Toxicants Health And Regulation Since 1945

The number of substances potentially dangerous to our health and environment is constantly increasing. The papers in this volume examine the concurrent rise of pollutants and the regulations designed to police their use.

Based on extensive archival research, this study examines the role of the Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations in improving public health during the interwar period. Barona argues that the Foundation applied a model of business efficiency to its ideology of spreading good health, creating a revolution in public health practice.

Lessons from the massive Chernobyl nuclear accident about how we deal with modern hazards that are largely imperceptible. Before Fukushima, the most notorious large-scale nuclear accident the world had seen was Chernobyl in 1986. The fallout from Chernobyl covered vast areas in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Europe. Belarus, at the time a Soviet republic, suffered heavily: nearly a quarter of its territory was covered with long-lasting radionuclides. Yet the damage from the massive fallout was largely imperceptible; contaminated communities looked exactly like noncontaminated ones. It could be known only through constructed representations of it. In The Politics of Invisibility, Olga Kuchinskaya explores how we know what we know about Chernobyl, describing how the consequences of a nuclear accident were made invisible. Her analysis sheds valuable light on how we deal with other modern hazards—toxins or global warming—that are largely imperceptible to the human senses. Kuchinskaya describes the production of invisibility of Chernobyl's consequences in Belarus—practices that limit public attention to radiation and make its health effects impossible to observe. Just as mitigating radiological contamination requires infrastructural solutions, she argues, the production and propagation of invisibility also involves infrastructural efforts, from redefining the scope and nature of the accident's consequences to reshaping research and protection practices. Kuchinskaya finds vast fluctuations in recognition, tracing varyingly successful efforts to conceal or reveal Chernobyl's consequences at different levels—among affected populations, scientists, government, media, and international organizations. The production of invisibility, she argues, is a function of power relations.

In the years following World War II the health and well-being of the nation was of primary concern to the British government. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between health and stress in post-war Britain through a series of carefully connected case studies.

Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the world’s population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supply’s productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. From the proliferation of synthetic additives to the threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the chapters in Risk on the Table zero in on key historical cases in North America and Europe that illuminate the history of food safety, highlighting the powerful tensions that exists among scientific understandings of risk, policymakers’ decisions, and cultural notions of “pure” food.

Medical Technology and the Social: How Medical Technology is Impacting Social relations, Institutions, and Beliefs about what is Normal explores the intersection of society and medical technology to examine how medical technology impacts our day-to-day lives. The contributors examine a variety of technologies and their impact on the social world, from older technologies such as the use of fax machines in hospitals to cutting-edge technologies such as Bluetooth-enabled smart pills. Underlying each chapter is a consideration of what is “normal”, investigating such themes as power and social control, diffusion of technology, eco-crip theory, the changing role of medical expertise, the embodiment of the fetus in utero, the history of prosthetics, and how technology has reformed conceptions of a “normal” body.

Winner of the 2021 Joan Thirsk Memorial Prize from the British Agricultural History Society​ 2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title​ Winner of the 2020 Turriano Prize from ICOHTEC Short-listed and highly commended for the Antibiotic Guardian Award from Public Health England​ Long-listed for the Michel Déon Prize from the Royal Irish Academy​ Pyrrhic Progress analyses over half a century of antibiotic use, regulation, and resistance in US and British food production. Mass-introduced after 1945, antibiotics helped revolutionize post-war agriculture. Food producers used antibiotics to prevent and treat disease, protect plants, preserve food, and promote animals’ growth. Many soon became dependent on routine antibiotic use to sustain and increase production. The resulting growth of antibiotic infrastructures came at a price. Critics blamed antibiotics for leaving dangerous residues in food, enabling bad animal welfare, and selecting for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria, which could no longer be treated with antibiotics. Pyrrhic Progress reconstructs the complicated negotiations that accompanied this process of risk prioritization between consumers, farmers, and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. Unsurprisingly, solutions differed: while Europeans implemented precautionary antibiotic restrictions to curb AMR, consumer concerns and cost-benefit assessments made US regulators focus on curbing drug residues in food. The result was a growing divergence of antibiotic stewardship and a rise of AMR. Kirchhelle’s comprehensive analysis of evolving non-human antibiotic use and the historical complexities of antibiotic stewardship provides important insights for current debates on the global burden of AMR. This Open Access ebook is available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license, and is supported by a generous grant from Wellcome Trust.

Although poisonous substances have been a hazard for the whole of human history, it is only with the development and large-scale production of new chemical substances over the last two centuries that toxic, manmade pollutants have become such a varied and widespread danger. Covering a host of both notorious and little-known chemicals, the chapters in this collection investigate the emergence of specific toxic, pathogenic, carcinogenic, and ecologically harmful chemicals as well as the scientific, cultural and legislative responses they have prompted. Each study situates chemical hazards in a long-term and transnational framework and demonstrates the importance of considering both the natural and the social contexts in which their histories have unfolded.