Environmental health
lborkowski | September 13, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
“Organic, schmorganic,” wrote New York Times foreign editor and International Herald Tribune editor-at-large Roger Cohen, summing up his “takeaway” from the study by Stanford University researchers that examined studies comparing the nutritional value and pesticide residues in organic and “conventionally” grown food. The study concluded that evidence was lacking to show that organic food is more nutritious than conventionally grown food, but that organic food did have about 30 percent fewer pesticide residues. “I’d rather be against nature and have more people better fed…
cmonforton | September 11, 2012Let's say you're curious to know whether there's evidence that a particular compound is carcinogenic to laboratory animals or to humans. Maybe you're wondering about UV radiation from tanning beds, or wood dust, or the drug tamoxifen. Do you want to rely solely on the opinion of the compound's producer or an industry trade association, or might you like to know the views of a panel of independent scientists?
Hearing from the latter was the vision for the U.S.'s Report on Carcinogens. It is a program put in place in 1978 by Public Law 95-622 with amendments to the Public Health Service Act…
egrossman | September 4, 2012By Elizabeth Grossman
We’ve heard repeatedly throughout this political season and throughout this Congress that environmental regulations stifle economic growth and destroy jobs. Yet a new economic analysis shows that in recent years, environmental restoration projects have created significantly more jobs per million dollars of investment than other industries, including coal, gas, and nuclear energy. The study, conducted by Peter Edwards, a natural resource economist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and colleagues, examined job creation resulting from American…
lborkowski | August 16, 2012We've written recently about two bills that had been passed by US and Massachusetts legislatures but not yet signed, so I wanted to close the loop and report that both are now law.
On August 6, President Obama signed into law the "Honoring America's Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012," which, among other things, provides that the Department of Veterans Affairs will give hospital care and medical services to veterans and their families who were exposed to contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, from 1957 to 1987, and have developed conditions associated with TCE, PCE,…
cmonforton | August 14, 2012In a New York Times story reporting on the resignation of Cass Sunstein, President Obama's director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the paper missed an opportunity to take readers beyond the rhetoric to reality. One sentence in the article said this:
"Business lobbies and Republicans in Congress complain frequently about 'job-killing' regulations, citing rules like the E.P.A.’s new standard for carbon emissions from power plants (recently upheld by a federal appeals court) and the Department of Labor’s new worker-safety rules."
"What Department of Labor's new…
cmonforton | August 8, 2012The NBC News affiliate in California's Bay Area released last week a multi-part investigative series entitled "Children in the field: American kids pick your food." The anchorwoman introducing the first segment said:
"They are too young to drive, work in an office, or even a local fast food joint, but thousands of them work long hours in brutal conditions to make sure we eat well, and on the cheap."
Investigative reporter Stephen Stock added:
"We talked to children who said they started working the fields when they were 8, 10 and 11 years old. While most of us had jobs when we were teens,…
lborkowski | August 1, 2012By Dick Clapp
After years of diligent and effective advocacy by former Marines and family members, the House voted on July 31, 2012 in favor of the Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act (H.R. 1627). The House version was amended by the Senate and passed earlier in July and the final version now goes on to President Obama for signing into law. The first section of the bill is named after Janey Ensminger, the nine year-old daughter of former Marine Jerry Ensminger, who was conceived and born at Camp Lejeune and lived there until she was diagnosed with leukemia,…
cmonforton | July 23, 2012A night out for the midnight premiere of the summer blockbuster "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises" turned deadly. Twelve people are dead and at least 59 were wounded. The victims will be mourned, the suspect studied, and the incident relegated to our criminal justice system. In my circle, however, we see gun violence a public health problem. It affects people, it causes death, injury and disability, and it can be addressed with environmental, legal, and behavioral interventions. A classic paper examining violence in a public health frame was published in a 1993 issue of the journal Health…
lborkowski | July 16, 2012If you haven't yet read Maryn McKenna's riveting Atlantic article "How Your Chicken Dinner is Creating a Drug-Resistant Superbug," you should. McKenna, working with the with the Food and Environment Reporting Network, has delved into research that's been accumulating about the association between the extensive use of antibiotics in poultry and the increase in drug-resistant urinary tract infections.
A quick bit of background: For decades, health officials and advocates have been concerned about the overuse of antibiotics. The more you use an antibiotic, the more quickly bacteria resistant to…
cmonforton | July 11, 2012When the deal was made five years ago, officials were proud to announce it was the first refinery expansion project in the U.S. in 30 years. Motiva Enterprises' CEO Bill Welte called it a "momentous occasion" for his firm and its owners Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco. The final product would be the largest refinery in U.S. It was projected to produce more than 12 million gallons of gasoline per day from crude oil shipped initially by tankers from Saudi Arabia to the Port Arthur, TX site.
Fast forward to the grand opening ceremony on May 31, 2012 where five executives including Shell's…
cmonforton | July 9, 2012If it wasn't such a terrible disgrace, an example of our malfunctioning regulatory system, and a public health failure, I'd have to pinch myself that three of my favorite investigative reporters have worked together to expose it. Ken Ward, Jr. of the Charleston (WV) Gazette, Jim Morris of the Center for Public Integrity (and rising star Chris Hamby) and Howard Berkes of National Public Radio (NPR) have teamed up to write about black lung disease among U.S. coal miners. The first of their stories were reported yesterday in the Gazette and at Hard Labor, the Center for Public Integrity's…
cmonforton | July 5, 2012"Regulation in an uncertain world," was the title of a speech that President Obama's regulatory czar Cass Sunstein delivered on June 20, 2012 at a National Academy of Science's government-university-industry research roundtable on "Decision Making under Risk and Uncertainty." Mr. Sunstein's speech, as prepared for delivery, tried to make the case that under his leadership at the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) the Administration has instituted new procedures and practices that make the federal regulatory system more rigorous, evidence based, and transparent…
lborkowski | June 25, 2012This month, Environmental Health News has been running a fantastic series of stories in a series entitled “Pollution, Poverty, People of Color.” The editors planned the publication around the 30th anniversary of protests in Warren County, North Carolina, which are widely credited with launching the environmental justice movement. In 1982, residents of Warren County -- a predominantly black, low-income area -- learned that the state was planning to build a hazardous-waste landfill there to hold thousands of cubic yards of PCB-contaminated soil. Activists Deborah Ferruccio and Reverend Willie T…
egrossman | June 14, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
“It’s basically strip mining,” said Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) environmental engineer Rick Wulk, describing the sand mining activity that has exploded across western Wisconsin since 2010. Mining silica and quartz and processing it into industrial sand is big business these days because this sand is an important component of hydraulic fracturing operations that extract natural gas from shale. To understand the magnitude of the current boom in sand mining, the place to look is Wisconsin. What’s happening in Wisconsin also offers a good example of how…
cmonforton | June 12, 2012A panel of scientific experts convened by the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded today that diesel engine exhaust is carcinogenic to humans. Previously, the IARC classification for diesel exhaust was "probably carcinogenic to humans," but with the publication of additional epidemiological and toxicological studies over the last 20 years, the expert panel determined there was sufficient evidence to change the compound's cancer designation. The IARC panel wrote:
"The scientific evidence was reviewed thoroughly by the Working Group…
cmonforton | June 11, 2012Tobacco companies did it. Asbestos-peddlers did it. Chromium users did it. The list goes on and on. When polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products feel threatened by scientific evidence that their pet compound is carcinogenic to humans, they will do everything money can by to avoid the "cancer-causing" label.
The latest example comes from diesel-engine manufacturers. Their efforts come just in time for a meeting of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) scheduled for June 5-12, 2012. IARC, an agency within the World Health Organization, is convening an expert…
lborkowski | June 7, 2012Via Ezra Klein, here's a striking infographic from the Bipartisan Policy Center comparing what makes us healthy to how we as a nation spend our health dollars:
Infographic from the Bipartisan Policy Center
As it illustrates, behaviors are major contributors to our health status, but a tiny fraction of US health spending goes to encouraging healthy behaviors like physical activity.
The Bipartisan Policy Center report Lots to Lose: How America's Health and Obesity Crisis Threatens our Economic Future offers several recommendations for improving nutrition and physical activity in the US. In…
cmonforton | June 6, 2012by Mark Catlin
Tony Mazzocchi was a visionary who was in the forefront of the labor movement's major struggles for social justice in the postwar period. Those hard fought struggles and victories, from the civil rights movement and the struggles against nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam War, to the struggle for environmental justice and the movement for occupational health and safety, which he spearheaded.
Last evening, in a very moving ceremony, the US Department of Labor inducted Tony Mazzocchi, dynamic labor leader, into its Labor Hall of Honor. The ceremony took place at the New…
egrossman | June 4, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
Tap water bursting into flame, water sources contaminated with toxic chemicals, once-pastoral rural hillsides turned over to industrial fossil fuel extraction, and unprecedented earthquake activity. These are among the environmental health concerns commonly associated with the extraction of natural gas by the method known as hydraulic fracturing – or fracking. But one of the more pernicious and pervasive potential occupational fracking hazards may come from sand. Not just ordinary sand, but sand that is nearly 100% crystalline silica and specially produced to play a key…
cmonforton | May 25, 2012When Debbie "Muvmuv" Brewer was diagnosed in 2006 with pleural mesothelioma, it was a tough year. She'd also lost her beloved Dad, Phillip Northmore, who succumbed to his own asbestos-related disease. After meeting Muvmuv a few weeks ago at the 8th Annual International Asbestos Awareness Conference, I wrote that she named the tumor inside her chest wall "Theo,” and she was hoping that he would remain dormant. Muvmuv, a native of Plymouth UK, was due to undergo a CT scan:
“to find out if Theo had moved at all, or if he has been a typical lazy man and sat on the sofa watching TV. He must be…