced Illnesses like Multiple Chemical Sensitivities are REAL! This book also points out how companies go to great lengths to hide these facts from the public. And unlike the other books in this genra, the author offers well thought out, common sense, easily implemented solutions. This is a great book...be prepared to have your emotions stirred.

This is an excellent introduction to the concerns of religion and ecology. The volume has leading authors survey topics of religion and science, mutli-religious perspectives on the topic, religion and ethics, and religion and educational policy respecting the topic. The book is ideal for schools and discussion groups.

This book, with chapters from a wide variety of scholars of religion, ecology, and science, is a great introduction to the interaction between ecology and faith. This book will be a rewarding read for anyone interested in how religion must cope with the environmental crisis, as well as those who (wrongly) think that religion has nothing to say about ecology.

Finally, a book that incorporates corporate responsiblity for the environment while maintaining the practicality of concern for the bottom line. It covers all the bases with respect to how within the financial sector companies can adjust to environmental change, include environmental reporting in their balance ledgers, and learn about the wide variety of investment products with origins in environmental issues being introduced into the market. Truly a pioneer in a field that commands attention.

An excellent overview of an emerging field. Discusses the development of environmental policies and products as well as the new products that are being created, such as pollution permits, weather derivatives, catastrophe bonds, etc. A good resource for those interested in hedging environmental risk and exploring the growing intersection between finance and the environment.

Hi there my name is Gary Burleson. I am a student of Cynthia Fincher at the University of North Texas. We discuss many topics of Cynthia Fincher's book "Healthy Living in a Toxic World" in class and I have found that as a student I have only started scratching the surface of many serious issues. There are many things I didn't even think about until I enrolled in Ecological Psycology and Cynthia Fincher brought them to my attention. I strongly encourge everyone to read her book, it is very informative. This book will open every persons eyes who read it to many issues that are going on and will countine going on unless we as people can take alternative measures. Gary Burleson

This book is a wonderful reference. It describes the little (and inexpensive) things you can do to make your environment safer for your immune system. There are tables of reference. The ideas provided on cleaning products, personal hygiene, medical, are everything you need to know to help yourself.

It is short and condensed. You can read it quickly and use it for a reference for years to come. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to make their "space" a life-long healthier way to live.

This is a very practical book dealing with quantitative aspects of microbial risk assessment. Nicely written and very useful!

This book synthesizes diverse materials from microbiology, statistics, and risk assessment, covers applications to water, food and other exposures to infectious pathogens

Did you know that when you read about cancer rates, skin cancer is not included because it occurs so frequently it skews the statistics? That is the sort of information you need to know, and will find in RISK.

This is an excellent book which really puts things in perspective. It's a MUST HAVE book that should be on everyone's bookshelf.

FINALLY a book that translates hard science into concise, interesting, and readable text that anyone (even a child) can understand. This book is full of surprises too. I found comfort in understanding that some things I'm afraid are actually quite UNLIKELY to affect me while others I pay no attention to are REAL risks. From "accidents" to "x-rays", 48 chapters include other topics like: Air bags, articificial sweeteners, Bad Backs, Caffeine, School Buses, Mad Cow Disease, biological weapons, indoor air pollution, lead, pesticides, Radon, breast implants, mammography, sexually transmitted disease, and a an eye-opening one on medical errors. A necessary home reference guide with valuable basic knowledge.

Everyone remembers the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Or at least most people do. Like all baby boomers remember about the JFK assassination or Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon. Exactly like the other two history altering events, news of the disaster hit the headlines all over the world. All those who read, saw or heard about it heaved a sigh of despair. In brief, for the benefit of those who are challenged on their recall abilities, the Bhopal gas tragedy involved the release of Methyl Isocyanate gas from a pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, Central India. Forty tonnes of the poisonous cloud, that was released from the factory settled over the low-lying areas of the city. Within minutes innocent people, living in surrounding shanties and squatter camps, were transported into a lethal gas chamber facing a holocaust. It happened around midnight on December the 2nd, 1984. By sunrise of the 3rd over 2000 people lay dead or dying in homes and on the streets.

Morehouse and Subramanium's book on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy is a well-researched study about the Union Carbide and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The book starts with the history of Union Carbide, a company that came to colonial India in 1905. The company started the manufacture of "Eveready Flashlight Batteries" in 1926. "Eveready" and portable lighting became synonymous and was remembered with fondness in households across the cities, towns of villages of India. In 1969 the by now huge multinational corporation started a plant in Bhopal, to manufacture pesticides. By 1983, the company had 14 plants in India manufacturing chemicals, pesticides, batteries and other products. In December 1984, Union Carbide brought permanent darkness to the lives of thousands of residents in Bhopal, maimed and injured several hundred thousands more. The events of that fateful night left a swath of destruction and desolation that has only been rivaled by the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima.

What Morehouse and Subramanium have done is to take us backstage to the events that happened at the plant before the release of the gas, and the response of the various agencies after the disaster. The authors help us get a clearer understanding of what led to the disaster, the chaos and confusion that secondarily led to failure of the relief organizations. Later they explore the tangled web of litigation that followed. The authors critically evaluate the plant and point out the defects in the design of the plant, as well as the failures in the safety devices that led to exothermic chain reaction that caused the accumulation of the large quantities of the poisonous gas, and its final release into the atmosphere.

According to the authors, and this has been substantiated by several other publications, besides the failure of the plant management several other factors compounded the tragedy. Relief measures were botched, disaster sirens not blown, orderly evacuation not planned all leading to chaos and confusion. Later, lack of experience in dealing with mass disasters or knowledge on how to treat the suffering significantly influenced the mortality and morbidity. Political considerations paralyzed the Governments relief efforts while well meaning volunteer efforts were perceived as threats to Governmental stability. The post disaster record keeping and documentation was conducted so haphazardly as to prove worthless. Even today we remain with inadequate scientific evaluation of the disaster to develop preventive scenarios.

In later chapters, the authors describe the jurisdictional battles, the attempts by Union Carbide's Corporate lawyers to disown the subsidiary, transfer the case to India and several other legal maneuverings. The last three chapters answer two important questions (a) Can it happens here in the US? Yes, of course it can happen here, it has happened here at a subliminal level but a major tragedy could strike any chemicals factory in say Thailand or New Jersey, any day. The other question gives very creative information on what can we do to prevent future Bhopal's from happening. The book was written with Subramanium covering the first set of chapters about the situation in India and Morehouse writing the latter half. However, the book reads very seamlessly and has an absorbing narrative. It is eminently readable and extremely thought provoking.

The book is a classic study about the cause and effect of environmental disasters. It is also a clarion call for action by concerned activist groups for legislation on the "Right To Know Laws" about hazardous chemicals that are manufactured, stored or utilized in a community. Despite the numerous reassurances from the chemical manufacturers, occurrence of another Bhopal like tragedy cannot be ruled out with certainty. The authors suggest, preventing a future environmental disaster from happening can only be done by concerned public action, effective legislation and efficient enforcement of safety regulations. As they describe it, the calamity in Bhopal could have been used as an opportunity to revamp the existing imperfections in the hazardous chemicals industry.

Unfortunately the legal maneuvering in the Bhopal case precluded the judiciary from giving the chemical industry a sound warning. Those in the know of the turn of events know that the legal settlement failed in this important aspect, adding insult to injury heaped upon the citizens of Bhopal. Ultimately, the judicial failure in censuring the chemical industry absolved it of responsibility in vaporizing a city. Moreover as it did not serve a punitive warning to Multi-national corporations, it condoned the view that it was okay to place corporate greed above interests of the people and, company bottom line above human dignity. This book eloquently reveals that man really is at the mercy of mammon.

Outstanding reference book. The chapters on biomedical waste management and incineration crisply and coherently describe the problems and concerns and provide excellent examples to underscore the author's points. Mr Turnberg fills in a gap that has long been missing: a single text that covers all the issues related to this complex and controversial field.

If you want to find out what can be learned about environmental policy from excellent fundamental research, read Calculating Risks by James T. Hamilton and W. Kip Viscusi. In contrast, the debates over environmental policy are often muddled by poor empirical work; politicians and newspapers use the "telling" anecdote; and many public policy writers on environmental topics throw together bits of data from some standard sources and then perform statistical analysis, much of which suffers from aggregation biases and inadequate data.

Hamilton and Viscusi decided to dig deep and collect the kind of data needed to make an assessment of the effectiveness of environmental policy. They study the Superfund, which has been established to clean up hazardous-waste sites around the country. They start with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents that describe the hazardous waste and the nature of the dangers in more than two hundred sites around the country. They then match that information with data on socioeconomic factors in the same areas. In some case studies, they collect housing prices to allow them to examine the impact of the Superfund sites on housing values. Finally, they develop information about the political and economic forces that might influence EPA decisions about cleaning up various sites. Originally a series of articles that went through the peer-review process and were published in some of the leading economics and public-policy journals, Calculating Risks can be understood by policymakers, yet it contains enough dense material to ensure that strong-willed and avid students of political economy can examine exactly how Hamilton and Viscusi came to their conclusions. The result is an excellent political-economic analysis of Superfund.

One caveat is necessary. The discussions of the compensating differentials in labor and real-estate markets seem to assume that the full value that people place on avoiding risk is reflected in the estimated compensating differentials. That assumption is problematic because it presumes that information costs are low and that markets are essentially frictionless. More likely, the compensating differentials give a lower-bound estimate on how people evaluate the risks. My best guess is that in most cases the compensating differentials may understate the buyer's actual value of a statistical life by about 20 to 30 percent. Even if understated as much as 75 percent by the compensating differentials, however, the true value of a life would still be only in the $20 million range. Still, in many cases, the Superfund is paying far more than $20 million to reduce the risk of a statistical death.

Anyone interested in environmental policy needs to take a long, hard look at Calculating Risks. In places, the analysis is somewhat dense for the noneconomist, but in both the introduction and the conclusion of each chapter, the authors do a good job of explaining their results and the significance of what they have discovered. Some readers might quibble with certain specific interpretations, but my sense is that such quibbles will not influence the overall effect of the book. Hamilton and Viscusi have put together a truly impressive set of evidence, and they have painstakingly analyzed the operation of the Superfund. I doubt that one could find a better analysis in any other source.

The analysis is also fair-minded. The authors are not cranks tilting the data and the analysis to conclude that the Superfund should be eliminated. Instead, they focus on trying to find ways to make the program more effective. The EPA could save a similar number of lives at much lower cost if the EPA were allowed to follow an alternative strategy for choosing where and when to clean up hazardous waste. Further, the funds saved by the change in EPA policy could be used to save more lives in other areas. Of course, there is no guarantee that reducing the spending on the Superfund would lead to greater risk-reduction spending elsewhere. After all, one of the key lessons of the book is that political pressures can sway agency decisions in ways that are not always consistent with the stated goals of their projects.

This book is one of the first, serious attempts to look at the implication of climate change for weather-related natural disasters and, particularly, how society would, could, and should react to that.