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“The story Rosner and Markowitz tell of generations of children gravely damaged by promiscuous dispersal of lead, and the persistent attempts made to evade responsibility for the harms caused, is both true and shocking. This book will not just educate future environmental and health leaders, it should outrage them.”
RICHARD J. JACKSON, MD, MPH, Professor and Chair, Environmental Health Sciences, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health
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A strategy of avoiding confrontation with the political and economic institutions that impede the solutions for public health problems—and indeed may have given rise to them—has led to avoiding confrontation with the structural impediments to improving public health. This is the dilemma of public health today: For generations, many in the public health field have depended on the laboratory, on the development of the next magic bullet, on new technologies and diagnostic and therapeutic interventions to deal with public health problems. But, like lead, other ubiquitous environmental poisons now raise fundamental problems that cannot easily be addressed by these methods. If detection of endocrine disruption is truly a new frontier in the understanding of reproductive problems or other biological changes, for example, a medical intervention may not be adequate; and even were it possible, dealing with the consequences individual by individual would overwhelm any health system.
If public health professionals are to effectively address the problems of chronic conditions, subtle neurological damage, obesity, and childhood developmental anomalies, they will be forced to confront huge industries that profit from, for example, the production of fast foods, high-calorie drinks, and tobacco. These health difficulties are not simply an issue for public health professionals; they are of course an issue for society as a whole. Public health individuals and institutions can press, but ultimately their success depends on political and economic forces larger than themselves. From the guarantee of an adequate water supply and sewer system to the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, successful public health reforms of the past have depended on social movements and legislative and/or executive action, and the same is likely to be true for effective action on a broad array of toxins, lead included.
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