Environmental health
revere | September 11, 2007When smoking bans in public places were first broached, some of the fiercest opposition came from bar and restaurant lobbyists who predicted it would be their ruination. In March of this year 2006 Scotland instituted a ban and the rest of the UK on July 1. What's the verdict so far? If you read the business news, you might be a bit confused. Here are five headlines about pub chain, JD Weatherspoon:
Wetherspoon sales slump on smoking ban (TimesOnline)
Wetherspoon Says Pub Sales Growth Slowed After Smoking Ban (Bloomberg)
Wetherspoon warns on smoking ban (Daily Telegraph)
Wetherspoon cautious…
revere | September 9, 2007Flying on an airplane used to be something special. Now it's just another means of mass transit, with all that implies. So our attention is more and more directed to the unpleasant parts of flying, which, for many is the lousy air quality. Modern pressurized airliners fly high -- very high indeed. Stratospherically, literally. When you are up 35,000 or 40,000 feet you are in the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere where there is little vertical movement of air (it is essentially a temperature inversion) and high ozone levels. Those ozone levels are a good thing for those of us at on the…
sb admin | August 30, 2007By Liz BorkowskiÂ
Here in the U.S., people seem to like the idea of our government ensuring that weâve got clean air, clean water, and healthy workplaces, and that our exposure to toxic substances is limited. However, we also keep electing politicians who make it hard for federal agencies to ensure these things.
Weâve written before about problems at OSHA, where workers suffer from preventable harm while officials emphasize voluntary compliance at the expense of standard-setting, and at FDA, where a rush to review new drug applications leaves post-market drug safety under-resourced. While…
revere | August 28, 2007I like John Edwards and tend to agree with him on poverty and campaign finance, although his Iraq war opposition is weak and ambiguous. But he's got a lot of company there, unfortunately. The one thing you can say about the Republican candidates is their pro-war stance isn't ambiguous. It is explicit -- disgustingly so. But that's not what this post is about. It's about different Edwards disappointment, his newly announced position on cancer policy. For someone who was a plaintiff's lawyer in tort cases and whose wife is a cancer patient, his policy is mostly silent about a public health…
revere | August 27, 2007I'm at the beach and it's hot. It's supposed to be that way at the beach. When I get overheated I head back to the unit, which is air conditioned, and I cool off. Actually, I don't. I stay the same temperature (body temperature), but that aside, it's no problem. But not everyone is so lucky and recently a good section of the US south has been having a heat wave. The same thing happens every summer (although some are worse than others), and two years ago I wrote about this on the old site. Instead of just reposting it I decided to rewrite it. At the time I was struck by a headline in the…
sb admin | August 23, 2007By Liz BorkowskiÂ
Revereâs been keeping us up to date on the latest news about the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences â specifically, the stepping aside of Director Dr. David Schwartz for an NIH investigation, and the letter sent to NIEHS employees with the apparent goal of discouraging whistle-blowing. It seems like a good time to review some NIEHS happenings that had already attracted congressional scrutiny.
Conflicted Contractors
As regular readers may recall, NIEHS lacks appropriate policies to identify and address potential conflicts of interest in contractors it hires…
sb admin | August 21, 2007Cross-posted by Revere at Effect Measure
You wonder when they will ever learn -- or IF they will ever learn. In the wake of yesterday's announcement that the Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Dr. David Schwartz, will step aside while NIH does an inquiry into allegations of turmoil at the institute and management irregularities, comes a letter sent to NIEHS employees -- and as far as we know only NIEHS employees -- asking for reporting of any contacts with Congress:
Employees of the National Institutes of Health in North Carolina are being asked to report all…
sb admin | August 21, 2007In a McClatchy Newspapers article, Kevin G. Hall shows how China and the Bush administration have both undermined efforts to keep lead out of children's products by opposing efforts to police Chinese imports. This description of the Bush administration's role will sound familiar to regular readers of this blog (emphasis added):
Consumer advocates say the Bush administration has hindered regulation on two fronts. It stalled efforts to press for greater inspections of imported children's products, and it altered the focus of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), moving it from…
sb admin | August 20, 2007Cross-posted by Revere at Effect Measure
In an email letter sent internally to all National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) personnel, its Director, Dr. David Schwartz, has announced he is temporarily stepping aside while the NIH Director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, conducts an internal review of NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program (NATP), both of which have come under fire from congressional, internal and outside critics (see our posts, here, here and here). Here is the text of Dr. Schwartz's email, as we received it:
Dear Colleagues:
As you know, there have been recent…
sb admin | August 17, 2007Apparently, thereâs something about a study involving cats and flame retardants that makes it irresistible blogging fodder. Lisa Stiffler at Dateline Earth was the first to alert us to the study, reporting that it linked catsâ PBDE exposure and hyperthyroidism. (PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers, are flame retardants that have been banned in Washington state due to health concerns associated with them.) The Olive Ridley Crawl points out a logical fallacy regarding PBDE and reminds us that correlation is not causation. Eric DePlace at Gristmill and EvilMonkey at Neurotopia combine info…
sb admin | August 16, 2007By Liz Borkowski
Aman at Technology, Health & Development reminds us that itâs World Water Week, and provides a great collection of water-related links for the occasion. Several of the articles are about a backlash against bottled water â apparently, a critical mass of people has just discovered that a) tap water is often as clean, if not cleaner, than bottled water and b) that buying bottled water is wasteful.
Now that weâre all quenching our thirst with tap water again, this might be a good time to look at a few concerns that have been arising about municipal water supplies.
Angry…
sb admin | August 9, 2007The expert panel evaluating the chemical bisphenol A for the National Toxicology Program has âsome concernâ that BPA exposure causes neural and behavioral effects in developing fetuses, infants, and children. The panel has âminimal concernâ or ânegligible concernâ that BPA affects the prostate or causes premature puberty or birth defects. (PDF draft meeting summary here)
Several scientists and health advocates have expressed far more concern about the effects of BPA, an estrogen-like compound thatâs found in plastic and also in most of our bodies. Last week, 38 scientists published a…
revere | August 8, 2007Maybe I'm not the right person to bring this message as I drink very little in the way of fluids each day, at least compared to my students who will, I am sure, have to be surgically removed from their water bottles. Of course I've also had kidney stones twice, so I'm not suggesting anyone do as I do. How much you should drink is unknown. The 64 oz. recommendation everyone has heard is probably way too high and has no basis in science. But whether it's 40 oz. or 50 oz. or something else I don't know and neither does anyone else. My 30 oz. is probably too low.
But I would also urge you to…
sb admin | August 7, 2007It no longer seems unusual to see an article in the Washington Post or the New York Times about Bush administration officials interfering with science for political reasons. Over the past week, though, two major news sources that reach a different audience have given this problem a lot of ink.
Dan Verganoâs USA Today article âScience vs. politics gets down and dirtyâ begins with the example of former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, who testified recently about administration officials suppressing health reports, and goes on to describe clashes between officials and scientists at the Fish…
sb admin | August 6, 2007In today's New York Times, Eric Lipton and Louise Story examine the problem of lead in inexpensive children's jewelry. Inspections have found lead problems one out of five times when testing these products, suggesting that hundreds of thousands of contaminated jewelry items remain on the market. Here's why jewelry is particularly problematic:
Jewelry is perhaps the most dangerous place for lead because children can swallow an entire ring or pendant, causing acute poisoning, which can cause respiratory failure, seizures and even death, whereas neurological damage and learning deficiencies are…
revere | August 3, 2007We don't usually talk about stories published in Physics Today, a publication of the American Institute of Physics. But a recent one caught our attention for two reasons. One, it is about the effects of non-ionizing radiation (in this case an oscillating electric field) and a biological effect, cell division. The second reason is that physicists have been telling us for decades such effects are physically impossible. The only physical effect would be heating a cell, they said. They ridiculed epidemiologists who found an association between powerline frequency electromagnetic fields and…
sb admin | August 2, 2007By Harrison Newton, National Nursing Centers Consortium (Lead Safe DC)
The recent recall of top-selling toys made by Mattel Inc. because they âcouldâ contain the neurotoxin lead should cause government, academia and the public to consider why we are still allowing lead to harm our communities. Canât we do better?
Of course we can, and the industries that have spent the last 100 years pushing lead into our homes could be doing a lot more to help. In the Washington D.C. area, hundreds of children this year will suffer the effects of lead, which has been proven to decrease IQ, ability to…
revere | August 2, 2007When it comes to protecting us from chemical carcinogens, the Bush administration has never been part of the solution. In fact they have consistently taken the side of the solvent, in this case the ubiquitous (and notorious) chlorinated ethylene solvent, trichloroethylene, or TCE for short. One of the most prevalent contaminants in US groundwater, TCE has been in regulatory limbo for years while EPA does one evaluation after another. If it doesn't like the answer it gets from its scientists and outside panels, it kicks it over to the National Academy to study some more. NAS then confirms what…
sb admin | August 2, 2007Our regular readers may remember that back in March, environmental advocates raised concerns about the National Toxicology Program contractor preparing a draft report on bisphenol A, because the contractor had ties to companies that manufacture this particular chemical. (Read past posts on the issue.) After investigating the allegations, the NTP fired the contractor, Virginia-based Sciences International.
Now, Susanne Rust of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that the NTP has conducted an audit and found no imporpriety in the preparation of the report, which will provide background…
sb admin | July 26, 2007By David Michaels
We are pleased that the Washington Post has come to the same conclusion we have here at the Pump Handle (see here and here): something needs to be done to shake up the attorneys at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In an editorial today entitled FEMA's Toxic Environment, the Post tells FEMA director R. David Paulison that âknocking a few heads in FEMA's general counsel's office would be a good first step" in sending a strong signal that the beleaguered agency needs to undergo major changes.
The environment at FEMA is certainly toxic to the Katrina victims, many of…