This morning I listened to an interesting NPR show on the topic of arsenic in our food and water.  Arsenic is one of those things that is present in most of our food and water, but we hope in levels too small to be of concern (if eating poison can ever not be a concern).  It is an acute poison, but also a known carcinogen - as well has having a wide range of rather nasty non-carcinogenic impacts on lots of our organs.

Apparently, the EPA limits for drinking water have been set so that the "expected" deaths in the USA per year from cancers caused by arsenic is around 720/year. (I don't understand how they get it so fine as to get to a specific number - around 1000 seems close enough to me.) That is a lot, but not so much in the grand scheme of things. 

However, the EPA started to find that those numbers of deaths are probably far from the true results - so they did some more studying and came up with a value that is 17 times as great.  So instead of about 1000 deaths per year it is more like 17,000 deaths.  Ten years ago they were just at the point of publishing the results of their studies, until a Congressman in the House Appropriations Committee wrote a little paragraph in a report (not a bill, just a report) that suggested that the EPA suspend all work on studying arsenic (and about 50 others chemical studies that they were working on).  So, while the EPA had done the studies, and was ready to make a regulation that is 17 times as stringent as the current one, that work was put on hold for an undetermined people of time (at least five more years from now). 

My read on this is that Congressman is directly responsible for the "excess" deaths due to cancer that would have been prevented had the EPA been allowed to complete their work.  The delay is at least 15 years, meaning that the number of deaths that person is responsible for is something like 240,000 people unnecessarily dying from cancer.  That doesn't include all of the other deaths and illnesses that could have been prevented.  Amazingly enough, that particular Congressman also gets about $15,000 a year from two companies that produce pesticides that contain arsenic - not a huge amount of money I suppose, but maybe enough to make an impact.  If nothing else, even if the money wasn't the influence it is certain that these companies gained direct access to the Congressman, and therefore had an impact on his "education" with regard to this particular poison, and apparently 50 others as well.  I don't know how many people his paragraph managed to impact in total, but it seems fair to assume it resulted in the unnecessary deaths of over a million folks!

I wonder how politicians and business folks can live with themselves knowing the impacts of their decisions to trade the lives of strangers for the profits of a few.  I would think this would weigh on their minds - but apparently that is not the case.  Apparently there is no guilt or remorse for these kinds of actions as long as their person incomes and corporate profits benefit.

I marvel at the state of affairs that we have managed to get ourselves into.  Maybe many years ago businessmen made similar decisions based upon ignorance.  We now don't seem to have that excuse, we now have good enough science and evidence to know the impacts of these decisions.  Now we can no longer pretend that we "didn't know" - we now have to admit that we just don't care.