Widely used chemical *(that was generally phased out in the 70s) linked to Parkinson's. Still important, but you don't need to start searching product labels in 2023 for it.
the chemical solvent trichloroethylene (TCE)—common in soil and groundwater—increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. The movement disorder afflicts about 1 million Americans, and is likely the fastest growing neurodegenerative disease in the world; its global prevalence has doubled in the past 25 years.
It’s used today mainly in producing refrigerants and as a degreaser in heavy industry.
But in the 20th century, TCE was used for many purposes, including making decaffeinated coffee, dry cleaning, carpet cleaning, and as an inhaled surgical anesthetic for children and women in labor. TCE is highly persistent in soil and groundwater; inhalation through vapor from these hidden sources is likely the prime route of exposure today. However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
As one who went under inhaled anesthesia a dozen times or more as a child in the 70s, I can only say, "WTF?" It makes a great solvent, so let's put in anesthesia?
To be fair though, the restricted audience for the administration of this particular chemical would seem to indicate considerations of safety have been applied, otherwise one would expect a more general pattern. One must suspect there are many more chemicals with similarly hard-to-test-for longterm effects in daily use, note especially the so-called 'forever chemicals' (PFAS).
What's more, dose / length of exposition makes a poison, so it's not possible to say in the abstract how a short but intense exposition of TCE stacks up against 24/7 exposition of low levels over the entire childhood. Meaning there's hope here.
Also can you be sure it was TCE you received? I remember one general anesthesia when I was maybe 9 or so and that was pretty definitely laughing gas. It might have been the same in (some of) your case(s), too.
I'm pretty sure they don't cut you open on nitrous oxide (that and...that stuff just wasn't nitrous). Was it TCE? I don't know, nor do I really care. What's done is done, and worrying about it isn't going to change anything. My reaction is more to the fact that there were just not a lot of fucks given back then. Rivers were open sewers, lead was in gasoline even when it was known to be a bad idea, and we put solvents in children's anesthesia.
I remember feeling like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich being folded in half, and then the lights went out.
Hopefully one-off cases don't significantly affect the chances of getting a serious neurological disorder later in life -- it seems we'll find out in the coming years...
My father and grandfather were anesthesiologists. We kind of adopted an older nurse anesthetist as a surrogate grandmother when I was a kid. She told us stories of back in the old days, sitting there with a stopwatch with one hand on the patient's wrist taking their pulse, and a dropper full of chloroform in the other hand, placing drops on a gauze mask over the patient's mouth when the pulse rate started going up. She always got significant amounts of second-hand anesthetic exposure.
She said it was pretty common after a long day of work to drive home quite high from all of the chloroform exposure. I presume TCE anesthesia was similar, and nurse anesthetists likely got at least 10,000 times the lifetime exposure that you got. Granted, there can be differences due to age of exposure, and often non-linearities of exposure. However, if the risks of a single surgery under TCE anesthesia were significant, I'm pretty sure someone would have noted absurd rates of parkinson's in nurse anesthetists.
Certainly, read up on the early signs of Parkinson's, and talk to your doctor if you think you might start showing symptoms, but don't get hypochondria over it.
Cyclopropane as an anesthetic on the other hand... particularly with electrocautery pens... I have no idea how they were ever allowed in the same operating room, at least not without some kind of fume hood around the patient's head pulling air rapidly out of the room using a non-arcing fan.
Literally, yes. The potency of an inhalation anesthetic is usually directly proportional to its lipid solubility. (Known as the Meyer-Overton correlation.) This is why solvents such as ether and chloroform were used as anesthetics and why N₂O is both an anesthetic and is dissolved in cream to form whipped cream.
The mechanism of inhalation anesthetics is not completely understood but it's thought that they interact with lipids in cell membranes and disrupt stuff. The better they dissolve in lipids, the lower the concentration that is needed for anesthesia.
There's a nice graph on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_general_anaestheti...
Whipped cream is cream with colloidal air in it. Mostly regular atmospheric air, but any gas that is safe to eat and has no flavor would function equivalently. If the air were dissolved in the cream, it would just be cream, not whipped cream.
Wikipedia says that the purpose of nitrous oxide in commercial whipped cream canisters is to be stored (dissolved) at very high pressure so that, when the pressure is released, it can whip the cream by undissolving from it. (And that the secondary purpose is that the nitrous oxide doubles as a preservative.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipped-cream_charger#Culinary
Whilst there are many who call decaffeinated coffee a crime against humanity, it is somewhat disconcerting that at one stage, it actually was just that.
[0] https://garmentcleaningsupply.com/picrin-1-gal-streets.html
[1] http://www.cleanairsupply.com/CleanAir_Web_Image/Chemical/MS...
[2] https://henryschein.com.au/impression/accessories/finale-sol...
Does it remain in the fabric after use? Is there danger to the wearer of dry-cleaned clothes or only to the people working at dry cleaner businesses?
Source: a college friend of mine, years ago, who worked as a dry cleaner. After talking to her, I've never used one since.
What do we do about our formal wear then?
If your formalwear is wool (for example, a tuxedo or blazer) you'd probably want to swap it out for a version of the garment which is made from Superwash wool, which is machine-washable. (Or your choice of alternative fabric.) Creating superwash wool is still a pretty chemically-intensive process, but that might not be forever: https://www.moderndailyknitting.com/community/superwash-part... It should at least cut down on your TCE exposure.
Silk is trickier -- if you wet it, you have to take great care to dry it without overheating it, while at the same time getting it to dry evenly, so you don't get watermarks on the fabric. It's doable, but it's a total PITA. The best strategy here, for me, has been to wash my silk blouses very rarely, and with a great deal of care, and tumble-dry low. I also use the 'vodka trick' I picked up working in the backroom of a theatrical costume company, many years ago -- get a bottle of cheap vodka, pour it into spritz bottle (one with a fine-mist setting -- the kind at beauty stores work great) and turn the garment inside-out; hit the pits, etc. It's safe for silk, fur, and other delicate fabrics.
If you're going to be wearing silk, do it in winter or in air conditioning :)
Fur -- well, you wouldn't have been dry-cleaning fur anyway, right? right?? This is a whole chapter on its own. (The vodka trick works tho)
Finally, there are also lots of wonderful new machine-washable fibres on the market -- tencel, etc. -- that may be suitable for formalwear.
But putting formalwear aside, the biggest problem I see is down-filled jackets and duvets. I have literally no good ideas here, other than 'wash very rarely and tumble dry low, low low'
While highly prized, I've decided that eider down is simply not a practical material for either my jackets nor my bedding. There are plenty of suitable alternatives on the market these days, and no geese are harmed in their making.
I confess though that I have yet to bear to throw out either my eider down duvet (or, for that matter, my luscious fur coat, guiltily secreted for special occasions in the back closet). Perhaps I should hold my tongue until I can do as I say.
Yet I say this as a lover of fur and rabbit felt hats
My wife also has some silk that likewise is done tumble dry low without being an issue.
"[Silk] may be dry-cleaned but should not be washed with water , as water can alter the sheen and crispness of the silk fibers and cause staining if dried unevenly." Banner, Bernadette. _Make, Sew and Mend_, p15 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57693333-make-sew-and-me...
I find the jacket and pants of a suit don't get very dirty if you just wear them at work, and dry cleaning ruins them anyway. I've gone many months of regular wear, probably more than a year in some cases without washing. You can spot-clean if you spill something on it.
Don't miss those days of mandatory suit-wear.
For me it’s not an option. I have to dry clean. It is easier to find alternative materials to cotton for the office but they don’t replace button downs and jeans. They can’t replace a suit, linen is still much too casual.
Supposedly wool doesn't shrink in cold water on gentle and air-dried.
Now, sure many dry cleaners will offer laundry services, but that isn’t dry cleaning.
Proven to cause neurological damage, horrifically acutely toxic and chronically toxic, causes colorblindness of all things...
Oh yeah, when it thermally decomposes into phosgene, a WWI-era chemical weapon. Spray brake cleaner on hot brakes and you're pretty much instantly dead.
brake cleaner is bad -- i'm not here to dispute that -- but i've witnessed quick-lube/inspection mechanics spraying brake cleaner onto hot brakes for 20+ years, both in shops i've worked in personally and in shops i've witnessed as a customer.
Oil-lube guys routinely work on very hot just-off-the-highway cars. Brake inspections are often a required element of such jobs, and there are few better ways to spray the brake dust off of calipers/drums/disc-hats/suspension components in a hurry than sprayable brake cleaners, as horrible as they are. Not only is the solvent and kinetic action of the spray itself useful, but the wetting action towards the brake dust prevents aerosolizing the brake dust for everyone in the shop.
I have never witnessed a death on-site.
I have no doubts that what you say about instant death is true in some laboratory environment or closed conditions, but it doesn't really correspond to practical reality.
The reality is that these folks go home, create a family, live their life , and then die at an early age from a chronic illness that is brought about by the conditions.
That's why these practices continue unabated; people aren't dying instantaneously from exposure, they're dying from the pernicious long term exposure effects.
https://www.amazon.com/CRC-05089-BRAKLEEN-Brake-Cleaner/dp/B... vs https://www.amazon.com/CRC-05089-BRAKLEEN-Brake-Cleaner/dp/B...
This article is from 2000, before the housing development began. People knew TCE was there but the housing development happened anyway
https://extras.denverpost.com/news/news1126.htm
It’s also at Stapleton, another huge residential area, and previously Denver’s primary airport:
“At the former Stapleton Airport, which is also being redeveloped, the TCE is 35 to 40 feet deep, according to Tom Gleason, spokesman for Forest City Stapleton Inc., the private developer overseeing the building.
He said it won't have any effect on the redevelopment, which will include homes and commercial areas.”
Indeed, it didn’t. The redevelopment happened anyway. And now I’d guess it’s in the air, water, and of course the soil.
There's also the Rocky Flats nuclear site, the chemical plant in Lakewood, and also the wildlife "refuge" north of the city.
Seems somewhat ironic given Colorado's reputation for pristine natural beauty.
i also wonder how much of the environmental focus that denver-boulder is known for is something of a reaction to that exploitation.
> "TCE the solvent ENTEK uses is essential to ENTEK's separator manufacturing process TCE has a unique combination of chemical properties that , together , facilitate the controlled removal of process oil while allowing ENTEK to efficiently recover and recycle previously used TCE for reuse in both the lead- acid and lithium separator production processes in a manner that minimizes worker exposure while resulting in a product with the characteristics demanded by the battery customers . TCE possesses the following properties critical to ENTEK's use and reuse" (ENTEK TCE rulemaking report to EPA, July 14 2021)
The fundamental issue (that led to widespread contamination in the past) is that capturing and recycling TCE after use is fairly expensive, and since it was cheaper to buy new TCE, manufacturers would just dump their dirty used TCE, creating superfund sites etc.
There are some approaches to replacing organic solvents entirely (supercritical CO2 for example) but they're often quite expensive.
This isn't a problem, us future generations can just engineer our way out of it at a cheaper cost than it would have been to deal with it in the first place.
/s - For sarcasm, and sorry.
People are constantly assuming magical future entropy-undoers to justify their breaking and ruining things today.
That said, at the store I worked at, the only things that actually got recycled were the cardboard boxes from the stockroom, and the oil from the fryers. Everything else went into the dumpster.
https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-...
One of the dirty secrets of development is that we really have just poisoned a lot of our environment. Now you can work around that in real estate dev because there are creative ways to interpret disclosure regulations. But Mother Nature doesn't care about such tricks. She has a set of, (in this case chemical), rules and if they're broken, she'll happily punish you without a second thought.
I'm not sure how we solve the issue of toxins in our environment? It gets complex not only because of the competing interests, but also because research like this will continue to come out, and something we didn't think was a problem, will turn out to have been a problem. So you're in a situation where you know a lot. You even learn more everyday. But you don't know what you don't know.
Doing so may be an effective way to catalyze invention and economic activity but ignoring externalities becomes existentially risky as our capacities develop
If we prefer human arbitration to nature's blind and brutal judgment, we had better put toothy disincentives in place
Is it possible that occasionally punishing an honest mistake or absence of forethought may be the price we have to pay to prevent poisoning by diffusion of sociopathy?
It feels wrong, but so does perishing because the species can't deploy technology in the long term interest
It's not even about punishing. If you cause a car or home accident because of a mistake, your insurance rates will go up, and if the damage exceeds your coverage, you'll pay out of pocket. There's nothing punitive about it, you're just responsible because of fault.
That shouldn't feel wrong. It should evoke pity, but not a feeling of wrongness.
For the heirs of the stockholders of these polluting companies we need a special tax to clean up the "accidents" of those companies. These taxes could be limited to the maximum value of the company, or better yet the proportion of the total wealth of the heirs that the company stock represented at the time they sold or dissolved the company. That's still limiting liability, but in the original sense of the term (clawback of sold and wipeout of retained shares).
For the heirs of anyone who made a purposeful decision to pollute despite knowing the harms, then the limited liability should be pierced to allow taxation of the fraction of the total wealth of the heirs that derive from the polluter.
That being said, if you run your own private well, you’re not subject to this.
> The Oakland Unified School district announced the temporary closure of the McClymonds to test for the chemical tricloroethylene (TCE), which was found in groundwater under the campus.
> "This is West Oakland and so there is a history of environmental injustice, of racial injustice that happens in this community. So these are places where there are leaks, there are dumps, there are things like that that are not healthy for our community," said Jumoke Hinton Hodge, Oakland Board of Education District 3 Director.
> McClymonds has recently seen a handful of students and former students develop cancer, including the high-profile cases Darryl Aikens, a McClymonds football player who died of leukemia a month after graduating in 2017, as well as 2018 graduate Ramone Sanders, who died of cancer last fall. Sanders was playing football at Laney College when he broke his leg and it was discovered he had bone cancer that spread to his lungs.
Honestly I am quite disgusted at this take. How many readers want to bet this take is informed by more than a little implicit racial bias, these being Black men at a primarily Black high school in a primarily Black neighborhood?
See this doc, including the section "Some important points to consider".
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/understanding-...
You can be disgusted all you want but I think you're making an error.
But note there was more than TCE at those superfund sites.
The vast majority of the Bay Area population gets its water either from the Hetch Hetchy (SF, South Bay, Peninsula) or the Mokelumne River watershed (East Bay). This is surface water that is mostly clear of VOCs which is why nothing shows up on the map for the Bay Area that you shared.
For a more accurate representation of the state of the groundwater in the Bay Area, see this map of chemical plumes (hint they're everywhere) [2].
[1] https://www.epa.gov/vaporintrusion/what-vapor-intrusion
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20141120123953/http://www.nbcbay...
Growing up I knew a lot of kids that were affected by it, they were called "fairchildren" or a "fairchild".
I was born elsewhere and my family moved to the area, the kids that were born there weren't so lucky.
https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/map/?global_id=SL60019...
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-Treasure-Is...
If it's so cheap, and available in such large quantities, it's definitely getting used today, in massive quantities, in some parts of the world.
>> About 90% of Parkinson’s cases can’t be explained by genetics, but there have been hints that exposure to TCE may trigger it. The new study, led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), represents by far the strongest environmental link between TCE and the disease. Until now, the entire epidemiological literature included fewer than 20 people who developed Parkinson’s after TCE exposure.
That is to say, the relation between TCE and Parkinsons had, until now, no strong evidence to support it. It seems (not sure, not my field) that now it does.
Also note, from the article:
>> “Alarmingly, TCE vapor intrusion is widespread today and ranges from an elementary school situated on top of a former chemical facility in Shanghai, China, to multimillion-dollar homes built on a previous aerospace plant in Newport Beach, California,” the authors of an accompanying editorial in JAMA Neurology write.
They only studied TWO military bases and compared the rate of Parkinson's. There could be any number of environmental differences between these two locations besides the TCE levels in the water.
The other issue is that there is an active class action lawsuit about this exact military base. When a study is published that directly reinforces the claims of one side of an active lawsuit, you always need to be cautious about taking it at face value. There could be some conflict of interest or even just sympathy from the scientists that introduces bias in their research methodology.
A few years back I found an internet search for “United States TCE” would turn up articles about Camp Jejune. A search for “China TCE” would turn up a picture of a truck with a bunch of barrels and an offer to buy it on Alibaba.
The things we did with (now known) hazardous chemicals in the 20th century are really disturbing. My question is are there now enough safeguards in place that we're unlikely to be repeating the same mistakes?
My guess is no, certainly not with every product imported from other countries. We joke about sketchy smelling products from China, and you occasionally hear about imports being recalled or blocked. How much of it are we missing, both known and unknown chemicals?
On the other hand, it's also easy for people disposed to anxiety to go down a rabbit hole where the only conclusion is you should go live off the land in the middle of nowhere...
Nope. For instance some of the chemicals in sun screen never had to pass rigorous safety testing because it was assumed they couldn't enter the blood, but in fact that's not the case, and already at least one is known to have negative effects on reproductive health: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2733085 . Who knows what other chemicals are floating about in various cosmetics entering the bloodstream through the skin without ever being safety tested for that.
I doubt it. One obvious example is plasticizers: there was a big ruckus about BPA a few years ago, so manufacturers phased it out and switched to different plasticizers, many of which are incredibly chemically similar to BPA. It's seems very plausible that they have similar negative health effects, but there's no regulation (or even disclosure, in most cases) of which plasticizers are being used.
https://www.science.org/content/article/bpa-substitutes-may-...
For degreasers, it was replaced by 1,1,1-Trichloroethane, a chloroalkane later banned by the Montreal Protocol. It's use in refrigeration was replaced by 1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane, a hydrofluorocarbon banned in the EU today for global warming potential. And finally, its use as a general anaesthetic was succeeded by Halothane, which doesn't seem to have any major health affects (beyond those coming from being an anaesthetic). However, that too was later replaced by Sevoflurane, which is suspected to accelerate Alzheimers.
Also both those anaesthetisc are greenhouse gases.
So no, we are definitely going to have more problem chemicals in the future, because chemistry is complicated.
Was this meant to be reassuring?
Per the article, you won't find in retail products; but rather, in the soil and groundwater -- where it is "highly persistent".
~20 000 tonnes today vs. 250 000 tonnes in 1970.
> TCE is highly persistent in soil and groundwater; inhalation through vapor from these hidden sources is likely the prime route of exposure today. However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
the groundwater route still seems pretty troubling
Might even be unknowingly imported into other countries
Untrue.
Wiki isn't great, but here is what I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichloroethylene
Fetal toxicity and concerns for carcinogenic potential of TCE led to its abandonment in developed countries by the 1980s.
The use of trichloroethylene in the food and pharmaceutical industries has been banned in much of the world since the 1970s due to concerns about its toxicity.
The saddest one I found: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...
Historically, TCE was used as a surgical anesthetic and inhaled analgesic. The Food and Drug Administration banned such use in the United States in 1977.
I was calling out the lies, not doing other people's research for them.
People ought to understand that this stuff stays in the industrial pipeline for years (I'm avoiding the tangent that was brought to mind by another poster's mention of carbon tetrachloride...) and we are still in the process of simply classifying it according to its dangerousness. It's not close to being gone yet.
(it's not even banned in the EU yet, and I just assume that will happen well before it's banned here)
I don't understand why you would write that, particularly after having read my comments and throwaway2037's comment on this thread. "This is a chemical that is currently produced in various forms by companies and used by people in 2023" and "it was phased out in the 1970s" would seem to be mutually contradictory facts. There's no "nuance" involved. I get that we're not giving you essay-length analysis here, but... I give up.
edit: the LMGTFY for "who makes trichloroethylene": https://www.thomasnet.com/products/trichloroethylene-8767360...
For example: Generally people don't make their own clothes, is a true statement even though there's still plenty of people who make their own clothes.
it's in picrin [1], which is a spot cleaning solvent. You can buy that today.
A paper from 2020 indicates that it is still used and not banned [2]
[1] https://www.a-1products.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Picri...
Trichloroethylene has been a long-standing chemical utilized in dry cleaning and spot removal processes, but its safety towards dry cleaners' health has been questioned in recent years. In 2012, California enacted a ban on using TCE or TCE-based products for dry cleaning.> However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
Yikes.
> Alarmingly, TCE vapor intrusion is widespread today and ranges from an elementary school situated on top of a former chemical facility in Shanghai, China, to multimillion-dollar homes built on a previous aerospace plant in Newport Beach, California,” the authors of an accompanying editorial in JAMA Neurology write.
Yikes.
Your comment was very misleading.