Environmental health
sb admin | March 4, 2008Environmentalism sometimes gets treated as a luxury, something that countries can pursue once theyâve attained a certain GDP. In China, though, galloping economic growth has created an unprecedented environmental crisis, and citizens are organizing to stop industrial pollution, even though they know it might mean fewer jobs.
In todayâs Washington Post, Edward Coody reports that residents of southern Chinese fishing towns are protesting a planned chemical facility that has already been rejected by residents of another city:
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Violent protests erupted in several southern Chinese fishing towns…
revere | March 1, 2008Full disclosure: I know the toxicologist who is the subject of this post. Not well. But I know her and I know her work and she is, as the story from the LA Times says, a highly respected scientist. And no shrinking violet, which accounts for the fact that the Bush EPA has dismissed her from an expert panel on brominated flame retardants widely used in consumer products like upholstery and electronic equipment. Your body is also full of them. Well, at least that's true for some 90% of Americans. Maybe you are the one in ten. Back to the one in 300,000,000, the President of this country (for…
sb admin | February 29, 2008Weâve written before about the problems with conflicts of interest on EPA scientific advisory panels. In particular, we think scientists working for product defense firms, whose money comes from clients seeking to avoid regulation of their products, ought to be barred from such panels. Now, a group is raising concerns about bias on an EPA panel reviewing the brominated flame retardant deca â but the charge comes from an industry group thatâs concerned about the state-government scientist chairing the panel, and the EPA has acceded quickly to their wishes.
The LA Timesâ Marla Cone reports:…
sb admin | February 28, 2008The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has ruled that Californiaâs regulation of pollution from ships using its port is pre-empted by the Clean Air Act, and thus requires a waiver from the EPA. This is bad news for the state, since the last time it requested a waiver from EPA, the agency delayed for a long time and then denied the request â against the advice of its legal and scientific staff.
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Ships arriving at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are a major source of the particulates, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur that make the regionâs air so unhealthy. (The ports are…
revere | February 27, 2008Chromium is OK when it's on your car bumper but not so OK when it's in your workplace air or your drinking water. That's because chromium, in some of its forms, causes cancer. In fact it is a remarkably good carcinogen. A few years, ago both epidemiological studies and risk estimates done by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suggested the lifetime risk of dying of lung cancer for workers exposed at the then workplace limits as about 25%. This is higher than for heavy cigarette smokers. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) lowered the workplace standard by a…
revere | February 26, 2008As I write this I am at 30,000 feet winging my way to Montreal, Canada, where the temperature is below freezing. So what more appropriate topic than microbial hazards of bathing beaches? Maybe it was my foray into the wonderful world of fecal accidents that prompted me to look further into the subject but I found a couple of papers from last year by a groups at Johns Hopkins about the effect of bather density on levels of parasites pathogenic for humans at one particular beach in Maryland, the Hammerman area of Gunpowder Falls State Park in Chase, Maryland in mid to late summer of 2006 (here…
revere | February 25, 2008I hate writing posts like this almost as much as people hate reading them. But write them I must. It's the cell phone issue again.
Health risks from cell phones aren't supposed to happen because the radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation involved is not energetic enough to ionize molecules. The damage done by ionizing radiation is related to the chemical changes that ensue from the ionizations. Those chemical changes don't occur with exposure to non-ionizing radiation. The most non-ionizing radiation is supposed to do is heat of up the tissue (as in a microwave oven), and the thermal…
sb admin | February 20, 2008As the recent problems with tainted food, drugs, toys, and other consumer products have made clear, our regulatory system has a lot of holes in it. Part of the problem is the current reluctance of agency appointees to do anything that might burden the industries in question, but thatâs not the whole story. Itâs also the case that the laws we rely on to protect us from dangerous products simply arenât strong enough.
The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (at the University of Massachusetts Lowell) has just issued two reports that pinpoint the policy problems weâre facing and offer…
sb admin | February 19, 2008If you havenât heard yet, USDA has ordered the largest meat recall in U.S. history â 143 million pounds of beef from the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company. USDA officials believe that the meat distributed by the company poses little or no hazard to consumers, which is fortunate, because much of it has been eaten already. Itâs being recalled because the company failed to follow procedures necessary to prevent sick cows from entering the food supply.
Violations at the Hallmark meat packing facility came to light a few weeks ago, when an undercover Humane Society investigator released video…
revere | February 16, 2008It's official. Living in one of the 120,000 trailers FEMA supplied after Hurrican Katrina is bad for you:
Federal health officials on Thursday urged hurricane victims to move out of trailers supplied by FEMA after tests showed dangerous levels of formaldehyde fumes.
Tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on more than 500 trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi showed formaldehyde levels that were five times higher than levels in a normal house. The levels in some trailers were nearly 40 times what is normal.
The CDC said people should move out quickly -- especially children,…
sb admin | February 14, 2008Public health values prevention. In many cases, this means spending a relatively small amount of money up front (on things like water treatment and vaccination) to avoid spending a lot more money later (on medical care, lost productivity, and reduced earning potential - not to mention quality of life).
In the past few days, I've come across two examples of governments facing a stark choice between paying for something now, or paying a lot more later. It at least one case, it looks like the elected officials will stick with boneheaded option.
Here's Lynda Waddington at RH Reality Check,…
sb admin | February 14, 2008Reporters and bloggers are using the occasion of Valentineâs Day to explore the health and environmental aspects of typical gifts and recommend worker- and Earth-friendly alternatives.
â¢Â Jennifer Sass at NRDCâs Switchboard blog describes how typical greenhouse practices harm flower workers, and offers some healthier Valentineâs Day suggestions.
â¢Â The Green Guide at Grist suggests some green options for flowers and chocolate.
â¢Â Terra Sigillata alerts us to a romantic tune that can be downloaded to benefit the Prostate Cancer Foundation.
â¢Â The LA Timesâ Margot Roosevelt reports on…
sb admin | February 12, 2008Forbes has created a âMisery Measureâ to rank the countryâs 150 biggest metro areas, and I wasnât surprised to see Detroit awarded the title of Most Miserable City. What did surprise me, though, was one of the factors Forbes considered: number of Superfund sites. Kudos to them for acknowledging that hazardous waste has a way of interfering with residentsâ happiness.
The article doesnât go into detail about Superfund misery; for that, we can look at an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, which discovered that site cleanups are dragging, companies are forking over less to clean up…
sb admin | February 11, 2008The tumultuous tenure of Dr. David Schwartz, who directed the NIH National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, is over. Bob Grant at TheScientist.com reports:
During his time as NIEHS director, Schwartz's leadership was often questioned. Scientists and lawmakers criticized Schwartz in 2005 when he pushed for privatizing the institute's journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, and last August more than 100 NIEHS researchers voted no confidence in Schwartz to protest his management. Later in August, Schwartz took a temporary leave while NIH and NIEHS reviewed his management and…
sb admin | February 7, 2008Pulitzer-winning Seattle P-I reporter Andrew Schneider is already known to many in the public health world: He broke the Libby, Montana story,  and tracked the asbestos problem across the country. With fellow P-I reporter Robert McClure, he revealed the environmental devastation from mining on public lands in the West. He started writing about the dangers of diacetyl before it was cool, and stepped up (when OSHA wouldnât) to investigate the potential diacetyl exposure of restaurant cooks.
Now, Andrew Schneider has launched a blog, âSecret Ingredients,â at the Seattle P-I. Hereâs his reason…
sb admin | February 6, 2008This month's Environmental Health Perspectives features an informative but disturbing article by Andrea Hricko entitled  "Global Trade Comes Home". It describes the adverse impact on communities of the "goods movement" system, where imports to the U.S.---electronics, food, toys, furniture--- make their way from waterfront ports to trains and trucks, and into warehouses and to our neighborhood stores. Hricko, an associate professor at USC's Keck School of Medicine, with first-hand experience working with families who live near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, paints the…
revere | February 6, 2008Bird flu is all over the Indian state of West Bengal and the country that borders it on the east, Bangladesh. The Ganges River flows through West Bengal, dividing in two, with one branch headed into Bangladesh. The Gangetic alluvium and delta region also has another unhappy claim to fame: it is the site of an enormous chronic poisoning from groundwater containing naturally occurring arsenic.
The mass poisoning that is occurring in West Bengal and Bangladesh is another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Drinking water is one of the most important resources for any community and the…
sb admin | January 29, 2008In San Francisco, large grocery stores are no longer allowed to give out the disposable, non-biodegradable plastic bags that have formed a giant patch of plastic (twice the size of Texas) in the Pacific Ocean and caused a host of other problems. The Whole Foods supermarket chain will halt plastic-bag distribution on Earth Day this year, and China's ban on plastic bags will take effect on June 1.
In light of China's actions, the Guardian looked at other countries that have taken steps to ban or limit the distribution of plastic bags:
At least 40 countries, states and major cities have imposed…
revere | January 23, 2008This week sees the tenth anniversary of an important event in the American environmental movement, although few people know it (even some who were there had forgotten the date). In late January, 1998, a group of 32 environmental scientists, activists and scholars sat down together at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin to hash out a consensus statement on The Precautionary Principle. After a grueling three days, the statement was put into final form on January 25 (just in time to see my beloved Green Bay Packers lose the Superbowl. Is history repeating itself? Aargh!).
In…
sb admin | January 23, 2008At the second annual Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø, Norway, 500 experts are discussing the outlook for oil and gas production in the rapidly warming Arctic. As is all too common these days, theyâll do so without the benefit of all the information that scientists worked hard to compile about the topic. Christoph Seidler reports in Der Spiegel that the final âArctic Oil and Gasâ report, the product of four yearsâ work by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, is missing 60 recommendations that scientists had compiled for politicians. Can you guess who was behind the editing?…