Arsenic and Old Tastes Made Victorian Wallpaper Deadly | Hacker News Reader

Arsenic and Old Tastes Made Victorian Wallpaper Deadly

smithsonianmag.com

20 pointsprismatic9 comments

This is a very interesting treatment of the famous paint:

http://rdemaree.com/blogs/emerald-green-the-deadly-pigment-a...

This article is no better than a back-cover summary of " Bitten By Witch Fever".

Such a great and intriguing topic, and such a stilted article :/

And in today's wallpaper (and paint, and wall construction, etc), VOCs are making people sick. And there are plenty of people who say it isn't harmful.

The abundance of VOCs in our indoor environments, especially offices, is one of the more serious public health issues currently. Most offices/people are not aware of the problem and it isn't even measured regularly. Symptoms and issues are hard to link because they can vary from person to person, take a while to develop.

It might be true, but isn't that also the perfect BS argument? If I said that about lettuce it'd be really hard to dispute.

Even mortality itself varies from person to person and takes a while to develop

There's always something that's going to be harmful to us in our man-made environment. It's just a matter of degree. If it's not radium watch dials or arsenic paint, it's asbestos or lead paint, or radon gas, or, triclosan soap, or plastic microbeads, or whatever else.

That's not to say people shouldn't be concerned or strive to improve even more, but we're better now than we ever have been in any time in our history. The "product containing x will kill you and your children!" thing just gets tiring after a while.

The BBC produced an hour long documentary about the perils of Victorian domestic life a year or so back: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03l7nl8

The title is a nice pun: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036613/

For an entertaining, yet thoroughly researched account of the history of the home (including the story of arsenic and lead in paints), see Bill Bryson: At Home.

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