OCCUPATIONAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL NEUROTOXICOLOGY.

By R. G. Feldman . 1998. Pp. 500. Philadelphia: Lippincott–Raven. ISBN 0-7817-1739-6. It is almost 20 years since the appearance of Spencer and Schaumburg's ground-breaking volume on experimental and clinical neurotoxicology, which gave us a comprehensive survey of the subject as understood at the time. That book served a useful purpose but is now largely out of date. Dr Feldman's new work has a different approach. It is a survey of the problems posed by occupational and environmental neurotoxicology as shown by a comprehensive and detailed account of the effects of 20 chemicals widely employed in industry. These include various metals, several types of widely employed solvent and agrochemicals to which workers in the field and in the factory become exposed. In the context of the title, the `environment' is that contaminated by man's industry and inventiveness stemming from his desire to improve the lot of his race, of which this book offers the most noteworthy examples. It does not include toxic substances of the natural environment derived from animals, plants, insects, dinoflagellates, bacteria or other living organisms, interesting though these certainly are. This is a handbook providing all relevant details of these 20 important chemicals, enabling clinicians and others to have ready access to such data. It even goes so far as to provide web site addresses, so that up-to-date information can be obtained about regulations governing the use of potentially hazardous compounds in the workplace, their threshold limit values, permissible exposure limits and so forth as laid down, in this instance, by various American government agencies. It is a pity that WHO …