Quotes from Deborah Blum

In a best-selling book, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (reprinted nine times by 1935), a pair of consumer-advocate authors complained that American citizens had become test animals for chemical industries that were indifferent to their customers' well-being. The government, they added bitterly, was complicit.

Two years ago, when leaders in neighboring Mathews County broached the subject of sea-level rise, Tea Partiers packed meetings, warning of an environmentalist plot to "put nature above man." They linked a proposal to build dikes to a United Nations sustainability plan known as Agenda 21, which has inspired a number of conspiracy theories among far-right activists.

In his examination of the young dial painters, he'd discovered a fact that was impossible to dismiss. The women were exhaling radon gas.

death certificates were filled out with no effort at determining cause. Among the entries were 'could be suicide or murder,' and 'either assault of diabetes.' In one instance, a coroner had attributed a death to 'diabetes, tuberculosis, or nervous indigestion.' A few death certificates simply read 'act of God.

There was the Bennett Cocktail (gin, lime juice, bitters), the Bee's Knees (gin, honey, lemon juice), the Gin Fizz (gin, lemon juice, sugar, seltzer water), and the Southside (lemon juice, sugar syrup, mint leaves, gin, seltzer water).

Nicotine had been isolated and synthesized in the nineteenth century. In pure form, it took an ounce at most to kill the average adult.

Our own ways of mourning may be unique, but the human capacity to grieve deeply is something we share with other animals.

The name explains the structure: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen bond into a ring-shaped structure called a cresol (also found in creosote), and phosphorus hangs on to the ring like an exhausted swimmer gripping a life preserver.

Standard Oil issued a cool response: "These men probably went insane because they worked too hard," according to the building manager. And those who didn't survive had merely worked themselves to death. Other than that, the company didn't see a problem.

As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want? If we don't grapple with that question ourselves, our gadgets will be happy to answer it for us.

Government reporters may cover City Hall. Education reporters may write about schools and school boards. Science writers may report on asteroids one day, HIV vaccine experiments the next, sonar technology the next, a universe without boundaries.

As the mother of the ten-month-old hospitalized in San Diego said, if people want to make that choice, they should go live on an island with its own schools and doctors: "their own little infectious disease island.

A growing body of scientific research links antibiotic use in animals to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: in the animals' own guts, in the manure that farmers use on crops or store on their land, and in human illnesses as well. Resistant bacteria move from animals to humans in groundwater and dust, on flies, and via the meat those animals get turned into.

And it wasn't just one warning. Eight years before the Panel on Climate Change's report, an assessment of global warming's impacts in New York City had also cautioned of potential flooding. "Basically pretty much everything that we projected happened," says Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the cochair of the Panel on Climate Change and coauthor of that 2001 report.

But with sea levels rising along the East Coast—a natural phenomenon accelerated by climate change—scientists project that in our lifetimes what was once considered a hundred-year flood will happen every three to twenty years.

In 1847 three English children fell seriously ill after eating birthday cake decorated with arsenic-tinted green leaves.

Even in the heyday of frozen concentrate, the popularity of orange juice rested largely on its image as the ultimate natural beverage, fresh squeezed from a primordial fruit. But the reality is that human intervention has modified the orange for millenniums, as it has almost everything people eat.

He confessed to stalking, torturing, and assaulting 400 children while traveling the country.

Henry Adams: "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

Massachusetts is seeing a surge in the number of unvaccinated children. Last year nearly 1,200 kids entered kindergarten with religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions, roughly double the total about a decade ago.

That same January the city government had released a report declaring that thanks to ill-informed, corrupt, and occasionally drunken coroners, murderers in New York were escaping justice in record numbers.

We typically think of stress as being a risk factor for disease," said Cole. "And it is, somewhat. But if you actually measure stress, using our best available instruments, it can't hold a candle to social isolation. Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete.

During the previous summer U.S. public health workers had accidentally killed four sailors, on two different foreign vessels, by fumigating against possible plague-carrying rats.

shared pain is central to what it means to be a human being," but we are a society that values the anesthetic over pain. We hide our prisons, our sick, our mad, and our poor; we expend colossal resources to live in padded, temperature-controlled environments that make few demands on our bodies or our minds. We come up with elaborate means of not knowing about the suffering of others and of blaming them when we do.