How much a person's health matters is based on their income and lost service to their employer. If in fact the percentage of employed drops as experts say it will, large areas of the globe will be populated by people with very little if any incomes. So their lives may not be valued highly enough for the purpose of these analyses to 'justify' pollution controls, or any other "trade barriers". Since there are no lost wages or anything of that nature. Pain and suffering awards are limited to values that make it unlikely any attorney would take cases ($250k for example in Calif - has not changed in a very long time) Plus federal laws, often enacted in response to international treaty requirements to preempt national laws for these little known treaties, will in many cases result in no case being allowed to be filed in any court. Similar to ERISA sec 514 (?) preemption for people with certain kinds of health plans (employer provided plans which are the ones that most working Americans have, they cant afford individual plans.) Also, health insurance often has what are called subrogation clauses, meaning that should somebody sue, their health insurer gets first crack at anything they might win to pay them back for what 'they' spent.
Many of these HMOS are not good places to get health care.
Example of what I mean.
None of these problems get discussed in the US media, ever.
This is all happening as more and more evidence emerges about things like endocrine disrupting chemicals. (Hugely expensive impacts on health and building up in the environment, nobody knows what the long term impact will be but its clear lots of cancers (prostate, breast, etc.) are increased greatly by them. Also morbid obesity/metabolic syndrome/diabetes/insulin resistance in a dose-related relationship.)
Thank goodness electronics has shifted away from CRTs, because hit CRT containing devices probably caused a lot of exposure to plasticizers, many chemicals in plastics, also teflon contains EDCs.
See ciel.org and endocrine.org for links to papers.
There are a great many situations like this in various areas. Mercury in the environment too. Also as temps rise the amount of existing mercury that vaporizes will rise.. The cost calculations need to go back to sane ones thats not dumping all these problems on people everywhere, just as FTAs are globally taking away governments abilities to help them or fix intnl trade deals (binding laws) that cede away policy space irreversibly. Emasculating democracy.