Environmental health
revere | January 14, 2010It's been over a year since we discussed the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) article on bisphenol-A (BPA), a high volume chemical used in plastic components of food and drinks packaging and found in 90% of all Americans screened for the chemical. It is also a chemical that disrupts the endocrine system, a complex chemical signaling system that coordinates the actions and responses of various tissues and organs. The JAMA article examined self report in adults of cardiovascular disease and diabetes ("has a doctor ever told you that you had . . . ") and measured liver enzyme…
revere | October 14, 2009I don't fly as much as I used to but I still fly too often for my likes and when the cart comes around for the free beverages it's either orange juice "with no ice" or a bloody mary mix "with no ice." I rarely drink water, but if I did, I would never drink the water out of a pitcher, as offered to me a couple of weeks ago on Air Canada. From a bottle, maybe, but since bottled water isn't as well regulated as tap water, I usually don't partake. I know a fair amount about public drinking water, but one day I was seated on a plane next to somebody who knew a lot about airplanes and he said he'd…
sb admin | September 24, 2009by Ken Ward, Jr., cross-posted from Sustained Outrage: a Gazette Watchdog Blog
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board is scheduled to release the findings of its investigation into the terrible explosion that killed 14 workers at a Georgia sugar refinery in February 2008.
Itâs another big test for the CSB, which has been under fire recently. Organized labor harshly criticized the board for backing off a strong recommendation on the need for OSHA and EPA to write new rules to prevent accidents involving highly reactive chemicals. The board refused to support its own staffâs call for a safety…
sb admin | September 23, 2009Bans on smoking in restaurants and other public places don't just make nonsmokers' working and dining experiences more enjoyable, they also protect our health. Reducing exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke reduces the risk of heart attacks - and the places that have enacted bans are finding that the health improvements are significant. Two new studies that pool results from several communities that enacted such bans found that a year after the bans took effect, heart attack rates were at least 17% lower.
The Wall Street Journal's Ron Winslow describes the studies and their limitations, and he…
sb admin | September 22, 2009Today is Car-Free Day, and how easy it is for us to get along without a personal vehicle depends largely on where we live. Using Census Bureau data, Forbes has created a ranking of the cleanest-commuting metro areas. Areas earn points for having large percentages of workers who use public transit and carpool to their jobs, and lose points for having large percentages of workers driving alone.
There are a few surprises. I expected to see New York at the top of the list rather than at #5, given how massive and heavily used its transit system is, but perhaps the decision to separate the New…
sb admin | September 17, 2009Today, Andrew Schneider at Cold Truth tells us that way back in April, acting Surgeon General Steven Galson issued a long-awaited statement about the dangers of asbestos, a statement urged for years by asbestos-disease victims, their families and public health advocates.  Galson's action was so stealth (intentionally, perhaps?) that the individuals who had been calling for it were never even notified--Not the Senators who marshalled a  Senate Resolution urging a Surgeon General's warning or the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) who supported the congressional…
sb admin | September 17, 2009The environmental and occupational health impacts of end-of-life management of stuff (not people!) are often downplayed. Unless the landfill or incinerator is in your backyard, the management of stuff as waste is generally ignored. Throwing away stuff is a subconscious activity for most people, but probably not the families and friends of the waste management and remediation services workers who died while working in 2008.
The Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries data are still preliminary, yet the refuse and recyclable material industry is already starting to take notice. In 2008,…
sb admin | September 16, 2009The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) released its report and recommendations yesterday on the December 19, 2007 explosion at the T2 laboratory in Jacksonville, Florida. The violent explosion took the lives of four individuals: Charles Budds Bolchoz, 48, Karey Renard Henry, 35, Parish Lamar Ashley36, and Robert Scott Gallagher, 49. The CSB compared to blast to one from 1,400 pounds of TNT, and one "capable of flinging a one-ton chunk of the steel reactor onto a set of railroad tracks, then into a building 400 feet from where it had stood."  At the time of the disaster, the company…
sb admin | September 16, 2009A country's gross domestic product, or GDP, is often used as shorthand for its success - but, as Robert F. Kennedy pointed out four decades ago, it doesn't capture the toll of our damaging practices or the benefits of hard-to-measure qualities like the ability of the public to have high-quality debates about important issues. If we only look at our GDP figures, short-sighted practices can seem like smart moves.
For instance, keeping gas taxes relatively low has allowed us to enjoy lots of cheap consumer goods, and our enthusiastic consumption of these goods has kept our GDP growing. At the…
sb admin | September 15, 2009The Associated Press is reporting that urgent recommendations proposed by the Chemical Safety Board's (CSB) hands-on investigators of the ConAgra Slim Jim factory explosion, which killed three workers in June 2009, were rejected by the CSB's Board. The AP story reads:
"Documents obtained by The Associated Press show that staff members of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board wanted the agency to immediately distribute a safety bulletin and recommendations, saying the June blast exposed weaknesses in nationwide standards. The staff proposed guidelines that would require more controls on how…
sb admin | September 11, 2009The American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute® (ACS GCI) has teamed with stakeholders from industry, non-governmental organizations, and Federal and State agencies to develop a Sustainable Chemical and Process Technology Standard for the chemical industry. As stated in the January 2009 memo from the ACS GCI, the new Standard is intended toâ¦
â¦establish consistent requirements for sustainable chemical products and production technologyâ¦to demonstrate how chemical products can conform to the environmental, economic, and social principles of sustainability throughout the supply…
sb admin | September 2, 2009The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (a partnership between the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Pew Charitable Trusts) compiles an inventory of nanotech-enabled consumer products, and they recently announced that they've identified 1,000 nano products.
Given the many concerns about effects of nanoparticles on workers' health, human tissues, and even our water supply, it's too soon to be using nanoparticles widely - but that's exactly what's already happened.
Although nanotechnologies have many potentially valuable applications (like improving monitoring and…
sb admin | August 28, 2009by Kas
Universities nation-wide welcome students to their campuses for the start of a new academic year. With âsustainabilityâ on the lips of many university administrators and faculty, it comes as no surprise that new student orientations and university move-in programs have âgone green.âÂ
Some specific examples of âgreenâ activities at The George Washington University include the following:
1) New environmental health masterâs students were provided a tour of the Green Roof on campus.Â
2) The annual Green Move-In program is encouraging students to think about reusable packaging,…
sb admin | August 27, 2009by Kas
In August 2006, the National Vehicle Mercury Switch Recovery Program (NVMSRP) was established by the USEPA in a cooperative effort with auto manufacturers, steelmakers, dismantlers, shredders, State governments, environmentalists, and trade associations. The NVMSRP was designed to recover mercury-containing materials from scrap vehicles, specifically mercury switches used in convenience lighting (the reason the light turns on when the trunk is opened).
The NVMSRP was designed to be implemented at the State level. Currently, 15 States have programs that are either required by law…
sb admin | August 25, 2009One of the most e-mailed articles on the New York Times website today is Dickson D. Despommierâs op-ed âA Farm on Every Floor.â He has an intriguing proposal: grow crops inside tall buildings, a practice known as vertical farming. Since climate disruption is altering rainfall patterns and causing more floods and droughts, farmers are finding it harder and harder to produce food for a growing population. And agriculture as practiced today is a major user of water, which is in short supply in regions throughout the world.Â
Despommier has started a business to build vertical farms, so you can…
sb admin | August 24, 2009As evidence about the health risks associated with smoking accumulated, the tobacco industry responded by funding its own research, which concluded that cigarettes aren't so bad after all. They recruited spokespeople who'd proclaim tobacco's safety without revealing that they were being paid handsomely by cigarette manufacturers. These activities (and others in the same vein) helped stave off regulation of tobacco products and created a blueprint that other dangerous industries would adopt and refine in the years to come.
In the latest installment of their investigation into bisphenol A, Meg…
sb admin | August 21, 2009by Richard Denison, PhDÂ cross-posted from blogs.edf
In June, EPA published a Federal Register notice that included Significant New Use Rules (SNURs) for two carbon nanotubes (as well as 21 other chemicals). That notice certainly got the attention of lawyers in town (see here, here and here). The nanotube SNURs would require anyone planning to produce or process either of the two substances to notify EPA if the person intended not to comply with the (rather limited) risk management conditions specified by EPA. Well, as reported yesterday by Sara Goodman of E&E News, EPA is now…
sb admin | August 21, 2009Three physicians and researchers from the Capital University of Medical Sciences (Beijing, China) have published a case report in the European Respiratory Journal describing severe lung disease in seven female workers employed at a shop where they applied polyacrylic coatings to polystyrene boards. The lung disease is just one part of the story---two of the women died (ages 19 and 29)---the other part is that pathology samples from the workers' lungs identified 30 nm (nanometer) in diameter particles. Further investigation found that the coatings used by the workers contained nano…
sb admin | August 18, 2009Last year, FDA disappointed us by insisting that there was no cause for concern about the presence of the chemical bisphenol A in food and beverage containers. An expert panel charged with evaluating the FDAâs draft assessment strongly criticized the agency for its severely limited exposure assessment and the criteria it used to assess BPA studies. Then, Suzanne Rust and Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (whoâve won multiple awards for their coverage of BPA and other chemicals) reported that FDAâs report âwas written largely by the plastics industry and others with a financial…
revere | August 14, 2009If you are a paranoid hypochondriacal person with young children who lives in a suburb, you've come to the right/wrong place (take your pick). Because now you get to hear about Baylisascaris procyonis. What's that, you ask? The procyon part should be the tip-off, but I suppose not that many people know that Procyon is the genus to which raccoons (Procyon loto) belong. We're going to talk about raccoon latrines.
Yes, raccoons have latrines. Who would be crazy or stupid enough to build a latrine for raccoons? Other raccoons. Raccoons have communal defecating sites called raccoon latrines where…