Responsible use of chemicals: A warning too grave to ignore

THOUGH not as catastrophic as the 1984 accident at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, when nearly 4,000 people were killed and over half a million were injured, the Tianjin accident — death toll 114 so far — is another stark reminder of how very lethal the chemicals we all depend on can be if things go wrong.

It is a reminder too that some industrial plants need to have a decent buffer zone between them and residential areas, the very issue in play in the years of protest over the Corrib gasfield pipeline in Mayo.

One of the reasons the Chinese disaster has provoked such fury is that planning regulations designed to keep potentially dangerous factories a safe distance from homes were ignored, another indication that there is a flexibility on these matters in that country that hardly enhances it or generates confidence among investors considering doing business there.

There is hardly a facet of our lives that is not dependent on chemicals. Medicine, food — growing, preserving and cooking — communications, travel, forestry and even clothing all depend on the magic found in the chemists’ lab. Like oil, chemicals are the very lifeblood of modern, ever more urbanised living. Modern farming would not be productive enough to support the world’s population without chemicals or oil. We have become utterly reliant on the science of chemistry and it is more than unlikely that dependency will diminish.

A lot of the difficulties with our chemical use, especially in less aware times, were established by trial and error.

DDT is a classic example of what was once thought to be a solution becoming a serious problem. Now banned in many countries the synthetic organic compound was used as an insecticide but, like other chlorinated aromatic hydrocarbons, it lingered destructively in the environment. It became concentrated in animals at the top of the food chain and was blamed for the collapse, now thankfully reversed, in the peregrine falcon population. The compound weakened the birds’ eggshells and it became difficult to hatch nestlings.

The same progression can be seen in some medicines. Thalidomide is an example of what was once imagined as a breakthrough bringing tragedy rather than comfort. The drug, still on the market today, was offered to pregnant women and resulted in thousands of infants being born with phocomelia — malformation of the limbs. Only 40% of these children survived.

Over recent years one of the mysteries confronting scientists is the unexplained collapse in bee populations all around the world. Bees pollinate crops and are essential to food production and without a healthy active population of bees our world would be very different. Basically, bees are one of the irreplaceable foundation stones of our existence

That is why the calls from environmentalists urging that cypermethrin not be used in Irish forests any more should not be ignored. The chemical is used to protect pine forests and, it is suggested, represents a considerable threat to bees. We ignore these warnings at our peril, as the people of Bhopal and Tianjin have discovered in the most dramatic way.