Cheap Seats 2023 By Rich Trzupek

Alchemy in the 21st Century - 10/04

By Rich Trzupek
  A few years ago the city of Chicago was in a state of panic over the supposed public health dangers related to potential exposure to the element manganese. The local media, politicians and community groups jumped on the exponentially expanding anti-manganese bandwagon with the sort of self-righteous enthusiasm that Professor Harold Hill used to combat the evils associated with playing pool.
  The narrative focused on the Southeast Side Chicago neighborhood where I grew up called Hegewisch. It was once home to a huge concentration of steel mills. Those mills started to close in the 1970s. Today, except for a few holdouts in Northwest Indiana, they’re all gone. One of the legacies of those old mills, built and operated before the United States had an EPA, is contamination. This is not unusual. Until the late 20th century, heavy industry and environmental damage went hand in hand more often than not.
  The element manganese is very useful in making many grades of steel. It is not surprising therefore that elevated levels of manganese might be found in the soil where large integrated steel mills operated for decades. When this was brought to the publics’ attention journalists, politicians and environmental organizations went into a feeding frenzy. They searched for all the dirt they could find about this particular type of dirt and looked for villains to blame. Residents of my old neighborhood were warned that they were in grave danger. Raising the level of fear in this case, and in most every similar cases, involves clever use of innuendo including the deployment of one of the most charged and misused words in the English language: toxic.
  It is a scientific truism that everything is toxic and nothing is toxic. Put another way any substance can be safe and any substance can be dangerous. Some examples are obvious. We obviously need oxygen to live. But if we breathe pure oxygen for too long we can suffer from oxygen poisoning. No one can last long without ingesting water. But ingesting too much can and has been fatal. And no, I’m not talking about drowning. Drowning involves water entering your respiratory system. Drinking too much water can throw off the chemical balance that your body depends on and if it’s thrown off too much the body will shut down.
  These are but two examples of the medical pioneer Paracelsus’ dictum: the dose makes the poison. To this we should add an important corollary: so does the route of exposure. Both of these scientific truths are routinely ignored by journalists, politicians, activists, and other people eager to exploit the public’s tendency to fear that which they do not understand.
  I could cite dozens upon dozens of examples from throughout my career, but let’s return to the fight against manganese in Chicago. It is true that at the right dose and route of exposure and frequency of exposure manganese can have a negative impact on a person’s health. But as I hope is clear by now one can make that statement about any substance on planet earth. Does that make manganese toxic? No because nothing is inherently toxic. Only dosages and routes of exposure generate toxicity.
  Next time you have a chance to glance at a label on a vitamin bottle check out the ingredients. Chances are that manganese will be among them. The reason being is that manganese in the right dosage is a recognized micronutrient. There are other substances that are often called toxic or hazardous that are necessary for good health in small dosages as well. The element selenium is regulated by the EPA as a hazardous air pollutant. It too will probably be in your vitamins because it too is a recognized micronutrient.
  There are three primary routes of exposure that we consider when assessing the risk a particular substance may present. These are inhalation, ingestion and dermal. In other words: How dangerous it is to breathe? How dangerous is it to eat? And how dangerous is it to touch?
  Dermal is off the table for manganese. As long as you don’t lick your hands afterwards there’s no reason you can’t pick up a lump of manganese in perfect safety. The inhalation and ingestion routes are of primary concern. A sober examination of the distance between where elevated levels of manganese were found in the soil and through testing of ambient air compared to where residences actually are made the installation route highly unlikely. You couldn’t get the wind to blow strong enough for long enough to carry a dangerous amount of manganese to the neighboring residential districts, much less to blow in the same direction while doing it.
  That leaves us with ingestion, which would be a legitimate concern if residences nearby were using well water. They don’t. Chicago and the vast majority of outlying suburbs get their water from Lake Michigan, treated and purified, before it enters the distribution system. There may or may not be a manganese contaminated water table on the southeast side of Chicago. It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s using it.
  When you peek beneath the covers of the manganese story there was nothing to be seen and nothing to be scared of. Nothing. No doubt the series sold a lot of papers and scored politicians many a brownie point. And no doubt it scared a lot of people. But the Greater Chicago Manganese Scare was much ado about nothing. I wish I could say that this type of panic inducement and exploitation is rare. But, it is not. It is more common than most people can possibly imagine, and our society is all the poorer as a result.
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com