Read This Book

    Ok, I recently told my (few) followers not to read a particular book. Now I'm telling them to read a book if they haven't got to it yet. 

     Toms River received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize.  Dan Fagin inscribed a copy for me last spring, but, well, you know, life gets in the way. 

     The book is about patterns.  The patterns people look for when more than one thing happens in a given area in a given time span. The patterns parents are desperate to find when that pattern is a cluster of childhood cancer.

     Nobody wants to think about children getting sick.  We are a few generations removed from the days when parents lost children of the diseases of the country, like tetanus, or the diseases of the city, like diptheria. So we like to pretend children don't die. 

     But, the trappings of the civilization that make us feel immune to dangers are often the very causes of those dangers.

     We love color. Well, not society ladies of New York, but most of us. Plumage, if you will. We attach status to color. Hence, royal purple. 

     While rummaging the racks at Macy's we don't think about the chemical process required to create these colors and to make them more or less fade-resistant. Even those of us who sew don't think much about the process of dying the fabric.  I have a friend who worked as a colorist on Seventh Avenue and I don't think much about the creation of dyes. 

    But, starting in the 19th Century, making chemical dyes was big business in central Europe. Eventually, the companies that made these dyes moved their production to the United States. The processes weren't safe for workers and the releases from the factories weren't safe for the people who lived nearby. 

    In the 1950s and through the 1970s, state-of-the-art disposal of chemical wastes was dumping it in 55-gallon drums and burying the drums in a field later dusted with lime. In addition, filtering of what came out of the smokestacks was limited or non-existent. 

     Ciba Geigy's plant in Toms River was sloppy to say the least, up to and including building a large pipe that took effluent to the ocean. Compounding the problems from Ciba Geigy, Union Carbide, up in Bound Brook needed to rid itself of chemical waste, so, not surprisingly, they hired a couple of mob wannabees and didn't ask where they were burying them. More SOP.

     In spite of all the evidence of sloppiness and lack of oversight, it was very difficult to establish that there was a cancer cluster that could have been caused by pollution. That kind of proof had only been established once before, in Woburn, MA.  But years of review of the evidence by New Jersey and federal officials produced results that left little doubt of a connection between effluent from the plant and the buried waste and the occurrences of leukemia and brain cancer among children in Toms River. 

     Fagin goes into amazing detail about the search for a connection and about the history of the companies responsible. He even traces back through the history of scientific research into chemicals and their effects. He also reveals the hero of the story: a nurse at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who noticed an unusual number of patients with the same hometown. 

     It's a long book and not an easy read. It's not supposed to be easy. Read it anyway.