Fear of Chemicals

Why Michelle Francl calls chemophobia a blindness

Michelle Francl has written that the culture is chemophobic, and that chemical has become a synonym for something artificial, adulterated, hazardous or toxic. Her diagnosis is precise about what kind of failure this is. She calls it more like colour blindness than a true phobia, because the people who have it are blind to nearly every chemical they meet. Every substance in the universe is one.

That blindness is the reason a bottle can be sold as chemical free. Taken literally the claim is impossible, since consumer products consist entirely of chemical substances, but it works on the sentiment rather than the sense. The appeal to nature does the rest. Naturally occurring substances feel safer because no human hand was involved, so man-made compounds are feared while natural poisons are accepted, and the fear tracks provenance rather than dose.

The consequences are not always trivial. Francl points at local statutes opposing the fluoridation of public water, and at the documented tooth loss and nutritional deficit that followed.

What the toxicology actually says

The Carcinogenic Potency Project, part of the US EPA's structure-searchable toxicity database network, has been testing chemicals of both origins since the 1980s and publishing the results. Its scientists set out the imbalance in Science in 1992. Examining synthetic chemicals without examining natural ones had skewed both the data and the perception of what a carcinogen is: of 479 chemicals tested for carcinogenicity in rats and mice, 378 were synthetic, which is 79 per cent, in a world where exposure runs overwhelmingly the other way.

The assumption underneath is that human defences evolved against dietary chemicals and not against synthetic ones. It fails on the biology. The defences animals evolved are mostly general rather than tuned to particular compounds, and they are inducible, which means they handle low doses of either kind. Since the toxicology is similar, the positivity rate should be similar too, and it is: about half of everything tested in rodents comes back positive, whatever its origin. Only fifty-seven natural pesticides in plant foods have been tested at all, and twenty-nine of those are rodent carcinogens occurring in more than fifty common plant foods. Almost every fruit and vegetable on a supermarket shelf probably contains one.

Why chemophobia is not a clinical diagnosis

Despite the suffix, most of the writing on chemophobia treats it as a non-clinical aversion or prejudice rather than a phobia in the medical sense. IUPAC calls it an irrational fear of chemicals. The American Council on Science and Health defines it as a fear of synthetic substances grown from scare stories and exaggerated media claims. It is generally addressed through chemical education and public outreach, which sits oddly with the fact that a great deal of it is economic or political in origin.

Which events built chemophobia

Pierre Laszlo, a chemistry professor, describes chemists encountering it from the general population and locates its roots in both irrational notions and real grievances, chemical warfare and industrial disasters among them. Gordon Gribble dates the beginning to Silent Spring in 1962, with the contamination of Times Beach in 1983 and the Bhopal disaster in 1984 making everything worse.

What those events built was an association: chemical means unnatural, artificial and dangerous. Marketing then ran the association backwards, labelling goods natural and chemical free to escape it, which reinforced the misconception that produced the labels. The industry has followed the money, producing flavours and aromas by biotechnology rather than synthesis so that the output can be sold as natural.

The arguments about how bad it is

The American Council on Science and Health, an industry advocacy group, calls it a growing phenomenon at epidemic proportions among the American public. Jon Entine, writing for them, attributes part of it to people reacting with alarm to reported chemicals in their bodies or environments at minuscule and entirely safe amounts, and has argued elsewhere that it drives a precautionary principle in agricultural policy that could threaten the world's ability to feed a growing population. In Britain, Sense about Science produced a leaflet explaining science to celebrities, making the point that people carry only small amounts of chemical baggage and that advances in analytical chemistry are the only reason those traces are detectable.

Philip Abelson made a different objection. Dosing laboratory animals enormously when testing for carcinogenic potential, he argued, manufactures public fear about effects on humans that the doses do not justify, and the opportunity cost of those phantom hazards is attention taken from hazards that are real.

Michael Siegrist and Angela Bearth put numbers on the sentiment, surveying 5,631 people across Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

• thirty per cent said they were scared of chemical substances
• forty per cent said they avoid chemical substances in daily life
• thirty-nine per cent said they would like to live in a world that was chemical free