To better accommodate our staff schedules, bulletins will be distributed on Wednesdays, starting with this issue.
Please check the CHE-WA website to stay abreast of the latest postings, news and events: http://washington.chenw.org.
To join the Collaborative on Health and the Environment-Washington (CHE-WA), please complete the form at http://washington.chenw.org/index.html#member.
September 7-8, 2006
Bellevue, Washington
at the Meydenbauer Center
The Puget Sound Partnership meets regularly in its quest to develop an aggressive 15-year plan to solve Puget Sound's most vexing problems. The Partnership is holding a series of general public forums and specific scientific forums throughout the summer and fall.
Website: http://www.pugetsoundpartnership.org/
Contact: Martha Neuman, 206-625-0230 or mneuman@sharedsalmonstrategy.org
from Washington Toxics Coalition
The State Alliance for Federal Reform of Chemicals Policy (SAFER) is a strategic, tightly coordinated national campaign whose long-term vision is to establish a new precautionary federal chemicals policy by 2020. The core strategy of this state-based campaign is to launch and win a critical mass of comprehensive policy measures in key states to tip the balance for achieving reform at the national level.
SAFER is a new campaign that is a response to one of the most pressing public health and environmental challenges facing the U.S. and the globe- the growing rates of cancer, developmental disorders, asthma, and other health effects caused in part by toxic pollution entering our lives.
The candidate must be deeply passionate about protecting public health and the environment and be persistent in the face of great challenges. We are looking for someone committed to working with a diverse set of groups and individuals spread across the nation as part of a core strategy for building the long-term movement to win dramatic policy changes. We are looking for a candidate who knows how to run complex campaigns. Candidates should have at least 5 years of relevant experience, including work in policy and political settings, coalition management, and fundraising.
While we would prefer the position to be housed with one of the SAFER steering committee members, the location is flexible throughout the United States. The position is open until filled.
Send resume, cover letter, three references, and a brief one-page summary of your list of campaign and coalition building accomplishments to:
SAFER Search Committee
Washington Toxics Coalition
4649 Sunnyside Avenue N, Suite 540
Seattle, WA 98103
The Washington Public Interest Research Group is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest advocacy organization. With 20,000 members across the state, WashPIRG has been advocating for and organizing on public interest issues for two decades. Using the time-tested tools of investigative research, media exposure, grassroots organizing, advocacy, and litigation, we deliver persistent, results-oriented public interest activism that improves the quality of the environment, our government, and of Washingtonians' lives.
Job Description
WashPIRG's Environmental Advocate would play the following roles: issue expert, political strategist, researcher, advocate, media liaison, political organizer, organization builder. Qualifications include passion and persistence. We're looking for a goal-driven and results-oriented individual who is committed to the public interest, someone with leadership skills and initiative, and the verbal and written skills necessary to make the case that protecting the environment must be a top priority. Candidates should have 3 to 8 years of relevant professional experience, post-college, including (but not limited to) work in political, policy, legal, journalistic or government settings. For more information, please see http://www.pirg.org/jobs/positions/show/55.
Send a compelling cover letter and resume to careers@pirg.org. Please specify which position you are applying for in the subject line of the e-mail, and be sure to mention where you saw our job advertised. We'll carefully consider your application and if we think you're a good fit, we'll be in touch.
Job Description
We are seeking an Executive Director to lead our continued efforts to protect the public interest. We're looking for a talented and dedicated individual who will bring creative ideas and gumption to the environmental and consumer challenges facing Washington state. The director's responsibilities includeo perations, advocacy, campaign strategy, media outreach and fundraising. Qualifications include passion and persistence. We're looking for a goal-driven and results-oriented individual who is committed to the public interest, someone with leadership skills and initiative, and the verbal and written skills necessary to make the case that protecting the public interest must be a top priority. Candidates should have 8 or more years of relevant professional experience, post-college, including (but not limited to) work in political, policy, legal, journalistic or government settings. Advanced degrees, including a JD or masters in related fields, may count toward a candidate's professional experience. Send your cover letter and resume to careers@pirg.org. Please specify which position you are applying for in the subject line of your e-mail, and be sure to mention where you saw our job advertised. For more information, please see http://www.pirg.org/jobs/positions/show/56.
by Karen Auge, Denver Post
July 25, 2006
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_4091083
Two weeks ago, Dr. Dan Hall looked around his intensive-care unit at Children's Hospital and realized there were four babies born with their intestines outside their bodies. When Hall started in medicine three decades ago, so many babies with that condition -- gastroschisis -- would have been unheard of. And unthinkable. Now, it is hardly unusual.
Researchers are still putting together definitive numbers on how many babies are born with the condition. But doctors in Colorado report they have seen a frightening and baffling increase in a condition that, while not fatal to about 90 percent of babies who get it, has no known cause. One of the doctors, at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, recently received a federal grant to investigate what could be behind the increase.
So far, researchers can say with certainty only that the malady is not genetic, that most babies can lead normal lives if treated and that it is more than three times as likely to occur in mothers 20 years old or younger. At the same time, pediatricians and obstetricians from Washington state to South Carolina, from British Columbia to Australia are reporting similar increases in the number of cases. In North Carolina, a study in the early 1990s found that out of every 10,000 babies born in that state, 1.4 had gastroschisis. A decade later, the number was 4.49 out of every 10,000, said Shilpi Chapra, a pediatrician at the University of Washington in Seattle. In Canada, the rate grew from 1.85 per 10,000 between 1986 and 1990 to 4 per 10,000 between 1996 and 2000, Chapra said. "People are calling this an epidemic," she said. She doesn't disagree.
In the past couple of years, Chapra has crossed the country presenting papers on the rise of gastroschisis. The response is universal: "People come up to me and tell me, 'We need to do something about this. We have five cases right now.'" Chapra returned to her Seattle office after one presentation and found a phone message from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC researchers are trying to measure whether gastroschisis has become more common -- and wanted her help. A number of states, including Colorado, are contributing data.
Chapra's interest in the condition began during a fellowship at the University of Kentucky. "I had never seen so many gastroschisis cases -- over 15 months, I saw 19." Nurses at the university hospital wrote it off as a rural phenomenon, she said. But when Chapra looked deeper, she found that wasn't the case.
Searching for reasons
Researchers are convinced gastroschisis is not genetic -- but they're struggling to determine its cause. Instead, babies with gastroschisis had been born to mothers from 24 different counties, urban and rural. Counting the cases is one thing. Explaining the apparent increase is quite another. Researchers are convinced the condition is not genetic. It seems to strike male babies and female babies in equal proportions.
Researchers theorize that gastroschisis happens because something inhibits growth of the baby's blood vessels, and they have compiled a long list of possible culprits. Cigarettes, pesticides and methamphetamine are on the list, but so are such seemingly innocuous things as aspirin and Sudafed. "It's not something biological. It has to do with environmental factors -- either drugs or nutritional issues or both," said Hall. Chapra believes that whatever the environmental trigger may be, the timing of exposure to it is critical. She points to one study in which mice were given aspirin on day eight of pregnancy. There was no increase in gastroschisis among their babies. But when mice moms-to-be were given aspirin at nine days, there was an increase, she said.
The only characteristic that links most babies with gastroschisis is each mother's age. "The incidence is much higher in others under 20," said Regina Reynolds, a CU neonatologist. Reynolds, who started noticing the increase in gastroschisis cases at CU several years ago, has been awarded a grant to study what might be causing the increase. Onieda Lohman, 20, is one of those young moms.
Lohman's baby, MaKenzie Loh man Herdt, was born June 9 at University of Colorado Hospital. That she came eight weeks early and weighed a little over 2 pounds was a surprise. That she had gastroschisis was not. Lohman was 12 weeks pregnant when her doctor said an ultrasound showed something was not quite right: gastroschisis. She went home and cried. Then she got on the Internet, and much of what she found reassured her: Roughly 90 percent of babies born with the condition survive.
"Obviously, it's a tough diagnosis," said Dr. Henry Galan, director of obstetrics at CU, who works with high-risk pregnancies. Galan said it's important to emotionally prepare parents who are expecting a baby with gastroschisis, because the condition is so visually disturbing and the parents tend to be very young. He even shows them a medical-textbook picture of a gastroschisis baby -- "if I think they can handle it." And he emphasizes the positive: "It's not without risks, but it's fixable," he said.
That's what doctors told Loh man. "They said, 'Of all the birth defects, this is the one to get,"' she said, holding MaKenzie in a Children's Hospital room as MaKenzie's dad, Adam Herdt, looked on. Usually, prenatal tests alert doctors when a woman is expecting a baby with gastroschisis, which allows doctors to closely monitor the pregnancy.
Intestines form outside the body in all babies. Then, at about 10 weeks' gestation, the abdominal wall closes around the gut. In babies with gastroschisis, that doesn't happen. The intestines can function while the baby is in the womb, although not as efficiently as they should, and gastroschisis babies often are small, Galan said. Once the baby is born, the exposed intestines need to be protected, not only from infection but from twisting that could cut off the blood supply. "In a significant percentage of cases, the kids are born and we can take them right to the (operating room) and put the intestines back in and close it right up," said Michael Alls house, a pediatric surgeon who operates on babies with gastroschisis at Children's Hospital.
But in some babies, especially premature babies, putting the entire intestine in at once would cause too much pressure, making it hard for the baby to breathe, he said. For those babies, there is another option -- a silo. The silo is a cylindrical covering applied to the exposed intestine. Over time, it helps ease the gut inside the baby.
Babies typically stay in the hospital four to six weeks, depending on how well they are able to digest food, Allshouse said. At five weeks -- and after two surgeries -- MaKenzie is improving steadily, taking milk through a tube in her nose and actually eating three times a day, Lohman said.
Once the babies go home, the long-term outlook is good, Galan said. "If there aren't any significant bowel complications, they probably end up leading a normal life," he said. Allshouse said he warns parents that for the first year, their babies may be fussier than normal, because their stomachs aren't always working smoothly.
Lohman has no idea what might have caused MaKenzie to have gastroschisis. She just knows that her baby is getting better, and she can't wait to take her home. "We're lucky," Lohman said, smiling at her daughter. "And we're happy with what we got."
by Rebecca Palmer, Wellington [New Zealand] Dominion Post
July 25, 2006
excerpts from the complete article at http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3742526a7144,00.html
New Zealand researchers -- particularly at Auckland University's Liggins Institute -- are helping to establish how nutrition in the womb influences health throughout life. Dr Coad says it is not only what women eat during pregnancy but also what they eat beforehand that have impacts. "If they are crash dieting or bingeing or just eating very badly, it might have knock-on consequences."
The foetus responds to the environment in the womb by making physiological adaptations that prepare it for life after birth -- a process known as foetal programming. Foetuses short of nutrients tend to be smaller and have smaller organs, allowing them to use the nutrition they get more efficiently. "It's a really good survival mechanism. The downside is there's a cost with that." Researchers have found links between a small birthweight and increased risks of heart disease, diabetes, lung disease and hypertension in adulthood.
Ironically, a woman who diets before or during pregnancy can set her child up for future obesity because her foetus is preparing for a world with little food. "They are just predisposed to becoming obese and, as they get old, diabetes."
But women who suffer from morning sickness do not necessarily deprive their babies of nutrition. "Usually it's just transient," Dr Coad says. The placenta also has "some really good transport mechanisms", she says. However, those experiencing severe vomiting can lose too many electrolytes and need rehydration. In mature women, the body tends to prioritise the foetus, giving it the nutrition it needs first. "There's kind of a hierarchy of importance." In pregnant teenagers, there is more of a balance between mother and child.
Paradoxically, studies have found that undernourished women are less likely to experience morning sickness than those who are well-nourished. Women with a healthy weight should gain between 11.5 and 16 kilograms during pregnancy, according to the Health Ministry guidelines. But the requirements vary -- thinner women may need to gain more weight and obese women, much less.
Vegetarian women are not likely to cause problems for their foetuses, as long as they are careful to have a balanced diet. "A lot of women who are vegetarian are a little bit more nutritionally aware anyway," Dr Coad says. Nutrients that vegetarians and vegans need to pay particular attention to are protein, iron, zinc, calcium, vitamin A, vitamin B12 and the fatty acids usually found in eggs, meat and fish.
Most women should not avoid common food allergens, though those whose families have a history of hay-fever, asthma or eczema are advised to avoid peanuts and peanut products while pregnant and breast-feeding. DR COAD says alcohol consumption continues to be a concern, especially as many women do not plan their pregnancies. An Otago University study issued this month found 20 per cent of the mothers and pregnant women surveyed had binged on alcohol at some point during their pregnancy. But most had not realised they were pregnant. More than half of the 1256 women surveyed thought it was okay to drink some alcohol during pregnancy, despite new Health Ministry guidelines that advise total abstinence. Alcohol consumption during pregnancy can cause foetal alcohol syndrome, which has varying effects, including unusual facial features and intellectual impairment. At the lower end of alcohol exposure, infants may show learning and behavioural difficulties.
There is no known safe period or safe amount for drinking during pregnancy. "Certainly the changes in the face are associated with drinking early, but the brain is developing all through gestation and afterwards," Dr Coad says. Alcohol can be transferred to a baby through breast milk.
Foodborne illnesses also pose dangers to the unborn child. A raft of foods -- everything from cream to sushi -- can contain harmful bacteria. Pregnant women need to take extra care with food safety and are advised to avoid prepared foods, wash fruit and vegetables well, cook food thoroughly and not eat raw eggs, meats or fish. Listeria is a bug commonly found in the environment, including in plants, animal faeces, dust and soil. Though not a problem for most people, it can be disastrous in pregnant women. Other foodborne nasties include campylobacter, salmonella and toxoplasma. They can cause miscarriage, stillbirth, premature birth or illness or premature death in an infant. However, Dr Coad says it is uncommon for food to be a cause of miscarriage.
All in all, what women eat and drink before and during pregnancy can have profound impacts on the health of their children. But Dr Coad says many New Zealand women do not actively prepare for pregnancy. "It's quite typical in Westernised cultures, where people don't want to get too ready." A lack of planning means women might inadvertently put their unborn children in danger or miss out on some of the nutrients they need. For instance, the importance of getting enough folic acid during pregnancy is well-known, "but most women don't start till they've had their pregnancy confirmed". Taking folic acid supplements is advised at least four weeks before conception.
If it all seems like a hassle, Dr Coad points out that measures that encourage foetal health -- such as eating nutritious foods and reducing caffeine and alcohol consumption -- are good for women too. "They will probably feel better for it anyway."
by Anna Smyth, Scotsman
July 24, 2006
http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1070362006
MOISTURISE, moisturise, moisturise is the mantra of most women, but many of those creams claiming to keep our skins smooth and wrinkle-free contain parabens, which may not be so kind to your health. Parabens are used frequently in face moisturisers and body creams because they can inhibit microbial growth, so extending the shelf life of products both in-store and at home.
However, researchers at the Clinico Hospital in Spain have proposed a possible link between parabens and breast cancer, after finding increased levels of environmental parabens in breast tissue removed from cancer patients. The study cited cosmetics as one of the most common sources of the absorbed chemicals. According to the lead scientist, Dr Nicolás Olea, cosmetics that include oestrogenic substances (parabens, phthalates and some ultraviolet filters such as benzophenone) strengthen the effects of the female hormone, which drives the development of cancer.
Dr Chris Flowers, a toxicologist and the director general of the cosmetics trade association, the Cosmetic Toiletry and Perfumery Association (CTPA), suggests there is little scientific concern: "There is actually no evidence that parabens are absorbed through the skin, but even if they were the quantities required to effect cancer growth would be staggering."
If you share the concerns of the Spanish scientists, check the ingredients list on the back of all your beauty products -- the National Environmental Research Institute of Denmark found that 77 per cent of rinse-off cosmetics contain parabens (the figure rises to 99 per cent for leave-on cosmetics such as sunscreens). You might not see the word parabens, but that does not mean they are not there, as these chemicals might be listed as methylparaben, ethylparaben, propylparaben or butylparaben.
When buying your moisturiser also look out for diazolidinyl urea, which has similar preservative qualities. The American Academy of Dermatology has found this chemical to be a primary cause of dermatitis, an inflammation of the skin which can be both uncomfortable and unsightly.
Deodorants
IN 2004, Dr Phillippa Darbre published findings in the Journal of Applied Toxicology that stated a link between the parabens used in deodorants and breast cancer. After traces of the chemicals were found in breast cancer tissues, the team of scientists at the University of Reading proposed that their use in the underarm area allowed the substances to be absorbed easily into the breast and called for their safety to be reviewed. It was the first study to suggest the accumulation of these substances in human tissue. While there was no evidence to suggest the parabens had caused the cancer -- and Cancer Research UK has confirmed there is no direct link -- it does imply that if used over a long period, the chemicals will build up in your body. Further reviews have found that deodorants which contain parabens are in the minority, but it is important to check your brand's label if you want to be as toxin-free as possible.
Hair dyes
THERE have been many scare stories about the continued use of permanent hair dyes, mainly focusing on the properties of arylamine, an ammonia derivative. In 2001 researchers at the University of Southern California found that women who used permanent dyes could double or treble their risk of developing bladder cancer. Women who coloured their hair every month for 15 years had the greatest increase in risk. Swedish researchers also found that continued use for 20 years or more could almost double the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis. The link between permanent dye and the disease is unclear, but the scientists suspect that some of the chemicals may affect the immune system, so triggering the onset of arthritis. Semi-permanent or temporary dyes don't have the same effect.
Hair removal cream
MOST women feel a slightly uncomfortable sensation when using depilatory creams, or a stinging irritation afterwards. This could be owing to the thioglycolic acid used in the majority of brands to break down hair. In mild concentrations, it causes nothing but a little skin irritation, but on contact with your eye it may burn and leave the cornea cloudy. Commercial creams must not be more than 5 per cent thioglycolic acid, to ensure their safety. "The concentrations of thioglycolic acid used in depilatories are high enough to cause damage to the hairs," says Flowers, "but provided they are used as per instructions and washed completely off the skin, they should cause no adverse reaction. It is true that some cosmetics have hazardous properties in certain forms or concentrations, but it is the job of the cosmetic scientists to ensure that domestic substances are safe."
Shampoo
THE rich soapy lather which gives us that squeaky-clean feeling when washing our hair is usually produced by sodium lauryl sulphate (SLS), used in many foaming bathroom products. For some it can cause irritation, scalp rash and allergic reactions. Flowers insists that though in large quantities the chemicals in shampoo can be irritants, in approved cosmetics there is no health risk. "There are rumours that SLS is carcinogenic, but no scientific studies have shown a link between shampoo and cancer. At a high concentration, if SLS were not washed off the skin, it would certainly irritate the skin but the cosmetics industry would never use it in those quantities, or in that form."
If you use an anti-dandruff shampoo, you should also look out for the antifungal chemical zinc pyrithione, which aims to tackle the root cause of skin flakes. Although considered safe for external use, avoid swallowing it as it can have serious health implications. Lab tests on rats found that ingested zinc pyrithione caused progressive hind-limb weakness, muscle wastage and penile prolapse.
Soap
Propylene glycol is a solvent found in dozens of bathroom products, including some soap, lotions and baby wipes. Much has been made of the fact that this chemical which we put on our skin can also be used as anti-freeze. A US study published in the journal Pharmacology, found that although it is a relatively safe substance, overdoses of propylene glycol have been associated with serious adverse effects. When ingested, propylene glycol can cause depression of the central nervous system -- and while adults are less likely to get soapy water in their mouths, this is something to take on board when choosing soaps for children and babies. In milder cases, it can cause hives and exacerbate eczema. However, the Cosmetic Ingredient Review -- an independent body which tests the safety of cosmetic ingredients -- has concluded that the chemical is safe for domestic use in concentrations of up to 50 per cent.
Nail polish
THE major concern with nail varnish is the inclusion of phthalates, which are termed "endocrine-disrupting" chemicals, meaning they tinker with our hormonal balance. They are also included in hairsprays and vinyl flooring. But the ones to watch for in your beauty products are dibutyl phthalate, diethyl phthalate or dimethyl phthalate. The World Wildlife Fund has raised concerns about the impact of this hormonal shift. "You won't get ill immediately after using these products, but we don't know what the lifelong consequences may be of disrupting the hormonal system, and there are suggestions that they affect the way the reproductive system develops in pre-natal males." There is no conclusive proof that they cause damage in cosmetic concentrations, and therefore no recommendations for their use to be restricted, however next time you are painting your nails, you might want to consider that the European Commission has restricted the use of phthalates in soft toys that might be sucked by young children.
Hairspray
THERE have long been concerns about the chemicals in hairdressing products -- particularly hairspray, which can so easily be inhaled. Environmental campaigners argue that the copolymers -- plastics to coat the hair -- can cause respiratory problems on contact with the lungs. There have also been studies to show that long-term exposure can affect the foetuses of hairdressers. A Swedish team of researchers found that although there was no clear link between individual exposure and birth defects, frequent perming and spraying during pregnancy were associated with an increased risk of having a small baby. The scientists concluded that while the risk seems to be moderate, hairspray contains chemicals, such as ethanol and acetone, that have sometimes been linked to reduced birth weight.
Lipstick
IF you wear lipstick, you will probably get through an average of five lipsticks every year. Between the ages of 16 and 60, scientists predict, you are likely to swallow two pounds of the stuff. Although this poses no serious health risk, the Women's Environmental Network estimates that even as you wear it you absorb 90 per cent of what you apply, meaning your body has to break down and excrete the chemicals involved -- which are likely to include propylene glycol and parabens. That just might make you think twice about licking those lips.
by Melanie Gosling, Johannesburg Star
July 24 2006
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=14&click_id=14&art_id=vn20060724003819434C666973
A study has found mothers tested in rural areas have pesticides, including DDT, in their breast milk. Some of the women had 77 times the international limit for DDT residue in humans, while in some of the babies it was 12 times the World Health Organisation's acceptable daily intake. These shock findings emerged as a new US study shows DDT in mothers is linked to delays in physical and mental development. The study is one of the first to link DDT with human developmental problems.
Banned in most countries because of its harmful effects on the environment, DDT is used in some parts of South Africa to kill malaria mosquitoes. Pyrethroids, found in women's breast milk here, are used as agricultural pesticides. DDT, one of the world's "dirty dozen" organic pollutants, stays in the environment for years after use, enters the food chain and gets stored in the fatty tissue of birds, animals and humans. Barabara Sereda, from the Agricultural Research Council in Pretoria and one of the scientists who conducted the study, said DDT was present in water and soil and had been taken up by crops. "The results are quite scary," she said.
The pesticides were found in the breast milk of 152 women at clinics at Jozini, Mkuze and Kwaliweni in northern KwaZulu-Natal. DDT is used in Jozini and Mkuze to kill mosquitoes, but not Kwaliweni. Between 1995 and 2000 pyrethroids were used for malaria control in the two towns, and then DDT usage was resumed. Mothers from Jozini have the highest residue, followed by Mkuze and Kwaliweni. Mothers in Jozini had life-long exposure to DDT from malaria control. Exposure for those in Mkuze was variable while moms in Kwaliweni had never lived in DDT-treated dwellings. The scientists said the source of DDT in Kwaliweni should be investigated to determine whether water or fish were the source.
First-time moms had the highest levels, meaning first-borns got the highest amount of the pesticide in the breast milk. Scientists said the levels of DDT found in babies warranted strong concern, but believed the malaria threat outweighed the negative effects of DDT at these levels. The peer-reviewed study has been accepted for publication by Environmental Pollution. It is available online.
by Colin Perkel, Canadian Press, Macleans Magazine
July 23, 2006
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/politics/news/shownews.jsp?content=n072308A
TORONTO (CP) -- More than 20 per cent of federally-tested fresh fruit and vegetables sold in Canada show traces of pesticide contamination, according to the latest data, but manufacturers of the chemicals say the numbers prove there's no need for consumer concern. In a new analysis being released Monday, which is hotly disputed by environmentalists and some health experts, CropLife Canada says there's no reason for consumer concern because in almost all cases, the pesticides found on food are well within the safety limits set by Health Canada.
Just a tiny fraction of foods tested by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency were found to have contamination in violation of the maximum residue limits, with domestic fresh foods faring better than imports. "People think that their food, unless they buy organic, is laced with pesticides," said Peter MacLeod, executive director of CropLife Canada, an industry association of pesticide manufacturers and distributors. "The truth is that they're not."
Federal inspections in 2004-05 turned up chemical residue in just over 22 per cent of both domestic and imported fresh produce, but at levels lower than the maximum residue limits, the analysis concludes. Only 0.65 per cent of domestic and 1.1 per cent of imported fresh produce exceeded those levels. What's important, said MacLeod, is that even when residues were found, they were detected in minute quantities -- in the range of parts per million or lower.
While environmentalists and health advocates agree the amounts are tiny, they say it's impossible to be definitive in asserting they pose no health risk, especially when it comes to children. Some experts worry that some chemicals are unsafe at any level, that many safety standards are out of date, and that Ottawa doesn't test for all chemicals in use.
A key worry is how the toxic cocktail of pollutants interact. "We are concerned about the health effects of low levels of many different chemicals in a person's body," said Sarah Winterton of the group Environmental Defence. "We really don't know the health impacts of low-level exposure, particularly within the context of how many different chemicals we are exposed to every day."
Results of a study released by Environmental Defence last month detected a wide array of toxins in the bodies of seven children and six adults from five families living in different parts of Canada. The chemicals, among them pesticides, PCBs and flame retardants, are known carcinogens, hormone disrupters and neurotoxins. The disturbing findings prompted Health Canada to announce it would study 5,000 people for signs of pollution-related toxins. "Pesticides are among the most widely used chemicals in the world, and also among the most dangerous to human health," according to the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. "They are a leading cause of poisonings here in Canada and have been estimated to account for thousands of deaths each year globally."
But MacLeod said Canadians can be confident that Ottawa is closely monitoring residue levels and their health is being protected. "Even if they hit that maximum residue limit level, there's still a 100-fold safety factor in there before any health effect would ever be shown," MacLeod said. "So (these are) very, very conservative numbers showing a high degree of safety for our food supply."
by Elaine Hopkins, Peoria Journal Star
July 23, 2006
http://www.pjstar.com/stories/072306/TRI_BAELG76L.012.shtml
PEORIA -- While providing good jobs and products that people want, chemical plants also may stink, accidentally explode or catch fire, and their emissions can threaten the environment and human health. Even worse, after Sept. 11, 2001, it became apparent that terrorists could turn a chemical plant into a weapon of mass destruction and in some cities endanger millions of people.
Hoping to prevent toxic terrorism, Congress has been considering measures that would require greater security for chemical plants. Several in the Peoria area could be affected. Legislation has been introduced in the Senate and the House and might come to a vote in September, said Scott Jensen, spokesman for the American Chemistry Council. "It doesn't seem to be highly contentious," he said, but some issues need to be resolved. They include:
Chemical plants likely will be required to conduct vulnerability assessments and create site security and emergency response plans based on their specific vulnerabilities, subject to approval by the secretary of homeland security. Five separate, adjacent chemical plants on U.S. Route 24 across from Mapleton, a town of about 200 people, probably will be affected by the proposed legislation. Other industrial plants, from ethanol manufacturers to farm chemical suppliers, may or may not be included in the final legislation, said Mark Biel, executive director of the Chemical Industry Council of Illinois. Their inclusion likely will depend on which chemicals they use and the quantities used and stored at their facilities, he said.
The trade organization supports this proposed regulation of chemical plants. "We want to see federal legislation passed this year to cover as wide a universe as possible. We want to make sure (all) competitors are required to comply with certain levels of security," Biel said.
The five Mapleton plants are Degussa, Chemtura, Lonza, Air Liquide and SPI Polyols. All manufacture chemicals and products for other industrial processes. Degussa was once known as Sherex Chemical Co., then became Witco Corp., which merged with Crompton and Knowles. A part of Witco then was split off and sold to Degussa Goldschmidt. Crompton recently merged with Great Lakes Chemical and has taken the name Chemtura.
Several years ago, the plants and the town formed the Mapleton Community Advisory Panel, which continues to meet regularly. Studies of risks have been made, and emergency response plans were developed. Disaster drills take place annually, and communications systems are tested monthly. Alice Dailey, the village clerk and postmaster and a member of the panel, said the plants have upgraded security with guards and cameras. "You can't get on the property. You can't get into the buildings" without company permission, she said. "I really think they're safe," she said, adding, "I know the guards." At the most recent disaster exercise in May, the FBI attended and observed, Dailey said.
A glitch in procedures can bring out the "bomb squad," she said. Two years ago, a salesman forgot his briefcase in the office at the Degussa plant, and the Peoria Police Department bomb squad appeared, Dailey said. X-rays revealed that the case contained only papers, but precautions were taken just in case. Jeff Seppa, plant manager at Degussa, said with better fences, new guards and cameras, all the plants have been "proactive without legislation." The plants "don't consider ourselves targets for terrorists," he said, though "we do handle and store hazardous chemicals."
Asked about shifting to less hazardous chemicals, Seppa responded that Degussa is always looking for better products and technologies "that allow us to be safer."
In 1999, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency required the company to disclose the risks connected with its use of six industrial chemicals. The most hazardous substance was anhydrous ammonia. A worst-case scenario showed the substance moving up to 3.6 miles from the plant in toxic amounts, affecting both Mapleton and Pekin. The other plant that disclosed risks under the EPA requirements was Lonza Inc. It handled five substances, including methyl chloride, which could travel 3.2 miles but likely would move only one-fourth of a mile, the reports showed.
Today, public information about these risks has been scaled back for fear that terrorists would use the information. But recent accidents showed the tip of the toxic iceberg. On Aug. 21, 2001, a mechanical failure in a chemical reactor at Crompton Corp. caused a fire of liquid triethylene aluminum, sending a few motorists on U.S. Route 24 to hospitals for smoke inhalation treatment. No employees were injured. Safety experts said the community was lucky, as the substance could have exploded if rain had occurred.
A previous fire at Crompton had occurred in April 2001, with smoke threatening children at a nearby elementary school. But emergency procedures were followed, and no one was injured. After the fires, the telephone warning system for community members was upgraded, said Vicki Turner, executive director of Peoria County's Emergency Services and Disaster Agency. The system calls everyone with a listed phone number. "The notification system is better," she said. "Before, it took too long." Sirens also warn people, she said. "If it's not a storm, they know it's a release." A public address system on the siren towers issues instructions, she said.
Toxic emissions also bring regulatory attention. A year ago, Degussa was cited by the U.S. EPA for clean air violations, for emitting a hazardous air pollutant, methyl chloride, and for odor complaints. That case is still pending, an agency spokesman said last week. The company makes chemical products from fats and oils that are used in manufacturing detergents, personal care products and in the oil-drilling industry. Sometimes they smell bad. Odor complaints continue to anger some residents, Dailey said, adding that the plants sometimes are blamed for odors they don't produce, including the smell of dead deer on the highway. Seppa said, "There's an ongoing effort to reduce odors."
The most recent Toxic Release Inventory from the U.S. EPA shows that in 2004 Degussa released 182,863 pounds of nine hazardous chemicals into the air. Crompton released 6,650 pounds of four chemicals. Lonza released 15,990 pounds of nine chemicals. The other two plants were not listed on the report.
by Dan Stockman, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
July 23, 2006
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/fortwayne/news/local/15105299.htm
If you could locate your home anywhere, would you place it next to a tank of hazardous materials? What if that material was on wheels and rolled by your home at up to 40 mph? In Fort Wayne, nearly 36,000 people live within a few blocks of the busy railroad lines that cross the city -- railroads that each year carry millions of tons of poisonous gas, corrosive acids and explosives past homes, businesses, schools and child-care centers. An additional 10,000 live close enough to the busy tracks in New Haven to be in danger.
In fact, of the thousands of railcars that roll through the city each year, about one in 20 is carrying hazardous materials, according to federal statistics. But aside from standing near the tracks and logging ID numbers on railcars -- assuming you know how to interpret those numbers -- finding out what is in those cars is nearly impossible. "For security reasons, we don't discuss that with the media," Norfolk Southern spokesman Rudy Husband said. "We do provide all that information to the (local emergency planning committee) on request."
Local officials say they get general information about the types of materials that generally move through the city but not specific information on how much or when. Someone wanting to choose a school or a home, then, is left to trust that whatever is being hauled nearby will not spill or leak and would not find out what that material was unless something happened.
Recently, a train rumbled down the tracks over Broadway with tank cars whose placards identified them as carrying highly flammable alcohol and liquids such as diesel or fuel oil. The elevated tracks sit between a grocery store and a child-care center and are lined by hundreds of homes. A derailment and fire could imperil hundreds before they even knew what had happened. Another train carried refrigerated carbon dioxide through the city in its black tank car. Refrigerated carbon dioxide, according to a federal guidebook, can cause dizziness or asphyxia if inhaled, and the containers not only can explode if heated, but also a rupture can cause the tank to rocket, where the escaping gas blasts the tank car through the air.
On a recent Friday, a train rumbled through downtown and past the homes in the East Central neighborhood carrying thousands of gallons of alcohol, plus a tank car full of butane, isobutene or propane. A federal guidebook calls the gases "extremely flammable" and says they can form explosive mixtures in the air. The Journal Gazette identified the chemicals using the federal Emergency Response Guidebook from the U.S. Department of Transportation. But the people who live just feet from the tracks are not told what dangers are rumbling past. "We would leave (public information) up to the public officials, since ultimately they're the ones responsible for public safety, to let them decide what should be shared with the public," Husband said.
Mayor Graham Richard said residents have a right to know what dangers they're facing. "I come down in this case on the side of encouraging higher levels of knowledge," Richard said, "and the ability to make decisions based on facts."
Should the public know?
The federal response to the issue of dangerous cargoes was a proposal that would have increased secrecy: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security proposed removing the placards from railcars hauling hazardous materials because they could point terrorists to possible targets. That idea was scrapped after protests from firefighters who pointed out their lives depend on knowing what's in a railcar in an accident. The federal government has also shown no inclination to remove rules requiring railroads to accept hazardous shipments and at rates comparable to other cargo.
Fred Millar, a homeland security consultant in Washington, says telling the public of the dangers nearby only lets the public make decisions on whether to accept that risk. Hiding it from the public, he said, denies them that opportunity. "Doesn't it make you proud as an American that we can export democracy around the world, but we keep Americans in the dark about what's moving through their cities?" Millar said. Millar contends that if people knew of the tons of dangerous chemicals and explosives roaring past their children's school or where they work, they would work to move them elsewhere. "It's fair to say this is a completely underappreciated hazard," he said.
Millar helped the Washington City Council devise a law banning railroads from moving the most dangerous materials through that city, a move that spurred both lawsuits from the railroads and similar proposals in six other cities. A federal court upheld Washington's law, but the railroads have appealed.
In Washington, the catalyst was terrorism: Hazardous materials move on rails just blocks from the Capitol and the National Mall, where the government estimated 100,000 people could be killed within 30 minutes if terrorists struck during a large event. Millar said Fort Wayne may not be the terrorist target Washington is, but an accidental release could be just as devastating. "The basic consequences are the same -- the chemicals act the same no matter how they get out," Millar said.
Risk of release is small
The railroads insist the chances of an accidental release are remote. "It's as close to 100 percent (safe) as it probably could be, as far as hazardous materials being shipped without incident," Norfolk Southern's Husband said. The Association of American Railroads, a national trade group for the industry, also says railroads are safe and getting safer. Joseph Boardman, administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, pointed out recently that despite the enormous amounts of dangerous cargo on the nation's rails, injuries and accidents are few. There were 29 train accidents in 2004 where hazardous materials were released, but those were among 1.7 million shipments of hazardous materials. That makes the risk of a release a tiny fraction of 1 percent.
But even one release can be catastrophic. In January 2005, a Norfolk Southern train was mistakenly switched onto a siding in Graniteville, S.C., where it hit a parked train and ruptured a tanker car of deadly chlorine gas. Thousands were evacuated, hundreds were sickened and nine people died. Experts say if the crash had been during the day, the death toll would have been much higher.
The materials being hauled are so deadly and so voluminous that the railroads have asked Congress to either stop requiring them to carry them or limit their liability. Wick Moorman, Norfolk Southern's president and CEO, told a House subcommittee that his railroad wouldn't carry the cargoes if it didn't have to. "Norfolk Southern does not make these highly hazardous materials. Norfolk Southern does not use these highly hazardous materials. And Norfolk Southern does not make enough money transporting these highly hazardous materials to justify the risks the federal government requires us to take," Moorman testified. "The simple fact is we are putting our company at risk every single time we couple a carload of these highly hazardous materials to one of our trains -- no matter how safely we operate."
The risk is so high it may soon be uninsurable. Insurance executives testifying in the same hearing as Moorman said that few companies will write insurance for railroads because of the hazardous material risk. One more catastrophic loss could wipe out the railroad insurance industry completely, they said. Many of the risks railroads carry come from factors outside their control, but those incidents do raise questions about the safety and security of the nation's rail lines.
Spills recounted
Norfolk Southern's Moorman complained to Congress about an Indiana derailment in Hagerstown, caused by a driver who drove around flashing signals and crossing gates, and an incident in Goshen where vandals were able to derail 11 railcars being stored there. And accidents happen, as well. Parts fail, valves come open and cars leak. According to the National Response Center, a federal agency that serves as the national contact point for reporting all oil, chemical, radiation and biological releases into the environment, there have been 19 accidents involving railroads in Allen County since 2000.
Most of those spills have been motor oil or diesel from the locomotives, but in January 2003 a gallon of liquid magnesium chloride leaked out of a tank car with a loose cover in the rail yard. According to the federal Emergency Response Guide, used by first responders at hazardous material spills, magnesium chloride is an oxidizer that can explosively accelerate fires. In 2000, 100 pounds of anhydrous ammonia leaked from a tank car's hose in Huntington. Anhydrous ammonia, used as a farm fertilizer, can be fatal if inhaled, ingested or absorbed through the skin, and contact can also cause burns, the Emergency Response Guide says. In September 2003 in Wabash County, an unknown amount of fuming sulfuric acid spilled out of a tank car from a defective rubber gasket. According to the response guide, sulfuric acid can cause severe injury, burns or death if it is inhaled, ingested or touched. And according to a survey of railroad workers, the potential for many more incidents is great: A survey conducted by the Teamsters found that trains and their cargo are not secure, are often left unattended -- even when hauling hazardous material -- and that railroad police were often nowhere to be found. They also said they had not been trained in handling spills.
The Association of American Railroads blasted the survey, saying it "ignores the facts" and called it a self-serving union bargaining tactic. Specifically, they said the 62 percent of those surveyed who said they had not been trained on their company's security plan "is absolutely false" because all employees receive that training and federal regulations require workers handling hazardous materials to get special training.
No quick change expected
The danger has some in Fort Wayne worried. Officer Michael Joyner, spokesman for the city police department, has for years watched tank cars sit near or roll past the Three Rivers Apartment high rises, the water filtration plant, the City County Building, the Allen County Jail and St. Joseph Hospital, and worried about what a leak or explosion would do. "They're just sitting there waiting for some disaster to happen," Joyner said.
A disaster could wipe out the city's water supply, cut off the main north-south routes through town, require the evacuation of prisoners, destroy the emergency communications center and even take out the hazardous materials response team at Fire Station No. 1 that would be needed for such an emergency. An explosion or fire could also render the burn unit at St. Joseph Hospital inaccessible or worse. "You could in effect bring this whole city to its knees," Joyner said. "The worst-case scenario is right here in Fort Wayne. ... This would be one for the lesson books."
The mayor agrees, to a point. "Like so many issues, this is a complicated one," Richard said. "When the city is well known for its rivers and its railroads, you obviously give a lot of thought to how we protect public safety and at the same time encourage commerce." So far, Richard said, the city's response has been to give its first responders the best possible training and do all the planning possible in case something does happen. In the meantime, the city is trying to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals that need to be here; recently it stopped using deadly chlorine gas at the sewage treatment plant in favor of something safer.
Bernie Beier, Fort Wayne-Allen County director of homeland security, said training in the city and county is top-notch, much to the credit of Norfolk Southern. He said that each summer the railroad trains first responders for a week at its own expense, working on not only hazardous materials training, but law enforcement and security issues as well. The railroad also works with local officials when there is particularly dangerous cargo expected. "Norfolk Southern has got a fairly tight working relationship with the city and county on the types of materials coming through," Beier said. "There's a very strong comfort level between our first responders and Norfolk Southern."
Although local officials are not told what is on particular trains or given particular times, he said, they are told what materials come through on a regular basis. If there was something ultrahazardous that was expected during a major festival or some other event, Beier said, local officials would ask the railroad to re-route the material, though that has not been done, that he knows of.
Richard said he would consider asking the City Council to enact a ban on hazardous materials rolling through Fort Wayne on its way somewhere else but only after the Washington case works its way through the courts. And most likely, he said, that possibility would be used only as leverage to work with the railroads to find a solution so an outright ban was not needed. "We'll wait to see how the courts deal with that issue," Richard said, since it may run afoul of the Interstate Commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. "Rerouting is really difficult because you have to have parallel track systems."
Millar, the Washington consultant, said cities are gambling with the lives of their residents by allowing hazardous cargo on rails through town. "This is bad stuff. Even in peacetime bringing it through major populated areas is just astonishingly reckless," Millar said. "You're just betting your city on this."
by Jeff Montgomery and Mike Billington, Wilmington News Journal
July 23, 2006
http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060723/NEWS/607230344/-1/NEWS01
A recent national report that stressed links between dioxin and cancer is raising concerns in Delaware, where thousands of tons of dioxin-tainted wastes have been spilled, buried or stored. Delaware ranks No. 1 in the nation in the production of dioxins, furans and dioxinlike polychlorinated biphenyls, industrial byproducts that in some cases are routinely trickled into the Delaware River. The Edge Moor wastewater plant, the Delaware City refinery and the Wilmington Amtrak repair shops are among the region's top sources of dioxins and dioxinlike PCBs. The National Academy of Sciences recently confirmed that dioxin is highly toxic and known or likely to cause cancer. Exposure also can lead to birth defects and other health problems.
One now-shuttered Delaware City business, the former Standard Chlorine of Delaware Inc., supplied and then recycled some of the chemicals used to produce the herbicide Agent Orange, a defoliant that made dioxin a household word after the Vietnam War. Experts say this puts Vietnam veterans in Delaware at double the risk for exposure. "Delawareans have probably been more heavily exposed to dioxin than most other populations," said Alan Muller, who directs the environmental group Green Delaware. "Given the near total inaction in Delaware on dioxin-related issues, these reports confirm the need for much more aggressive and timely action to protect the public."
Environmental activist Lois Gibbs, executive director of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice in Falls Church, Va., has made several trips to Delaware and New Jersey over the years to argue against proposals to pump dioxin wastes into the Delaware River. Gibbs said the new report may help government agencies get tough with polluters. "The chemical industry has been stalling the release of this information for 21 years," she said. "Now that it's out, agencies can start building policies for cleanups."
Dioxins, furans and dioxin-like PCBs "are detected at low concentrations in virtually all organisms," scientists have found. In humans, the toxins can cause skin lesions, liver disease and possibly cancer. Other health effects can include thyroid and blood disorders, neurological problems, heart disease, diabetes and other metabolic disorders. Late last month, another report, this one issued by the World Health Organization, upgraded the risk associated with a chemical found in huge amounts at DuPont's Edge Moor plant.
The state is examining the report to see what, if anything, needs to be done. "We're going to look at it and we may have to have our third-party contractor [for the Edge Moor cleanup] look at it," said Kathy Stiller-Banning, a Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control program manager. Edge Moor's plant ranks as the nation's largest producer of dioxin byproducts, a fact that led to a series of cleanup proposals and reviews of plant operating methods. Company, state and community officials have for years debated options for removing or containing a 15-acre, 500,000-ton pile of dioxin-tainted leftovers from ore processing. DuPont is evaluating the new study as well, said, Eddie Johnston, a manager at DuPont's Titanium Technologies Business. "We have just received the report ourselves," he said. DNREC was not immediately able to list other dioxin-contaminated sites in the state.
Earlier studies misleading
Dioxins, furans and PCBs most often form as unwanted byproducts in chemical processes involving chlorine and high temperatures. Delaware, once at the center of the nation's largest chemical complex, had several such industries, including Edge Moor, Standard Chlorine of Delaware and its successor, Metachem Products.
State and federal cleanup studies in Delaware have been complicated because low levels of dioxins are routinely found in the environment, making it harder to link contamination to individual polluters. Rick Hind, toxic programs director for the environmental group Greenpeace USA, said the new academy report ranks dioxins as a major global concern. "What the report does say is that cleanups of dioxin contamination need to go ahead and need to be more strict," Hind said. "That could have a very specific impact on the cleanup of the mountain of dioxin at the DuPont plant in Wilmington."
The EPA singled out Edge Moor for close attention in the late 1990s after finding that some of DuPont's practices produced dioxins and wastes that deserved a "hazardous" label and special disposal restrictions. That created a public controversy over DuPont's plan to permanently seal a 15-acre waste pile along the river east of Wilmington. DuPont officials argued that the dioxins at Edge Moor are a weaker cousin of the most dangerous variety and can remain on site under a protective liner forever. However, the World Health Organization report released June 27 said dioxins like those at Edge Moor should be considered three to 10 times more hazardous than previously acknowledged.
Steve Tindall, a resident of the Cragmere neighborhood northwest of the Edge Moor plant, said Delaware should take the new report seriously. "I would be concerned if they were using old standards when something state of the art is available," he said.
Metachem cleanup
Even higher dioxin concentrations were found at the bankrupt Metachem Products chemical plant north of Delaware City. It's now the site of a federal cleanup that could cost taxpayers $100 million or more. Metachem took over the plant from Standard Chlorine in 1998 and then abruptly shut it down, leaving a 75-acre toxic-waste cleanup problem and more than $60 million in unpaid bills. State officials have said some unapproved practices at the factory increased the chance of creating unwanted dioxin or PCBs. The risks were underscored in 2003, when a Delaware River Basin Commission described Metachem as one of the region's top sources of PCB-tainted runoff to the Delaware River.
Marvin Olson, a Vietnam veteran and longtime resident of the Emerald Ridge neighborhood northwest of the Metachem plant, said odors have dwindled from the factory since the shutdown. He nevertheless criticized regulators for failing to act on known pollution problems. "I saw the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam and in veterans today," Olson said. "I don't think they're doing what they need to to make it necessary for these kinds of places to actually make changes. They're giving them too long a lead time. I work at a nuclear plant, and if we operated the way they do here, we'd be shut down."
The EPA spent millions of dollars processing the abandoned chemicals at Metachem and turning out thousands of huge cubes, three feet on a side. Those cubes are stored at a warehouse near Delaware City, awaiting money to pay for their transfer to one of several toxic-waste incinerators in the nation.
by Sue Goetinck Ambrose, Dallas Morning News
July 22, 2006
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/nation/stories/072306dnnatnuepakids.171965d.html
For years, scientists have warned that government safety standards leave children too exposed to cancer-causing chemicals. Last year, the Bush administration took action. But many experts say the new guidelines may offer only one-tenth the protection that children need from the chemicals most dangerous to them. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which issued the guidelines, says they add an extra margin of safety to already stringent standards. But some public health specialists note that while some chemicals are 100 times more toxic to children than adults, the EPA's new guidelines assume the worst chemical is only 10 times as bad.
The new guidelines are "not protective of children," said Philip Landrigan, professor of pediatrics and community and preventive medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. "It's an example of the administration failing the most vulnerable members of our society." The need for special protection for children was widely recognized more than a decade ago, after a 1993 report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that pesticides probably posed greater risks to children than adults. But it wasn't until March 2005 that the EPA issued the guidelines, officially known as the Supplemental Guidance for Assessing Susceptibility From Early-Life Exposure to Carcinogens. The guidelines are used primarily by the EPA to set standards for acceptable chemical exposure levels in various settings, such as in air or drinking water or at waste cleanup sites.
Until the early 1990s, many scientists say, the idea that children may have an extra sensitivity to some chemicals was not widely appreciated, Dr. Landrigan said. "I don't think there was deliberate inaction," he said. "The consciousness of children's susceptibility just wasn't there." Children are not miniature adults when it comes to chemical exposures. They have their own behaviors -- playing close to the ground, putting dirty hands to their mouths -- that distinguish them from adults. Children also eat, breathe and drink more per pound of body weight than adults and differ in how they metabolize foreign chemicals that enter the body.
And in recent years, scientists have become aware of a deeper difference between children and grown-ups: The rapid development of children both before and after birth can make them more susceptible to harm from chemicals. Scientists suspect that a child's swift growth can leave less time to repair chemical damage to cells or genes, creating populations of cells with dormant, tumor-causing alterations that can erupt into a cancer later in life. Indeed, studies in lab animals have shown that exposure to certain chemicals before birth or early in life can cause cancer in adulthood.
Each year, about 700 new chemicals enter the market, according to a 2005 government report. Not all of those will be directly tested for their potential health effects. And when a chemical is tested for its ability to cause cancer, the research generally is conducted on adult lab animals, not juveniles. "Virtually all the data that are now used for cancer risk projection are based on these studies that exclude the period of greatest vulnerability," said Dale Hattis, a geneticist and toxicologist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
To create the new guidelines, the EPA examined the few published studies that do exist -- some dating to the 1960s -- on cancer-causing chemicals given to juvenile animals. Of 50 chemicals identified by the EPA as causing cancer after early-life exposure, adequate comparisons between juvenile and adult exposure existed for only 18. And of those, the EPA focused its efforts on 12 chemicals that appear to cause cancer by creating mutations in genes.
The EPA calculated how potent each of the 12 chemicals was in its ability to create tumors in juveniles vs. adults. Some chemicals were almost 10 times more potent in adults. But the EPA found that others were more than 100 times more potent in juveniles.
Studies limited,br /> Few of the known cancer-causing chemicals -- the government lists more than 230 known or probable cancer-causing substances -- have been compared in studies on younger and older animals. So the EPA took, in essence, a one-size-fits-all approach to devise its new policy for all untested chemicals. To account for the wide range of potencies, the agency chose to use a value known as the geometric mean, which is similar to an average. For the potencies of the 12 chemicals, the geometric mean was 10 -- and the EPA used that number in its guidelines. For children under age 2, for example, the EPA said acceptable carcinogen levels for any untested chemicals should be set 10 times lower than they would have been before the guidelines were issued. For children between 2 and 16, the acceptable levels should be three times lower.
"What it's telling you is that, on average, children are more susceptible and that tenfold is the average," said Dr. Lynn Goldman, professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and a former assistant administrator at the EPA under the Clinton administration. "But by applying this factor, they may not be sufficiently protective." It's likely, she said, that many carcinogens -- if they were specifically tested -- would be more than 10 times as potent in juveniles, just like the chemicals in the EPA analysis found to be more than 100 times as potent in young animals. "You don't want to stop here and say 10 is right," she said. "That should be the starting point to make sure we aren't underprotecting kids from a whole series of chemicals."
The chemical industry has its own perspective on the EPA guidelines -- at least one industry group said it thinks the EPA's guidelines are based on faulty science. "There are fundamental problems with the dataset," said Rick Becker, a toxicologist with the American Chemistry Council. "There's very limited data across the board to show that there's increased susceptibility" in children. He argues that the EPA should be responsible for testing whether chemicals actually are worse for juveniles. "You shouldn't base decisions on science that isn't supported by the data," he said. Dr. Landrigan dismissed Dr. Becker's reasoning. "They're ignoring the vast body of literature that children are more susceptible than adults," he said.
The EPA says it will incorporate new information on chemicals' effects on juveniles, should it become available. "We didn't choose the chemicals that were tested," said Martha Sandy, a toxicologist at California's state EPA. "We're depending on what's out there in the literature. We don't know about other chemicals that we're exposed to that haven't been tested." As a result, Dr. Sandy said, the guidelines essentially are an educated guess for any chemicals that haven't been tested. If some of the studies analyzed by the EPA simply hadn't been done, Dr. Sandy said, the default factor could have come out lower or higher.
Another shortcoming is that the studies weren't originally designed to measure the relative potencies for juveniles vs. adults, scientists said. So even choosing the best calculation to capture the broad range of potencies is a matter of scientific debate. Environmental officials from California and Connecticut, for example, have said that for their states' own guidelines, they are likely to use calculations that end up offering more protection than the EPA's federal guidelines.
In theory, the EPA could have proposed a higher adjustment factor for children, one that would account for the higher potencies seen in the animal studies. This would cover more chemicals that are the worst for juveniles but overprotect for chemicals that don't seem to pose any increased risk.
Bill Farland, a top official in the EPA's office of research and development, predicted that there would not be many chemicals that would need more stringent regulation to protect children. Further, he said of the new guidelines, "We're adjusting something that was already ... protective."
Prenatal exposure
But other scientists said it's unfortunate that the EPA guidelines don't address prenatal exposure to potentially harmful chemicals. Studies have shown that exposure to chemicals in utero can influence adult health. For example, women whose mothers took the anti-miscarriage drug DES were more likely to develop vaginal cancer in their 30s. "The policy that the EPA put in place does not address prenatal exposure but clearly ... that's an important time and needs to be thought about," said Tracey Woodruff, an EPA scientist who participated in the study that led to the new guidelines. She made her comments in a lecture at the National Academy of Sciences this year.
And the EPA's guidelines only cover chemicals thought to cause cancer via genetic mutations. "We don't quite have enough information to look at any [other] group of chemicals as a whole," Dr. Woodruff said. Others disagree. Dr. Henry Anderson, a medical officer at the Wisconsin Division of Public Health, led the advisory committee assigned to evaluate the guidelines while they were still in draft form. He said the EPA could have addressed chemicals that trigger cancer in ways other than via mutations. "The EPA said ... for the other carcinogens that don't work through that [mutation] mechanism, we aren't going to change anything," Dr. Anderson said in an interview. "We came at it the other way."
In fact, scientists are beginning to understand that while genetic mutations definitely contribute to cancerous growth, other kinds of changes to the genetic blueprint can be just as harmful. One type of such change reprograms genes without actually causing a mutation. Just like mutations, these so-called epigenetic changes can encourage the rampant growth that's the hallmark of cancer cells. One new theory even holds that epigenetic changes -- not mutations -- are the first missteps on the long road from healthy tissue to cancer.
The debate over the guidelines raises another, broader issue, said Clark University's Dr. Hattis -- a cost-benefit analysis of what risks are acceptable, given the conveniences that chemicals offer and the costs associated with avoiding any potential harm from them. "You might want to impose more burden on the responsible parties to achieve confidence that you should be more protective," he said. "But all that is a discussion ... that has not been really engaged in by risk managers or the public."
from Reuters Health
July 21, 2006
http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2006/07/21/eline/links/20060721elin043.html
NEW YORK -- High blood levels of the pesticide DDT are associated with an elevated risk of liver cancer, according to the results of a study conducted in China. Previous reports have linked DDT and its breakdown product DDE with liver tumors in laboratory animals. Whether exposure to this pesticide is associated with liver cancer in humans, however, has been less clear.
To investigate, Dr. Katherine A. McGlynn, from the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland, and colleagues analyzed data from 168 "case" patients with liver cancer and 385 age- and sex-matched healthy controls who participated in the Nutritional Intervention Trials in Linxian. DDT and DDE serum levels were measured using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.
The risk of liver cancer was directly related to the DDT serum level, McGlynn's group reports in the current Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Subjects in the highest DDT quintile were nearly four times more likely to develop liver cancer than those in the lowest quintile. The DDE level alone was not significantly associated with liver cancer risk. However, in conjunction with a high DDT level, a low DDE level appeared to increase the risk further.
In terms of absolute risk, the highest DDT quintile was tied to a liver cancer rate of 46 cases per 100,000 persons per year compared with a rate of 26 cases per 100,000 persons per year for the lowest quintile. The results suggest that DDT exposure may be a risk factor for the development of liver cancer in humans, "especially in populations that are directly exposed to DDT, rather than just exposed to its metabolites," the authors conclude.
SOURCE: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, July 19, 2006.
by John Heilprin, Associated Press, Forbes Magazine
July 21, 2006
http://www.forbes.com/business/energy/feeds/ap/2006/07/21/ap2896390.html
Bush administration plans to ease clean air rules for thousands of aging industrial plants might increase air pollution, the National Academy of Sciences said Friday. Those Clean Air Act rules are under review by the Supreme Court, which is due to receive legal briefs on the administration's attempts to rewrite the rules in 2002 and 2003.
An NAS report requested by Congress said the possibility of emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide "increases in some locations and decreases in others. However, the magnitude of the changes and the number of geographic areas affected could not be assessed." Those chemicals contribute to smog, acid rain, soot and other fine particles that lodge in people's lungs and cause asthma and other respiratory ailments.
The academy also implicitly criticized the Environmental Protection Agency's information gathering, saying "a lack of data and the limitations of current models" prevent anyone from drawing firm conclusions about how the rules might affect air pollution. The EPA took a different view. Bill Wehrum, EPA's acting chief of its Office of Air and Radiation, said the report "confirms that the Bush administration's approach to reducing air pollution guarantees results" by allowing more companies to use a marketplace approach that features an emissions-trading plan.
Under a trading system -- which has been promoted in the EPA's Clean Air Interstate Rule -- plants unable to meet the required reductions could buy emission allowances from plants that have exceeded the required reductions. EPA has said that approach would encourage more technology advances; environmentalists said they would compromise public health.
Under the Clean Air Act's "new source review" program -- including the Bush administration's changes that Congress asked the academy to study -- companies must first get a permit and possibly install anti-pollution controls before building or expanding facilities that could significantly foul the air. For almost 30 years, the program has been viewed by proponents and opponents alike as too bureaucratic and complex. In 1999, President Clinton used it to sue owners of 51 coal-burning power plants. The Bush administration continued those cases, but rewrote the rules.
Some of the administration's 2002 changes were struck down by a federal court last year; the rest went into effect only in a few states. The 2003 revisions, affecting replaced equipment, was struck down by a court two years ago. One case, involving Duke Energy Corp., based in Charlotte, N.C., is now before the Supreme Court. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., ruled last year that power plants can spew more pollutants into the air when they modernize to operate for longer hours.
Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, representing power companies, said he viewed the report as "unqualified good news" because it shows more companies should be allowed to trade emission allowances. The NAS advises the government on scientific and technological issues.
by Bill Hendrick, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
July 21, 2006
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/0721meshasthma.html
The smog-shrounded Atlanta area surpassed federal ozone safety standards Thursday for the 22nd time since smog season began May 1. It's the worst air this region's had in four years, aggravating asthma and sending coughing, wheezing, red-eyed sufferers to emergency rooms and doctors' offices. Grady Memorial Hospital's Denise Simpson said its asthma clinic has seen more than 700 patients since May, more than in recent summers, which were wetter and cooler. As doctors are advising patients to stay indoors rather than risk getting sicker from the air pollution, the patient count is also up at some area allergy and asthma clinics.
Ozone is a key ingredient in smog, which is hazardous for people with respiratory problems, including asthma, emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary respiratory disease. Metro Atlanta is in a weeklong cycle of bad air prompted by a string of 90-plus degree days, said Susan Zimmer-Dauphinee, who manages air monitoring for the Georgia Environmental Protection Division. This week, the region has had two Code Orange days, when sensitive groups need to limit their activities outside, and two Code Red days, when the air is unhealthy for nearly everyone.
A little more than half-way through the smog season, metro Atlanta is on track to have the worst air since 2002 when the region violated the federal Clean Air standard on 37 days. The region this year has already violated the standard on 22 days. Zimmer-Dauphinee expects more smog alert and excessive ozone days for the rest of the smog season, which runs through Sept. 30, the most likely time for temperatures to get hot enough to cook emissions into ground-level ozone. "Ozone is part of smog, but only a part," said Zimmer-Dauphinee. "The hazy stuff is ozone. Smog is composed of fine particulates, emitted from car exhausts, industry. But if you have high ozone, you'll have smog."
Meteorologist Matt Sena with the National Weather Service in Peachtree City said conditions haven't been good for people who suffer from respiratory problems. Average temperatures have been up since May and stayed there. Rainfall is down compared to other, "cleaner," years. And winds have been moderate. "We've had some rain but it's sporadic, heavy for a little while in some areas, but mostly scattered," he said. "Generally, conditions have been conducive to the buildup of smog and ozone." He said tropical storms in recent years brought this area relief from smog and ozone.
Asthma sufferer Sandy Weyers, 45, of Smyrna, said she feels like coughing every time she looks south and sees Atlanta's skyscrapers all but obscured by smog. "It's nasty," she said. "It looks scary. I wheeze a lot. I have a prescription inhaler and that saves me."
Dr. Gerald Teague, ulmonologist at Emory University School of Medicine, said Emory's clinics are seeing an increase in patients with respiratory problems. Smog and the fine particles in ozone, he said, enter the lungs' deepest areas, causing inflammation and respiratory distress. "The combination of carbon and iron is a chemical stressor to the lung," he said. "Oxidative stress is caused by the carbon, iron, metals causing chemical stress, inflammation of individuals with asthma, cystic fibrosis and others with allergies and sensitive lungs and smokers."
Asthma causes thousands of hospitalizations in Georgia each year, 11,000 in 2003, the latest year for which statistics are available. The illness, which afflicts 212,000 children and 480,000 adults in the state, is far more severe in African-Americans than in other ethnic groups, Teague said. Atlanta ranks No. 9 on the American Lung Association's "worst 10" list for people with respiratory problems.
"Ozone is clearly going to be worse this year," Teague said. "It's not clear why, but asthma is very prevalent in Atlanta," said Dr. David Tanner, a pulmonary specialist with Atlanta Allergy & Asthma Clinics. "We're having a lot of [patient] walk-ins, and that's part and parcel of heavy ozone. We're hearing a lot more wheezing, coughing, people asking for medications that can help."
by Michael Casey, Associated Press, Akron Beacon Journal
July 21, 2006
http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news/state/15089804.htm
BANGKOK, Thailand -- Some paints in Malaysia, China and India contain dangerously high levels of lead, as much as 300 times the legal limit in the United States, presenting a health risk to children, Ohio researchers said Friday. With safer substitutes readily available, researchers from the University of Cincinnati called for better regulation of, or a worldwide ban on, the sale of lead-based paints. "There is a clear discrepancy in product safety outside the United States," said professor Scott Clark, who led the study published in the September issue of Environmental Research, a peer-reviewed journal. "In today's global economy, it would be irresponsible for us to ignore the public health threat for the citizens in the offending countries -- as well as the countries they do business with," he said.
In 1978, the United States introduced regulations restricting lead content in paint to 600 parts per million after studies showed that children who eat or breathe in flaking paint chips or dust can suffer brain damage and other health problems. But Clark said he found paint containing dangerously high levels of lead easily available in hardware stores in Malaysia, China and India. About 50 percent of the paint sold in China, India and Malaysia has lead levels 30 times higher than is permitted in the U.S., although some had as much as 300 times the American limit. Other surveys found similar levels of lead in paints in Indonesia, Peru and the Seychelles, Clark said. In Singapore, where lead levels in paint are supposed to be held to the same standards as in the United States, about 10 percent contained too much of the metal, the study found.
"Lead-based paints have already poisoned millions of children in the United States and will likely cause similar damage in the future as paint use increases in Asian countries and elsewhere," he said. "Our findings provide stark evidence of the urgent need for an effective worldwide ban on the use of lead-based paint." Officials in China couldn't be reached for comment. Telephones weren't answered Friday at the China Coating Industry Association and China's State Administration for Quality, Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.
Clark said his findings also underline the fact that Asian products decorated with lead paint are increasingly being sold in America. In recent years, products ranging from Chinese toys to Indian jewelry have been pulled from U.S. department store shelves because they contained dangerous levels of lead. Clark's team sampled 80 paints in the four countries over two years. The countries were chosen at random.
by Alexander Lane, Newark Star-Ledger
July 21, 2006
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-4/115347089274910.xml&coll=1
With two new coal-fired power plants on the drawing board in New Jersey and 148 more planned across the country, an environmental group warned yesterday that this "coal rush" could cause global warming to spiral out of control. The New Jersey Public Interest Research Group called on state officials to place a moratorium on construction and expansion of coal plants until anti-global warming policies can take effect. "They're trying to hurry up and build coal plants and come in under the wire before regulations are adopted," said Dena Mottola, executive director of the group. "That's why you're seeing this surge and this rush to build coal right now."
Paul Thessen, executive vice- president of LS Power, which recently acquired 300 acres on which it would like to build a coal plant in the Gloucester County town of West Deptford, said that charge was "totally without merit." "Even if you have a plant out there that's already being built or operated you could still be subject to regulations, that's number one," Thessen said. "And number two, we've been working on developing coal plants for five years now, so it isn't something we just thought of yesterday."
The Public Interest Research Group report, entitled "Making Sense of the 'Coal Rush,'" said 150 coal plants were planned nationwide as of June, representing $137 billion of investment and the potential capacity to power 96 million homes. The group said that many plants would increase U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, the primary man-made contributor to global warming, by 10 percent. Instead, the U.S. should be cutting them by 80 percent to avoid the worst consequences of global warming, the group said. Moreover, the plants would subject investors to risks of massive lawsuits for harming public health, not only with carbon dioxide but also with soot-forming sulfur dioxide, smog-forming nitrogen dioxide and the neurological toxicant mercury.
LS Power is in the early stages of seeking permits for the West Deptford plant, which the company hopes to have on line by 2012, Thessen said. He said it would cost about $1 billion, provide 1,200 construction jobs and 100 permanent jobs, and produce 500 megawatts of electric ity, enough to supply 5,000 homes. "The situation in New Jersey is that the load is growing and in the surrounding region the load is growing," Thessen said. "Coal is a very low-cost, stable-priced fuel, as compared to the other potential fuels like natural gas or oil, and it's a domestic resource."
However, the research group not only objected to traditional coal plants like the one LS Power plans, but also took a cautious stance on more modern gasified- coal plants, which could be set up to capture carbon dioxide emissions in the future.
Another company, SCS Energy LLC, is seeking the rights to build a gasified coal plant at the site of the B.L. England plant, a traditional coal plant in Cape May County's Upper Township. Authorities should only permit such plants if they can capture carbon, and are demonstrated to be more cost effective than renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, the report said.
Jeanne Fox, president of the Board of Public Utilities, said in a statement that the wisest energy investments would be those "that can remain competitive in a future where we almost certainly will see constraints on emissions of greenhouse gasses to address global warming." Furthermore, overall power plant emissions of carbon dioxide will not be allowed to increase in New Jersey since the state adopted the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an agreement Northeastern states signed last year to keep their carbon emissions in check. The foremost hurdle for any new coal plants would be receiving several permits from the state Department of Environmental Protection.
by Wes Smalling, Santa Fe New Mexican
July 20, 2006
http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/46702.html
New Mexico's 314,000 anglers each spend an average of 11 days a year in pursuit of trout, bass, catfish and other species in lakes and rivers around the state. But are the fish they catch safe to eat? The New Mexico Environment Department cannot answer that question with any certainty for most waters in the state. New Mexico does not allocate any funding to the Environment Department for the agency to check sportfish for contaminants such as industrial chemicals and pesticides. However, the agency's lone fisheries biologist, Gary Schiffmiller, has been able to scrape together some grant money from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other sources over the past few years to begin testing fish from a handful of the state's waters.
Schiffmiller's most recent work has been funded by a $150,000 federal grant, which was enough to collect and test about 50 composite samples of fish at $3,000 per study. As the results have come in from each study, it's been more and more bad news almost everywhere he's looked. This year, channel catfish in Abiquiú Lake, carp in Cochiti Lake and catfish and carp in stretches of the Rio Grande near Los Alamos, were found to be unsafe to eat because they are contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a group of industrial chemicals suspected of causing cancer and other serious health problems. The state released a fish-consumption advisory for those waters in January.
In Southern New Mexico, samples of channel catfish, walleye, largemouth bass and white bass collected from Brantley Reservoir near Carlsbad in 2001 and 2005 have showed levels of the banned pesticide DDT that in some instances are three times higher than the EPA's do-not-eat guidelines. This year the state issued a fish-consumption advisory for Brantley and the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish made catch-and-release mandatory at the lake.
Right now the Environment Department is waiting on lab results from fish samples collected earlier this year from Ute, Conchas, Elephant Butte and Navajo reservoirs. There is not enough grant money left to check many of the state's other popular recreational fisheries such as El Vado, Heron, Santa Rosa and Sumner lakes, Schiffmiller said. "We just haven't had the budget to deal with it, but I think that's going to change," he said. "What I would like to see is the Legislature allocate some money for this. I hope that would happen."
Schiffmiller said there is enough money left from the grant to conduct follow-up studies this year in the Rio Grande around Los Alamos, Abiquiú Lake and Cochiti Lake. He also hopes to sample the Pecos River both upstream and downstream of Brantley Reservoir, and other lakes in the Carlsbad area to determine the extent and magnitude of the DDT contamination there, but there might not be enough money to get to it. "Right now I don't want to tell people that the fish (around Carlsbad) are safe to eat," he said.
The pesticide DDT was banned in the United States in the early 1970s. The DDT in Brantley, which has mostly broken down into DDD and DDE, probably comes from very old sediments that were churned up after the McMillan Dam was breached when the Brantley Dam was completed on the Pecos River in 1991, Schiffmiller said. "I think the level you're seeing of DDT in Brantley is essentially there forever," he said. "For anyone who's alive today, it's going to be there for the rest of our lives."
Widespread contamination
In 1995-96, the state checked more than 2,000 miles of New Mexico's waterways for mercury, but only recently has anyone begun testing fish for other contaminants. Reservoirs at lower elevations, such as Brantley, tend to be more at risk than other waters because they accumulate so much sediment. PCBs and DDT tend to settle in the muck at the bottom of lakes and slow-moving rivers and build up in the fat tissues of fish and animals that eat fish. Bottom-feeders, typically have the highest concentrations of contaminants.
PCBs are a family of more than 200 chemicals that were once used in plastics, capacitors, solvents and other industrial applications. They were banned from production in 1977 because they are probable carcinogens. Biologists first detected PCBs in New Mexico in storm runoff following the Cerro Grande Fire that burned in and around Los Alamos in 2000. PCBs also unexpectedly turned up that year in studies of storm runoff in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. "Now, we think we're going to find (PCBs) in varying concentrations just about everywhere," Schiffmiller said.
DDT contamination tends to be concentrated in smaller areas than PCBs. DDT also is present in the Rito de los Frijoles at Bandelier National Monument, a small stream where fishing has been banned. Decades ago, the forests of that area were sprayed with DDT and crews used to clean their pesticide equipment near the stream, Schiffmiller said. "If you eat a fish that's really hot with DDT, you're not going to feel sick," he said. "But if you're eating them over the long term, that can raise your risk of cancer. It's a lot like smoking."
According to the Environment Department, no fish from Brantley Reservoir should be eaten. Also, do not eat catfish from Abiquiú Reservoir, carp from Cochiti Reservoir, carp in the Rio Grande from Frijoles Canyon to Pojoaque Creek, and catfish from the Rio Grande from Otowi Bridge to Pojoaque Creek. For anglers wanting to eat their catches from other waters, the EPA recommends avoiding carp, catfish and older, bigger fish of most species. Younger trout, salmon, walleye, bass and sunfish should be OK.
Exposure to PCBs and DDT can be reduced by filleting the fish, removing organs and cutting off as much fat as possible. Fish should be baked or grilled and fat poured off before eating. "This is not true for mercury," Schiffmiller said. "Mercury is all through the fish, and there's no way to cook it out."
New Mexico has fish-consumption advisories in 26 lakes and reservoirs and five river segments because of mercury. A list of guidelines for each body of water and species of fish is on the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish Web site at http://www.wildlife.state.nm.us.
Mercury occurs naturally in soils or can be deposited into the water from the atmosphere from the burning of coal in power plants. "You'll find mercury virtually everywhere," Schiffmiller said. "New Mexico has the highest mercury emissions of 11 western states from its power plants." Most mercury found in fish has combined with methane to form methylmercury, a highly toxic organic compound. It accumulates in the muscle tissues of fish throughout their lifetimes so older fish tend to have more of it in their bodies. Low-level exposure to mercury is not considered hazardous for most, but it is dangerous for children and pregnant women.
New Mexico is not alone in having dangerous levels of toxins in some of its wild fish. The EPA has released fish-consumption advisories on 25 percent of river miles and 35 percent of lake acres in the United States, not including the Great Lakes. A fish-consumption advisory is in effect on 100 percent of the Great Lakes. About 65 percent of U.S. coastal waters are under fish-consumption advisories, including 92 percent of the Atlantic Coast and 100 percent of the Gulf Coast.
from Canadian Press
July 19 2006
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060719/toxic_politicians_060719/20060719?hub=Canada
TORONTO -- New Democrat Leader Jack Layton is slated to become the first of several prominent politicians to have their blood tested for chemical contaminants when he provides a sample on Thursday. The testing is part of an environmental group's campaign to highlight Canadians' exposure to toxins -- especially when it comes to children. "Canada is one of the worst polluting industrialized nations in the world," said Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence. "We're at a critical point."
With Parliament currently reviewing the country's pollution laws, Smith said it's vital that political leaders are engaged in the process and show leadership on the issue. Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, Health Minister Tony Clement and Liberal health critic John Godfrey will also give blood, while Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe has not responded to a request by the Environmental Defence to be tested. The samples of blood will be tested by an independent laboratory for 102 compounds that fall into seven broad categories, ranging from pesticides like DDT and heavy metals such as mercury, to various air pollutants and flame retardants. The results should provide a snapshot of Canadians' exposure to harmful chemicals, many found in ordinary products, which can cause cancer or other serious health issues.
Layton could not be reached Wednesday, but said in a statement that all Canadians need to understand the health hazards of pollution. "We know that even the youngest children have these contaminants threatening their health," Layton said. "It's time the federal government got serious about reducing emissions and controlling pesticide use."
Environmental Defence issued the challenge to the politicians last month after releasing a study that found the bodies of seven children were contaminated with a range of toxic chemicals, among them PCBs and flame retardants. The children, and six adults, were from five families in Vancouver, Toronto, Sarnia, Montreal and Quispamsis, N.B. The study found an average of 23 known or suspected toxins -- including carcinogens, hormone disrupters and neurotoxins -- in the children. The adults were contaminated by 32 chemicals, and had higher concentrations of some products no longer in use, such as DDT and PCBs.
In response, Health Canada promised a national study in which 5,000 people will be monitored for toxic contamination over a two-year period, starting next year. Neither Clement nor Ambrose was available Wednesday, but a spokesman for the environment minister said she would likely be tested within a couple of weeks. "Our government firmly believes that health and the environment are closely linked," said Ryan Sparrow. "That's why we're taking steps to reduce pollution and that's why both ministers are taking the steps and these tests in order to highlight the problem."
Smith said he hoped that testing the politicians would "put a face" on the problem and drive home the scope of the issue. There is no doubt toxins will be uncovered in the politicians, he said. "The only question is how much and at what levels."
from ScienceDaily
July 18, 2006
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060718221113.htm
submitted to this bulletin by Sylvia K. Mueller.
Scientists know that children of women who smoke during pregnancy can develop hearing-related cognitive deficits. For the first time, researchers believe they have evidence that not only implicates nicotine as the culprit, but also shows what the substance does to the brain to cause these deficits. In a study using rats, Raju Metherate, associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, and colleagues from UC Irvine, showed that nicotine exposure during the equivalent of a human's third trimester led to hearing-related cognitive problems. This is the first time a study has demonstrated this causal link. Further tests then revealed that the probable cause of the deficits was damage to the receptors in the brain that are sensitive to nicotine, which seems to occur when humans or animals are exposed to the substance during development. The study appears this week in the early online issue of the European Journal of Neuroscience.
Children with auditory processing deficits can have a number of hearing-related problems. They may have difficulty understanding speech in a noisy environment, not understand information that is presented verbally, and may not be able to tell the difference between similar sounds. "This study is significant because it suggests to us precisely what aspect of smoking is so harmful in pregnancy when it comes to cognitive hearing deficits," Metherate said. "Most women who smoke find it difficult to quit during pregnancy. For them, doctors often prescribe a nicotine patch. While that does protect the fetus from the well-known physical under-development related to harmful chemicals in cigarette smoke, exposure to nicotine appears to be enough to cause serious problems on its own, in terms of brain development."
Chemicals known as neurotransmitters act as message carriers between cells and bind with receptors on the cells' surfaces, much like a key fits into the lock. If the receptors are damaged, they can no longer bind properly with the neurotransmitter. Nicotine shares a receptor with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is important for a number of cognitive functions. Researchers believe that when people are paying attention to something, such as an important sound, acetylcholine is released into the brain. It then interacts with the nicotinic-acetylcholine receptor and, the UCI study showed, thereby enhances sensitivity to that sound. If that receptor is damaged due to prenatal exposure to nicotine, acetylcholine cannot bind with it and increased sensitivity to the important sound is lost. "While verbal function cannot be measured in an animal, this establishment of a causal relationship between prenatal nicotine exposure and auditory-cognitive deficits is an important step forward in reinforcing these previous findings in humans," Metherate said.
According to the researchers, given the importance of acetylcholine to a number of brain functions, a loss of nicotinic-acetylcholine receptors may have a negative effect on other higher cognitive functions and may also impair vision and other senses. Nicotine does seem to actually enhance cognitive processing when administered to adults, a finding that has also been shown in previous studies. The researchers found that in this study, nicotine appeared to enhance auditory function in the adult rats, but only if they had not been exposed to the substance during development.
Researchers placed electrodes in the animals' auditory cortex, then exposed them to different frequencies of sound. They found that nicotine made the cortex much more responsive to sound if the rats had not had exposure to nicotine during their early development. In the case of previous exposure, there was no increased sensitivity to sound. According to Metherate, this occurs most likely because the nicotine is mimicking the action of acetylcholine on their shared receptors and increasing responsiveness to sound if those receptors had not been previously damaged.
Collaborators on this study from UCI were Norman Weinberger, research professor of neurobiology and behavior; Frances Leslie, professor of pharmacology; Kevin Liang, graduate student researcher in neurobiology and behavior; Bonnie Sue Poytress, laboratory assistant in neurobiology and behavior; and Yiling Chen, associate specialist in pharmacology. The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, both parts of the National Institutes of Health.
About the Study: In the study, the researchers treated one group of one-week-old rats with nicotine and another group with saline, for five consecutive days. One week after birth, rats are in the same developmental stage as a human fetus in the third trimester. Two months later, as adults, the rats were placed in a two-chamber box and taught to cross from one chamber to the other during a five-second tone in order to avoid a shock. Researchers found that after four days of training, the animals treated with saline moved to the other chamber in most of the trials. By contrast, the rats treated with nicotine avoided the shock on significantly fewer trials. Some animals never learned to correlate the tone with the coming shock. Tests showed that the animals did not have a hearing problem -- they could hear the tone, but could not always relate it to the expected behavior -- in this case, moving to a different chamber to avoid the shock. Additional tests to determine the nature of the underlying problem were performed by placing electrodes in the animals' auditory cortex to record brain activity, and showed that the nicotinic-acetylcholine receptor did not function properly.
by Erin Gartner, Associated Press, Charlotte Observer
July 18, 2006
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/local/15067514.htm
RALEIGH, N.C. -- It could be a father hugging his children after a day's work in the tobacco field, or pesticide residue on his clothing washed with family laundry. Maybe it was children playing in farming fields outside their homes. A new study suggests all could be factors in high levels of pesticide exposure detected in children of migrant workers in eastern North Carolina, where an estimated 21,000 people in the heart of the state's agriculture industry work in vast fields of tomatoes, cucumbers and other produce.
Educating workers and pushing for more enforcement of safety laws are central to protecting workers and their children from chemicals, experts say. "We know that exposure to these pesticides creates all kinds of problems, we just don't know exactly how much," said Thomas A. Arcury, lead researcher for a study conducted by the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. The study analyzed urine samples from 60 children between the ages of 1 and 6 who lived with migrant farm workers in six North Carolina counties in 2004. The study looked for specific metabolites the body produces after being exposed to pesticides.
The study found the metabolite level in the North Carolina children was generally higher than the national averages of slightly older children, the only comparison data available, and either the same or higher than levels found in similar studies in Washington state, California, Texas and Oregon. Scientists weren't sure if the levels were high enough to cause harm, the study said. Researchers concluded the results "are of concern," because exposure to pesticides has been linked to health issues ranging from nausea to cancer, problems in lung and brain development, and even death. "This information is helpful, but it's only a snapshot at a particular time," said Allan Noe, spokesman for CropLife America, a trade group of pesticide manufacturers. He noted that some of the national comparison data goes back to 1999.
But advocates said the study would be helpful in pressuring officials to focus on enforcement of safety rules, said Fawn Pattison, executive director of the Agricultural Resources Center, a nonprofit that supports the use of nontoxic pesticides in North Carolina. "It certainly informs policy makers, and the officials charged with regulating this industry, about dealing with the health and environmental questions that are exposed by this research," Pattison.
Programs to educate farmworkers and farmers about pesticide safety have been under way for years, but with the recent surge in immigration -- North Carolina saw its illegal immigrant population grow 43 percent to 300,000 from 2000 to 2004, according to the Pew Hispanic Center -- advocates say the need to educate workers has increased. "Most of them come from Mexico, but little groups of them come from all over the world, and a lot of them travel with their families," said Omar Lainez, community education coordinator with Legal Aid North Carolina's Farm Unit.
The nonprofit group visits migrant and seasonal farmworkers at camps, sometimes set up near crop fields, to teach them about pesticide safety and the legal remedies available, such as the right to ask employers for proper safety equipment and what pesticides are used, Lainez said. "The workers normally don't say anything, because they're afraid," he said, adding that has seen empty pesticide containers near or inside homes. "There's a lot of lack of education out there."
Education efforts focus on three areas: parents who work in fields and bring home pesticides in clothing, living in substandard housing where pesticides may be used to combat insects and rodents, and living near fields where pesticides may drift or children may play. CropLife America completed a two-year education effort in February to distribute booklets and DVDs in English and Spanish about pesticide safety in counties with large agricultural populations, Noe said.
Concern has heightened since three workers for Ag-Mart, which grows tomatoes in eastern North Carolina, had babies with serious birth defects. A state report released in May said pesticide exposure may have caused the defects, but stopped short of making a conclusive link.
Wake Forest researchers hope their study will add to the growing stockpile of information about pesticide use and children, who may be at greater risk from small doses of chemicals that can harm their developing brains and lungs. "It's the larger picture," said Arcury, who directs the school's Department of Family and Community Medicine. "I think we need to do a better job of educating farmworkers."
The study was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, an agency of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of Centers for Disease Control.
news release from Mercury Policy Project
July 11, 2006
WASHINGTON -- In light of new testing by Defenders of Wildlife showing higher-than-expected levels of mercury in canned light tuna, advocates are urging U.S. agencies to take more precautionary measures to protect low-income and vulnerable Americans from exposure to mercury. "The U.S. Government should stop subsidizing the tuna industry at the expense of exposing America's poorest and most vulnerable to mercury, a known neurotoxin," said Michael Bender, director of the Mercury Policy Project. "Like in Hawaii, we recommend that other animal protein substitutes be offered in Federal low income food assistance programs."
In 2005, the U.S. government purchased nearly 10 million pounds of tuna from the fishing industry at a cost of over $16 million dollars. (For more detailed information, see Web link at end of press release.) Federal programs that purchase and distribute tuna include:
"According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, canned tuna is the fish most consumed by pregnant women and children -- hence it is probably their largest exposure to mercury," said Bender. "Yet USDA's Women, Infant and Children program (WIC) provides over 8 million low-income women and children with 26 ounces of tuna per family per month, based on Food & Drug Administration advice which mistakenly assumes that all light tuna has low mercury levels."
Bender said that at least one state WIC program, Hawaii, has convinced USDA to allow canned salmon, a low mercury substitute, to be offered along with canned tuna. Yet other states can only provide canned tuna since it is the only animal protein source allowed under the Federal WIC program.
Testing done by Defenders of Wildlife concluded that tuna imported from many Latin American countries, including several samples from Ecuador, had significantly higher mercury concentrations than the FDA had previously attributed to light tuna. More importantly, testing found that the average mercury content in the imported light canned tuna sampled was more than twice the average for light tuna that the FDA found in their test samples and well above their cutoff for "low-mercury" fish.
The entire report and advice on how to protect your family from high levels of mercury exposure from consumption of light canned tuna can be found at http://www.defenders.org/tunamercury. Information obtained from a U.S. Congressional Office on Federal "Tuna Purchases, All Commodity Programs, FYs 2004-2005" can be viewed at http://www.mercurypolicy.org/new/documents/TunaPurchasesByProgramFYs20042005.pdf. For additional information, see http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/22/tuna/print.html
Contact: Michael Bender, 802-223-9000 or 802-249-8543