Book Review: Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement, by Phil Brown

Abstract

In 2005, the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the blood and urine of a group of average Americans contain metals like cadmium, lead, and mercury, as well as phytoestrogens, organochlorine pesticides, phthalates, and dozens of other hazardous chemicals. 2 Toxic chemicals pervade our environment and our bodies. Researchers suspect that environmental exposures to commonly occurring toxins may cause illnesses such as asthma, autism, lupus, Parkinson's disease, and breast cancer. 3 While definitive proof of environmental causation for these illnesses is lacking, advocacy groups have made efforts to gain support and funding to eliminate suspected environmental triggers. In Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement, Phil Brown explores the social movements that have emerged around illnesses with suspected environmental origins. 4 Brown concentrates on three of these movements - the breast cancer, asthma, and Gulf War-related illnesses (GWRIs) movements - and constructs a model to explain their varying degrees of political success. His model contains four factors: (1) scientific basis for environmental causation, (2) prevalence and public perception of risks, (3) sources of support for environmental causation hypothesis, and (4) strength of the health social movement. 5 Additionally, Brown explains that the strength of the movement, the model's fourth factor, is determined by the first three factors. While the model highlights important determinants of a movement's success, it fails to account for two factors that clearly differentiate the movements Brown studies - race and socioeconomic ...