Take the example of lead. Lead has been established as a poisonous metal for over a century. It is a malleable metal that can easily be crushed into a fine powder. This property has allowed it to become commercial ‘gold’ for the producers of paints, cosmetics, Ayurvedic products, gasoline, confectionary and more.  

Lead damages the growing brain of children, and long-term exposure to it could leave them retarded. A higher dose of lead exposure is fatal. But for those industries that manufacture paints, cosmetics, candies or that process gasoline, lead is too good a component of their final product to discard. Lead provides a shiny finish when mixed with paint, and the paint industry does not want to discard it easily, no matter how poisonous it is. Similarly, for producers of cosmetics—lipstick and mascara (kajal) in particular—lead provides an attractive look to their products. In the case of petroleum, lead provides a high-octane performance.

When lead was established and demonstrated to be a poison in the late 19th century, it caused a commotion among the industries that had been making money off lead. Although a few countries banned the use of lead in paints within a few years of its being deemed poisonous, it took decades, or a century in some cases, for others to do so.

Here is why. For any public policy to be implemented against a product, the lawmakers need to pass a bill. But the lawmakers are either heavily influenced or intimidated by the profit makers or the lobbyists of the profit makers to stop such bills or to provide as much resistance as possible for as long as possible.

In the United States, it took almost 90 years to ban the use of lead in paints after the metal was  established to be harmful. The US did not ban lead in gasoline for over seven decades.

The consequence? Decades of unnecessary exposure on the part of consumers to the poisonous metal. Had the use of lead in paints and gasoline been banned about the same time that science established it as a poison, thousands upon thousands of lives would have been saved, and billions and billions dollars would have been saved.

Cigarettes and tobacco products are another example where science waited decades, and is still waiting in some countries, to label them dangerous. It was established in the mid-1960s that smoking causes cancer, heart disease and other adverse health outcomes. But tobacco products were not regulated for decades. The complex network of tobacco companies and their shareholders, including the tobacco farmers, kept on waging a war against facts, with their influence, intimidation and their ‘counter-science’, as they tried to debunk the facts.

In 2000, when the World Health Organization (WHO) began the process of getting a global resolution out asking the member countries to regulate tobacco products, it faced huge road blocks and resistance from the tobacco companies, who went as far as questioning the need of WHO.   

WHO finally got the resolution out. Now after over a decade, many countries are following WHO’s advice to heavily regulate tobacco, thus preventing many untimely deaths and saving millions of dollars.

Currently, science is fighting with the sugar industry, the salt industry and the fast food industry. The long-term and excessive use of their products have shown to cause serious health damage, which are irreversible is some cases.

Like in a boxing ring, these fights of science versus industries last many rounds and the industries do everything possible to maintain their market before yielding to science.

Science thus always needs activists to fight on its behalf.

Dr Sanjeeb Sapkota, a medical epidemiologist working for a government public health agency in the United States, can be reached at [email protected]