Trichloroethylene: An invisible cause of Parkinson’s disease?
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I don't entirely agree with what they have to say, especially when they search for a possible target chemical, but they provide a whole bunch of contradictory evidence against the naive laziness hypothesis. Of which the most convincing argument is lab animals: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2010...
Lab animals do not have control over their diet and activity level, and yet are becoming more obese.
1. They haven't found any mechanistic evidence to support this.
2. All of these populations had access to manufactured food. (Either human or pet food)
3. This is really only one study, not really a field of research.
IT seems like the theory manufactured food has gotten tasty since the 80's would also explain this data.
Is it really a choice when 75% of all food found in the supermarket has been spiked with sugar and 88% of the US population is suffering from metabolic issues? And sugar has been linked to a host of degenerative neurological conditions.
> activity level
We can't outrun a bad diet.
Yes, it is. If you walk into the store, pick up the item, pay for it, take it home, and eat it, then it was 100% your choice. Just because a decision is difficult doesn't absolve an individual of responsibility.
>We can't outrun a bad diet.
You can, but it's not easy. However, what tends to happen is when you increase you activity level your body will auto-regulate cravings for better food. High performance athletes can get by on mostly fast food if they need. Most don't because they know it's not optimal.
Both of your notions are currently popular but that doesn't make them right. Emotional reasoning has taken over diet, fitness, and health and caused millions of people to give up their personal responsibility and sense of control. It's harmful thinking.
I can feed my family with a small permaculture farm, some chickens and goats, without relying on anyone else. I can heat my house with wood and solar energy retained in water, again without relying on anyone else. If my farm is surrounded by polluters and thus the ground is so tainted that nothing grows without buying Monsanto's entire catalog, that would be the fault of Republicans who've blocked environmental regulation.
Your experience is valid but the population density of a particular city (or lack thereof in a particular territory) is a poor indicator of whether the earth's population is too high for its carrying capacity.
In what world is this remotely good for the environment, in any way?
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Also, if you do really live on a farm off the grid, you might be interested in this NYT profile: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/thomas-massie-rep...
You might argue that more people produce more other good stuff, but that is a flawed argument for a few reasons. For starters, a lot of scarcity in our economy is fake and introduced to maximize profit. Second, there's only so much valuable work to be done, but everyone has to have a job, so somewhere between 50-80% of people end up doing meaningless work (think of all the people involved in making/marketing a lot of infomercial garbage and lame tchotchkes like dog bowls shaped like toilets that flush when the dog eats). Nobody would miss those things if they'd never existed, and I'm sure none of the people responsible wanted to do that sort of thing growing up. It's basically a big capitalist circle jerk.
2. Poisonous chemicals leech into air, soil, water. Then they accumulate up the food chain. Humans are at the apex.
3. Synthetic hormones, plastics, and etc. decimate fertility.
If you’re concerned about population growth, you should support some degree of environmental regulation. Only one mainstream* party in the states gets you that.
* A mathematical consequence of first past the post voting systems is that the two largest parties are stable. Third parties only exist as unstable equilibria. If you desire a serious third party, you should also support election reform. . . which also means not voting Republican.
Tribalist myopia enables this status quo.
Some of this crap is worse than others. Some we can destroy and maybe make our food supply and water safe. But others are really hardy, by design (Teflon!). There's no good way to get rid of them and this should have been treated as an emergency ages ago. In a sense they are worse than radioactive waste because they don't even decay.
I spent twenty years in the fertilizer industry. I always read the chemical sheets on everything we sold. Paraquat which this article mentions was the single most toxic herbicide that we sold.
My bosses wife got a small amount mixed with water in her hair once. She grabbed a comb to try and thin the amount. When she stopped combing she examined her comb and it looked like a melted glob of plastic. This shocked all of us and she very quickly went and washed her hair.
They are reporting about feeding mice with 400 mg/kg/day during 6 to 8 weeks. For humans, this is equivalent to 33mg/kg/day. So for a 80kg body: 2.6g, half a sugar cube every day.
If you feed an animal (including us) with unreasonable levels of most anything you will observe weird stuff.
For example feeding mice with high fat diets gives them a kind of Alzheimer disease.
It reminds me a bit of the datasheet for sodium chloride - common table salt - that describes the skin contact LD50 (the amount that is a lethal dose for 50% of a population of test rabbits) as ">25kg".
So what do we read from that? If you drop a sack of salt weighing as much as an eight-year-old child on a series of rabbits, roughly half of them will die? I can't say I'm *very* surprised...
No, you should read exactly what it says. If you put a series of rabbits in skin contact with 25kg of salt each, less than half of them will die. That's how we know the LD50 is greater than 25 kilograms.
I assume 25 kilograms was the limit of testing, and that's why the result is reported the way it is.
I'm also willing to go out on a limb and assume the number of test rabbits that died from being put in skin contact with 25kg of salt was zero, which is less than half of the test pool as long as it contained a positive number of rabbits.
That seems a pretty safe assumption.
Depending on what height it was applied from
> less than half of the test pool as long as it contained a positive number of rabbits.
Positive integer number of rabbits, with any luck, although I suspect in this instance imaginary rabbits may have been used. Definitely not complex ones though.
But for e.g. a contact poison absorbed through the skin, sticking your finger into a large pool of the stuff might get you a bigger dose than sticking your finger into a tiny puddle, even with little to no difference in surface area of skin making contact.
Going back to salt, it is known and used for its ability to draw water out of other materials. If you stay in contact with a large quantity of salt, it will kill you through dehydration, because even though it can't flow, the water that you contain can. Your skin should have a good amount of resistance to this; the inside of your nostrils, or an open wound, not so much.
I'm speculating here; if you really want a definitive answer, you'll need to find someone who creates data for MSDS sheets.
How does one convert that? It makes sense that this isn't necessarily linear, but I have no idea how to turn one of those numbers into the other
Generally, from mice, it's ([mouse dose in mg/kg] * (3/37)) = human equivalent dose in mg/kg.
But humans have much more time to ingest it. Parkinson develops during decades, not weeks.
I found this: "However, some of these diets contain levels of dietary fat that are much higher than the levels that humans routinely consume. The question has been raised as to whether experimental use of these diets with very high levels of fat adequately models the situation of human obesity." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-019-0363-7
Once I left highschool I stopped working on cars (discovered computers), but I wonder how screwed we are, or are going to be (we're all nearing our 60's even though we still have the maturity of 20 somethings).
All that shit is probably in the ground water though.
We don't have the excuse earlier generations had, we know this stuff causes cancer, we know it seeps into your skin and doesn't come out just because you washed your hands well, but people still don't see a problem with going fist deep in used engine oil or dumping half a can of brake cleaner on something in an enclosed garage
Apparently, this stuff was great for cleaning electronics PCBs but clearly it is super bad for you. I am not sure how you could slightly smell it and not realize it...has a very strong "I cause cancer" smell to it.
I second this. I used it to clean electronic systems in the military and they did not really give much training on this chemical which surprised me as they trained extensively on much less dangerous chemicals. Some of my team members liked inhaling the fumes.
Timeline of events: https://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/local/2016/05/20/ti...
EPA Source: https://www.epa.gov/hwcorrectiveactioncleanups/hazardous-was...
Keep in mind that many people still deliberately inhale the products of combustion of tobacco.
I don't smoke, but most chlorocarbons smell good --- clean and slightly sweet is how I'd describe the fragrance.
But the US Surgeon General had different findings, and the only conclusion that we can make is that it is not tobacco that kills, only cigarettes:
Death rates for current pipe smokers were little if at all higher than for non-smokers, even with men smoking 10 pipefuls per day and with men who had smoked pipes for more than 30 years.[2]
Among the pipe smokers.... The US mortality ratios are 0.8 for non-inhalers and 1.0 for inhalers.[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdV_1u-TodY&t=13m25s
[2] https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf (No. 1103, p.112)
[3] ibid. (No. 1103, page 92)
Citation needed by all pot smokers. Just love how everyone insists they know absolutely everything and are never wrong. Guess what?
> ...causes cancer at the same rate as with them
I think they're referring to your original claim that tobacco smoke, without additives, doesn't cause cancer.
Your later apparent softening of that statement feels sneaky. It's significant, and makes all the difference in the world.
Once again I am being attributed something that is not mine. It is not my claim, it is the claim of the US Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health, and I stand by the science which claims (i.e. it is not my claim, it is the claim of the US Surgeon General) that pipe smokers who inhale live as long as nonsmokers, and pipe smokers that don’t inhale live longer than non-smokers.
Smoking tobacco that is not infused with more than 300 known carcinogens does not cause cancer. No one is saying smoking is healthy, only that the cancer rates of natural tobacco smokers are non-existent, no higher than the general population. They'll just have to deal with that fact, that they've been lied to in order to protect Big Tobacco's cash cow and methods of making cigarettes intentionally more addicting to drive it. Natural tobacco, in comparison, has a fraction of the amount of nicotine as what's in national brand cigarettes and thus is in comparison far less addictive.
I honestly don't care. I just think it's interesting that most people believe tobacco causes cancer so strongly, and they're provably wrong. It's what they put in cigarettes that causes cancer, and I don't know how anyone can call that tobacco.
It is certainly true that cigarettes are generally more carcinogenic. However, your statement that "actual tobacco can cause emphysema, not cancer" is emphatically false.
I would suggest being somewhat less confrontational when your primary source on an actively researched topic is from 1964. In your words, "[j]ust love how everyone insists they know absolutely everything and are never wrong. Guess what?"
That's awesome. Please cite which paragraph mentions "natural tobacco," because here "pipe smokers" is ambiguous, and even pipe tobacco can be treated to not only increase its nicotine content, but also be infused with carcinogenic additives to make the final product more addictive, and thereby also making it more deadly (not due to it's addictiveness directly, but by the chemicals that cause it to be more addictive, such as adding ammonia), In fact, it is standard practice for major brands of pipe tobacco to treat the tobacco to turn it into something that should be distinguished as "not tobacco," so unless the study distinguishes between natural and treated tobacco smokers, it is a flawed study.
Is it really so impossible to believe that you were lied to and believe total crap? Tobacco, natural tobacco without any carcinogenic chemicals added, does not cause cancer.
It's also in brake cleaner, which I have no idea how anyone tolerates that stuff.
I've never in my life been in a situation where I wanted a stronger solvent than acetone, I'm very skeptical most of these harsh cleaning chemicals are actually needed outside specialist industrial uses.
There's a lot of chemicals that do basically the same thing with widely varying desire to kill you. I don't understand why people like the dangerous ones.
They say it works better but what does that mean? Saves a few minutes? Gets it cleaner? Are people seeing failures in the field because of the less toxic alternatives leaving residue? Does it even matter at all how clean or not some of this stuff is? Is it just gonna get covered in more grease in 5 minutes?
EDIT: phosgene gas.
Chlorinated brake cleaner containing tetrachloroethylene will, on exposure to high temperatures (above 500 °F (260 °C)) or strong UV light, decompose into phosgene and hydrogen chloride, both of which are extremely dangerous if inhaled.
[0] https://trulaw.com/the-dangers-of-vinyl-chloride-phosgene-an...
It's also in brake cleaner
Acetone is blissfully not so toxic but it is extremely volatile, which is both a safety and a practical concern. I bought a small flask of the stuff recently from the big box store and you could not buy it at the self-checkout.
The chlorinated stuff is just a better solvent. Dries faster, leaves less residue (than some non-chlorinated versions), and is better at dissolving the greasy funk. Generally it's not enough of an improvement, even if you have the chlorinated stuff at your disposal.
I'll say. Oak Ridge National Lab has this to say about the toxicity of acetone:
> Acetone (CAS No. 67-64-1) is a clear, colorless, highly flammable liquid with a vapor pressure of 182 mm Hg at 20C (Morgott, 1993). It is completely miscible in water and soluble in organics such as benzene and ethanol (ATSDR, 1994). Its log Kow has been estimated to be -0.24 (ATSDR, 1994). Acetone is used primarily as a solvent and chemical intermediate, and it is also found in some consumer products such as nail polish remover (Inoue, 1983; Kumai et al., 1983).
https://rais.ornl.gov/tox/profiles/acetone.html
Given a choice between the chlorinated stuff, and something one can drink half a shot glass of and not suffer any toxic effects, I'll take the acetone any day.
I generally buy my acetone online, BTW. It's relatively easy to buy small quantities of pure acetone, because it's sold as nail polish remover.
Fun fact: if you drink isopropyl alcohol, your body metabolises it (partly) to acetone, which you can smell and taste. But, well, don't drink either anyway. :-)
Nail polish remover, like non-ethyl alcohol, is likely to be adulterated (e.g. with scents or crap to soften your cuticles, etc.). Depending on how clean you need something to be it may be an issue (and you probably can find high test nail polish remover). I was removing these infernal stickers from cooking implements so I went with the big box store. Depending on what you're working with you may still need to wipe it down with isopropyl anyhow.
Not if you buy the stuff that literally says "pure acetone," e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Onyx-Professional-Acetone-Remover-Fas...
I was going to suggest that the only "adulterant" likely to be in something labeled "pure acetone" would be water from the air, but Stack Exchange suggests differently: https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/54341/acetone-...
[0] https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B005510S9M/
[1] https://www.service.european-aerosols.com/en/products/presto...
So basically, "tin of shit that's too thin to call petrol", here in the UK.
I haven't seen the chlorinated stuff for years, either.
Don't get me wrong, I have zero doubt it causes cancer and God-only-knows what else. The stuff is like an eraser for physical reality. Whatever tiny droplets of it you breathe in, are desperately trying to clean your nasty organs away and leave a gleaming, residue-free skeleton behind. I suspect it could clean the face right off your head like in the end scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I no longer use it. For my purposes anything that can't be cleaned without TCE, doesn't need to be cleaned that badly. But I do get why it was used so much.
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-warn-common-cleaning-che...
Call me stupid, but can it really be volatile and persistent? I'd expect volatility and persistence to be negatively correlated.
Those of us who worked in the Electronics industry in the 1980s did come into contact daily.
Separately, there are many orgs which track and map the TCE plumes in the groundwater and you can find that info as well through google
And then there's the military waste…
A lot of the radioactive soil was just sent to regular state landfills.
Then after they had started building multi family homes on top of the site, they found out the cleanup company was falsifying soil samples and the site was still highly radioactive.
I hope that situation is not typical of how Superfund sites are handled
AMD, Intel, Fairchild, IBM, HP, Nat Semi, Raytheon, Teledyne, Westinghouse, and LLNL all gifted the Bay Area with Superfund sites with most concentrated in Santa Clara county. Even stuff that doesn't rise to the level of a Superfund site can still be far too polluted to develop (e.g. Brisbane).
It's also narcotic and carcinogenic. Banned in EU since 2010.
Until 50 years ago.
Always research the methods of your decaf coffee vendor before you buy!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/19...
Nasty stuff, but also very useful, and Those With Money like it.
They'll time your every breath
And every day you're in this place you're two days nearer death
But you go
There's overtime and bonus opportunities galore
The young men like their money and they all come back for more
But soon you're knockin' on and you look older than you should
For every bob made on the job you pay with flesh and blood
I'm somewhat fascinated by the image the song paints of a factory that will happily pay above-market rates for as many hours as you care to work there.
This is fine™.
Conveniently it seems that the smoking point of olive oil is about that, while its boiling point is ~300°C (570°F), which give nice physical cues without having a thermometer.
| "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'."