Environmental health
sb admin | May 21, 2008The story of asbestos in this country ought to serve as a cautionary tale: A seemingly miraculous fiber was widely introduced into common consumer products; only after it was already in millions of homes did the general public realize that it causes a particularly terrible form of cancer. Now, treating victims and cleaning up contaminated communities is costing billions of dollars, while thousands of people endure the toll of a debilitating and deadly disease.
Nanotechnology is another innovation that promises to bring consumer products to a whole new level â and, once again, it looks like…
revere | May 21, 2008Stephen Johnson is a career professional, now the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. He is reported to be very religious and to hold prayer meetings with select staff at the start of the day. Apparently he also takes "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" seriously. Too bad he doesn't take the US law and his sworn responsibility to protect its citizens from environmental hazards as seriously. New revelations show he is a liar, morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest. I guess prayer has its limits as a motivator of probity:
Environmental Protection Agency chief…
sb admin | May 20, 2008Over the past few years, itâs become harder to access several sources of useful, up-to-date information about the substances weâre exposed to. There were the EPA library closures; the changes in Toxics Release Inventory reporting requirements; and a dramatic slowdown in the pace of Integrated Risk Information System assessments. Now, the USDAâs National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) has announced it will not be collecting agricultural chemical usage data on 2008 field crops.
Today, 45 prominent public interest groups â including NRDC, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Consumers…
revere | May 19, 2008It seems with every terrible natural disaster we have to say the same thing. Dead bodies aren't a public health risk:
Contrary to popular belief, dead bodies left from natural disasters such as the China earthquake and Myanmar cyclone are not a source of disease or a health threat to survivors, the World Health Organization said Friday.
[snip]
"There is a widespread and erroneous belief that dead bodies are a source of disease and therefore a threat to public health. This is untrue," [Arturo Pesigan, WHO's Western Pacific Region's headquarters in Manila] said.
"There has never been a…
revere | May 17, 2008It contaminates the water supplies of about 11 million people in 35 states. It is suspected of interfering with iodide cycling in a way that could suppress thyroid hormone, a hormone necessary for the proper development of the fetus. Its source is military bases and aerospace companies. The health and environmental agencies of affected states have been waiting years for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate it. A decision may come "before the end of the year" (just after the election):
Benjamin Grumbles, the EPA's assistant administrator for water, said the EPA will decide…
revere | May 16, 2008At this moment I'm sitting in a Chicago O'Hare airport waiting room reading a news article on MSNBC's website telling me I am in more danger from breathing the air here in the terminal than I would be breathing the air on the airplane when it reaches cruising altitude. This was the conclusion from a just published study done by the National Institute for Occupational Study and Health (NIOSH), the federal research agency on workplace health problems, and two collaborating universities, Harvard and University of Massachusetts. NIOSH has been looking into the environment of the cabin crews, but…
sb admin | May 15, 2008After dinner last night at a local tavern, I asked the waiter for a container to carry home our leftovers.  He promptly returned with a No. 5 plastic container (damn!).  Have you ever looked at the carry-out containers you receive from your local restaurants?  Are they made of a recyclable material? Are they made of a recyclable material that the city you live in will actually recycle?Â
According to the District of Columbia Office of Recycling, âcarry-out containersâ are not allowed in recycling bins. I propose that we petition the City Council to pass a law requiring…
sb admin | May 12, 2008By Olga Naidenko
After lead, asbestos, aromatic amine dyes, Minamata disease, Bhopal, and fluorochemicals, we presumably have learned something about worker safety, especially when it comes to large-scale production in cutting-edge chemical industries. So here comes the test: can we use this knowledge to ensure worker safety in the up-and-coming nanotechnology industry?
An international survey published in the May issue of Environmental Science and Technology addressed precisely this question: are nanomaterials firms and laboratories installing adequate, nano-specific environmental health and…
revere | May 11, 2008The subject of a recent post, rabies, put us in mind of another rare, invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease, Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD). There is now pretty good evidence that the outbreak of CJD in Europe since the 1990s is caused by the same agent that causes Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease. The incriminated transmissible material is an unconventional agent, an infectious protein (now called a prion). When a prion from a BSE case in cattle is consumed it causes a disease very like CJD in humans. Technically it is called new variant CJD (nvCJD…
revere | May 9, 2008Last October (2007) a 46 year old Minnesota man died of rabies, the only known victim in the US last year. Rabies is a rare disease in the US because we have good veterinary services. Most animals in routine and regular contact with humans are vaccinated against the disease. But bats have become a significant wild animal reservoir and the Minnesota case was a bat case:
Once rabies was suspected, the patient's family was interviewed on October 16 for a history of potential exposure. According to his family, the patient had handled a bat with his bare hands in a semi-open cabin porch in north-…
sb admin | May 6, 2008Despite worsening problems with climate disruption and air pollution, politicians and individuals have kept making bad transportation choices for decades. As a result, weâve got an unsustainable transportation system full of single-passenger gas-guzzling vehicles, and the only âsolutionâ that politicians have been able to unite around is ethanol, which worsens global hunger and nutrient runoff without producing net energy savings.
Thereâs a little bit of good news, though. Recent stories suggest that the negative consequences of bad gas choices are finally starting to steer consumers and…
sb admin | May 2, 2008Companies have evidently realized that marketing anti-bacterial products to U.S. consumers is a good way to make money, and are pushing a wide array of products that claim to have bacteria-fighting properties. (I've seen socks, computer products, toys ... and even a handy hook you can use to avoid touching a potentially germ-ridden door handle.) This might seem like a good thing - bacteria cause some pretty nasty diseases, after all - except that they're using nano-sized silver particles to fight the bacteria, and we don't know nearly enough about the effects of all the nano-sized particles…
sb admin | May 1, 2008The Chicago Tribune has just reported that Mary Gade, the Bush administrationâs top environmental regulator in the Midwest, has been forced to quit her job after months of efforts to get Dow Chemicals to clean up dioxin contamination around its Michigan headquarters. The Tribuneâs Michael Hawthorne explains:
Gade, a former corporate attorney appointed by Bush in September 2006, invoked emergency powers last year to force Dow to clean up four hot spots of dioxin, including the largest amount of the cancer-causing chemical ever recorded in the United States.
In January, Dow urged officials at…
revere | April 30, 2008Every day seems to bring a new story about the crap we are leaving strewn around our environment. Not just trash but chemical trash, the kind of stuff we eat, pop as pills or dispose of and which winds up as molecules in our air, water and food. You may think you know more than you want to about this but in fact you know very little about it because no one knows much about it. For example, there are no systematic measurements of the stuff in the raw water that goes into our water treatment plants, facilities designed to handle micro-organisms and not chemicals. The EPA has a program called…
sb admin | April 29, 2008Just as the 60-day deadline approached for filing a legal challenge to a new health standard to protect mine workers from asbestos exposure, mining industry trade associations submitted their petitions in federal court. MSHA's rule was published on February 29, and tick-tock, like clockwork, the National Mining Assoc, the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Assoc (NSSGA) and others filed suits in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, requesting judicial review of MSHA's rule. Under both the OSHA and MSHA statutues, "any person who may be adversely affect by a [newly promulgated]…
sb admin | April 29, 2008On the heels of the Union of Concerned Scientistsâ report on political interference with EPA scientists, the Government Accountability Office reports that the White House Office of Management and Budget is taking a major and non-transparent role in EPA toxic chemical assessments.
At issue is the agency's Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), which contains EPAâs scientific position on the potential human health effects of chemicals. There are 540 chemicals in the system now, but the process of adding them has slowed in recent years, and now thereâs a backlog of 70 chemicals. This…
revere | April 28, 2008On a couple of occasions (here, here) we've taken note of the scientific controversy regarding the plasticizer, bisphenol-A (BPA). I shouldn't really put it this way, because as the leading BPA researcher, Fred vom Saal of the Univeristy of Missouri said in the Washington Post over the weekend, there is no meaningful controversy any longer. Now that NIH's National Toxicology Program has finally presented its draft report on BPA expressing concern over possible carcinogenic and developmental effects, vom Saal's statement seems pertinent:
"The scientific community basically said, 'This argument…
revere | April 26, 2008We frequently observe here that almost everything in public health, from the societal level to the molecular level, is a balancing act. With most benefits comes a risk and with many risks a benefit. Of course there is a problem when the benefits and risks accrue to different parties as when the public runs the risks and the corporation gets the benefits. So that's one problem in making the trade-offs. Another is when the risks and benefits are completely different, essentially non-comparable. We often try to solve this by measuring them on a common scale like total number of lives saved or…
sb admin | April 22, 2008Angry Toxicologist makes a good point about Earth Day:
What's wrong with Earth Day?
The name, for one. Earth day. Protecting mother earth. Saving the environment. What's wrong with these? They're all about the earth. No humans mentioned. For a day that's supposed to highlight the damage we are doing and to energize some action, it's woefully off the mark. The degredation of the environment is harmful for people, this is what matters. Doubtless, there are those who care about the environment for the environment's sake. You are entitled to your value but let me tell you that the majority of…
sb admin | April 22, 2008by Lindsay Wheeler
Although today's the official Earth Day, I've been reflecting more and more on my own lifestyle and the efficiency with which I live. It started a few months ago, when I was watching the BBC series Planet Earth with my brother, and I found myself almost to the point of tears thinking about what we, as a human race, have done to the planet. I grew up spending summers in the backcountry of Wyoming and I have always considered myself as a person who has loved the outdoors. However, living in Washington, DC, I often find it easy to forget the fragility of the world…