Environmental health
sb admin | December 5, 2006While Indiaâs population has been growing, its rice harvests have been declining. Two of the culprits, reports the BBC (citing a study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), are particulate and greenhouse-gas pollution.
South Asia suffers from a particularly nasty âbrown cloudâ â layers of pollution containing soot and other fine particles. The brown clouds reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the crops, and polluted haze can also reduce rainfall. Researchers found that rice yields would have been higher under lower concentrations of greenhouse gases.
The BBC also…
sb admin | December 1, 2006By David Michaels
The Bush Administration is manufacturing uncertainty about global warming, even as its allies in the carbon producing industries are abandoning it.
Last week, the Washington Postâs Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin reported that âtop executives at many of the nation's largest energy companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable.â John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co, said
We have to deal with greenhouse gases. From Shell's point of view, the debate is over. When 90-plus…
sb admin | November 30, 2006By David Michaels
In a move that recognizes the post-election climate change in Washington, the EPA has told two Democratic Senators that it is revising plans to roll-back the reporting requirements of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). In a post yesterday, I wrote about TRI as an important (and cost-effective) example of "Regulation by Shaming" or "Democracy by Disclosure."
Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post obtained the letter EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson sent to New Jersey Democratic senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez in which he announced his plans. According to…
sb admin | November 29, 2006By David Michaels
Last week, public scorn forced Rupert Murdock, powerful chief executive of the News Corp, to cancel âIf I Did It,â OJ Simpsonâs book and Fox TV tie-in. While shaming has fallen out of favor in the field of criminal justice, the heaping of public scorn and anger - dating back to putting criminals in public stocks and labeling adulterers with a scarlet letter -- has long been recognized as a deterrent to unacceptable behavior
Shaming works on corporations as well as individuals. As a mechanism for restricting undesirable behavior, or promoting desirable behavior, shaming is…
sb admin | November 28, 2006by Liz BorkowskiÂ
Parties to the Basel Conventionâthe international treaty dealing with the transport and disposal of hazardous wastesâare meeting this week in Nairobi, and e-waste is on their agenda. Each year, consumers generate 20 â 50 million tons of e-waste (waste from electrical and electronic equipment), and it's full of hazardous substances: heavy metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, and chromium, and flame retardants such as polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) and polybrominated diphenylethers (PBDEs).
Much of the e-waste ends up in developing countries, where its toxic components…
revere | November 22, 2006China is becoming an environmental nightmare. Now experts from the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, a Chinese government think tank, have located the culprits. The rest of the world. We are forcing China to make products for them and as a result making their country an environmental paradise -- for polluters. Don't blame me for this bogus argument. I'm just telling you what they are saying:
A high-profile report released by a governmental think tank in Beijing, last week, berated current trade patterns, which resulted in China bearing the brunt of…
cmonforton | November 20, 2006by Celeste Monforton
From the Ground Zero construction site to an expansion of the Los Angeles International Airport, the tide seems to be turning for cleaner diesel engines, particulate filters and low-sulfur fuels. As Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter Alex Frangos writes: âInstead of belching black smoke, the bucket loaders, cranes and other diesel-power behemothsâ are being replaced with less-polluting equipment in order to win community support for massive construction projects in populated areas. Lawmakers are backing these measures, too. On November 1, Governor Pataki signed a…
lborkowski | November 18, 2006by Liz BorkowskiÂ
Nearly half of Mumbaiâs 18 million residents live in unofficial settlements called zopadpatti. In one of these areas, Dharavi, estimates suggest there is one toilet for every 1,4440 people, tap water flows for only two hours each day, and approximately 15 families share each water tap.
Around the globe, rural residents are migrating to urban areas and expanding these unofficial settlements, where global challenges in water and sanitation are highly visible. Many rural areas that struggled with water to begin with face new constraints as aquifers are depleted and global…
revere | November 9, 2006The Lancet has just published (NOvember 8, 2006, online publication) a major review of the scientific evidence suggesting developmental disorders in children traceable to chemicals in the environment is significant and largely overlooked. Authored by two internationally recognized scientists, Philippe Grandjean (Harvard School of Public Health and University of Southern Denmark) and Philip Landrigan (Mt. Sinai School of Medicine), the paper identifies 201 industrial chemicals with the capacity to cause a neurodevelopmental defect (NDD) such as autism, attention deficit disorder and mental…
revere | October 26, 2006A paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine is being reported to say that there is an apparent dose response relationship between cell phone and sperm counts, i.e., the more hours spent on the phone each day the lower sperm count levels.
Scientists in Cleveland, Mumbai and New Orleans tracked 364 men who were being evaluated for infertility, and split them into three groups based on sperm count. In the group whose sperm counts were within the normal range, those who used a cell phone more than four hours a day produced on average 66 million sperm…
revere | October 13, 2006Many years ago I received a call on a Sunday morning from Canadian Broadcasting asking if I would be on their live weekend radio show. They were scheduled to interview the Canadian Minister of Mines (or some such title, I forget what) about continued Canadian exports of asbestos. One of the things I used to joke about was that the asbestos industry and their allies would say anything, including asbestos was so safe you could eat it for breakfast. It was a joke. I thought.
Because this Canadian official got on the radio and said (I heard it with my own ears) that Canadian asbestos was safe and…
revere | October 2, 2006A couple of days ago Bloomberg's John Lauerman had an interesting story about guests leaving viruses behind in their hotel rooms.
During an overnight hotel stay, people with colds left viruses on telephones, light switches, television remotes, and even ice buckets, researchers said today at an infectious disease conference in San Francisco.
Infectious disease specialists caution people to wash their hands and avoid touching their noses and faces to avoid catching colds that infect about 60 million people in the U.S. annually.
[snip]
"When you touch surfaces a day later, the virus may still be…
revere | October 2, 2006Does the Bush administration always have to blame someone else? Does a bear shit in the woods? The Washington Post asks the second question and answers it with the first (hat tip Lindsay at Majikthise).
Here's the alleged problem. Some major rivers in the DC area, like the Anacostia and Potomac, don't meet EPA standards to be clean enough to swim in. Now work from Virginia Tech reveals that a lot of the enteric bacteria in these rivers that contribute to their non-attainment status come from local wild life, like deer, geese and raccoons, our co-habiting species in the modern suburb. Who is…
revere | September 28, 2006If you demolish two gigantic buildings full of hazardous materials like asbestos and acrid concrete products it isn't a surprise you would produce a hazardous environment. So it was no surprise the air around the World Trade Center was dangerous to breathe after 9/11, although we were told otherwise while officials knew better. Officials like then EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman (see post here).
We now can document it wasn't just Whitman who made the decision to "re-open" the Wall Street and financial districts adjacent to the WTC attacks after 9/11. The decision came all the way…
revere | September 23, 2006The Bush US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has done just what we have come to expect them to do: wimped out on keeping Americans truly safe. Oh, you expected them to protect your health? Yes, they will. In partnership with the Easter Bunny. The Tooth Fairy had enough and decamped to the Democrats.
What's this about?
When I first looked at air pollution epidemiology, the measurements of particulate matter in the air was in pretty crude terms, Total Suspended Particulates. You measured TSPs by sucking a measured volume of air through a filter, weighing the filter and then expressing it…
revere | September 20, 2006Christie Todd Whitman, former EPA Administrator under Bush, scores points with some reality-based humans because she clearly is a GOP moderate. Which means, of course, she's solidly right wing. Still, that doesn't mean she shouldn't be trusted or respected. No, this means she shouldn't be trusted or respected. From the every reliable Jordan Barab at Confined Space:
I never thought much of former EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman, especially regarding EPA's fatally weak warnings about the hazards of the smoke and dust coming off the collapsed World Trade Center towers, and her inability…
revere | September 6, 2006On Labor Day, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) issued a press release whose title summarizes its contents all too neatly: Bush Declares Eco-Whistleblower Law Void for EPA Employees. Here's some of it:
Washington, DC - The Bush administration has declared itself immune from whistleblower protections for federal workers under the Clean Water Act, according to legal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result of an opinion issued by a unit within the Office of the Attorney General, federal workers will have little…
revere | August 21, 2006The "fresh air" smell of a lot of air fresheners is really the smell of pollution according to a paper from scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. That's because 1,4 dichlorobenzene (1,4 DCB), found in air fresheners, toilet bowl cleaners, mothballs and various "deodorizing" products, also causes modest decreases in lung function.
"Even a small reduction in lung function may indicate some harm to the lungs," said NIEHS researcher Stephanie London, M.D., lead investigator on the study. "The best way to protect yourself, especially children who may have asthma…
revere | August 17, 2006In the days -- and weeks -- following the frantic rescue work after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the US EPA reassured everyone there was no harm from breathing the dust and fumes from that catastrophe. We now suspect this was quite wrong and EPA should have known it from the outset. Studies of Ground Zero rescue workers are beginning to show significant pulmonary function deficits and many workers are symptomatic. Since there was no registry of workers, unraveling the effects will be difficult, but there is an official commission and scientific studies under way.
Now we are…