Main description:

This book provides extensive information on the chemicals that inhabit our environment, our food, our water and our air and the impact that they may be having on human health. The author is a medical scientist, with training in the law.

The book documents current understanding about pesticides in food, the plastics revolution, toxic metals, air, water and electronic waste pollutants, chemical exposure in the workplace, radiation pollutants, chemical exposure and hearing loss, how our bodies deal with chemicals, genetic variability and the risk of disease, the effect of chemicals on genes, mitochondria and the immune system and what we can do about it all.

Industrialisation has resulted in many thousands of chemicals, which are being continuously developed and often escaping from where they are used into our human environment, without us really knowing enough about them. In high dosages or with continuous small dosage, the evidence suggests, that many of them could interfere with human health and some of them are known to be doing so. But for the vast majority, we are left wondering whether some could be responsible for some diseases the causes of which are inadequately understood. Every chapter is thoroughly reinforced with several pages of references from the peer-reviewed literature.

Contents:

Preface: Julian Cribb, FRSA FTSE

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2: Pesticides in our food

Chapter 3. The plastics revolution

Chapter 4. Toxic metals

Chapter 5. The Indestructibles

Chapter 6. Air pollutants

Chapter 7. Chemicals from paper manufacture and use

Chapter 8. Chemical exposure in the workplace

Chapter 9. Fluorocarbons

Chapter 10: Radiation

Chapter 11. How do our bodies deal with chemicals?

Chapter 12: Genetic variability and the risk of disease - the advantages and disadvantages of being different

Chapter 13. Environmental chemicals and our genes

Chapter 14. Environmental chemicals and mitochondria

Chapter 15. Environmental chemicals and our immune system

Chapter 16: Just because the amounts are small, does it mean they are safe?

Chapter 17. What can we do for a better future?