SOC433H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Occupational Hygiene, Biophysics, Occupational Safety And Health
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Chapter 4: Indoor pollution at the encounter of Toxicology and Popular Epidemiology (pg, 81-110)
• The revolution in mass-produced synthetic building materials that began in the postwar era
brought dramatic change to the built environment of daily life
o The increased use of synthetic materials in construction and materials
• A lot of different potentially dangerous chemicals get into our lungs through the oxygen we
breathe and into our blood stream in ways that we are often unaware of
• Workers in the U.S have protested against exposure to harmful chemicals
• The number of health hazard evaluations has increased over the years suggesting that there is
increase concern over this issue
• During the 1980s, ‘‘indoor pollution’’ became an object of activism, investigation, and possible
regulation, subtly linked to a growing movement to regulate public tobacco use.
• Indoor pollution was considered the country number one hidden health threat
• A number of tobacco companies also pitched in and founded a non-profit centre for indoor air
research
o Because the wanted people to be aware that cigarettes aren’t the only thing that can cause
indoor pollution
• Chemical exposures are difficult to prove
o Invisible to the eye
o Can’t smell it often
o Most are investigated well after the initial chemical exposure
▪ The significance of the chemical effects decrease over time and when the do
detect it, the traces are often too low to be considered dangerous
• Sick building syndrome: was first used in 1984 by a Danish- born Yale biophysicist in a Swedish
publication and quickly proliferated in the English-language medical literature and in media
accounts of problem office buildings on both sides of the Atlantic
• NIOSH investigators and other indoor-pollution researchers fell into two camps
o one arguing that indoor pollution existed in chronic and non- specific forms and that sick
building syndrome was a legitimate phenomenon
o the other holding that sick building syndrome was a misnomer for what was better
understood as a gendered psychological delusion.
• Over the course of the twentieth century, two distinct traditions, two distinct regimes of
perceptibility—as toxicology and popular epidemiology—characterized the effects of buildings
on bodies in conflicting ways
• sick building syndrome came into being with its uncertain and nonspecific form at the
convergence of these two different ways of apprehending chemical exposures.
• the assemblages that governed both toxicology and popular epidemiology were simultaneously
productive and constraining.
o Each allowed the apprehension of some qualities, attributes, and connections, but not
others
o Each involved a disengagement from a broader field of possibilities for the sake of
focusing on, isolating, and rendering intelligible a more narrowly delineated set of
qualities.
o Both were infused with relations of gender and priviledge
▪ feminist activists, investigators, and even bureaucrats drew attention to
occupational health issues, while white women workers have been singled out for
rescue and protection
▪ Performances of gender informed the very technologies, practices, and subject
positions that composed both industrial hygiene and popular epidemiology.
Toxicology, Industrial Hygiene and Specificity
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• Each chemical has a threshold level value at which it becomes toxic and a description of the
effects caused in the human body once that threshold is passed.
• Industrial hygienists, were interested in the dangerous chemicals found in factory atmospheres
• white middle-class women reformers mobilized maternalism to call for the protection of women
of primarily European descent
o they strategically asserted that women possessed sex-specific biological frailties requiring
special treatment.
• From the inception of American industrial hygiene, the gender and race of workers was an
important consideration.
o Industrial chemicals were considered race poisons as they women of racial minorities
were more exposed to them because worked in these factories
• The ‘‘environmentalist world- view’’ in which, first, sickness was caused by environmental
conditions and, second, workplace conditions could be carried into the home, not by chemicals
clinging to clothes, but rather by impeding women’s important reproductive work for the family,
the society, and the race.
• Hamilton’s research was flawed because she relied primarily on walk-through factory inspections
and surveys of employees and local clinicians
o Her success was due more to personal persuasiveness than to the objectivity of the
science she wielded.
• it was not until the interwar years that the assemblage of technologies, people, and practices that
gave shape to contemporary regulatory toxicology was first articulated.
• In the early 1920's industrial hygiene gained its first institutional foothold with the establishment
of university laboratories.
o Provided alternative sources of information
o Harvard was a leader
• industrial hygiene labs in the interwar years offered their toxicological and physiological services
to companies as an objective, apolitical, and non-legislative way to arbitrate occupational disease
disputes
• by passing the connection between chemicals and bodies through the laboratory, industrial
hygiene promised to objectify the cause and result of industrial disease.
• They developed techniques that could detect small amounts of a substance in the blood and used
animal experiments to find the physiochemical mechanism that could account for the
corresponding disease.
• Core factors that contributed to the emergence of toxicology
o Testing on animals
o Instruments that measures physiological processes
o Exposure chambers
• industrial hygienists introduced a specific chemical at a controlled concentration and measured its
effects on their experimental subjects
• used animals to test how many of the animals they exposed to a chemical, then suffered from
health issues
• In the postwar period, toxicology became an independent specialty as its techniques and tools
drifted from occupational disease to more general studies of chemicals
• Toxicology labs were no longer run by famous physiologists or found at prestigious universities.
• Instead they had spread to bureaucracies like the Food and Drug Administration and private
research labs
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