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Coordinated nationally by the Institute for Children's Environmental Health |
To join the Partnership for Children's Health and the Environment (PCHE) and receive this bulletin, please complete the form at http://www.partnersforchildren.org/members.html#member.
July 19, 2006
10:00 a.m. Pacific / 1:00 p.m. Eastern time
Topic of the call is "NIEHS Research on Asthma, Pulmonary Health and the Environment: An Update and Discussion with NIEHS Director, Dr. David Schwartz." For more information about this call and to RSVP, please contact Julie as described below.
Contact: Julia Varshavsky, Julia@HealthandEnvironment.org.
July 20, 2006
9:00 am Pacific / 12:00 noon Eastern
This call will focus on diabetes and metabolic disorders. Confirmed speakers are Ted Schettler, MD, MPH, Director, Science and Environmental Health Network; David Carpenter, MD, Professor, Environmental Health and Toxicology, Institute for Health & the Environment, University at Albany, SUNY; and Dr. Greg Ferguson, Wellness Coordinator, Eastern Aleutian Tribes, Alaska
In order to join this call and receive dial-in information, please RSVP to Julia Varshavsky, CHE Program Associate, at Julia@HealthandEnvironment.org.
September 16, 2006
Cedar Creek, Texas
at the McKinney Roughs Nature Center
This symposium will focus on the National Children's Study, the largest long-term study of human health ever conducted in the United States. Study researchers will follow 100,000 children from before birth to age 21, hoping to better understand how children's genes and their environments interact to affect their health and development. In the study, "environment" includes factors like air, water, food and house dust, as well as how children are cared for, the safety of their neighborhoods, and how often they see a doctor. Keynote speaker will be Dr. Alan Fleischman, chair of the National Children's Study Federal Advisory Committee. Plenary speaker will be Gail D.A. Vitorri, co-coordinator of a National Environmental Health Agenda for the Built Environment with the Healthy Building Network
Website: http://www.cehi.org/
Contact: Janie Fields (CEHI's Executive Director), Janie.Fields@cehi.org
December 4 - 6, 2006
Atlanta, Georgia
Presented by Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Environmental Health, The 2006 Environmental Public Health Conference has a theme of "Advancing Environmental Public Health: Science, Practice, New Frontiers." The conference committee is now accepting submission forms for abstracts for workshops, posters, and exhibits. The deadline is August 1, 2006.
Website: http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/conference/abstract_submission.htm
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
from the Bangor Daily News
July 10, 2006
http://www.bangornews.com/news/templates/?a=137095
AUGUSTA -- The federal Environmental Protection Agency is proposing its first rules for dealing with lead paint in the remodeling of homes, but some state officials argue the proposed regulations do not go far enough while remodeling industry sources predict the rules will boost home renovation costs.The EPA is expected to adopt new rules later this year. "The rules are long overdue," Andy Smith, a toxicologist with the Maine Center for Disease Control, said recently. "About half of our cases of childhood lead poisoning are associated with homes where there have been recent renovations done either by contractors or the parents themselves."
The Maine CDC, formerly the Bureau of Health, has a lead screening program that seeks to catch lead poisoning cases early and provide public information about the problems posed by the long banned lead paint. Since 1978, it has been illegal to sell lead-based paint in the United States, but many homes still have lead paint on walls or trim dating back years before the ban. When a home is renovated, the scraping, sanding, sawing and demolition of old walls releases lead dust. Nationally, it is estimated that 40 percent of all homes, about 38 million homes, contain lead-based paint and they include both affluent and poor neighborhoods. "And we have an older housing stock in Maine than many states," Smith said. "When those homes are renovated, that's when we see lead that has been covered up released."
Carole Cifrino with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection said last week that Maine already has a program to license contractors to remove lead from a home. She noted the proposed EPA rules apply only to homes where a 6-year-old child or younger is present, and homeowners who do their own renovations are exempted from the safety procedures. "Lead is toxic to everyone during an active renovation," she said. "It is most toxic to children. Even some dust not cleaned up in a corner can cause problems to kids because they crawl around on the floor and put things in their mouths."
While she is pleased the EPA is proposing national rules, Cifrino said Maine has joined with a New England regional group in filing comments suggesting the rules be strengthened to include homes where any children are present. She added there should also be a national program to help homeowners who want to do renovations themselves in a safe manner. "We were one of the first states to have a lead smart renovator program that has a training program for homeowners that want to do their own renovations," she said. "There are hundreds of people in this state that have taken this course."
She said contractors have taken the course as well as individual homeowners. The problem is there is no follow-up inspection program to make sure contractors implement the training they have received, she said.
The proposed EPA rules are lengthy. For example, the work area must be isolated from the rest of the house with heavy plastic barriers. Debris must be removed daily. Warning signs must be posted. The area must be cleaned with powerful vacuums and mopped down to remove any dust. Before an area can be reoccupied, workers would have to conduct a "white glove" test to check for any dust in the area. The building industry nationally has opposed the rules, arguing they would drive up the costs of renovations and could backfire because homeowners may try to do the cleanup on their own to reduce costs.
Carl Chretien, president of the Home Builders & Remodelers of Maine, said last week his Saco-based remodeling business has not done any renovations involving lead abatement. But he expects any new regulations to increase renovation costs. The EPA agrees. In its study of the proposed rules' impact, the EPA estimated a bathroom renovation would increase between $22 and $63 and the cost of exterior house painting could jump as much as $181.
Both Smith and EPA officials point out there is also a cost to society for allowing children and adults to inhale toxic lead dust. In its study, the EPA estimated that nationally the cost of home renovations would increase by $500 million a year while $5 billion could be reaped in children's health and education costs annually.
by Jens Manuel Krogstad, Waterloo Cedar Falls [Iowa] Courier
July 9, 2006
http://www.wcfcourier.com/articles/2006/07/09/news/metro/e084e1d2dd63161f862571a6000c51fa.txt
WATERLOO -- The air-conditioning that saves Iowans from long, muggy summers doesn't come cheap. And American's growing appetite for such amenities and rising population -- combined with a rise in the price in natural gas -- makes the market ripe for new coal power plants. When one was proposed in Waterloo's back yard, hopes of economic stimulation voiced at public hearings were tempered with warnings of negative effects on residents' health.
The good news is something experts can agree on: The $1.3 billion facility, a 750-megawatt, coal-fired plant planned by LS Power and its affiliate, Elk Run Energy Associates, will be much cleaner than yesteryear's model. Indeed, the most egregious pollution offenders among the nation's power plants are coal facilities several decades old. "The project that we're proposing, it's not your grandfather's coal plant. It's a totally new technology," project manager Mark Milburn said.
Experts also agree coal power plants -- no matter what generation -- emit pollutants that harm human health. That's why federal regulations are in place. Agreement ends, however, when the question arises about the severity of consequences caused by a coal power plant. Determining the direct health effects of any one power plant is difficult, said Tom Newton, division director of environmental health at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. As such, the agency does not keep those kinds of statistics. "Some of the conditions that you may see associated with large industrial facilities, such as hospital room visits for asthmatics, (isn't) a reportable disease. So it's difficult to make an association between a pollutant and the illness," Newton said. "I think we know that emissions at various levels can cause a response."
The point at which people get sick is the measuring stick for federal oversight. Newton said regulations take into account those levels and officials cautiously drop emissions even lower. Because any proposed power plant must pass state and federal Environmental Protection Agency regulations, Newton said, the public will be safe if a plant is built in the area. "The bottom line is that, if the EPA and state of Iowa deemed that our plant or any other plant would not be safe for the environment or for human health, then they wouldn't give us a permit and wouldn't allow us to operate," Milburn said.
Keep in mind, he added, the majority of air pollution doesn't come from coal power plants. That distinction falls on cars. Corn processing, grain processing and cement plants join coal plants in the top 10 polluting facilities in the state, according to DNR statistics. The No. 1 and 2 individual polluters by far, however, are large coal power plants in Council Bluffs and Sergeant Bluff.
Coal power plants contribute a sizable chunk of the nation's air pollution. Skies became cleaner when power plants shut down during a 2003 blackout in the Northeast U.S., according to a University of Maryland study. And they are the largest source of man-made mercury in the country.
'Tolerable' levels
Jonathan Levy is an associate professor of environmental health and risk assessment at the Harvard School of Public Health. He said a study he helped conduct showed coal plants, even with the latest control technology, will make people sick and cause premature deaths when air pollution levels meet or exceed federal safety standards. That is because the EPA sets air quality standards to a "tolerable" level, Levy said, not one at which no one gets sick. He added ample corresponding information exists about the evidence of health effects below national ambient air quality standards.
A study by Levy and colleagues was used in a 2003 court challenge of a pair of proposed 615-megawatt coal-fired power plants in Oak Creek, Wis. The plants are scheduled to go online in 2009-10. They are, individually, "fairly comparable" to the power plant proposed in Waterloo, Levy said. LS Power has not yet filed permits with the state, so specifics on the Waterloo plant's emissions aren't available. The study found chronic respiratory disease, like asthma, cardiovascular disease and premature death, were all more likely to occur because of pollution from the new plants, even when federal regulations were met. The researchers concluded the two power plants would produce 26 premature deaths, 2,000 asthma attacks, 350 emergency room visits, 26 hospital admissions, 26,000 minor restricted activity days and $188 million in impact on public health.
While there is plenty of data on the health effects of older coal power plants, the study Levy's school conducted is one of the few to examine the impact of plants using the latest technology. Milburn noted rebuttal testimony in the court case criticized and attempted to debunk the Harvard study. Those testifying against the plaintiffs said the assumption and methods used were inaccurate. The courts eventually ruled the proposed plants were safe for human health and the environment and allowed construction.
Among the counterclaims was one that the study, which examined fine particulate matter -- the type of pollution most likely to cause adverse human health effects -- did not account for the large variety of particles in existence. Those include some from dirtier sources, like diesel trucks. The testimony maintained pollutants in the study -- even those that didn't come from coal power -- were incorrectly attributed to the plants. Levy stands by his findings. He emphasized the data used in the study "was really standing on the shoulders" of health evidence compiled by the EPA and other researchers. "I think we saw, as in any place else, the health effects range from severe, but less frequent -- such as premature death -- to respiratory symptoms, which are more frequent, but less severe," he said.
The study showed the lives of people, usually the elderly and sick, would be cut short by months because of fine particulate matter exposure. Trying to predict life expectancy beyond that time frame is difficult, Levy said. In addition, the study found those who lived closest to the plant would face an increased chance of severe health effects, while more people farther away would become sick.
In Wisconsin, however, large population centers, Milwaukee and Chicago, respectively, are north and south of the plant. The population of Oak Creek is a little more than 30,000. "For the Wisconsin power plants, only a relatively small fraction of those premature deaths occurred, say, within five miles of the plant," Levy said.
Clearing the air
As part of the federal law that requires plants to use the "best available technology," the proposed Waterloo facility will capture 90 percent of mercury emissions by using a halogenated activated carbon injection system. Milburn said that will result in "the lowest mercury emissions rate, probably, that has ever been built."
John Thompson is director of the Clean Air Task Force's coal transition program. He also appeared as a witness for the opposition during the permitting process for an LS Power plant in Texas. He says one of the main drawbacks to traditional coal power plants is mercury -- a neurotoxin with no half-life -- and its storage. "The problem with a conventional coal plant on the mercury side is that even if you're capturing 95 percent of the mercury, you're taking that mercury and you're dispersing it in a mountain of sludge each year. The chances of it re-emerging in the biosphere is a lot higher than in technology like coal gasification," Johnson said. The coal waste, or sludge, is either sent to a landfill or sold for another use, like wallboard or road construction.
Coal gasification uses an integrated gasification combined-cycle, a process that breaks coal down into a gas and results in a cleaner fuel. The new technology is more expensive than its coal-fired counterpart, and Milburn argues it is not yet viable economically. Most mercury concerns should be alleviated by the Clean Air Mercury Act, which will reduce utility emissions of mercury from 48 tons per year to 15 tons -- a nearly 70 percent reduction -- by 2018, said Catharine Fitzsimmons, the Iowa DNR's bureau chief of air quality. The act, announced last year, was heavily criticized by opponents for its cap-and-trade system, which places a national cap on emissions but allows older and higher polluting plants to trade mercury to newer, lower polluting plants.
The law regulates how much mercury can leave smoke stacks, but Fitzsimmons said the lack of an ambient air quality standard for mercury, a measurement at ground level where people breathe air, constitutes a definite hole in state and federal regulations. She said mercury is one of close to 200 air pollutants any facility can emit for which no ambient air quality standard exists. "It's one of those funny things. You can have limits on how the equipment operates, but if you don't go ahead and look at what those emissions are on the ground level, then you really don't have the full story," she said.
by Janet Raloff, Science News
July 8, 2006
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060708/food.asp
U.S. agriculture has developed a heavy reliance on chemicals to safeguard crops from yield-robbing weeds. However, many of those herbicides can pose substantial health risks to people, pets, and wildlife, which is why laws prescribe how some of these chemicals are handled in fields. A study now finds that trace quantities of such agricultural chemicals nonetheless find their way into consumers' homes -- not on the fruits and vegetables they buy but probably by hitchhiking on dust.
The findings are disturbing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the link between pesticide exposure and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a malignancy whose incidence has exploded during recent years. Indeed, the new study was as an offshoot of a larger non-Hodgkin's lymphoma study financed by the National Cancer Institute. What the research shows is that home exposure to agricultural weed killers increases as the acreage of nearby croplands increases.
We don't fence them in
In their new study, Mary H. Ward of the National Cancer Institute and her colleagues collected dust vacuumed from the homes of 112 Iowa lymphoma patients or healthy, randomly selected volunteers of their age. Using satellite-generated maps of agricultural fields in the state, the team calculated the acreage of croplands near the home of each participant. Both farm and in-town homes were included in the study. This being Iowa, much of the cropland had been historically planted with corn and soybeans, almost all of which had been treated repeatedly with protective herbicides. Ward's team probed homes for specific chemicals known to have been used on the fields.
Analyses showed that at least one of six primarily agricultural herbicides was present in house dust from 28 percent of sampled homes. These chemicals included acetochlor, alachlor, atrazine, bentazon, fluazifop-p-butyl, and metolachlor. Atrazine and metolachlor were the agents most commonly used to protect corn and soybeans from weeds. The next most-popular weed killers used on the crops were trifluralin and dicamba. At least one of these four herbicides showed up in 43 percent of homes.
Although atrazine had been applied to nearly 70 percent of corn acreage, it showed up in the house dust of only 8 percent of homes. Where detected, however, its concentration in dust ranged from 60 to 4,700 parts per billion (ppb). Metolachlor was found in about 20 percent of homes; its concentration ranged from 27 to almost 3,200 ppb.
However, such herbicide contamination paled in comparison to the amount of dust containing 2,4-D, the third most widely used herbicide in the United States and Canada. It was present in 95 percent of homes, typically in concentrations exceeding 1,000 ppb. In one house, 2,4-D's values reached an astounding 125,000 ppb. That it was the most abundant of the chemicals might not be too surprising, Ward notes. Not only is this chemical commonly employed to protect corn and soy, but it's also used along roadsides, in forests, and on lawns to fight weeds. Luckily, toxicity studies suggest that this is also one of the least toxic herbicides to people and animals.
As these are some of the first measurements of pesticides in house dust, the researchers don't have much with which to compare them. Most previous correlations between non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and herbicides came from questionnaires where data indicated only whether individuals had been exposed to certain chemicals and for how long. Even in the current study, the measurements offer only a snapshot of exposure on the day of dust collection.
In the new study, farm workers' homes were generally the most contaminated with weed killers. Some herbicide concentrations in their dwellings were more than triple those present in the homes of people who had never worked in agriculture. Nearly 60 percent of the study's participants lived within 550 yards of cropland. The chance of finding agricultural weed killers in house dust increased by 6 percent for every 10 acres of cropland found within a roughly 800-yard perimeter of the house. The result was that herbicide-laced dust showed up in three-quarters of homes having at least 300 acres of cropland within that 800-yard perimeter.
Ward's team published its findings in the June Environmental Health Perspectives.
So what?
Of nearly 120 studies that have investigated the risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma associated with pesticide contact, most showed increased risk -- especially for weed killers -- according to the Lymphoma Foundation of America. Printed information from the foundation states that the pesticides "more frequently associated with increased lymphoma incidence and/or deaths" are the herbicides 2,4-D and the triazines, which includes atrazine. Such herbicides are typically used on corn.
Some of Ward's colleagues have examined whether residential use of weed killers might contribute to risk of the cancer, but they've found no evidence of that. In the April 2005 Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention, the scientists report that carpets in healthy people's homes were as likely to contain the pesticides as were carpets in the homes of people with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The researchers also found no elevation in the cancer's incidence among people who had used herbicides in or around the home during the preceding 3 decades.
What did emerge in the team's investigations was some suggestion that people whose homes had been treated for termites were at elevated risk of developing the cancer. This risk was restricted to people whose homes had been treated with chlordane before its residential use was banned in 1988. A report of those findings appeared in the February Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention.
Last November, Australian scientists linked non-Hodgkin's lymphoma with workplace exposure to herbicides and other agricultural chemicals. Overall, "substantial exposure to any pesticide trebled the risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma," these researchers noted in the American Journal of Epidemiology. The herbicide 2,4-D was among those linked to the cancer. A year earlier, scientists from institutions throughout the United States described finding an increased risk of certain cancers -- including a doubling in lymphomas -- among the children of men who worked as pesticide applicators.
Cancer, however, is far from the only health or environmental risk associated with agricultural pesticides. For instance, some herbicides used on corn have been shown to disrupt normal reproductive development -- albeit in frogs, in studies so far. Some biologists now suspect that such changes may explain declining amphibian populations.
Agricultural chemicals may also affect human fertility. Four years ago, epidemiologist Shanna H. Swan of the University of Missouri and her colleagues studied sperm in men from big cities and small towns. Sperm concentrations and quality in men from semirural Missouri communities were below those of men from Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New York City. This suggests, Swan told Science News Online, that "environmental exposure to current-use pesticides is associated with poorer semen quality." In an extension of that study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta will soon measure agricultural pesticides in the urine of men who had participated, notes Swan, now at the University of Rochester.
Clearly, there are lots of advantages to living in the country: farm-fresh food, skies clear of urban pollution, and little traffic. The new herbicide study suggests, however, that there can also be at least one health drawback.
by Janet Raloff, Science News
July 8, 2006
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060708/bob9.asp
It was the mid-1980s, and Terry Trent and his wife, Carol Adams, had broken ground for their dream home. Atop a hill east of Sacramento, Calif., the remote, 10-acre site in the Sierra foothills offered plenty of privacy. As the couple eventually learned, it offered plenty of something else as well: a nasty type of asbestos known as tremolite. Respiratory exposure to this mineral has been linked with mesothelioma, a lung cancer that quickly turns fatal.
Trent vividly recalls his first encounter with the asbestos. He was working on what would become his front yard. "Operating a backhoe, I popped a roughly 12-inch diameter vein of tremolite out of the ground that was maybe 35 feet long. I thought it was some old, ancient tree root," he told Science News.
Closer inspection revealed a fibrous mat resembling the asbestos that Trent had seen on insulation pads in his college chemistry class. Gently, he reburied the rope. His worries mounted after he turned up smaller ropes of the material throughout the rest of his property. Eventually, Trent found it poking through the surface in so many places that he decided to haul in 1,000 tons of clean-fill dirt to resurface his homestead.
This solution seemed adequate for 9 years -- until construction began on the plot next to his. Thick dust regularly covered surfaces inside Trent and Adams' home. The local newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, sent out samples of that dust for chemical analysis. It confirmed heavy contamination with asbestos. Pleas to the owner of the neighboring property and to local officials went for naught, and Trent and Adams' insurance company refused to compensate them for the contamination. Finally, the couple did the unthinkable. In 1998, they abandoned the house, then valued at $650,000.
Meanwhile, as other families moved into the area -- the growing suburban county of El Dorado, where home values can now exceed $1 million -- government officials tended to downplay any suggestion that the soil was toxic. That is, until last year, when the Environmental Protection Agency told local residents that its data showed worrisome concentrations of the carcinogenic fibers could be kicked up by normal activities.
What's more, federal scientists now observe, El Dorado is hardly unique. Shallow, natural deposits of asbestos occur in 50 of 58 California counties and in 19 other states. Although some building-industry groups dispute EPA's El Dorado findings, federal scientists have launched a campaign to evaluate threats that such deposits pose to the people living above them.
Personal storms
One problem in documenting any effects of natural asbestos deposits is that those needlelike fibers tend to be bulkier than the asbestos fibers used by industry and so tend not to remain airborne long enough to be captured by outdoor air-pollution monitors. EPA sent scientists, wearing moon suits and personal monitors at face height, to collect personal-exposure data from the town of El Dorado Hills. Values were compared with the asbestos measurements simultaneously recorded by several stationary devices installed nearby, the day before, to sample air about 1.5 meters above the ground.
Asbestos readings were low as long as the researchers were inactive. However, playing basketball in a park in El Dorado Hills kicked up 3 to 16 times as much asbestos as was in the air recorded by the stationary monitoring devices, according to Arnold Den and his colleagues in EPA's Region 9 office in San Francisco. The asbestos probably came from dirt on the asphalt surface. Playing baseball, hiking, or biking on unpaved dirt released even more asbestos, the researchers found.
During a baseball game, "we put monitors on the bases and pitcher's mound, and they recorded much lower [asbestos] values than monitors on the runners," he says. The most asbestos -- 60 times what stationary monitors picked up in the area -- appeared during digging in a garden, Den notes. Similar data emerged during motor biking at the Clear Creek Management Area, a recreational site southwest of Sacramento. Results show that everyday outdoor work and play in these areas create a "personal storm" of asbestos-tainted dust, says Den.
Industry challenges
Last winter, the National Stone, Sand, and Gravel Association of Alexandria, Va., voiced strong objections to EPA's findings. Although the association doesn't represent home owners or builders, its members' products sometimes contain minerals that come in both asbestos and nonasbestos forms. Association spokesman Gus Edwards says, "Our concern is that any federal regulatory agency ... use sound science to differentiate between [them]."
The industry association hired a consulting firm to evaluate how EPA measured and identified asbestos in El Dorado County. Last November, the R.J. Lee Group, headquartered in Monroeville, Pa., reported that 63 percent of the dust fibers that EPA had termed asbestos in El Dorado Hills didn't meet physical and chemical criteria set by academic mineralogists and that the remaining 37 percent were largely inoffensive rock dust.
In some cases, the fibers' chemical makeup didn't qualify as asbestos, the Lee Group said. In other cases, it charged, EPA inappropriately counted needlelike fragments that had broken off a crystal that was too big to qualify as asbestos. Those fragments aren't asbestos even if they have the same chemistry and dimensions as those that crystallized as asbestos needles, the group said. Arthur M. Langer, a consulting mineralogist formerly of Brooklyn College, agrees. "There are data by the bucketful" indicating that such cleavage fragments, as they're called, "are, for the most part, inactive," he says.
On April 20, EPA issued a point-by-point rebuttal to the Lee Group's report. "What we did -- and Lee attacks us on -- is use the public health definition [of asbestos]" rather than the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) criteria, says Daniel Meer of EPA's Region 9. In other words, he explains, EPA counted as asbestos both the mineral fibers regulated by OSHA and additional fibers that EPA toxicologists expect to behave similarly in the body. "In the absence of evidence to the contrary," he says, "we will assume the human body can't tell the difference."
Lungs full
Skeptics in the rock-and-gravel industry have pointed out that no formal study has established that people living over diffuse U.S. deposits of asbestos or related fibers are acquiring potentially toxic doses. However, at least three preliminary pieces of evidence suggest risks to people living near asbestos deposits in El Dorado County and elsewhere. In one informal study, an El Dorado County veterinarian collected lung tissue from two dogs and a cat that had lived in the region for 2 to 9 years and died from causes unrelated to lung disease. The vet also took lung samples from a cat that had lived elsewhere. The specimens were independently analyzed by pathologists Jerrold L. Abraham of the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse and Bruce W. Case of McGill University in Montreal.
At the American Thoracic Society meeting last year, Abraham and Case, specialists in asbestos analyses, reported finding up to 9 million asbestos fibers per gram of tissue in the El Dorado County animals' lungs. Those concentrations were higher than those seen in livestock from an area in Europe where tremolite-tainted soil has been linked to human mesotheliomas, according to Abraham. In contrast, tissue from the cat outside the area didn't show any asbestos.
A second indicator of lung effects comes from Mark Germine, a psychiatrist in Mount Shasta, Calif., who before entering medical school was a mineralogist specializing in asbestos. In 1998, he collected soil samples at six sites in El Dorado County. "I found some very loose, hairy stuff -- tremolite asbestos," Germine recalls. "Although I was really careful, I didn't wear a respirator," he notes.
The following morning, he coughed up green mucus, indicative of lung inflammation. On a whim, he sent some of the mucus to Abraham, who found it loaded with tremolite. Three months later, Germine washed out his larynx with distilled water. Under a transmission-electron microscope, the rinse water "was loaded with tremolite fibers -- more than I could count," he told Science News. He wishes that he'd used a respirator. "I'd never go back there without one," he says.
Finally, a team led by pulmonary physician Marc B. Schenker of the University of California, Davis collected data on 3,000 mesothelioma patients in their state and 890 men with prostate cancer, a malignancy not known to be related to asbestos. In the Oct. 15, 2005 American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, the team reported that although most mesotheliomas occurred in people who had worked with asbestos, people who simply lived near known deposits of rock likely to include asbestos also had an elevated incidence of the lung cancer but not prostate cancer. Indeed, risk of mesothelioma steadily declined by 6 percent for every 10 kilometers that an individual had lived from a likely asbestos source.
Living with asbestos
Many government officials say that it's possible to coexist safely with asbestos-tainted soils. Some physicians and mineralogists doubt it. Since EPA officials reported on asbestos-laden dust in El Dorado Hills last year, the county government has enacted new controls on dust from construction sites. Home sellers must now disclose the presence of asbestos in their soil, where known.
Two decades ago, scientists discovered that large portions of Fairfax County, Va., also were underlain with tremolite. With housing under development throughout much of the affected 28-square-kilometer area, the county quickly developed laws to monitor for asbestos in construction dust and to control soil taken from the area, notes John Yetman, an official with the program. As new buildings are erected at affected sites, the surface must be capped with 6 inches of clean, stable material, such as dirt, sod, or asphalt. Fairfax's rules have gained national renown. But the county doesn't publicize its asbestos problem, and home sellers don't have to alert buyers about near-surface tremolite, says Yetman. The county does host a Web site (http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/hd/asbintro.htm) that maps affected areas.
Communities are reluctant to acknowledge the presence of asbestos, says John Puffer, an asbestos researcher at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. Several years ago, he identified a deposit of blue fibrous crocidolite -- a highly toxic form of asbestos -- adjacent to a nature trail in Mendham, N.J. "When I pointed it out to the mayor, I expected he would be grateful," says Puffer. Instead, the mayor "went ballistic and basically chased me out of town."
The federal government, however, has begun taking seriously community asbestos problems. Bradley S. Van Gosen of the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver spent a year compiling the accounts up to 100 years old of asbestos deposits in the eastern United States. Last year, he produced a map of 331 asbestos deposits -- some so rich they were once mined -- running in a band from Alabama to Vermont (http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2005/1189/pdf/Plate.pdf). He's now at work on similar maps for the Midwest and West.
At EPA's behest, Van Gosen is also looking into El Dorado County. He and his colleague Greg Meeker plan to describe the chemistry, shape, and size of fibers from samples they collected there. Three years ago, El Dorado Hills asked the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta for guidance on evaluating risks posed by the asbestos unearthed during construction of a high school soccer field. The agency determined that some student athletes, coaches, and school workers had received substantial exposures and that the inside of the school needed to be cleaned of asbestos dust, says John Wheeler, an environmental health scientist with the agency.
His office still hasn't yet decided how to address the bigger question of long-term risks from low-level exposures to community asbestos deposits, says Wheeler. The agency is considering setting up a registry to follow the health of residents in El Dorado Hills and perhaps do autopsy studies in the area. Other periodic tests for asbestos are also being considered. "I think, in general, we've found that [naturally occurring asbestos] is something that you can live with," says Wheeler. People need to be cautious where it occurs -- keeping their homes clean, for example, and limiting dusty activities such as tilling the garden.
Abraham is less sanguine about the safety of residential areas overlying natural asbestos deposits. Indeed, he predicts of places such as El Dorado Hills, "It's only a matter of time until we find mesotheliomas there."
by Steve Berberich, Gaithersburg [Maryland] Gazette
July 7, 2006
http://www.gazette.net/stories/070706/businew175501_31955.shtml
Starting last week, the European Union has cracked down on hazardous electronic imports, spurring manufacturers and merchants to ensure that their products pass environmental muster -- and are so certified. Several Maryland companies -- among them security electronics supplier SafeNet Inc. in Baltimore and broadcast audience rating company Arbitron Inc. in Columbia -- find themselves needing to meet the new directive, called the Restriction of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment, or face losing sales in EU nations.
Meanwhile, the new regulation, known as RoHS, is helping another Maryland company, software firm Precience Inc. of Silver Spring, which markets a computer program designed to help other companies meet the directive. RoHS prohibits electrical and electronic manufacturers and retailers from marketing products in the European Union that contain certain banned substances. It is part of a global environmental movement to switch from imposing fines to restricting market access.
In February 2003, the European Union passed the RoHS directive to restrict imported products with more than very limited amounts of any of six hazardous substances: lead, mercury, cadmiuim, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB), and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE). Lead is widely used in solder. Mercury, cadmium and chromium are used to inhibit corrosion. And PBBs and PBDEs are flame retardants used in plastic housings of appliances and computers.
Most aerospace and defense contractors are exempt from the new regulation. But public U.S. companies that sell in Europe must disclose to their investors any environmental risks of their products' materials, with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requiring accurate disclosure in annual reports. Efforts to pass a similar U.S. law have failed. But at least six states, including Maryland with its computer recycling act of 2005, have laws restricting sales of products with hazardous substances.
Products most affected by the new EU directive are those produced by the information technology and telecommunications industries, as well as household appliances, consumer equipment, lighting equipment, hand or household tools, toys, and leisure and sports equipment. "It has caused electronics companies to spend a lot of money to make sure all of their suppliers, parts and materials are RoHS compliant and there is all sort of documentation that has to be done," said Robert Straetz, international trade specialist the Office of the European Union, U.S. Department of Commerce.
Straetz said "companies are going to have to go over to this [RoHS compliance] anyway" because China has a similar directive that will go into effect on Jan. 1, and "even our own state of California" will enforce such a rule starting March 1. Japan, Argentina and several other U.S. states are also considering similar legislation. "Manufacturers are not going to make a separate line of products for three large markets like that and another line for everyone else," Straetz said. "It will force suppliers" to toe the environmental line across the board.
Compliance help
Precience recently marketed a computer program that allows manufacturers to make sure that "the complete structure" of their complex electrical and electronic products meets the RoHS compliance standards. The program, Tornado Environmental Compliance Management, speeds up a company's compliance process by analyzing each component through a database by PartMiner Inc., covering more than 39 million part numbers and more than 1,900 manufacturers. PartMiner Inc. is a global supplier of electronic components and intelligence.
The Precience program also provides buyers of parts and materials some assurance that their purchases will be compliant, said CEO and founder Ahmed Khan. "Even though the [U.S.] government is not saying, 'Be environmentally friendly,' the supply chain now says we are not going to make things with lead," Khan said. "People are changing their manufacturing. A typical electronics company is making network boards with many parts that have to be imported in the system. That is where we come in. Our program looks at all the data on each part, and the legislation requirements for them. Each country has its own reporting requirements."
Privately held Precience, founded in 1995, has 18 employees, with more than 180 customers worldwide. "We make sure everybody is following the same standards, but this is a monstrous industry," Khan said. RoHS is a "huge burden to a small company."
Arbitron Inc., which measures audience levels for radio and television broadcasters, has met an "engineering challenge" to make its Portable People Meters compliant with the RoHS directive, said senior manufacturing engineer Sheldon Tolchinsky. "We took the requirements of RoHS and we reviewed all of our products and we pulled out those substances in the components and the soldering that are restricted," Tolchinsky said. "We have been working on it for about a year. Arbitron markets the meters in Belgium and Norway for radio and in Great Britain for radio and television, with plans to start marketing in Singapore, Kazakhstan and Canada. "We saw RoHS coming for three years, and we don't mind if it improves the environment either," Tolchinsky said. "So, when we look at the scale of what we do, and we make tens of thousands of units for existing use and for future expansion, then we needed to find parts that met our specs and we had to redesign the [circuit] boards."
Last week, SafeNet Inc., which had 2005 sales of $263 million, told its customers that it has retooled its SafeXcel security semiconductor products to be "free of hazardous materials and meet compliance standards" defined by the new EU standards.
by Libby Quaid, Associated Press, Washington Post
July 6, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/06/AR2006070601038_2.html
WASHINGTON -- America's appetite for organic food is so strong that supply just can't keep up with demand. Organic products still have only a tiny slice, about 2.5 percent, of the nation's food market. But the slice is expanding at a feverish pace. Growth in sales of organic food has been 15 percent to 21 percent each year, compared with 2 percent to 4 percent for total food sales.
Organic means food is grown without bug killer, fertilizer, hormones, antibiotics or biotechnology. Mainstream supermarkets, eyeing the success of organic retailers such as Whole Foods, have rushed to meet demand. The Kroger Co., Safeway Inc. and SuperValu Inc., which owns Albertson's LLC, are among those selling their own organic brands. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said earlier this year it would double its organic offerings.
The number of organic farms -- an estimated 10,000 -- is also increasing, but not fast enough. As a result, organic manufacturers are looking for ingredients outside the United States in places like Europe, Bolivia, Venezuela and South Africa. That is no surprise, said Barbara Robinson, head of the Agriculture Department's National Organic Program. The program provides the round, green "USDA Organic" seal for certified products. Her agency is just now starting to track organic data, but Robinson believes the United States is importing far more organic food than it exports. That's true of conventional food, too. "That is how you stimulate growth, is imports generally," she said. "Your own industry says we're tired of importing this; why should I pay for imports when I could start producing myself?"
"We're doing a lot of scrambling," said Sheryl O'Loughlin, CEO of Clif Bar Inc. "We have gotten to the point now where we know we can get a call for any ingredient." The makers of the high-energy, eat-and-run Clif Bar needed 85,000 pounds of almonds, and they had to be organic. But the nation's organic almond crop was spoken for. Eventually, Clif Bar found the almonds -- in Spain. But more shortages have popped up: apricots and blueberries, cashews and hazelnuts, brown rice syrup and oats.
Even Stonyfield Farm, an organic pioneer in the United States, is pursuing a foreign supplier; Stonyfield is working on a deal to import milk powder from New Zealand. "I'm not suggesting we would be importing from all these places," said Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Farm Inc. "But for transition purposes, to help organic supply to keep up with the nation's growing hunger, these countries have to be considered."
The dilemma of how to fill the gap between organic supply and demand is part of a long-running debate within America's booming organic industry. For many enthusiasts, organic is about more than the food on their plates; it's a way to improve the environment where they live and help keep small-scale farmers in business. "If organic is something created in the image of sustainable agriculture, we certainly haven't accomplished that yet," said Urvashi Rangan, a scientist for Consumers Union. "What people do have to understand is if that stuff comes in from overseas, and it's got an organic label on it, it had to meet USDA standards in order to get here."
The issue causes mixed feelings for Travis Forgues, an organic dairy farmer in Vermont. "I don't like the idea of it coming in from out of this country, but I don't want them to stop growing organic because of that," Forgues said. "I want people to say, `Let's do that here, give a farmer another avenue to make a livable wage.'" A member of the farmer-owned Organic Valley cooperative, Forgues got his dairy farm certified nearly 10 years ago. Organic Valley supplies milk to Stonyfield.
Switching to organic is a difficult proposition. Vegetable grower Scott Woodard is learning through trial and error on his Putnam Valley, N.Y., farm. One costly mistake: Conventional farmers can plant seeds when they want and use pesticides to kill hungry insect larvae. If Woodard had waited three weeks to plant, the bugs that ate his seeds would have hatched and left. Organic seeds can be double the price of conventional. "There's not a lot of information out there," Woodard said. "We try to do the best we can. Sometimes it's too late, but then we learn for next time."
Stonyfield and Organic Valley are working to increase the number of organic farms, paying farmers to help them switch or boost production. Stonyfield, together with farmer-owned cooperative Organic Valley, expects to spend around $2 million on incentives and technical help in 2006, Hirshberg said.
Other companies offer similar help. And the industry's Organic Trade Association is trying to become more of a resource for individual farmers. Caren Wilcox, the group's executive director, described how an Illinois farmer showed up in May at an industry show in Chicago. "He said, `I want to get certified. Help me,'" Wilcox said. "It was a smart thing to do, but the fact that he had to get into his car and go down to McCormick Center says something about the availability of information."
In the meantime, manufacturers like Clif Bar and Stonyfield still prefer to buy organic ingredients, wherever they come from, instead of conventional crops in the U.S. "Anybody who's helping to take toxins out of the biosphere and use less poisonous chemicals in agriculture is a hero of mine," Hirshberg said. "There's enormous opportunity here for everybody to win, large and small."
from ABC News
July 6, 2006
http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=health&id=4342219
From food-storage containers to disposable silverware, plastic products are such a part of our lives that it's easy to forget they contain chemicals that could harm us. But last month, San Francisco banned a type of sturdy, hard plastic made with a molecule known as bisphenol A , or BPA. Any toys, bottles and pacifiers made with BPA must be replaced, according to the law the mayor signed in June.
Why did the city take such drastic action? BPA, like many other man-made chemicals, is now detectable in most people's bloodstreams and could cause dangerous hormonal changes in children. BPA -- sometimes indicated by a number 7 on products -- is found mostly in strong plastics, such as nondisposable water bottles, baby bottles and in the lining of canned foods.
But whether BPA poses a real danger depends on whom you ask. While the Food and Drug Administration and the American Plastics Council insist BPA is safe, an outspoken biology professor and other scientists believe it may bring all kinds of harm -- such as cancer, early puberty, obesity and even attention-deficit disorder.
Like a 'Sex Hormone Patch'
Frederick vom Saal, a biology professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia, stumbled onto BPA in 1997 while studying fetal development. He found that BPA passed through the protective placenta from mother to baby, mimicking the behavior of the natural hormone estrogen. Vom Saal, who has studied BPA ever since, said there is so much BPA in the environment it is as if we are all wearing "a sex hormone patch."
Six billion pounds of polycarbonates are produced each year, and much of it ends up in landfills, water systems and the air, vom Saal said. "You're breathing it, you're absorbing it." He also insists that even though the products may be labeled as dishwasher- and microwave-safe, heating this type of plastic may cause the chemical to leach out into the body at a much higher rate.
A number of recent studies support vom Saal's view that BPA could be unsafe:
And, according to vom Saal, there is a big discrepancy between 130 independent studies that identified harmful BPA effects and industry-backed studies, none of which found any danger.
Findings Are Disputed
However, Steve Hentges, a chemist and director of the American Plastics Council, disagrees. In the research as a whole, Hentges said, "the most consistent finding is no effect." He criticized the recent findings, saying even "low dose" studies use BPA levels that are too high to represent real-world situations. A person would have to consume more than 500 pounds of food or drink in contact with BPA in order to exceed the Environmental Protection Agency's acceptable dose, according to Hentges.
Researchers, meanwhile, defended their methods as in line with or more conservative than human exposure to BPA. "There are too many positive findings by reputable laboratories to ignore," said Prins. Prins and Ho's study showed precancerous prostate lesions in 100 percent of male rats exposed to BPA but in only 40 percent of the control group. BPA exposure affected a number of genes, said Ho, including one that normally fuels cell growth in development. This gene stayed "turned on" later in life, leading to precancerous growth. "Our environment is very artificial right now," Ho said, and it could have complex effects on disease. She works in an emerging scientific discipline called epigenetics, which examines how environmental and lifestyle factors reprogram our genes.
What Should Be Done?
While San Francisco has banned BPA in certain products, the FDA has taken no action for now, said Mike Herndon, a spokesman for the FDA in Washington, D.C. "At the present time, FDA has no reason to change its opinion that the dietary exposure to BPA ... is safe," he said.
Dr. Durado Brooks, director of the prostate cancer division within the American Cancer Society, called the BPA correlation with prostate cancer "debatable" and cautions against extrapolating from rodent studies to humans. He said the scientific community is a long way from making any recommendations to the public.
But vom Saal suggests taking the steps he uses for his own family: Buy water filters, avoid heating plastics and throw away old or cracked plastics. Pregnant women and parents of young children should be especially cautious, he said. And as for the action taken by San Francisco, vom Saal called it a "rational start," while Hentges said it was "inappropriate" and not based on science.
by Bart Jansen, Portland [Maine] Press Herald
July 5, 2006
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/060705chemical.shtml
WASHINGTON -- Legislation requiring chemical plants to develop better security plans has bogged down in the Senate because of a dispute about whether the federal government will force companies to switch to less toxic compounds. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, drafted the legislation calling on the Department of Homeland Security to require companies to develop security plans based on the types of hazardous materials they have and how vulnerable they may be to terrorist attacks.
The Homeland Security Committee that Collins heads unanimously approved the bill June 15. Tougher standards would apply for more dangerous locations. The chemical industry generally supports the effort in order to avoid a patchwork of state laws. But Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., is blocking it from coming to the floor. His concern is that the bill could force a company to switch chemicals because of safety concerns.
The dispute raises doubts about whether legislation on the subject will be approved this year. A House committee is still developing its version. "I hope that we can ease whatever concerns that he has," Collins said of Inhofe. "But it is imperative that we pass chemical security legislation and that we do that this year." The urgency of improving chemical security results from the catastrophic threat from an accidental release or terrorist attack. The worst example was the 1984 accidental release of methyl isocyanate in Bhopal, India, which killed 3,000 people and injured 200,000.
About 15,000 facilities nationwide store enough chemicals to kill or injure people in surrounding communities if released. The Environmental Protection Agency says more than 100 facilities each have the potential to kill 1 million people, assuming the worst. In Maine, facilities that would be regulated would be the fuel-tank farm in South Portland and paper mills statewide.
Inhofe, who is head of the Environment Committee, held a hearing June 21 -- less than a week after the vote on the Collins bill. Inhofe argued that environmental groups pursued chemical substitution such as a ban on chlorine for years, but latched on to the security argument since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "Despite what some interest groups would have us believe, chemical companies do not want an attack on their assets any more than we do," Inhofe said. "They do not need the federal government coming in and telling them specifically how to manufacture products."
Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., said prohibiting something like chlorine would be overwhelming and impossible. "It was a bad idea then and it's a bad idea now," he said.
The dispute puzzled Collins because her committee defeated such an amendment from Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn. His provision would have required the riskiest chemical facilities to use safer chemicals, storage and operations if the strategy was cost-effective, feasible and would enhance security. The strategy is called employing "inherently safer technology." "Clearly that approach has been rejected," Collins said. "I'm frankly puzzled by (Inhofe) putting a hold on the bill because of his fears that the department would be able to dictate chemical processes is clearly not accurate."
In fact, environmental groups criticized Collins for failing to pursue the provision that Inhofe opposes. Some 284 chemical facilities in 47 states -- including two in Maine -- switched to less acutely hazardous processes or chemicals, according to a report by the liberal Washington think tank Center for American Progress. Monson Co. in South Portland eliminated chlorine gas, anhydrous sulfur dioxide and ammonia from its wholesale chemical business. Katahdin Paper in East Millinocket switched from a chlorine-gas bleaching process to a liquid-bleach process.
"A wide range of chemical facilities have made substantial changes at their facilities to protect communities," said Matthew Davis of the advocacy group Environment Maine. "Despite chemical industry claims that this is unworkable, chemical facilities across the country are changing to safer chemicals and processes to reduce their risk to surrounding communities." The advocacy group Greenpeace said senators who opposed Lieberman's provision received $818,900 since 2001 in political contributions from companies required to submit chemical disaster plans to the EPA, including $102,201 to Collins. "Public safety should not be optional," said Rick Hind, Greenpeace's legislative director. "Among the bill's most serious failures is the refusal to require the elimination of unnecessary risks with proven safer and cost-effective technologies."
Collins said she might support legislation for switching to safer chemicals in the future, but as an environmental bill, not part of a security bill. Martin Durbin, managing director of federal affairs for the American Chemical Council, told a House subcommittee last week that companies should be allowed to develop their own security strategies. "Legislation should not mandate specific security measures," he said.
For her part, Collins said she would continue discussing the legislation with Inhofe to develop a consensus. "I think the fact that the bill has bipartisan support and was reported unanimously, which is almost unheard of for such a major piece of legislation, demonstrates that we struck the right balance," Collins said.
from the British Broadcasting Company
July 5, 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5149670.stm
McGill University Health Centre looked at patterns between the development disorder and jabs in 28,000 children, the Pediatrics journal reported. They found autism rates were higher in children given jabs after thimerosal was eliminated from vaccines and after MMR vaccination coverage decreased. Experts said research was now needed to explain why autism was more common.
Concerns were raised in the late 1990s that the MMR jab may be linked autism as the three-in-one vaccine was said to overload the immune system. The 1998 research has since been discredited, but immunisation rates have dropped in recent years. Meanwhile, thimerosal, traditionally used as a preservative in vaccines, has been gradually phased out of use after being linked to autism. This has come at a time when autism rates have been rising across the world.
Before the 1980s, one in 2,500 children was diagnosed as autistic, a developmental disability that affects the way a person communicates and interacts with others. Now the figure is closer to one in 250. But the Canadian team said their study should help allay fears over the link, the journal reported.
Exposure
The team found that after thimerosal was phased out in Quebec in 1996, the autism rate rose from 59.5 per 10,000 to 82.7 per 10,000. And after MMR coverage fell in the late 1990s, the rate rose to 102.5 per 10,000 compared to 40.6 in the late 1980s. Lead researcher Dr Eric Fombonne said: "There is no relationship between the level of exposure to MMR vaccines and thimerosal-containing vaccines and rates of autism. We hope this study will finally put to rest the pervasive believe linking vaccines with development diseases like autism." And he added the rise in autism rates was likely to be caused by a broader definition of autism and greater awareness of the disorder.
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, an autism expert at Cambridge University, said research was needed to pin down why there has been a rise in autism. He said there was many likely factors but an "explanation" was needed. "There may also be some as yet unidentified environmental factor, but the new study suggests MMR and thimerosal are ruled out."
Jackie Fletcher, from campaign group Jabs, a support network for parents who believe their children have been damaged by vaccines, said the study still did not prove there was not a link. "What we need, and what we have always called for, is a full and open review into the link so we cann establish once and for all what the truth is."
by Marla Cone, Los Angeles Times
July 5, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ddt5jul05,0,5641738.story
Babies and toddlers of California farmworkers exposed to the insecticide DDT have neurological effects that are severe enough in some cases to slow their mental and physical development, according to research by UC Berkeley scientists published today. The federally funded research involving the children of women who recently emigrated from Mexico to the Salinas Valley is the first in the United States to indicate that the pesticide harms human brain development. "This suggests that ... DDT has effects that no one even thought to test for back when it was in use," said Dr. Walter Rogan, an epidemiologist with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. He was not involved in the new study, published in the journal Pediatrics.
Because DDT was banned more than 30 years ago in the United States and most developed countries, the findings have particular relevance for the ongoing, controversial use in Africa to combat malaria. UC Berkeley scientists measured levels of various pesticides in 360 pregnant women, nearly all of whom were born in Mexico, and tested the mental and motor skills of their infants and toddlers, who were born in the Salinas Valley.
For every tenfold rise in DDT exposure, the children's scores on mental tests dropped 2 to 3 points. Their motor skills were also reduced. In the worst cases, the highest DDT doses were associated with a 7- to 10-point drop in the mental scores of 24-month-old children compared with those who were not exposed. Those drops are significant, because the average score in the study was 86 at that age and anything below 85 indicates a developmental delay and potential learning disability. The tests measure the children's ability to learn and think, including memory and problem-solving skills. "If you had a whole population with a downward shift like this, you'd be seeing more kids with developmental problems," said Brenda Eskenazi, a UC Berkeley professor of maternal and child health and epidemiology, who directed the project.
The Salinas Valley women had very high exposures, eight times higher than average levels in the U.S. population reported recently by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They were probably exposed in Mexico, because most of them had lived in the United States for less than five years. Mexico allowed the use of DDT on farms until 1995 and for mosquito control until 2000. All uses in the United States ended in 1972. "These women probably received very little exposure while here in the U.S.," said Asa Bradman, associate director of UC Berkeley's Center for Children's Environmental Health Research and coauthor of the study.
Virtually every human body on Earth still carries traces of DDE, a compound formed as DDT breaks down. But the effects in the Salinas study were mostly associated with DDT, rather than the DDE that is found in most animals and people. Rogan said that means that the babies' brain development was mostly affected by relatively new spraying, not the residue that remains in the environment from spraying decades ago. "This finding is mostly relevant to the current debate about new use of DDT, or any place that still uses DDT, and is less important to places with historical use," said Rogan, who studied DDE's effects on children in the 1980s. "The take-home message," he said, "is that this is not an entirely benign compound even though the great advantages of its use when you're saving lives with effective malarial control are very important."
Under a United Nations pact, the Stockholm Convention, DDT is used only for killing mosquitoes that transmit malaria, which claims nearly 1 million children and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa annually. President Bush's year-old Malaria Initiative, the new chief of the World Health Organization's malaria program and some environmental groups support continued use of DDT as one of many strategies until safer options are found. In Africa, small amounts are squirted on interior walls, unlike the broadcast spraying of the 1940s and 1950s that contaminated most of the world's food, soil and wildlife.
Eskenazi and her colleagues caution in their new report that "the benefit of using DDT to control malaria should be balanced carefully against the potential risk to children's neurodevelopment. Whenever possible, alternative antimalarial controls should be considered, especially in areas where pregnant women and children may be exposed."
Nobody knows if the effects found in the Salinas toddlers will persist. The UC Berkeley team plans to study the same children until they enter school. "It remains to be seen whether it's a lasting effect or not," Rogan said.
Because DDT and DDE are so similar, scientists were surprised that DDT seemed to harm brain development while the other had little impact. That suggests that the mental abilities of U.S. children born between World War II and the early 1970s -- when DDT was routinely sprayed -- could have been affected, but not those born years later and exposed to old residue in the environment. Nevertheless, the researchers reported that breastfeeding is beneficial to babies even when the milk contains large doses of DDT. The children's test scores increased with every month of nursing even for the most contaminated mothers.
Doctors know that breastfeeding boosts a baby's intelligence, yet they have long wondered if contaminants in the milk erase that benefit. The new study "provides additional evidence that breastfeeding may help to compensate for the subtle perinatal insult associated with DDT/DDE exposure," the authors wrote. The insecticide's damage probably occurs in the womb, not during breastfeeding. The researchers tested the women for other pesticides, but only DDT was connected to neurological effects.
The study is part of a federally funded UC Berkeley project that assesses whether agricultural chemicals in the Salinas Valley, one of the world's most intensely farmed areas, are harming children. Although animal tests have repeatedly shown that DDT causes neurological damage, the new study is the first in the United States to find such effects in humans. In North Carolina and New York, large studies in the 1980s and 1990s detected no effect on babies' mental abilities, but they tested for DDE, not DDT. A smaller study in Spain did report some neurological effects.
The insecticide, which mimics estrogen, also affects reproduction. California women exposed in the womb are more likely to experience delays in getting pregnant decades later, according to a 2003 UC Berkeley study. Again, the effect was predominantly found with DDT, not its older residue.
Developed as an insecticide in 1939, DDT was popular because it killed insects but wasn't acutely poisonous to people or animals. But by the 1950s, it was accumulating in food chains, nearly wiping out eagles and other birds. Canadian scientists recently reported that DDT still contaminates farm soils and will seep into the air for another generation.
by Rebecca Renner, Environmental Science & Technology
July 5, 2006
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2006/jul/science/rr_perchlorate.html
The presence of perchlorate in foods has attracted widespread attention because of the chemical's ability to interfere with iodide uptake by the thyroid. But other chemicals found in food can also inhibit the uptake of iodide, an essential component of the thyroid hormones that direct brain development. Researchers are now looking beyond perchlorate at other iodide blockers, including thiocyanate and nitrate, to determine whether they are cause for concern.
Nitrate levels in leafy vegetables are many thousands of times higher than perchlorate levels. The two chemicals may have an additive effect in inhibiting the uptake of iodide by the thyroid. "The question of the impact of multiple sources of perchlorate and multiple iodine blockers is not known," says Gregory Brent, a medical professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Chief among these other iodide blockers are thiocyanate and nitrate, says John Gibbs, medical director at former perchlorate manufacturer Kerr-McGee.
To get a better handle on overall iodide availability, Benjamin Blount and colleagues at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently published a new method for quantifying iodide and its blockers, perchlorate, thiocyanate, and nitrate, in human amniotic fluid. "We know that you need perchlorate and iodide exposure data to get a good picture of iodide to the thyroid -- that's critical," says Blount. "These other chemicals may also affect the picture," he adds.
In developed countries, the main source of exposure to thiocyanate is cyanide in tobacco smoke, which is metabolized in the body to thiocyanate, a relatively potent iodide uptake inhibitor. "Smoking has been shown to reduce the amount of iodide in breast milk because thiocyanate interferes with iodide uptake," says University of California, Los Angeles, medical center endocrinologist Jerome Hershman. Cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts are also a source of thiocyanate. Unless properly processed, cassava, eaten as a starch in tropical regions, can contain large amounts of cyanogens, which are metabolized in the body to thiocyanate.
Nitrate is present in many common foods, often at much higher levels than perchlorate. In leafy vegetables, nitrate levels are ~10,000× greater than perchlorate levels.
In 2004, Gibbs and colleagues published a paper on in vitro experiments to evaluate the relative potency of thiocyanate and nitrate. They exposed Chinese hamster ovary cells expressing the human protein that controls iodine uptake to individual inhibitors at various doses and to combinations of inhibitors. Perchlorate is 250× more potent than nitrate and 15× more effective than thiocyanate. "We confirmed previous work on the relative potency and showed that over a wide range of exposures the effect of the three is additive," says Gibbs.
Most leafy vegetables have relatively high nitrate values, says Charles Sanchez, a soil scientist at the University of Arizona's Yuma Agricultural Research Center. Using Gibbs's potency factors to convert nitrate to perchlorate equivalents, Sanchez and colleagues found that, in most green leafy vegetables, nitrate has >100× the iodide-inhibiting effect of perchlorate. Sanchez has also measured thiocyanate in broccoli and found 15,000 µg/kg. This would be equivalent to 30,000 µg/kg perchlorate, if Gibbs's potency factors are correct.
Gibbs's potency factors are a good first step, says Herschman, but they can't really be applied to food. "To determine whether particular foods and chemicals in them alter human thyroid hormone production, the steps necessary are cell studies, animal studies, and then carefully controlled human studies," he says.
One of the few investigations of nitrate's ability to block iodide uptake in humans, a 2000 study conducted at the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, suggests that nitrate is not likely to significantly inhibit iodide uptake. The scientists gave 10 healthy human volunteers 15 mg NaNO3/kg body weight for 28 d. At the end of the exposure period, no change had occurred in the iodide uptake of the volunteers, even though the volunteers were on an iodine-restricted diet. The researchers also found no effect on thyroid hormone levels in the volunteers' blood.
Regulators in California and Massachusetts, states that have established some regulatory standards for perchlorate, acknowledge that nitrate and other iodide inhibitors may play a role in determining the risk of perchlorate exposure. They qualitatively allow for this possibility in their uncertainty estimates and in their assumptions for the amount of perchlorate that comes from food as opposed to drinking water.
To reduce that uncertainty, "We will need to have epidemiologic studies that integrate all forms of exposures with thyroid function to determine the cumulative effects," says Brent.
by Dene Moore, Canadian Press
July 4, 2006
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/news/shownews.jsp?content=n070427A
MONTREAL (CP) -- Environment Canada researchers have found a dozen different types of toxic drugs and even caffeine in water samples taken from the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. Although the amounts were minuscule, the study raises many questions about the long-term effects of pharmacological pollution in the country's waterways. "At this point we have detected toxic substances but we don't know what the real toxic effects are," Andre Lajeunesse, one of several researchers involved in the study, said Tuesday.
The study found drugs ranging from caffeine and over-the-counter ibuprofen to the prescription antibiotic oxytetracycline and carbamazepine, prescribed to treat epilepsy and Alzheimer's. The drugs were found in concentrations less than 10 micrograms per litre after sewage treatment -- "trace amounts," said researchers. The human body disposes of excess medication through urine but current sewage treatment methods were not built to deal with those kind of contaminants, Lajeunesse explained.
Although the study dealt specifically with the St. Lawrence, drug pollution in waterways is widespread, said Francois Gagne, who authored along with two other researchers the study published earlier this year in the journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety. "When you're near a city, you're going to see it," Gagne said.
Drugs, birth control hormones, Prozac and perfume have all turned up in similar studies in the United Kingdom and the United States in recent years. U.S. and European studies have also found antibiotics, anti-depressants, veterinary drugs and hormones in tap water. Previous research from Chesapeake Bay to the Thames River has blamed pharmacological and chemical pollution for the feminization of wild male fish.
Testing has begun on fish, sediment and micro-organisms in the St. Lawrence to try and determine the effects of the pollution, such as:
The drug contamination is unsettling, said Isabelle Saulnier, supervisor of the State of the St. Lawrence monitoring program for Environment Canada, but the condition of the historic riverway has improved greatly. Mercury, PCB and metal contamination has decreased, she said. "We know that the St. Lawrence is doing much better than it has been for the past 30 years," Saulnier said.
Improved technology means researchers can now distinguish between the different types of pollution in the river. Twenty years ago studies revealed alarming levels of PCBs in water, she said, and in ensuing years much has been done. A decade ago scientists worried about pesticide pollution and today, she said, controls have been put in place and pesticide levels have dropped.
The Sierra Club of Canada would like pharmaceutical companies to take the lead in fine-tuning their products and eliminating the drug pollution at the source. "Of course, you want the pharmaceutical to work ... but you don't want it to contaminate the fish that you eat," said Sierra spokesman Daniel Green. There could also be a risk to humans who swim in contaminated waters, eat fish from them or take drinking water downstream, he said.
Authorities say a drinking water treatment plant for Quebec City, downstream from Montreal on the St. Lawrence is among 40 in Quebec that treat water for such pollutants. Green said it's not enough. "There is a very high level of human exposure and at the end of the day we do not know what these chemicals will do."
by James Bruggers, Louisville Courier-Journal
July 4, 2006
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060704/NEWS01/607040350/1008/NEWS01
One Rubbertown chemical company is touting a cancer death study of its workers as a reason for taking some of its emissions out of the cross hairs of Louisville's toxic-air control program. "There's no reason to think people got cancer from chloroprene," said Michael Lynch, a senior scientist at DuPont Performance Elastomers, while discussing the conclusions of a study of workers at four plants worldwide, including the one on Camp Ground Road.
Chloroprene has been used to make rubber at the plant for more than 60 years. In the past three years, it has come under scrutiny by Louisville air pollution regulators because neighborhood monitors are detecting it at levels thousands of times higher than the city considers safe for long-term exposure. With the federal government and independent experts still warning that chloroprene may cause cancer in people, along with other medical problems, city officials said they are reluctant to remove it from the Strategic Toxic Air Reduction program's primary list of 18 dangerous chemicals, as plant officials have suggested. "STAR is intended to provide an adequate margin of safety to protect public health," said Art Williams, director of the Louisville Metro Air Pollution Control District.
Officials from the company's plant in Louisiana, as well as from a DuPont laboratory in Delaware, were in Louisville last week explaining the study's result to air pollution district officials and The Courier-Journal. The findings are giving ammunition to both sides in the debate over how to control toxic air emissions in Louisville, while raising questions for the company and its workers.
The study found that workers at the plant have elevated death rates from lung and liver cancer when compared with the nation as a whole, as well as regional and national groupings of DuPont workers. But researchers concluded that chloroprene was not the cause. At the same time, the study found that local workers fared better than the general population of the Louisville area.
Kenneth Gary, 58, a plant worker from Bullitt County, said he doesn't dwell on fears of chemical exposure, noting that "you don't have to work at chemical companies to come down with dreaded diseases." He said the plant has reduced worker exposure to all chemicals during his career, but added, "I think all chemical companies could come together and do better than what they do."
For their part, officials with DuPont and one of the study's lead authors cast the results in positive terms. By reconstructing past exposure for individual workers, they said they were able to show that lung and liver cancer deaths did not correlate with exposure to chloroprene. In addition, the study shows lung and liver cancer death rates among the plant workers "are not different from the general population," said Nurtan A. Esman, a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago and one of the study's lead authors.
Other experts said, however, that not enough research has been done to clear chloroprene as a possible cancer threat. "We need more work," said University of Louisville toxicologist Harrell Hurst, who has conducted his own research on chloroprene and is familiar with the industry study. He described chloroprene as similar to 1,3-butadiene, which has been linked to leukemia in rubber workers in Ohio. In addition, Hurst cautioned that comparing a group of workers to the general population can be skewed by the "healthy worker effect" because plant workers are likely to be healthier than the public.
Ronald Melnick, a senior toxicologist with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, noted that the industry-sponsored study examined only cancer deaths -- not occurrences. Mortality studies can miss cases of people who survive a cancer and then die of something else, said Melnick, who had not seen the study and could not comment on it directly.
Robin Leonard, an epidemiologist with the DuPont Haskell Laboratory for Health and Environmental Sciences who has closely followed the study, said it focused on lung and liver cancers because they are cancers the most likely to be caused by the chemical. And with those two cancers, she said, people who get the diseases often die from them.
Leonard said she was concerned about the local workers' elevated cancer rates when compared with other DuPont workers, nationally and regionally. "I am not saying we don't have an increase," she said. "There is a statistical increase. We are in the process of dealing with that." Leonard said that will mean looking more closely at what chemicals workers were exposed to over different periods of time, as well as trying to better understand workers' smoking habits in a region where smoking is more common.
In going over highlights of the findings, other company officials said the results support their case that the city's chloroprene rule -- part of STAR -- is too stringent. "We are being put in the position that we are poisoning the community, and that's not the case," said Jonathan Miller, the plant's environment specialist.
Others disagree. "What about the other scientists who say it (chloroprene) is harmful?" asked Charles Pope, who lives near the plant in western Louisville and objects to pollution from it and other neighboring chemical plants. One of those is Melnick, whose studies in the 1990s found that chloroprene causes cancer at multiple locations in the bodies of laboratory animals such as mice and rats. That led the National Toxicology Program -- the scientific body that Congress uses to sort through competing cancer claims -- to determine chloroprene is "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen." Said Melnick, "It's definitely a carcinogen. This wasn't something that was iffy at all."
In addition to wanting chloroprene cleared, DuPont remains opposed to the entire STAR program, even though the Louisville plant is scheduled to close next year, said Lynch, the senior scientist with the company. "If people don't address the STAR program, it will perpetuate itself across the country."
by Dorsey Griffith, Sacramento Bee
July 4, 2006
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/state/14963917.htm
SACRAMENTO -- Vaccines containing a mercury-based preservative are now largely off-limits to children younger than 3 and pregnant women in California. The only exception to the new state law, which took effect Saturday, is the vaccine against Japanese encephalitis virus, a deadly mosquito-borne illness endemic to certain parts of Asia. The new law, sponsored by Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, was aimed at reducing the risk of neurodevelopmental problems such as autism, which many parents believe can be traced to exposure to thimerosal, a substance used as a preservative in many vaccines.
Several large federal studies have shown no link between childhood vaccines and autism, but additional research is ongoing. The U.S. Public Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1999 began to advocate the elimination of thimerosal from vaccines because some infants who received them were exposed to mercury at levels that exceeded Environmental Protection Agency guidelines. Except for trace amounts allowable under the new law, thimerosal has been removed childhood vaccines.
The flu vaccine had been an exception. But concerns about its safety re-emerged in 2004, after the federal government recommended babies between 6 months and 2 years be added to the list of those who should get annual flu shots. Aventis Pasteur, the company that manufactures the lion's share of flu vaccine, has increased the supplies of its thimerosal-free version in response to demand. "Based on what we know, we anticipate there will be an adequate supply of thimerosal-free flu vaccine for pregnant women and children under three," said Department of Health Services spokesman Ken August.
The state has ordered 684,480 doses of flu vaccine to be distributed to counties for the upcoming season. The total includes 50,000 doses of thimerosal-free vaccine for children ages 1-3 and 15,000 doses for pregnant women. In addition, the state ordered 10,000 doses of FluMist, also thimerosal-free, for use in healthy people ages 5-49.
Aventis had opposed the Pavley bill, citing in a statement concerns that the ban could "undermine public confidence in immunization and ultimately deprive children of access to needed influenza vaccine." In response to industry worries and related concerns cited by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the legislation ultimately was amended to give the industry more time to stock up on thimerosal-free flu vaccine. The new law also allows for exceptions when no other alternatives are available or during public health emergencies.
August said Health and Human Services Secretary Kim Belshe issued an exception for the Japanese encephalitis virus vaccine. "Given the absence of a mercury-free vaccine against Japanese encephalitis virus, and because the risk of fatal disease or brain injury far exceed any risk of mercury in the vaccine, the secretary is exercising her authority and temporarily exempting the vaccine from the provision of the law for a 12-month period."
About 50,000 cases of the disease are reported annually in Asia. There is no cure, and up to 25 percent of those infected die from the disease. August said that California distributes about 32,000 doses of the three-dose vaccine in annually. Last year, 19,000 went to the military and the rest to people traveling to certain parts of Asia. It is unknown how many of those doses went to very young children or pregnant women.
by Charlie Emrich, Sacramento Bee
July 3, 2006
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/environment/story/14274342p-15084183c.html
Nobody likes finding bugs in their fruit, but ridding crops of bacteria and harmful pests often means using toxic chemicals. Methyl bromide, one of the most commonly used chemicals, has been scheduled for a worldwide ban since the 1990s. An odorless, colorless gas, methyl bromide is classified as a Class I ozone-depleting substance, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Many growers have carved out exceptions to keep using the pesticide until suitable alternatives are developed. That day may have come closer, courtesy of a group of UC Davis scientists. They have developed a machine capable of killing pests with carbon dioxide, a vacuum pump and a little alcohol.
Group leader Manuel Lagunas-Solar is a native Chilean who in 1990 turned from researching nuclear medicine to agricultural safety. The new system, which Lagunas-Solar calls metabolic stress disinfection and disinfestation, or MSDD for short, could be a replacement for current methods of treating produce after it has been harvested. The scientists' study is detailed today in the Journal of Food Science and Agriculture.
Post-harvest treatment is important so fruits and vegetables aren't ruined by bugs while being shipped cross-country. It's equally essential when importing or exporting produce from other countries to prevent potentially invasive species from being shipped around the globe. According to Glenn Brank of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, some foreign countries such as Japan require the use of methyl bromide before they receive certain exports because of their fears of pest infestation.
Post-harvest processing is now performed by loading fruit and vegetables into a large chamber filled with methyl bromide gas for about eight hours. This kills most of the pests, but Lagunas-Solar said his MSDD process can do the same job in half the time. Lagunas-Solar said insects, bacteria and other pests all have a single common feature -- "they all need oxygen." To get rid of the oxygen, a vacuum is applied to the MSDD chamber, reducing the pressure by about 90 percent. After a few minutes, the chamber is filled with pure carbon dioxide for a few more minutes. From there the process repeats, periodically augmented with ethanol vapor for extra killing power. Beyond just removing the oxygen, the changing pressure inside the MSDD chamber creates forces large enough to kill insects and pop their eggs. "It's really a simple concept," Lagunas-Solar said. "We're removing air, we put in carbon dioxide and we use a little ethanol."
Nearly all fruits tested, including table grapes, oranges, grapefruit, stone fruit, kiwi and bananas made it through the process unscathed. More delicate fruits, such as raspberries and blackberries, received minor damage, but Lagunas-Solar said some pesticides also damage fruit. "Methyl bromide is a pesticide that we could clearly do without," said Richard Wiles of the Environmental Working Group. Alternatives to methyl bromide use have been slow in coming. Most other chemicals are fraught with their own problems, Wiles said.
U.S. government experts estimate that about 5 million pounds of methyl bromide was used for post-harvest and quarantine uses in 2003, the last year data were collected, but EPA spokeswoman Enesta Jones said no agency formally keeps tabs on this practice. California, followed closely by Florida, is the nation's largest user of methyl bromide. Of all agricultural products in California, methyl bromide is used most on walnuts, grapes and cherries for post-harvest treatment, according to the state Department of Pesticide Control.
Lagunas-Solas has partnered with the USDA to validate his results and expects that the higher speed of his technique could mean that it sees commercial development within a year of regulatory approval. "If someone was to come up with an innovative, less risky treatment, DPR would be very interested," Brank said.
by James S. Granelli, Los Angeles Times
July 1, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-recycle1jul01,0,6452461.story
Wireless customers typically swap out new cellphones about every 18 months and, starting today, new state laws require retailers to help keep all those used handsets and accessories out of landfills. Sure, the phones are small, but put a million of them in a dump and you'll have a hazardous waste site. Californians replaced 13 million handsets in 2004, the last year for which numbers are available. Only a small fraction were recycled.
The laws that take effect today, following up on a recent one that makes it illegal to toss cellphones in the trash, require retailers to offer recycling services so customers -- at no cost -- can drop off their old phones, rechargeable batteries and other accessories. It's the latest effort to keep the rapidly growing pile of obsolete electronics out of landfills, where certain metals, plastics, acids and other hazardous materials can quickly turn an area into a toxic dump. "Requiring electronics retailers to take back obsolete cellphones and rechargeable batteries will provide consumers with a much-needed recycling opportunity," said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, a nonprofit public interest group that supported the laws.
Civil penalties are severe, though the maximum isn't likely to be imposed. Cellphone users, stores owners or others who throw handsets into ordinary trash face fines of as much as $25,000 under a law effective in February. Retailers that don't have a recycling plan or don't comply with the law could be barred from selling handsets. The laws, sponsored by Assemblywoman Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills), were passed in August 2004, but legislators heeded pleas of retailers for time to set up recycling plans. So the effective date for taking in cellphones was put off until today.
With more than 215 million cellphone users nationwide and new technology making current phones obsolete quickly, sales of handsets is a big business. Worldwide, analysts expect 1 billion handsets to be shipped this year. Most are to replace old phones.
But old handsets can gain new lives. "If you're not using it anymore, that phone can provide value for somebody else," said Mike Newman, vice president of sales for ReCellular Inc., the nation's largest cellphone recycler. "There's no reason for it to sit in a closet and gather dust." California now requires that Cingular Wireless, Verizon Wireless, Costco Wholesale Corp., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other retailers have a plan in place to recycle phones. Nearly all hire outside firms such as ReCellular to do the job. ReCellular, with about 53% of the recycling market, takes in 15,000 cellphones a day at its plant in Dexter, Mich., near Ann Arbor, and Newman said the company was on track to grow 67% this year. The company checks all the phones, fixing or cleaning up about 9,000 a day to ship back on the market. About half go to U.S. stores, where they are sold to customers who buy prepaid phone service. The rest go to 40 other countries, where a sales force gets the phones back into circulation.
Usually, recyclers take their costs and less than a third of the profit from the sales of used cellphones, and the carriers usually turn over the rest of the profit to charities of their choice. "It's incredible what we get," Newman said. "When Verizon Wireless starting selling the Razr cellphone, we started to see them being recycled to us within a month after they entered the market. And they're working just fine." The company also gets phones that are 15 to 20 years old. Some of those 5-pound phones still work great in wide-open areas such as Wyoming and Montana because their stronger transmitters and receivers can reach cellphone towers that are typically farther apart.
ReCellular tries to save at least one of every kind of cellphone for displays at conferences and trade shows, as well as for an exhibit it plans to open, Newman said. One problem the company faces is trying to assure cellphone customers that they can remove their personal data from phones quite easily. Websites, including ReCellular's, give directions for just about every model made. Recyclers often do the job as well.
Phones that are too damaged or too out-of-date to work anywhere are sent to the recycling grinders, which remove traces of silver and gold as well as any hazardous materials on circuit boards, and grind the remaining plastic and metal for other uses. "What's interesting is that because we track serial numbers, we're finding that there are phones we've received back as many as two more times," Newman said. "That means three people have used the same phone. "But all the phones become junk eventually."
by Charles Clover, London Daily Telegraph
July 1, 2006
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/07/01/nelectric01.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/07/01/ixuknews.html
A European directive banning poisonous heavy metals from all kinds of electrical and electronic goods including fridges, computers and vacuum cleaners comes into force today. Experts say that the directive, which represents the largest single change ever to hit the consumer electronics industry, is causing chaos among retailers and is likely to put up prices to consumers by at least five per cent.
Experts say that it is quite likely that consignments of electrical goods already afloat and on their way to Britain could be pronounced illegal the moment they get here today by the National Weights and Measures Laboratory, the enforcement agency. Computers, vacuum cleaners, fridges, freezers and lighting already on sale are exempt from the directive, which is designed to reduce the amount of lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium and two groups of flame retardants going into landfill sites.
But finished imported goods are bound by the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive from the moment they clear customs to go on the British market. Infringements carry a £5,000 fine for a small breach of the directive up to an unlimited fine for a larger one. Only 12 per cent of the electrical goods industry in Britain is ready for the new directive to come into force, according to research.
Gary Nevison, of Farnell InOne, the firm that carried out the research, said: "This is the biggest thing to hit the electronics industry in its history. There has been an awareness of this for three years and the DTI has held stake-holder consultations. But some people have only just started to pay attention." Mark Shayler, from the consultancy eco3, said: "These regulations have been causing chaos across the retail and manufacturing sector as people try to come to terms with their complexity. Our experience of training more than 400 businesses and 1,000 individuals across Britain has shown us that very few companies have got to grips with what RoHS will mean to them." He said the directive would mean a five per cent rise in the price of electrical goods, but some Chinese firms were trying to charge up to 30 per cent more.
by Shelly Sanders Greer, Toronto Star
July 1, 2006
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1151531412511&call_pageid=970599119419
While building "green" has been gaining momentum over the past few years, indoor air quality has actually taken a back seat. The level of energy efficiency in new homes has increased, and will continue to increase when the updated Ontario Building Code, requiring better energy efficiency, takes effect next year. But, unless there is a stronger emphasis on ventilation and an avoidance of building products that release or off-gas toxic chemicals, indoor air quality will continue to erode. And it doesn't matter if you buy a $300,000 home or a $2-million home. Toxic building products are used in every home built in Ontario.
In a recent report from Environmental Defence (a charity) called Polluted Children, Toxic Nation: A Report on Pollution in Canadian Families, lab tests found that adults in their test group had an average of 32 toxins in their bodies, while children had 23. Although the test group was small, just 13 people from across Canada, it has spurred Health Canada to begin a larger, national program tracking toxic substances next year. The report revealed three significant findings that cannot be ignored. First, the toxins found are known carcinogens; second, every child tested had at least one toxin at a higher level than the adults; and third, many of the toxins exist in all homes.
Probably the most ubiquitous building product in every new home is particleboard, which can be found in subfloors, cabinet boxes, shelves, closets, interior doors, window bases, moulding and kitchen cabinet doors. Particleboard can take the form of plywood, MDF or oriented strand board. Particleboard is a composite product made with sawdust and formaldehyde, explains Dan Morris, an engineer who is president of Healthy Building Inc. and teaches a program on sustainable building at Seattle Community College. "It is used anywhere in a house that used to be wood, and it is one of the worst things we have ever put into housing" he says. "Its half-life is between 10 and 40 years, which means it will off-gas formaldehyde for a long time. MDF has a higher density than plywood, so the formaldehyde comes out a bit slower than in plywood."
Dr. Kapil Khatter, director of health and environment for Pollution Watch and president of Canadian Physicians for the Environment, says formaldehyde is a carcinogen. He suggests particleboard should never be used. But Renee Bergeron, media relations officer for Health Canada, says formaldehyde is present at low levels in all Canadian buildings. In an email, she explains that most homes tested in Canadian studies have had formaldehyde levels below the Health Canada guideline. However, she does suggest we can lower our exposure to formaldehyde by increasing the flow of outdoor air to the inside, which means increased ventilation. She also agrees "wood-based products assembled with urea-formaldehyde resins (particleboard or MDF) emit more formaldehyde than those assembled with phenol-formaldehyde resins (such as oriented strand board), and bare products emit more than coated products." Although Canadian-made particleboards are tested on a regular basis for the Japanese market, and have the best rating going into this market, we import a lot of the particleboard used in our own new homes.
Dale Black, manager of quality management systems for the Canadian Plywood Association, says Canada does not test for formaldehyde for imported plywood or MDF. Morris, who says the same problem exists in the U.S., attributes it to free trade. "In the late '80s we had lowered formaldehyde by 70 per cent," he says. "In the late '90s, with free trade, formaldehyde was going up again. The reason is we can't tell any other country what to do or how to make products. So we are importing lots of particleboard from Mexico which has lots of formaldehyde."
Complicating the increase in formaldehyde levels is the tighter, more energy-efficient homes being built, where pollutants build up and are harder to get rid of, says Morris, who believes the biggest problem is inadequate ventilation. "In houses with poor ventilation, dust can get to be 500,000 particles per cubic foot of air that you breathe. I think there is a conflict between green building and indoor air quality." Morris's advice to homebuilders is simple: "If in doubt, keep it out" and provide good ventilation in all new homes. He would like to see heat-recovery ventilation systems in all energy-efficient homes. This would allow fresh air to enter the house through a single intake and then be distributed through ducts to other rooms. Stale, polluted air would be removed through a separate exhaust duct.
Sarah Winterton, executive director for Environmental Defence, says we should be getting rid of known products with toxic chemicals as soon as possible. "It's a matter of mandating industry to implement pollution plans and implement products with safer materials," she says. "Should products with toxic chemicals be created in the first place?"
by Martin Mittelstaedt, Toronto Globe & Mail
July 1, 2006
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/freeheadlines/LAC/20060701/CHEMICALS01/national/National
The federal government wants to add two chemicals that have been widely used in the production of stain repellants and flame retardants to Canada's list of toxic substances, one of the most aggressive regulatory actions in the world against the compounds. The substances, polybrominated diphenyl ethers and perfluorooctane sulfonate, have been widely used for decades in consumer products such as computers, mattresses, televisions, furniture and clothing. They are probably found in most homes in the country.
Ottawa is taking action because the chemicals, neither of which are manufactured in Canada, have been linked to a range of troubling symptoms in recent laboratory tests using rodents. The problems include conditions that resemble attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders in children, thyroid hormone disruption, decreased sperm counts, and in some cases, death. Trace levels of the two chemicals have been detected in the bodies of almost all Canadians who have been tested. Elevated amounts have been found in wildlife, including Arctic mammals such as polar bears that are far from any known manufacturing facilities.
Environment Minister Rona Ambrose and Health Minister Tony Clement are unveiling the proposals today in the Canada Gazette, the government's official record of regulatory announcements. They add the chemicals to Canada's list of harmful substances, which already includes such dangerous compounds as cancer-causing asbestos, will allow Ottawa to make formal regulations to restrict the compounds.
The two substances were among those profiled in a recent Globe and Mail series that investigated the exposure of Canadians to dangerous pollutants in household products. PFOS, for instance, was a key ingredient in the Scotchgard brand of stain repellent used on clothing and carpets for nearly 40 years, until its manufacturer, 3M Corp., announced a phase-out in 2000.
Although the Conservative government has often triggered the ire of environmentalists for cutting climate-change programs, it received rare accolades yesterday from anti-pollution activists for its intention to classify the chemicals as toxic. No other country has designated the entire class of PBDE flame retardants as dangerous. Chemical producers have been fighting an intense battle to keep the European Union, generally considered the world's leading regulator on pollutants, from moving against a PBDE formulation known as "deca" that Canada is proposing to regulate. "The federal government has made the right decision and they deserve credit for that," said Rick Smith, executive director of the Toronto-based group Environmental Defence. The main industry association of flame-retardant manufacturers, the Washington-based Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, could not be reached for comment.
Previous tests by Health Canada found Canadian women have the second highest levels of PBDEs in their breast milk in the world, after the United States. In the Canada Gazette filing, the ministers said they didn't think exposures to breast-fed infants were high enough to cause harm, although they said more research would have to be done to prove this conclusively.
from Environmental Health Perspectives
July 2006
http://www.ehponline.org/members/2006/114-7/focus.html
The etiology of a medical condition might seem an unlikely subject to arouse intense feelings. Yet few medical disorders have stirred up as much passion and divisiveness among scientists and the general public as autism has in recent years. The heat of the controversy has even attracted attention from periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Wired magazine -- seemingly improbable forums for a medical debate. Why all the furor?
At the eye of the storm is the startling climb in the numbers of children who have been diagnosed with one of the autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The most severe ASD is autistic disorder (which often is called simply "autism"); other forms include Asperger syndrome and the much rarer childhood disintegrative disorder. In the United States, the diagnosis of ASDs increased roughly 10-fold over the course of a decade, from 4-5 children per 10,000 in the 1980s to 30-60 children per 10,000 in the 1990s, according to a report in the August 2003 Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. The 5 May 2006 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report describes the results of two parent surveys from 2003 and 2004, which suggested that 55-57 children per 10,000 had autism (however, an editorial note points out that, due to the nature of the surveys, parents of children with other ASDs may have reported their children as having autistic disorder).
Some scientists believe that much of the upsurge is the result of increased awareness of ASDs or changes in diagnostic criteria, which would suggest that the true prevalence of the disorders has been stable over time. Others disagree. "It is premature to state that there is no increase in prevalence," says W. Ian Lipkin, a professor of neurology, anatomy, and neurobiology at Columbia University. "None of the studies to date has been designed to definitively address the issue. "
The prevalence of ASDs plays into the fundamental question of what causes these disorders. If the number of cases is truly on the rise, then it would seem likely that some change in the environment is driving up the total. That's partly what has divided scientists into opposing camps -- they cannot agree on the relative importance of genetic and environmental factors in the disorders' etiology. Alas, answering the prevalence question might not end that debate. "Even if the prevalence of autism were stable," says Lipkin, "you would not be able to rule out the possibility of an environmental trigger." That's because very little is known about the mechanisms that cause autism, be they environmental or genetic.
"The study of autism was, until recently, largely dominated by the field of psychology, where characterizing the behaviors and developing reliable instruments for diagnosis have been major areas of research over the past few decades," says Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis. Indeed, the core symptoms of ASDs -- social disinterest, repetitive and overly focused behavior, and problems in communication, usually appearing before 3 years of age -- have been well described. Much less research has focused on the causes of these symptoms.
Several investigations dating back to the 1970s indicate that identical twins have a much higher concordance rate of ASDs than fraternal twins, according to a report in the Spring 1998 issue of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews. Those studies provide some of the best evidence that these disorders have a strong genetic component. But the identity of the genes involved, much less how they produce ASDs, has not been established. Moreover, the concordance rate for identical twins is not 100%, which suggests that at least some cases must be associated with environmental or epigenetic factors.
A few cases of ASDs have been clearly linked to environmental insults. These include prenatal exposure to chemical agents such as thalidomide and valproic acid, as well as to infectious agents such as the rubella and influenza viruses. Here again, the concordance rate is not 100%, which suggests that a genetic predisposition is necessary for chemical and microbial factors to act as triggers.
Tantalizing clues like these are prompting scientists to reconsider the research agenda for ASDs. Martha Herbert, a pediatric neurologist at Harvard Medical School, and her colleagues have been applying the methods of genomics to identify environmentally responsive genes that might be important in these disorders. "When you realize that the widespread changes we're seeing in autistic brains may occur in parallel with or even downstream from widespread changes in the body -- such as in the immune system -- and that these changes may be environmentally triggered, you start looking for ways to think more broadly about genetic vulnerability. It can't be just about 'brain genes,'" Herbert says.
Some new epidemiological studies also are looking for gene-environment interactions. According to Diana Schendel, an epidemiologist and project officer for autism research at the CDC, which funds one of the projects, these initiatives will be able to examine many possible causal pathways to ASDs, including both genetic and environmental causes that may lead to the development of the disorders in different subgroups of children. Some of these projects are already under way, whereas others will begin soon. All of the scientists involved, however, believe their research will finally provide some of the answers that everyone has been looking for.
To read the complete article, including descriptions of the CHARGE, ABC, CADDRE and other studies, please visit http://www.ehponline.org/members/2006/114-7/focus.html
