Read 'n' Seed 5: Fourth Quarter of Environmental Epidemiology: Epidemiological Investigation of Community Environmental Health Problems

For the final quarter of my book I read chapters 17 through 24, which were pages 197-253.

Chapter 17 was about young drunk drivers in Michigan and the accidents caused by it. Deaths due to external causes are the highest causes of deaths for people aged 15-24 and car accidents is number one on that list. They talked about raising the legal limit for purchasing alcohol from 18 to 21, in hopes of it decreasing the number of fatalities due to drunk driving. This study was done in the late '70s and since then, they have found a significant decrease in drunken driving since raising the age.

Chapter 18 was just a review of the past five chapters, mostly talking about how it is hard to conduct these studies based on long term effects, so they are using the short term effects to hypothesize what the long term effects will likely be.

Chapter 19 was very interesting. It talks about a chemical, 1,2-dibromo-3chloropropane, also known as DBCP. They found that men who worked with this chemical (used on some crops to eliminate nematodes), became sterile. The longer they were around this chemical, the lower their sperm count. If someone had worked with it a shorter period of time, their count was lower than normal also. They found that if they stayed away from this chemical for a long time, they would regain their ability to reproduce. I found it interesting because there were no birth defects out of the ordinary, just less pregnancies.

Chapter 20 was about reproduction in relation to being exposed to anesthetic gases. Female anesthetists being exposed to this gas had results of spontaneous abortions. "The findings are sufficient to indicate three things: women should not be exposed to work involving exposures to waste anesthetic gases during early pregnancy; waste anesthetic gases can and should be controlled in order to protect the health of all operating room personnel; prospective monitoring of reproductive outcomes of nurses and of operating room personnel is needed to assure that unfavorable effects do not continue to occur" (p. 231-232).

Chapter 21 was a review of chapters 19 and 20. It mostly just talked about being adequately ventilated in work places, as to not be exposed for long periods of time to gases that can affect the body.

Chapter 22 starts to wrap up the entire book. It talks about the community studies that they wrote about in the previous chapters and how we learn from them to make health better. "Environmental health decisions reflect political, historical, and economic considerations as well as what is known and/or suspected about the impact of environmental exposures on health" (p. 240). He talks about how people who run farms and factories do not intend to cause damage to the health of the affected communities. It's important to learn from our experiences and make the changes necessary to protect ourselves for the future.

In chapter 23, he talks about the unintended effects of technological change, and how it not only affects humans, but our natural world around us that sustains our life, and how we must take responsibility for it. I thought it was very interesting because we talked about these things in class. We need to make changes before things get too out of hand and we lose all our resources.

The final chapter, chapter 24, is the historical postscript. He mentions the late Arnold Toynbee, who was dean of historians back in 1971. Toynbee says "Is it not an atrocity, to produce children who will have been condemned in advance to lifelong suffering and misery by the pollution of the world that is mankind's habitat?" (p. 253). It is so true and we need to do something to change our planet soon.

Goldsmith hopes that this book can teach people to alter their judgment and make the changes necessary to make our world last for generations to come. Like I said before, we need to make the changes necessary to overcome this. Not just a select few, but everybody. It's the only way we can make a difference for the future of this planet.