Writing is in someways a lonely land, or lonely may not be the precise word I’m looking for. There’s a kind of necessary solitude, the need for a clear space. At my home office, this usually means me telling the kids, “Go yell at each other somewhere else so that I can think.”

You take your quiet places where you find them. I’m currently in my hotel room in Amman, Jordan, where its just me, the laptop, and some really good coffee. But it’s really an internal quiet some times. I write in noisy bars too – when I was working on my book, The Poisoner’s Handbook, I got some of my best inspiration while drinking sidecars and listening to a clatter of sound.

Ring’d with the azure world she stands

When I started my blog, Speakeasy Science, I wanted it to be part of the bigger world, of course. And I wanted it to have some of that sidecar-and-sound feel to it. The chemistry cafe, the Periodic Table Pub, okay, I can’t think of any other great alliteration, but a place for a conversation about this gorgeous, complicated and fundamental science. It began as a Word Press blog on my author page and I was genuinely honored, this spring, to be invited to move it to Science Blogs.

And at Science Blogs, let me say, the conversation has been wonderful. I’ve learned a fantastic amount from the comments on my posts, enjoyed the arguments (most recently the great discussion following Warriors Against Claptrap). I’ve had the pleasure of exploring chemical stories that fascinate me – from the poisonous nature of the precious metal gold to all the chemical mischief-making in the Gulf of Mexico.

I’ve met, admired, and even envied many of my fellow bloggers here – for their stylish way with words and their commitment to writing blogs that matter. And they do matter – they illuminate science in breathtaking and wonderfully diverse ways. I’ve loved being a part of that.:

The wrinkled sea below her crawls

But, of course, things have gotten complicated at Science Blogs, following the PepsiCo sponsored blog fiasco. Yes, Sb management has worked extremely hard to learn from the basic mistake: when you sell credibility, you basically lose it.

Yes, it would have been great if management had figured that out in advance. And yes, to give them great, Sb management has been working really hard to make things right in the aftermath.

But, as I said, writing for all its communal nature requires a comfortable solitude. And for a journalist-blogger like me, that means I write from the self-respecting corner of my life, the place where I work really hard to get it right and am proud not only of the product but of where it appears.

And I just haven’t been able to do that at Sb these days. It’s like trying to write while sitting in a chair with a broken leg. There are lots of ways to write about science – funny or serious, investigative or literary – but it has to be done from a solid platform of mutual respect between writer and reader, blogger and blogging home. I can’t write the stories I want to tell when I’m worried about the integrity of the chair I’m sitting in – and my own integrity along with it.

She watches from her mountain walls

I’ve been traveling so much for my work with the World Federation of Science Journalists and next year’s meeting in Cairo that I missed the initial protest and walk outs. I’ve never believed in after the fact hissy fits and I wanted to take some time to think it over.

I listened, talked to people, read some amazingly thoughtful discussions of the issues raised by the Sb crisis in context of science blogging, its role and its directions. One of the best posts to evaluate the need for change (also a farewell to Sb) – is the recent one from A Blog Around the Clock:

As we all know, writing is thinking. During this same period, I’ve tried to actually write a post. I got interested in the homicidal use of household bleach but couldn’t make it work. I wrote almost an entire post on the annual dead zones in the Gulf (not related to the BP spill but to our continued, heavy-handed use of nitrogen-based fertilizers) and ended up depressing myself.

I realized I couldn’t stay – couldn’t write without constantly testing the chair legs, couldn’t hold onto my self-respect as a journalist blogger, couldn’t keep the curious alchemy of writing for fun and fascination that makes me actually love my blog and what I’m trying to do with it.

And like a thunderbolt she falls

The trouble with building a post around the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is that you end up with a vain-glorious line like the one above. And in my case, with some serious mixing of metaphors – chairs, cliffs, not good. Of course, the poem isn’t a perfect fit anyway. If you know “The Eagle: A Fragment” – you know that the bird is all male and all power. This is a Victorian poet, after all.

But I’ve always loved its sheer power (Tennyson is so much better in short bits) and as I thought about my decision, I liked that step-off-the cliff kind of image to leaving, free-fall into something new and different. I’m talking to a couple other blog networks about moving Speakeasy Science to other collaboration location and I hope to do that.

But until then, I’ll be posting at my old home.

Hope to see you there. The chairs are good, promise.

It was my first heady experience of working solely for myself. I’ve been a staff journalist at five newspapers, a freelance writer for a list of newspapers, magazines and websites, and a book author. I’ve worked with brilliant editors and indifferent ones, publishers who were generous, publishers who were penny counters.

My blog, right down to its artsy retro look, was just mine. My ideas, my unedited writing, my own vision of how to delve into the beautiful, fundamental and sinister science of chemistry. I was honored when, a few months later, I was asked to join the Science Blogs community, with so many writers I admired. And I learned to appreciate the astonishingly smart comments and diverse audience.

But I didn’t shut down my old blogging platform, just renamed it (The Write Note) and let it go quiet. Occasionally someone still shuffles through the old posts there and leaves a smart comment there as well.

All of which leads me to this week, in which I wrapped up some journalism business in Italy (board meeting of the World Federation of Science Journalists), returned home Wednesday, discovered that United had lost my luggage, and started playing catch up with the crisis here at Science Blogs caused by the decision to allow a sponsored blog by PepsiCo on the subject of nutrition science.

Right. Hard to write that last sentence with a straight face since it was such a bad decision, publicly mismanaged, played out like a farce. Of course, since Wednesday, United has returned my suitcase and Science Blogs has dropped the PepsiCo plan. Probably reluctantly since it did so in response to a blogger uprising in which many writers I know and admire – Rebecca Skloot, David Dobbs, and Brian Switek among them – pulled their blogs from this community.

But it did respond, which is something. I’ve been at newspapers at which fiery self-immolation wouldn’t have changed a planned direction. Business decisions are rarely pure, anyway, as we all know. In the most charitable light, mistakes get made and – as it appears to have happened here – mistakes get corrected. The part that’s not so easy guess is whether the correction is a cultural shift or merely a move to end a controversy.

I believe that the best thing about such events is that we can use them to question our bearings. So – surprise – I’m asking myself whether to stay or return to my old home where there is no possibility of clumsy business decisions because there is no business plan. No publisher to worry about counting pennies because there are no pennies. Just a science writer and her Word Press platform (which I’ve missed dearly since moving here.)

Somewhere over the Atlantic, during those hours at 35,000 feet, I missed my opportunity to quit in protest, to make a difference as these other authors did. So my questions at this point are mostly selfish – is the remaining community still a comfortable home? Some of my favorite bloggers have chosen, after all, to stay. Is this the right place for a chemistry and culture blog still? Was I wrong to give up the pure pleasures of a personal blog where I’m responsible for no one’s mistakes but my own?

If I knew the answers to those questions, I’d be able to tell you now my brilliant next move for Speakeasy Science. Still thinking it over, still jet-lagged.. Oh well. In just over a week, I’m flying to Jordan to teach a science journalism workshop in Amman. Perhaps somewhere in the clouds, back up there and out of touch again, the smart answer will come to me.

“There was an article in the Huffington Post not long ago about an extreme worst case scenario with the oil spill – that a giant methane bubble bursts through the sea floor, ignites, causes a huge supersonic tsunami that would wipe out all of Florida, followed by a vaporization tsunami.

I’ve heard this described as “disaster porn”, and certainly, the scenario smacks of it. But, there have been extreme natural disasters in the past, and not being a geologist, I can’t help but feel some alarm at this, as I’m currently a resident of Tampa. I have been trying to get a sense of the validity of these fears, but nearly everything I see only states that these are fears citing this article, and does not provide an in-depth critique of it. Could you or a well-informed colleague comment on this?”

A little quick research showed the epic-methane-disaster-theory to be spreading across the internet, blog to blog, in something of a viral fashion. Or at least a hyperbolic one, , if I go by titles such as “How the Ultimate BP-Gulf Oil Disaster Could Kill Millions.” And posts such as “All Gulf residents LEAVE NOW.”

If you look at these posts – and I’ll start with the ridiculous one on Huffington Post – you’ll notice that there’s lots of references to “some geologists” warning of the risk, without providing any names of said geologists. There are so-called references at the bottom but if click on the one for “methane driven oceanic eruptions and mass extinctions” I only get an error message. And if I do further research on the subject I find a speculative scenario that doesn’t any way resemble the current situation – it requires a body of water saturated with methane and then a handy asteroid event to ignite it.

Now granted, that reputable scientists have been saying from the beginning that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is also a massive methane leak. But the concerns related to that don’t seem to be of the asteroid-ignited-explosion variety. I find instead worries about chemical reactions leading to depletion of oxygen and, thus, the creation of major dead zones. But none of this is direct response to the millions dead in the Gulf scenario; I can find no evidence that U.S. scientists or scientific organizations or science agencies have made any effort to debunk this nonsense, even with sometime as basic as explaining that the geology of the Gulf sea floor is not a hollow chamber that houses bubbles but a complex network of rock and sediment layers.

Which brings me to “Warriors Against Claptrap”, a session presented yesterday at the Euroscience Open Forum in Torino, Italy. ESOF is a European version of the popular science meeting hosted every year in the U.S. by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Just to throw one more acronym into this paragraph, I’ve been attending as the North American board member of the World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ).

The warriors session is not about on the efforts of journalists like myself to debunk pseudoscience. It derives from the work of a U.K. charitable trust, Sense About Science, which has the mission of promoting “good science and evidence for the public.” Scientists affiliated with this program have publicly entered controversial discussions about everything from vaccines to climate change. The claptrap session was organized by the trust’s wonderfully activist program Voice of Young Science, which bands together smart, articulate and dedicated researchers early in their careers – often a time when scientists tend to be extremely cautious – who wish to make a difference in public perception of science.

Regarding the methane claptrap being circulated about the Gulf oil spill, where-oh-where are the comparable U.S. scientists? I don’t know why I continue to be so naive on this subject but after I received the alarmed e-mail, I went to the obvious government science agency sites looking for some rational information on the subject that I could pass along. Figuring that if people along the Gulf coast were unnerved, our own warrior scientists would want to reassure them.

At one level, of course, this is an irresponsible internet rumor. But at another – and even a journalist like myself can get this – it’s a great opportunity to educate people about the real risks – such as dead zones – about methane itself, and about the kind of research now underway to understand those dangers.

We absolutely need more warrior scientists in the U.S. Because when we hide from these confrontations, when we pretend we’re too smart for the discussion, when we presume that we exist best above the fray, we concede the war to purveyors of claptrap.

(ps more about methane in the next post)

And after mulling it over – helped along by the suggestion of Scibling Scicurious that a Zombie Day would be a good idea and also by a number of cocktails from the home speakeasy, I believe I’ve come up with a very reasonable theory.

1. The poisonous element arsenic (As) is famed for its ability to make a dead person look, well, undead.

2. Why? Arsenic helps preserve soft tissues, partly by interfering with the ability of bacteria to metabolize them. It was used in embalming corpses until the early 20th century when it became obvious that a) it was poisoning people in funeral homes and b) it was interfering with criminal detection of arsenic murders.

3. We’re not talking about any old half-ass kind of tissue preservation. Nineteenth century toxicologists called it “arsenic mummification” and one of my favorite such experts, Rudolph Witthaus of Columbia University, reported exhuming a body after nearly a year and discovering that appeared as fresh as the day of burial. “Except for the mold growing on the face,” he added. “Arsenic does not appear to inhibit the growth of mold.”

4. Ugh.

5. But I digress. A good example of arsenic mummification turns out to be the body of Napoleon Bonaparte whose corpse was in such excellent shape when he was dug up that it fostered a host of arsenic murder theories.

6. An even better example is the case of the 19th century outlaw, Elmer McCurdy, whose body was so soaked in arsenic during the embalming process that the resulting remarkably sturdy corpse was used in carnival sideshows for more than a century.

7. Ugh.

8. But consider this also. During the 18th and 19th centuries, chemists discovered that arsenic could be used to create some stunning green dyes, used to color everything from hat feathers to fake malachite jewelry, clothes to wallpaper.

9. In fact, of the more recent theories of the death of the late Napoleon Bonaparte is that rather than being poisoned by his enemies, he was killed by his wallpaper. That the emperor’s last prison had rooms decorated with Paris Green wallpaper and heat, humidity and mold growing in the paper caused it to release arsine gas.

10. My zombie theory is based on those two particular qualities of arsenic: tissue preservation after death and a tendency to color things green. I mean really, what more is needed in creating an undead creature?

11. But there’s one more factor. Until the early 20th century, arsenic was the poisoner’s weapon of choice, used so frequently it was nicknamed “the inheritance powder.” Scores of people were sickened or killed by arsenic, both intentionally and through accidental exposures.

12. So, in its heyday, arsenic offered a bounty of bodies that didn’t decompose easily and which might well be zombie green – if not from the poison (and arsenic tended to turn people more yellow than green) then from the mold creeping over dead faces. In other words, an obvious way to explain the history of zombies wandering among us in a slightly (but not completely) rotten state of existence.

13. Could my theory explain the zombie legend? Could it explain those legions of zombies purportedly wandering around, seeking vengeance or perhaps dinner? Of course it could. But then, of course, after a few of those speakeasy cocktails, I tend to suspect the existence of strange green creatures anyway.

!4. Kind of like this:

15. Pretty convincing, huh? Or do I mean “ugh”?

(ps. special thanks to zombie illustrator Joseph Hewitt of the Ataraxia Theatre for the great image to close my argument. If you want to see more of his great work, you should check out the scifi videogame Gearhead.)

As Dr. William Langston investigated further he discovered all six of these living statues had used a new form of synthetic heroin, new to the Bay Area that July. Alarmed, Langston called a press conference to warn of bad drugs on the streets.. But he – along with state and federal researchers – hurried to discover what it was about the drug was producing these startling symptoms.

To neurologists like Langston, the symptoms were bizarrely familiar. The victims, frozen into their eerie poses, despite the summer heat, resembled patients in the last debilitating stages of Parkinson’s disease, an illness which progressively destroys muscle control.

What had these drug users injected, what was the particular, peculiar chemistry that had launched them into something that looked like the end-stages of one of the most intractable of all neurological diseases? And if researchers could decipher what had happened to the frozen addicts could they also decipher what was going on with Parkinson’s?

As it would turn out, yes and no.

The drug on the streets had the nickname of Super Demerol; a home-brewed experiment based on the chemistry of the well-known narcotic pain killer. One of the earliest versions was cooked up by a chemistry graduate student in Maryland, who in 1977 also became a frozen addict (and later died of a cocaine overdose). As researchers explored the connection between that case and the illnesses in California five years later, they discovered that the source of the problems was in impurity in the mix.

That impurity was a knotted bundle of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen that researchers called MPTP ( useful short-hand for its full chemical name of 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine.). MPTP, as it turned out, metabolizes in the body into a targeted missile. The target is a region of the mid-brain called the substantia nigra for its dark pigment. The substantia nigra contains most of the brain cells that produce the powerful neurotransmitter dopamine, essential to everything from moving muscles to feeling pleasure.

Throughout our lives, we all naturally suffer a loss of these cells – an estimated five to eight percent every decade of our lives – without dramatic consequences. No one is yet sure why, but Parkinson’s is an accelerator, dramatically speeding the losses. When about 80 percent of the dopamine-producing neurons are gone, symptoms begin to flare – tremors, freezing of motion, erasing the face of expression, and gradually getting even worse.

It’s that “even worse” stage that the destructive effects of MPTP can mimic so well. And as researchers like Langston realized that, they also realized that it could be a tool. They could use it to better understand – and treat not only the frozen addicts but the disease itself. They could, in fact, develop an animal model for the disease, which they subsequently did in small South American squirrel monkeys.

And this leads me to that yes and no part of the story. Before the frozen addicts, the only real treatment for Parkinson’s was a drug that stimulated the production of additional dopamine in the brain, seeking to replace some of the lost neurotransmitter. Such therapy is still used today. But the animal model has allowed researchers to investigate surgeries to repair the injured region of the brain, new techniques using electrical stimulation, and more recently stem cell replacement of damaged cells.

In other words, researchers have found new ways of managing the disease. Some of the new treatments, such as the electrical stimulation, have even been used to treat the lingering symptoms of the old frozen addicts. Count those results on the yes side. On the no side, we have not yet discovered how to cure Parkinson’s – although some believe that stem cell therapies offer hope – and we don’t yet know what causes Parkinson’s, how to predict or prevent it.

The Case of the Frozen Addicts, as Langston called his 1996 book, also posed a question that we have yet to answer. If a street-drug impurity can trigger on form of Parkinson’s, could others also have a chemical source? Recent studies have found that ingestion of the pesticide Rotenone can bring on Parkinson-like symptoms in mice. Loss of motor control, stiffening of muscles, and even loss of facial expression have been noted among the rare side effects of the high blood pressure medication, Reserpine, and the heartburn drug, Metoclopramide.

It’s been been almost 30 years since the frozen addicts started turning up in California hospitals. And if we ever really understand what happened there – in all its chemical peculiarities – we may yet see that revolution in understanding Parkinson’s that doctors dreamed of way back when..

(Many thanks to Sarah, a winner of the Poisoner’s Handbook Giveaway, for suggesting this subject)

Phar Lap won his first race a year later and, as they say, didn’t look back. He’d matured into a beautiful, powerful chestnut with a cheerful disposition and a drive to win. Too much of a winner, some thought. On November 1, 1930, the day of the prestigous Melbourne Cup, a car started following him on the way back from morning practice and shots — apparently ordered by a rival owner — were fired at the big horse. They missed, and no one was ever caught although a furious Davis offered a $100 reward, huge for the time. Phar Lap, though, remained unfazed. And won the race.

In fact, it was one of 14 straight victories that year, followed by 14 straight victories in 1931. In his four-year racing career, Phar Lap ran hard and often and fast. He won 37 of 51 races, and that would include his last.

The racehorse was such a hero — and a martyr — to fans in Australia and New Zealand that museums from both countries telegraphed to ask for the chance to display the horse. Davis, after consulting with Telford, decided to send Phar Lap’s “great” heart to Australia’s National Institute of Anatomy in Canberra. The skeleton went to the Dominion Museum in New Zealand. And the hide was sent to the National Museum of Victoria, in Melbourne, where taxidermists labored for four months to create a life-like replica of the Wonder Horse, from his shining red coat to his tousled mane.

It’s not justice, of course. Because Phar Lap deserved so much better. The big copper horse deserved to be more than a fleeting star, a flash in the sky. He deserved a chance to finish his glorious career with a much-petted old age in one of those fabled green pastures … I hope that whoever came bearing arsenic to the stable in those soft April days of 1932 didn’t finish out his own days happy and healthy. The man — whoever he was — deserves so much worse.

(Note: This story of Phar Lap is cross-posted today on Women in Crime Ink, a true crime blog that I write for on a monthly basis)

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/23/arsenic-and-an-old-horse-story/feed/ 26 http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/20/our-poisonous-planet/ http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/20/our-poisonous-planet/#comments Sun, 20 Jun 2010 17:35:42 +0000 Deborah Blum http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/20/our-poisonous-planet/ During the 1970s, international aid agencies came up with a brilliant plan to stem a plague of water-borne illnesses in the Asian country of Bangladesh. They would underwrite the installation of wells in disease-troubled villages, tapping into the cleaner ground water below.

They would use simple, relatively inexpensive tube wells, place thousands of these over-sized drinking straws into the shallow aquifers. And these straws – millions of them – would suck up the cleaner, microorganism free water in healthy abundance.

At first, it seemed to work like a blessing. Infant mortality rates dropped by 50 percent as the rate of dysentery, typhoid and chlolera dropped. But by the mid-1990s, a strange epidemic of other illnesses began to appear – some symptoms rather like cholera (lethargy, severe stomach pain, nausea and diarrhea), but others wickedly their own: such as a roughening and darkening of skin, a corrosion appearance of lesions on hands and feet:

In fact, as a team of increasingly angry researchers from adjacent India concluded in 1995: classic symptoms of arsenic poisoning.

The element arsenic is one of the oldest known naturally-occurring poisons on Earth, found scattered through rocky beds of minerals around the place. It was reportedly identified by the Roman Catholic scholar and alchemist Albertus Magnus (also known as St. Albert the Great) in 1250, while he was heating the mineral orpiment, which turns out to be rich in both arsenic and sulfur. As an ingredient in the complex recipe that makes up the Earth’s crust, arsenic is relatively rare – about 1.5 parts per million over all – and usually brought to the surface as a waste byproduct of mining other ores.

Oh, but the problem is that that it’s not distributed evenly around the planet. Arsenic-dense mineral deposits cluster unevenly. We find them when illnesses appear, usually, beneath the Ganges River Delta, where Bangladesh and the West Bengal province of India sit, in Thailand, Taiwan, tracked across mainland China, in the Latin American countries of Chile and Argentina, in states of the American West such as New Mexico and Nevada.

And what happened in Bangladesh is that all those well-meaning wells, those nifty technological straws, pulled water, contaminated by the surrounding mineral deposits, right into the homes and lives of millions and millions of people. In fact, last week, the World Health Organization called it “the largest mass poisoning of a population in history.”

This followed a rather horrifying study published in the British medical Journal, Lancet, which concluded that some 77 million Bangladeshi had been exposed to toxic levels of arsenic and that such exposure was responsible for more than 20 percent of the deaths in a population study group from the region. “The results of this study have important public health implications for arsenic in drinking water,” the authors noted, with some understatement.

If you return to the original idea – finding a source of water uncontaminated by evil pathogens – the original hopes are still obvious. Easy to say, very easy to say, in hindsight, that a good geological analysis might have prevented the grief to come. But it’s also true that surface water remains often unsafe and the source of many illnesses in this region. There’s an element, at least for now, of being caught between the proverbial rock and hard place, even while we can hope for better answers.

So for the moment, let’s consider this a cautionary tale. A reminder that good intentions don’t always mean good health. That we live on a dangerous planet, both above ground and below. And that we are almost never as smart as we think we are.

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/20/our-poisonous-planet/feed/ 6 http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/17/shrek-vs-cadium-cadmium-wins/ http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/17/shrek-vs-cadium-cadmium-wins/#comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:40:21 +0000 Deborah Blum http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/17/shrek-vs-cadium-cadmium-wins/ This is a story about 13.4 million promotional drinking glasses. Really cute colorful glasses produced for McDonalds in a tie-in for the current hit movie, Shrek Forever After. All of said glasses recalled by said McDonalds (in both the U.S. and Canada) after it turned out that the pigments used to create those images contained the toxic metal cadmium.

Oops, you might say. Because cadmium has been known as a bad actor for close on 200 years. Almost since it was discovered, in fact. So before we return to the poisoned Shrek glasses, let’s spend a little time on that history – and figuring out why we use cadmium colors at all.

Back in 1817 – a German chemist named Friedrich Stromeyer was messing around, I mean experimenting, with a mineral ore made of zinc, carbon, and oxygen known in the day as calamine and today usually called Smithsonite, after the founder of the Smithsonian Institution.

He discovered that when he heated this zinc carbonate (ZnCO3) it sometimes changed color, glowing an unexpected yellow against its natural greenish background. Stromeyer deduced that the change must be due to an impurity in the ore and eventually isolated a color-shifting metallic element that he named cadmium.

The name derives from the Greek word kadmeia from Cadmean earth, supposedly dating back to an early discovery of the ore near Thebes, the city founded by the Phoenician prince Cadmus of Greek mythology.

Gradually scientists realized that cadmium (Cd) mixed with sulfur produced a clear sunny color that came to be known as cadmium yellow:

And if the mixture also included the element selenium, the result was a brilliant crimson now widely known as cadmium red. Cadmium red, which became commercially available in the early 20th century, was embraced by innovative artists like Henri Matisse, who used it in his painting The Red Studio (now on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York).

Matisse even tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade his friend Claude Renoir to change from the traditional red paint called vermillion to cadmium red. As an aside, vermillion was pretty poisonous, based on an alarmingly mercury-rich mixture. But cadmium red (and yellow and orange) is pretty poisonous as well.

In fact, even 1817, Stromeyer was warning of overexposure to the element. “Cadmium intoxication“, he said, led to surprisingly widespread damage, injuring kidneys, bones and lungs. Research since then has confirmed all those warnings and raised the possibility of cadmium exposures in some cancers as well.

Paint, of course, isn’t the only form of cadmium exposure. It’s notoriously found in in tobacco smoke. It poses a risk to workers assembling nickel-cadmium batteries. It poses a similar risk to workers engaged in cadmium plating of steel parts for the airline industry, a measure taken to protect against corrosion.

But for purposes of this story, we’re interested in the way cadmium is used to infuse paints, enamels, and pigments with the golden yellows and candy-apple reds. After all, it was these pigments, apparently, that were used to color the images of Shrek, Princess Fiona, Donkey, and Puss in Boots from the movie.

The glasses, by the way, were made at the Durand Glass Manufacturing Company of Millbury, N.J., which is a subsidiary of a French company, Arc International. I first leaped to the conclusion they were made in China, thanks to a series of recent recalls of cadmium-tainted children’s jewelry and toys that were manufactured there. Of course, there could still be that connection because so far folks at Durand have refused to say where they got the paint.

When I first read that, at the urging of the Consumer Protection Safety Commission, that McDonalds had begun a voluntary recall of the cadmium-tainted glasses, a question occurred to me: How did they know that the glasses were poisonous? I’d rather hoped that it was a vigilant inspection system either by the government or the companies involved.

It turns out to be rather a matter of vigilant safety advocates and mysterious tipsters.
Jennifer Taggert, a lawyer who writes for TheSmartMama.com reported that she sent the glasses out for tests which revealed discovering cadmium levels ranging from 1020 parts per million (Shrek’s green skin) to 1,946 ppm on a yellow “Fiona Wanted” sign. Taggert contacted the CSPC with her findings after doing some research and finding that the agency standard for soluble cadmium on children’s toys in 75 ppm. So did U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) who received an anonymous tip – don’t you wonder from whom? – that let her to also alert the CSPC.

In the wake of the recall, Spier issued this statement: “Our children’s health should not depend on the consciences of anonymous sources. Although McDonald’s did the right thing by recalling these products, we need stronger testing standards to ensure that all children’s products are proven safe before they hit the shelves.”

Well, yeah.I’m for that. I’m also for the development of better safety standards so we can actually judge the risks of Shrek glasses. But mostly I’m for manufacturers who have the basic intelligence – and decency – not to decorate children’s glasses with an element known to be poisonous for, oh, let’s say, almost 200 years.

End of story.

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/17/shrek-vs-cadium-cadmium-wins/feed/ 15 http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/15/spills-science-and-semantics/ http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/15/spills-science-and-semantics/#comments Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:23:58 +0000 Deborah Blum http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/15/spills-science-and-semantics/ Recently, I wrote a cranky little post about NOAA’s behavior regarding the Gulf of Mexico. The agency’s approach seemed to me to be timid and deferential at a time when I wanted a strong voice and and steady sense of purpose.

What had set me off was the agency’s reluctance to use the word “plume” in describing the underwater mists of oil drifting away from the BP disaster site. Why not, I asked, call a plume a plume?

To my surprise, I almost immediately got a call from NOAA. For some reason, people at the agency didn’t agree with my analyses. I thought they were being wusses. They thought they were being precise: “The way people are using the word plume, it sounds like an ash cloud from a volcano.” The drifting oil wasn’t as concentrated, as explosive in motion, as continuous as that volcanic image might convey.

But beyond that, the people at the agency were starting to wonder if they could both be scientifically precise and satisfy an increasingly ticked-off and vengeful citizenry. Since I was so critical, what did I – the peeved author herself – recommend?

She recommended that the government stop being so damn stingy with information. Speaking as someone who has spent hours trying to figure out the chemistry of dispersants, the toxicology of crude oil, the synergistic effect of dispersants and oil, whether clean up chemicals help create underwater “plumes” – with almost no help from government documents – part of my exasperation comes from lack of clear information from official sources.

It was almost two months before the EPA released the list of chemicals used in Corexit, BP’s favorite dispersant, and that was just a list. There was no context or explanation of why this particular formulation was reportedly so much more poisonous than any of the others. Literally, people were begging for explanations via Twitter. Wouldn’t it have made more sense for government toxicologist to have provided a solid analysis? Wouldn’t that have built some good will?

I do respect NOAA’s wish for accuracy and integrity of description. But it also bothers me when this semantics debate leads the agency to sound so much like BP in this regard. It’s a position that rings curiously like BP’s Don Suttles when he said on the Today show that it “may be down to how you define what a plume is here.”

I actually believe that the shared reluctance of BP and NOAA on this terminology is just an unfortunate coincidence. I also believe that it would be great if our public officials had less of tin ear about these nuances. But the real problem is that the more time BP spends arguing about whether it’s a plume or not, the less time it has to spend talking about the millions of gallons a day problem.

So let’s not play into that trap. How about if we all agree that there is so much oil gushing into the water – the newest estimate is up to 60,000 barrels a day (some 2.5 million gallons),12 times BP’s original estimate – that we really shouldn’t quibble about a relatively innocuous description like plume.

After all, “unprecedented environmental disaster” – as President Obama just called it – is probably the most accurate term of all.

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/15/spills-science-and-semantics/feed/ 14 http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/11/oxygen-parties-frozen-addicts/ http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/11/oxygen-parties-frozen-addicts/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:34:17 +0000 Deborah Blum http://scienceblogs.com/speakeasyscience/2010/06/11/oxygen-parties-frozen-addicts/ I was sorry to see the deadline pass on The Poisoner’s Handbook audio book giveaway because I received so many smart and thoughtful ideas for writing about chemistry in our culture. And I found it really difficult to pick just five winners – so first I’d like to say thanks to everyone who wrote in for the contest.

If I selected your idea for a free audiobook of The Poisoner’s Handbook, you will have received a direct e-mail from me by now.

As a writer I’m drawn to specific ideas, one in which I can clearly see the story. So expect to see future posts based on these excellent suggestions: lead poisoning as a factor in the doomed 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic. (I hope to use this for a series of posts exploring lead toxicity), the origin of the idea that we should enrich food products (such as niacin in flour) for health reasons, the role of bacteria in metabolizing poisonous substances, the oxygen parties of the the 19th century in the context of our attitudes towards chemistry, and the 1980s story of the frozen (paralyzed) addicts whose bizarre illnesses contributed to our understanding of Parkinson’s disease.

I’ll look forward to writing them and you’ll have to let me know if I’ve done them justice!

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