The narrative focused on the Southeast Side, Chicago, neighborhood in which 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 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is contamination. This isn’t 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 isn’t surprising, therefore, that elevated levels of manganese might be found in the soil of areas where large integrated steel mills operated for decades. When this was brought to the public’s 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 case, involves clever use of innuendo, including the deployment of one of the most charged and misused words in the English language: toxic.
It’s 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’s 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 who are eager to exploit the public’s tendency to fear that which they don’t 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’s true that at the right dose, 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.
The next time you have a chance to glance at a label on a multivitamin bottle, check out the ingredients. The chances are that manganese will be among them. The reason for this 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 that 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 afterward, 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 and where residences actually are made the inhalation 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 weren’t. Chicago and the vast majority of its outlying suburbs get their water from Lake Michigan, and it’s 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’s 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 isn’t. It’s more common than most people can possibly imagine, and our society is all the poorer as a result.
