| We are regularly exposed to benzene while breathing tobacco smoke, even secondhand smoke, pumping gasoline, while driving in high-traffic areas, and from industrial air pollution. Higher levels are released from the vapors of benzene-containing products such as glues, paints, furniture wax, and detergents. An estimated 44,240 new cases of leukemia will be diagnosed in the United States in 2007. Sometimes chronic low doses can be even more toxic than acute high doses. This looks to be especially true when it comes to the toxins that affect your hormonal, or endocrine, system. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
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 The bus drivers let the engines idle for long periods, resulting in all the gasoline fumes and hydrocarbons entering the ductwork intake and circulating throughout the school.
Dr. Rapp describes some of her cases involving environmental allergies. "In one case I encountered, a school had a printing press, and the exhaust pipe from the printing press was at exactly the same level as the ventilation intake on the roof, with the result that all the chemicals from the printing press were going right back in and circulating throughout the school. |
| I can't tolerate anything like gasoline fumes, new plastics, or any kind of new materials in a building. I have very restricted access to public places because of fragrances that are often used in offices, stores, or public restrooms, and because of cleaning solutions and sprays used in public places. After two years, I am still slowly making progress, but I know that I have several more years ahead of me before I can bring my immune system back to where it should be.
I like people and I have always, all my life, been around people. |
Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D.
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 With poor octane energy fuel, the cylinders in the car's high-performance engine (where the gasoline is ignited) would not have sufficient force to move the pistons evenly. The energy available to drive the car would be inadequate, and would result in misfiring pistons and sluggish, undependable performance. Similarly, the human body must have high-octane fuel to create the energy to carry on the basic processes of life such as respiration and the breakdown and assimilation of foods. |
David Steinman
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 Suburbans Tauruses, Explorers, and Stratuses have had flex-fuel engines and can run on both gasoline and ethanol. The trouble is that the carmakers' executives never thought it was a big deal and expended little effort to educate consumers. This is a case where the carmaker absolutely should have blown its own horn in advance of the current oil crisis. They should have been talking up the green game years ago.
No one believed when Bill Ford took over the company of his great-grandfather from the flailing times of Jack Nasser that Ford was serious about the environment. |
Paul D. Blanc, M.D.
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 The way now appeared to be open to start shipping MMT to U.S. gasoline formulators. Criticism was likely, certainly, and that would call for a firm response. A leading environmental group, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), began to take on MMT as a major public policy issue. The group would have to be dealt with. Ethyl was prepared. A full-page advertisement in the New York Times in March 1996 opened its public relations blitzkrieg. |
| Remarkably, PaineWebber even described MMT at one point as an "environmentally friendly gasoline additive," but, in general, the stock market has not been that bullish on Ethyl. The defunct newspaper the New York World may not be on the scene to crusade anymore, but the Wall Street Journal has given fairly close attention to the ups and downs of HiTec 3000.
MMT was developed initially by Ethyl in the mid-1950s. Canada was the first country to be sold in a big way on this organo-manganese fuel additive. |
| It is difficult to imagine any more efficient ways of indiscriminately distributing dangerous, long-acting toxins than these: an organic form of manganese employed as a common gasoline additive with ubiquitous airborne spread, and arsenic or other poisonous chemical treatments applied ad libitum to wood products and set out to disperse slowly into a contaminated landscape.
When it comes to wood preservatives, the forces of regulatory control seem to have gone AWOL altogether. They may have been a bit more vigilant in the case of MMT. |
| Reportedly in tesponse to the urging of the automobile industry, the major gasoline formulators in the United States, who would have had to purchase MMT from Ethyl, agreed to a de facto moratorium on the use of the additive.
As if this was not bad enough, even Ethyl's old ally north of the border began to get cold feet. In December 1996, Canada's Lower House of Parliament voted to ban MMT, and in April 1997, Canada's Senate followed suit. Needless to say, Ethyl sued, creatively invoking clauses of the North American Free Trade Agreement and claiming 250 million dollars in damages. |
Mark Schapiro
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 There were costs, to be sure: compliance with the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts from that period required billions in investments for pollution scrubbers, cleaner gasoline, and new waste-filtration technology. But there was no economic catastrophe, as industry had predicted at the time. New industries were created to develop those and other clean technologies, which cemented U.S. leadership going into the 1990s. Back then, America wrote the rules and the world followed.
But no more; leadership has switched. |
Michael J. Panzner
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 Should they replace worn-out shoes or top up the tank with gasoline so they can get to work? Should they pay for a babysitter to look after the children when they come home from school or skip their breakfast and lunch that day? Whatever the case, Americans will reduce spending at virtually every level, either because they don't have the money or because they fear losing what they have. During sustained hard times, formerly wanton consumers will attempt to do what they've avoided for years: save for a rainy day. |
David Steinman
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| Much of the oil here was flowing south, like our water, to the Chevron El Segundo refinery to become gasoline. We were living, breathing, carbon-based creatures.
I came down the 1-5 and took Highway 119 west to Taft to Highway 33. I saw a traffic light at Highway 119 and the intersection with Midway Road. I went about six miles and saw a stop at the Highway 3 3 intersection. I made a right and less than a mile later on the big flat fossil plain I saw the Chevron sign on my left and two big white water tanks on my right and this was the final turn on this leg of my journey. |
Neal D. Barnard and Bryanna Clark Grogan
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 The fact is that the cells of your body use this kind of sugar—glucose—as an energy source. Like gasoline for
3 your car or jet fuel for an airplane, glucose is your body's fuel. It powers your movements, your thoughts, and more or less everything you do.
And that is exactly the problem. If glucose is unable to enter your cells, they are deprived of their basic fuel, so you lose your energy. That is why you are fatigued. If your muscles do not have the glucose they need for power, you tire easily.
Meanwhile, the glucose that cannot get into your muscle cells builds up in your bloodstream. |
James Howard Kunstler
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 As motoring became democratized, a furious nationwide project of road-building and paving created a huge demand for the sludgy by-products of gasoline refining: asphalt and tar.
Between 1880 and 1930, the major cities of America grew to a scale that had never been seen before in world history. New York, Chicago, and Detroit came to represent a futuristic urbanism of immense megastruc-tures, including both office towers such as the Chrysler Building and vast horizontal factories like Ford's River Rouge plant. (The skyscraper would not appear in Europe until the 1960s, and even later in Asia. |
| What's more, electric cars would have carried a base price 30 percent higher than comparable gasoline models, while the batteries would have to be replaced every few years for many thousands of dollars more. These problems left the electric car in oblivion. But they were developed in the first place not in expectation of oil shortages but to mitigate the separate problem of air pollution. In 2001, the California legislature mandated that 10 percent of all cars sold in the state be low-emission vehicles by 2003. |
| In November, President Nixon, otherwise consumed with Watergate, proposed an extension of daylight saving time and a total ban on the sale of gasoline on Sundays. Both were later approved by Congress. Ration stamps were printed but never issued.
The U.S. economy suffered a body blow. Because absolutely everything in the industrial economy was either made, transported, or carried on with petroleum products, the price rise alone thundered through the system. Prices of food and manufactured goods shot up. The entire American workforce suffered, in effect, a substantial cut in pay. |
| Low oil and gasoline prices, in turn, stimulated demand in the United States, and with American oil companies languishing, increased imports fed the demand. Sensing a raw deal, the OPEC countries managed to put a quota system in place that would ramp up the average price to about $17 per barrel, and would form the basis for a global pricing system that held prices remarkably stable for another decade as virtually all oil nations reached production maturity. Saudi Arabia could always be counted on to act as the "swing" producer, using its huge excess capacity to modulate the global supply. |
Jonathan V. Wright, M.D. and Alan R. Gaby, M.D.
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 Is that the stuff they were putting in the gasoline awhile ago?"
"Boron is an element. There are some very intriguing studies showing an inverse correlation between boron in the soil and the incidence of all types of arthritis. Less boron, more arthritis, and vice versa. Unfortunately, there's not a great deal of study of boron and rheumatoid arthritis, but occasionally it really does well, especially in children with rheumatoid atthtitis. Please use 3 milligrams, 3 times daily."
"What about my ginger capsules?"
"We won't leave those out. How much have you been using? |
Abram Hoffer, PhD, MD, FRCP(C) and Dr. Jonathan Prousjy, DPHE, DSC, ND, FRSH
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 Lead was used in gasoline and paint for many years and is still used in some cooking utensils.
While the toxicity of cadmium, silver, gold, and lead is now universally accepted, aluminum and mercury are still the subject of debate between proponents who maintain they are safe as used and those, like us, who maintain that they are toxic and ought not to be used. |
Gary Null
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 The car, of course—and gasoline. gasoline vaporizes. The afterburn fumes caused by inefficient burning of gasoline are mostly carbon dioxide, which has no odor and is invisible. Breathing these fumes results in headache, dizziness, and mood swings. (Think of people stuck in traffic jams, breathing the afterburn of all the cars around them for hours at a time.) When you park a hot car in the garage and close the door behind it, the hot oil in the engine is volatile and gets into the air. Park the car outside and wait for it to cool off before you bring it into the garage. |
John A. McDougall
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 The most significant recommendation being withheld from patients suffering from any form of colon disease is this—Stop throwing gasoline on the fire! Without a change in lifestyle, the cause of irritation and ultimately disease is ever-present. By adopting a healthful plant-based diet low in fat, such as the McDougall Diet, individuals battling polyps, colon cancer, and all other intestinal troubles will begin to implement the most powerful weapon at their disposal.
Larry Gets a Second Chance
Following Larry's tests, he and Louise returned to my office to hear the results. |
Alan R. Gaby, M.D., Jonathan V. Wright, M.D., Forrest Batz, Pharm.D. Rick Chester, RPh., N.D., DipLAc. George Constantine, R.Ph., Ph.D. Linnea D. Thompson, Pharm.D., N.D.
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 Ipecac should never be used to induce vomiting of caustic poisons such as gasoline, acids, or bleach. Ipecac tincture and fluid extract are much stronger than ipecac syrup. Ipecac tincture or fluid extract should never be taken in the amounts listed above for ipecac syrup.
Are there any side effects or interactions?
When used as directed for poisoning, ipecac will cause severe nausea, vomiting, and intestinal cramps. If too much ipecac is ingested, it may cause dizziness, rapid heartbeat, and palpitations. |
Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, CCN
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 Until soy formula entered the picture, most cases involved miners exposed to manganese dust or people who breathed in high amounts of tetra-ethyl lead in the emissions from tail pipes or methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl from gasoline. Symptoms of manganism include instability, impulsivity, irrationality and hallucinations, or, with chronic exposure, the paralysis agitans of Parkinson's disease.3235 The area of the brain most affected in Parkinson's is the dopamine system, the very part of the brain now associated with ADD and ADHD. |
Abram Hoffer, PhD, MD, FRCP(C) and Dr. Jonathan Prousjy, DPHE, DSC, ND, FRSH
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| The aluminum and mercury debates recall the controversy raged over lead added to gasoline to prevent the motor from pinging and to paint to improve adhesion, used in shot gun pellets and lead sinkers for fishing, and used in glassware (leaded glass) and cookware because of its weight and pliability. The debate over lead illustrates very clearly how high-tech societies have approached innovation. Toxic minerals are added to products because they give them a quality that is desirable commercially. |
Phyllis A. Balch, CNC
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 Lead has been phased out of gasoline and consumer products, but there are still quantities of lead in the environment as lead paint and lead piping, and lead-contaminated dust and soil from years of lead emission is still a problem. Luckily, the number of children with elevated blood levels of lead has dropped significantly—from almost 4 million in 1978 to around 430,000 by the mid-1990s. More information on lead can be obtained from the National Lead Information Center (NLIC) at http://www .epa.gov/lead/nlic.htm. |
Alex Steffen
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 The auto industry was built on a seemingly endless supply of gasoline, but it is now becoming increasingly clear that the end is, in fact, in sight.
The concept of "peak oil" is pretty simple: Oil is a limited resource. Whenever we're dealing with finite resources, there comes a point when dwindling supplies make it more expensive to extract more of that resource, and we start extracting less. The term for that point is production peak. Without a doubt, at some point cheap oil will start running out, and less and less will be available.
The critical question is, when? |
Healing Children's Attention & Behavior DisordersDr. Abram Hoffer, M.D., FRCP(C)
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| Since February 1996 the oil refiners and the company that makes a manganese-containing additive called methylcyclo-pentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (MMT) have been trying to gain government permission to add this manganese-based element to gasoline because it is a a low cost octane booster. If MMT is allowed to be added to gasoline, we will once more face the problem of slowly gathering much more data to prove to the satisfaction of the industrial skeptics that the manganese in the atmosphere damages the health of children. As Dr H.L. Needleman and
Dr P. |
Alex Steffen
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| Many auto companies are working on short-term solutions: high-profile hybrids (quickly becoming Hollywood's trendy new accessory); more efficient gasoline engines; cleaner-burning diesel engines; and biofuels and synthetic fuels to substitute for petroleum. Right now, our choices matter more than ever—every time we go to the showroom and drive a hybrid instead of an SUV off the lot, we send a message to automakers to keep the new solutions coming.
The long-term solution is likely electric, whether the electricity is provided by a super-efficient battery or by a hydrogen fuel cell. |
| Vehicles that can burn either gasoline or ethanol blends are called flexible-fuel vehicles, and there are millions of them on the highways in the United States and around the world. From an automaker's point of view, creating a flex-fuel vehicle is relatively simple: you use a sensor and engine-control software that will determine what type of fuel the car is using and then adjust the fuel injection and combustion accordingly. The biggest stumbling block to E85's becoming a fuel of choice is that a limited number of gas stations are outfitted to provide it. |
Jane M. Orient, M.D.
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 In other words, hospitals are treated more leniently than gasoline stations, and a large excavation that you might see on a street corner is probably the former site of a leaky gasoline tank rather than a hospital.
A Tucson lumber supplier has a hole in his yard that could swallow a nine-story building. The dirt and crushed rock from that hole are being fed through an incinerator, to remove the minuscule traces of petroleum products that allegedly leaked from a gasoline tank about six years ago. The former owner of the site is bankrupt, and one man is dead. |
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