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Comment by ralferoo | Hacker News Reader

It didn't seem to be mentioned in the article, but have these covers always been unsafe to handle, or has the problem got worse as the books get older and maybe the chemicals are more likely to leech out or be released as dust etc?

If they've always been toxic, I'm kind of surprised that it wasn't noticed at the time. And presumably, there was a point when we stopped using these dyes. Was that because we knew the risks they posed, in which case why did we lose that knowledge, or was it just that we switched to cheaper processes that just happened to be safer?

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They were always toxic, and people got poisoned. Generally safety was not something victorians spend a lot of energy on.

Sometimes things are weird like that. Like how lead was put in petrol even when the toxicity of lead was known.

Victorians put a lot of energy on safety. It's just that the safety they cared about was vastly different to what were the actual things killing them.

If you want a modern take on it observe our obsession with stranger danger for children while we happily fill them up with plastic.

What was the safety they cared about?

I'm curious as well.

For one thing, they really seem to have worried about accidentally being buried alive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin

It is unclear to me how prevalent those fears were. The device was invented sure, someone had this fear or someone thought someone did, but how common was that really.

They were desperately concerned about women’s uteruses falling out and wanted them to avoid strenuous activities like reading fiction.

How many children are expected to eventually die from plastic?

Well we don't know If microplastics are really bad. Let's just assume they are mildly toxic. Since the high amount of children on earth it will still be millions seriously affected.

You have microplastic in your balls (if you have them). They're in your brain [0] - 0.5% by mass, which is 50% more than 8 years ago.

They're in the Mariana Trench, and Everest, and the rain.

And production is still rising.

0 - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/23/health/plastics-in-brain-...

Well, start with BPAs. Then add PFOAs (ie goretex, jackets are cca pure plastic). Micro/nano plastics themselves are still unknown, but those first two have already caused some significant damage. How do you count rate of cancer X raised by some tiny % Y on hundreds of millions of kids, billions if counting longer timescales since plastics were old news even in 80s?

If you think eating plastics is fine, feel free to start chewing some of it daily, of course lowest quality and price.

Like how we spray weed killer everywhere even though we know it causes cancer

and keep firing coal plants[0] even though more people in the US die from lung cancer, by far, than any other cancer (2.5x breast cancer, 5x leukemia, etc.; it also has a higher mortality rate than most other cancers[1]

[0] https://synapse.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/201fc98c0d74... [1] https://www.cancer.gov/types/common-cancers

Is that more a coal thing or a tobacco thing?

More tobacco, but the share of non-smokers with lung cancer has been increasing lately (probably because less people smoke). Estimated 10-20%. "“If lung cancer in never-smokers were a separate entity, it would be in the top 10 cancers in the U.S.” for both incidence and mortality."[0]

[0] https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/26/growing-share-of-lung-ca...

It's a pollution thing, whether that's from industrial plants, cigarettes, or fireplaces.

They say the lungs of people with fireplaces look similar to those of smokers.

Many pigments past and present a pretty toxic and always have been unsafe to handle. Of course it is also worse when old materials degrade and start shedding into the environment to be picked up or breathed in by people.

>presumably, there was a point when we stopped using these dyes

The discovery of toxicity and phasing out depends on the individual chemical, not really all at once.

In the past, it was often quite widely known how toxic these things were and they were used anyway.

Paris green was used as a rat poison, insecticide, and a pigment all at the same time, factory workers were often poisoned with it.

Today we are really paranoid about these kinds of things, sometimes maybe a little too much, but the comfort levels with known dangers in the past was surprisingly high.

And yet the US still uses Red Dye #3 for example.

Eh, different scales of toxicity. "Might give you cancer after years of exposure" is different from "you won't survive until tomorrow". Like people were straight up using this green pigment as rat poison.

the copper acetoarsenite covers have always been unsafe to handle, while the others are completely safe

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