In this episode of the "Leading and Learning Through Safety" podcast, Dr. Mark French discusses the absence of science in decision-making and its impact. He reflects on a 1979 documentary titled "Song of the Canary: The DBCP Story," which explores a chemical plant's discovery of harmful effects due to the absence of data. Dr. French delves into how organizations sometimes turn a blind eye to critical information, citing examples of privately funded studies being shelved for years. He highlights the importance of transparency in scientific research and the need for collaboration to address safety concerns effectively. Dr. French concludes by emphasizing the significance of shared knowledge and collective effort in ensuring workplace safety.
In this episode of the "Leading and Learning Through Safety" podcast, Dr. Mark French discusses the absence of science in decision-making and its impact. He reflects on a 1979 documentary titled "Song of the Canary: The DBCP Story," which explores a chemical plant's discovery of harmful effects due to the absence of data. Dr. French delves into how organizations sometimes turn a blind eye to critical information, citing examples of privately funded studies being shelved for years. He highlights the importance of transparency in scientific research and the need for collaboration to address safety concerns effectively. Dr. French concludes by emphasizing the significance of shared knowledge and collective effort in ensuring workplace safety.
This week on the leading and learning through safety podcast, we're talking about the absence of science in that how that affects our decision making. Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr. Mark French marks passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork, and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode. And now here is Dr. Mark French. Hello, and welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So happy you are joining me. Sorry, I've been absent for a few weeks. It's amazing how fast time flies before you realize that oh, yeah. I haven't recorded a podcast in a while. And I'm missing it. And I have ideas. Anyway, I'm glad to be back. Glad to be here. And most especially, I'm happy you're here. So thank you really appreciate you listening in. This week, I came across this is some time ago, maybe a couple of weeks ago, I was reading through a few of my blog that really enjoy of different safety and health people have opinions out there of what's happening in the world of health and safety. And in one of the blogs, they referenced a documentary video from 1979. Now I'll date myself, that was the year of my birth. And that struck me as of the year struck me as interesting, a piece of just like, hey, that's a happy luck thing. And it's a story about a chemical plant that discovered some very scary things from the absence of data. And there's a lot of questions around how did that happen? What happened? And that's what I want to talk about. I want to talk about this, how do we turn on the blinders what causes a human being, or a company or an organization to turn on blinders and go with what's out there rather than seeking deeper, and there's a lot more complex than you think there's a lot of human behavior here. And that's what struck me is most important, and most, I think telling, and you look now 40 plus years later, and I'm not so sure that a lot has changed. And that's what I want to talk about is how do we look through it? How do we find it? How do we attempt to understand it better. And I have been on both sides of this, I can see both sides, I understand it. And that's a little scary to me to that, how I have also been blinded at times, from the way the absence of the data. Therefore we go on whatever we do have whatever is tangible, rather than really seeing what's in front of us and how we do it. I've been very cryptic so far. I don't want to give too much away too fast. You know, anyway, let's get started on YouTube. And you can I'll put a link to this in my in my social medias in the comments section of this podcast. It is a 1979 documentary 30 minute documentary, and it's called Song of the Canary, the DBCP story. So DBCP was a super powerful pesticide. It was it worked. It worked exceptionally well for what it was designed to do. It had a lot of side effects, because anything that's made to be that powerful pesticide is powerful against a lot of things, including humans. So what is it it's one to die bromo three chloro propane, that's where they get the DBCP but it was taken off the market. Eventually, after some discovery work was done. This documentary takes us through like meeting of the Union and the company and they go back and forth they get the feedback from both sides. If you have 30 minutes to watch it, it's actually more than 30 minutes because YouTube has ads. And I probably saw like three or four sets of ads during this 30 minute video, which was okay, it was worth it. I really did enjoy watching how things have changed some. But not really, it starts off by interviewing a lot of the workers at kind of a casual location they're talking about, oh, yeah, I don't think I smell as good as I used to, like, I can't smell a lot of my nose. Like I don't pick up scents anymore after working in the plant. And these are young men, these are like people who had been working here a long time they were in their, like maybe their 20s, like young people, one was showing spots where their skin was bleached all over their arms. And His concern was, yeah, that's pretty bad. I hope it doesn't spread to the rest of my body. And the study continues on to find out that the sterility rate of the men in that area was significantly higher than the rest of the population, which then led further information. What began the talk was one all these symptoms, these symptoms are like we work here, and we're having these things that are amazingly bad happening to them. And they start asking the questions. And then of course, the one I alluded to, there's a lot of young people working that there were a lot of people in their 20s and 30s, that were working there at the time 1979. It was mostly a male workforce and this chemical plant, I'll go in and say that because it does lead to the importance of some of the data they find lat later. They find they as this is the age group that should be starting families, especially in 1979 20 years old, they should be starting a family, they have a good union job working for a very large company. And this was like the American Dream back then to have that kind of job leading into the 80s that that paid like that steady job union work. And they weren't having children. There was just a lack of babies being born or conceived in this area. And that's what led physician and some other people to begin the study of like, whoa, what's happening and finding volunteers to study further to find out that yeah, the sterility rate of this group was astronomical compared to the local population and compared to other people. And so then it goes down the road of what is happening here, what is out there. And what blew my mind, what really, this is where I want to really take the podcast is that there had been a study that had been paid for by other chemical companies. So this wasn't an oxy cam study. But there was a study that had been shelved back from the 1960s, where a couple of of companies did study together. And they filed it away to try to shelve it. But instead on the shelf for 16 years before people started looking at and going, oh my gosh, there is things wrong here. They found that in rats, so that's where a lot of the toxicology work is done is in rats, to see what happens when exposed to certain chemicals. That's how a lot of the material safety data sheets are written to is these toxicological studies, and a lot of time they involve rats and mice. They found that in male rats, this significantly affected their nether regions. I'll put it that way to stay PG here, significantly affected in to the point where like, parts of their body were atrophying that they needed to reproduce. But because they was rats, they didn't they claim that Oh, we'd solved it atrophied their body part. But did that really lead to sterility? Did it really? So they left that question open and filed it. Then in 1979 we see it happening in humans in mass in great numbers. They pull this off and they go they pulled this off the shelf, start reading it and go, Oh, well, here it is. Yeah. This chemical is doing that to our workers. It has to be and then they do a human study to like basically looking back and epidemiological study looking backwards at the population to find out that Yeah, absolutely. This is happening. Unbelievable. But it happens so many times. And I want to talk a little bit more I want to carry on with this. We're going to pick the Stop and keep going. In the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, you are listening to the leading learning through safety podcast with Dr. Mark French, D is da consulting, learn you lead others. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. The problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr. Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building stress management, communication, conflict management, and so much more. Individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great. For more information, visit us on the web at T SDA consulting.com. And welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So happy you're with me this week, we're talking about a 1979 documentary, The Song of the Canary the story of DBCP, which is a very strong pesticide. And where we left off in the first half was we found out too, that there was a study done 15 years before, that had been just kind of shelved away, that absolutely indicated that this could be exceptionally harmful to humans. Before they got into the documentary, talked about the paperwork, and the documentation, the interview some of the company spokespeople, and they talked about all the precautions that are in place that we're following the science, we're doing everything that we should be doing based on current science to protect our people. I personally have thought the same thing about when I do my safety work, I try to stay up to date on what is new now whether or not they were telling the full truth, that's a different thing. I come back to me personally, I think, yeah, I've done a lot of research before, and think that I'm doing the best that I can based on what is out there to protect people. What is interesting here is that science and I'm going to oversimplify overgeneralize the complexity that went into this, but I'm trying to make it easy and clear. For what exactly happened. This science was privately funded, it was a private study by a private company, they didn't have to share it. They could just file it away, which they did, because it was good for the business. And when I say the business, it means like, you don't want your if you're all doing the same thing. You don't want one person to air out someone else's dirty laundry, because then we all start airing out each other's dirty laundry, and then we could all lose money because of it. And wouldn't that be a terrible thing? We are We are the company was trying to do as much as they could to make money. They had found a workforce willing to work in it. And whether they ignored the science, whether they knew about it, and it just kind of said, well, you know, we don't it's not really our science, therefore, we can ignore it. Or and that was the big question of like, really what was happening there? Did they know that this report from 1961 was out there? Did they really read it and use it? And then even when they were confronted with like, you know, it didn't say it created sterility in rats. It just basically shriveled up their nether regions into nothingness. But they didn't call sterility. Oh, that. Yeah. Okay. Tell yourself that if it helps you sleep better at night. And it carries through this, but I even see it in modern day I watched this was a documentary just a few years ago, on the coal mining regions of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. And the Reese the resurgence of black lung. And even some of the early fights when I was reading, I read another book about the early fights about black lung in those areas. And what would happen was that they would doctor shop. So if someone had the potential for black lung, they would send them out to doctors, company doctors. And at the time, they could seal the records because they were private records like the company was paying for these medical records. Therefore it was the company's records. And so they would shop around and they get all these opinions until they found the one they wanted. And then they would only present that one to the board of like workers compensation or people. And then when the case because that was the piece of the data that was out there. One of the attorneys finally realized that it was really a method of discovery of requesting all records, rather than just looking at the one and going well how do I refute it with my own doctors. And then they found out that there were all these records that said that hey, that is this is resurgent, this is black lung disease and But yeah, we had one doctor that said, no, no, it's not. And that's the one we presented to win the case. But once it was actually legally requested that these documents come out, it was it was overwhelming evidence that something was wrong. The symptoms were there. I mean, when the first five minutes of the video when I'm seeing this gentleman show his arms, and they're just speckled, big splotches. And he goes, Man, I just hope it doesn't spread to the rest of my body, it hurts me physically, to think that these young people never had a chance to have a family, because they wanted to provide for that family, we will choose to have that work, rather than to choose your own safety, because we feel like that's, that's a human need to have food, water shelter, before we have safety, therefore, they will go out and they'll do that dangerous work. And they'll try to make the money before they can establish the safety. So the Union came together and started fighting for more information on their rights of what's happening to them. What is going on? Why are we having this issue? What is happening in this chemical company, and this is 1979. And I would like to think that regulations, and we as a society have moved forward, I'm convinced we've moved forward. But I do not think we have moved forward at the pace that we should have. We are not moving as fast and as nimble as we should be for the world of safety of protecting our people from unknown hazards such as these. And then we also now have such a paid for science process, that whoever funds, the science usually can get the result they want. And that's a scary situation that again, those with the money, those with the power dictate what the science looks like. Now, that's a huge generalization. I get it. There's a lot of debate on that. But a lot of this, this even shows here that that privatize science, didn't give us the visibility, we needed to be able to make the best decisions. And that's where, how open should it be? How much peer review is peer review? How much? Where can we truly say that it's 100% trusted, or even that the data is out there for us to find it. You can only find what's available. And if something's hidden, it's harder to find. That's a lot. There's a lot there to unpack. And really what I want to I mean, as we get near the end here, as we're reaching the end of the podcast, what is it I'm really trying to say it's that I I'm My background is in science, I love science. I love what it does, I love what it can produce. I think that there is so much opportunity there, but only if it's shared. Only if we're able to see it, to understand it, to learn it to do it together. Because that is where it really matters to us is when we can work together to solve these problems. Thanks for joining me. We'll get off that serious topic for a moment. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am so happy that you join me so happy that you're here. Hope you enjoyed the podcast checkout. Again in my social media links. I'll have a link to the story. I hope you will take just take a few minutes to maybe watch the first few minutes and see if it grabs your interest like it did just brought me into it. Also a reminder a couple of really great safety conferences come up in the summer the Kentucky in the Tennessee safety conference for me especially but a lot of others. If you need those CPUs, great opportunity. They're coming up later on in the summer. It's closer than we think. Until next time we chat. Stay safe Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online@www.ts da consulting.com. All the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice. This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast