Lower thresholds for danger are a good thing, but don't signal a more dangerous world
■"Common Industrial Chemicals In Tiny Doses Raise Health Issue: Advanced Tests Often Detect Subtle Biological Effects; Are Standars Too Lax?" by Peter Waldman, Wall Street Journal, 25 July 2005, p. A1.
Fascinating article about how scientists and government regulators are now coming to the consensus that, thanks to better measuring technologies, we're able to detect very tiny amounts of certain chemicals in our environment and begin to trace their impact on our bodies and lives.
This is, as with most new and improved technologies, both good and bad. Learning about these things, if we approach them with the same old same old answers, could end up generating cures worse than the disease. After all, you can't just say that we're going to build a world without any of these chemical traces because the benefits we garner from their use may end up saving or extending more lives than their limited presence in our environment may cost in terms of lives lost or shortened.
Here's a good example: When my daughter Emily's kidney cancer is diagnosed as metastasized to both her lungs, we achieved that diagnosis with a CT, or "Cat Scan." The chemo/radiation protocols in play at that time didn't really have a definitive answer to finding these very small tumors in her lungs, tumors so small that in the past they went undetected with just X-rays. Here was the conundrum: go more aggressive on chemo and radiation, armed as we were with this knowledge, or just pretend like they weren't there on the assumption that a lighter protocol of chemo and radiation, or the one we would have chosen absent this additional information, would do the trick and cause her fewer potential "late effects," meaning physical damage and complications from the harsher treatment choice.
The history and data to guide our choice back then was very ambiguous. We could never be sure if we were operating under "better intell" or just "more information than needed." There was a balance to be achieved, and the science only provided us with the dilemma, not the strategic decision.
In the end, we took the harsher approach. And may God have mercy on our souls if Emily someday ends up paying for our choice.