Environmental health
revere | January 22, 2008Recently we posted on the EPA highly unusual (as in unprecedented) decision to reject Californian's new greenhouse gas regulations. Why did they do it? Good question and one the California Congressional delegation wanted an answer to. To whom did EPA talk about the regulations? Who advised them to reject it? Sorry. Mum's the word. Actually its words. Executive privilege:
Invoking executive privilege, the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday refused to provide lawmakers with a full explanation of why it rejected California's greenhouse gas regulations.
The EPA informed Sen. Barbara Boxer…
sb admin | January 22, 2008By Les LeopoldÂ
If you need a quick snooze, read a US Government Accountability Office report with its carefully parsed prose. But lost in the holiday rush was a December GAO report that could keep you awake as it bashes the Bush administrationâs effort to water down the community Right to Know regulations that provide us with potentially life-saving information about the use, storage and release of toxic substances. These regulations require that companies make detailed reports which form the Toxics Release Inventory â an accessible public database on the quantity of toxic chemicals on…
sb admin | January 18, 2008Many of us who grew up in the U.S. took water and electricity for granted, but more and more of us are bumping up against the limits of resources. Three stories in the news this past week illustrate what the difficulties are and how different parties address them.
Negotiating water use: It took more than three years of negotiation for farmers, fishers, and tribes in the Klamath River Basin (which spans parts of northern California and southern Oregon) to reach what the LA Timesâ Eric Bailey describes as âa breakthrough agreement.â Even after all that negotiating, two environmental groups…
revere | January 16, 2008Another one of those stories about what is truly, a technological marvel: shrinking a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer down to the size of an iPod, with the target size being that of a matchbox. Designed by MIT engineers, the device which can analyze the air for hazardous gases (and could be adapted for other media like water) is touted as a possible distributed sensor for water supplies to protect us against chemical attacks or in subway systems to warn of terrorist attacks. I think this is bullshit and I'll explain why after a description of this ingenious device:
Their detector uses gas…
sb admin | January 16, 2008A quick look at âChernobyl: Relationship between Number of Missing Newborn Boys and the Level of Radiation in the Czech Regionsâ by Miroslav Peterka, Renata Peterková, and ZbyneËk Likovsky´ in Environmental Health Perspectives.
As a rule, more boys than girls are born. But in November 1986 in the eastern regions of the Czech Republic, the reverse was true â more girls than boys. It appears that radiation exposure released by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in April 1986, brought to earth by rain over the area, increased radiation exposure. Fetuses that were approximately three months old at…
revere | January 11, 2008The Consumer Product Safety Commission is supposed to make sure toys and other consumer products are safe. They recalled 472 products last year. That's a pretty good record for a Lilliputian agency that has a staff of only 400. This is George Bush's dream -- shrinking the size of the government. CPSC started out life with 800 staff. If Bush's budget recommendations had been adopted by Congress it would have had to cut another 19 positions -- 5%. For once Congress didn't go along. They increased CPSC budget from $63 million to $80 million. The agency's head, former industry lawyer Nancy Nord,…
sb admin | January 11, 2008A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience last week reports a link between lead exposure and accumulation of Alzheimerâs-type plaque in the brains of primates. The National Institutes of Health-funded study examined the brain tissues of 23-year-old monkeys that had been exposed to lead for the first 400 days of their lives (resulting in blood lead levels of 19â26 µg/dl, but no overt signs of toxicity), and found that they had elevated expression of Alzheimerâs-related genes as well as altered levels, characteristics, and distribution of amyloid plaques, which are one of the hallmarks…
revere | January 8, 2008Faith-based environmental protection. Why not? The Bush administration isn't using the law or regulations:
Ignoring all legal and technical evidence -- and the advice of his career experts -- [EPA Administrator Steven] Johnson sided with the car industry and rejected the request of California to enforce the state's landmark greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles. (No fewer than 19 other states have already adopted these standards or are considering them, representing about half the U.S. population.) In fact, Johnson took action that his own legal team said was probably illegal.
[snip]
In…
sb admin | January 8, 2008Remember how EPA library closures and record purges were threatening public access to important environmental information? Now Congress is requiring the agency to restore library services, reports Katherine Boyle of Greenwire:
U.S. EPA must craft plans to reopen regional libraries shuttered from a Bush administration cost-cutting effort under a provision in the agency's fiscal 2008 budget.
Congress allocated nearly $3 million for restoring library services and requires the agency to report its progress to lawmakers within three months.
At issue are EPA libraries that were closed in Chicago,…
revere | January 7, 2008Lots of countries have or will mandate the use of low-energy light bulbs. That's it, for the incandescent bulb. Soon it will be just compact fluorescents or LEDs or whatever comes next. Along with this comes the inevitable news articles that start, "Health experts are warning that . . . ":
The Government's planned switchover from traditional light-bulbs to low-energy lighting could cause health problems for tens of thousands of people with skin conditions including eczema, experts have warned.
And there were warnings that consumers will have to take more care disposing of broken or expired…
sb admin | January 7, 2008The latest issue of National Geographic includes a story on e-waste thatâs worth reading â especially if you got a new computer, TV, or other electronic gift over the holidays and now need to figure out how to get rid of the old one.
Discarded electronic goods often contain a few useful bits â drives, memory chips, copper used in wiring â along with toxic substances like lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and beryllium. For an impoverished family, breaking down old computers can be a reliable way to earn much-needed cash, but the job is hazardous. Chris Carroll reports:
June is the wet season…
revere | December 26, 2007There's a lot of stuff about tainted food in the news, whether it is toxins in imports or questionable additives in US products (e.g., bisphenol A in hard plastics). This stuff is not on any food label, of course, but there is a lot of detailed stuff that is on labels and increased concern about food seems to have made label reading more common. I've always wondered if the detail was encouraging or discouraging people from reading labels. How many people read labels really? Quite a few, it turns out, at least if you believe a new report, Label Reading from a Consumer Perspective, by the…
revere | December 21, 2007Being a poultry worker, in any country is not wonderful. There's the risk of bird flu, of course. And lots of opportunity to be seriously injured. And its strenuous, difficult, low paying and dirty work, which is why it employs so many undocumented workers.
It also turns out it is a great way to pick up drug resistant E. coli:
Poultry workers in the United States are 32 times more likely to carry E. coli bacteria resistant to the commonly used antibiotic, gentamicin, than others outside the poultry industry, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg…
sb admin | December 20, 2007EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has denied Californiaâs petition to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucksâagainst the advice of technical and legal staff, reports the Washington Postâs Juliet Eilperin. Governor Schwarzenegger says his state will sue over the decision, and EPA lawyers and staff predict California will win that suit (just as states have won previous related suits).
Johnson claims that Californiaâs proposed tailpipe emissions standards arenât necessary, anyway, because the Energy Bill thatâs just been approved will boost fuel economy standards to a comparable…
sb admin | December 19, 2007Updated 12/20: See belowÂ
Four workers were killed and at least 14 people were injured in a violent explosion at the T2 Labs in Jacksonville, Florida. The firm manufacturers Ecotane®, the gasoline additive "methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl" (i.e., MMT® or MCMT), which increases the octane rating of gasoline. The firm says that its Florida facility is state-of-the art, and uses a "novel, safe and efficient process." We'll have to wait for OSHA or the Chemical Safety Board to tell us whether they had an effective process management safety system.Â
The company's…
sb admin | December 19, 2007The "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" (H.R. 6) has passed the House and Senate, and is making its way to President Bush for a signing ceremony today at DOE headquarters. Richard Simon of the Los Angeles Times reports that the measure is getting mixed reviews from interest groups. Opponents, like the Grocery Manufacturers Association, say it will drive up fuel costs, while others, like the Natural Resource Defence Council (NRDC), are generally positive about the bill for its incentives to cut pollution and invest in energy-efficient technologies. I haven't reviewed…
sb admin | December 18, 2007Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivoreâs Dilemma, writes in the latest New York Times Magazine about two stories that âmay point to an imminent breakdown in the way weâre growing food today.â The first is the rise of community-acquired MRSA (thatâs Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a nasty antibiotic-resistant bacteria) and the growing body of evidence linking it to the overuse of antibiotics in industrial pig production. The second is Colony Collapse Disorder, which is wiping out many of the honeybee colonies that farmers rely on for crop pollination.
âWeâre asking a lot of our…
sb admin | December 18, 2007The journal Epidemiology has just published new evidence that drinking hexavalent chromium -- also called chromium 6 -- increases risk of stomach cancer. The study is important for public health purposes, since many drinking water sources are chromium contaminated (including the water in the community in the movie Erin Brockovich).
This new study is also the latest piece of a very ugly scandal that illustrates how polluters manufacture doubt to impede regulation. And this scandal is but one of several in which chromium polluters have manipulated epidemiologic studies to sow uncertainty -…
sb admin | December 13, 2007If you live near a facility that releases between 500 and 2,000 pounds of a toxic chemical each year, you may be about to lose your access to important information about what you and your neighbors are potentially exposed to. Thatâs because EPA has changed its Toxics Release Inventory reporting requirements, raising the level at which facilities have to start detailed reporting on the release of designated chemicals from 500 pounds to 2,000. (More on the TRI and why it's important here.) Thanks to the new rule, more than 3,500 facilities will be able to skip filing more than 22,000 TRI…
sb admin | December 12, 2007By Dick Clapp
There were two reviews of Devra Davisâs new book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer (Basic Books, 2007), published in Lancet journals last month. One was in the November 24 issue of the Lancet and the other was in the November issue of Lancet Oncology. They are so diametrically opposite that one wonders if the reviewers had read the same book. The Lancet review is by Peter Boyle, the current director of IARC (the International Agency for Research on Cancer) - an agency that is widely respected but whose recent report on attributable causes of cancer has raised some…