Environmental health
sb admin | February 1, 2007Friday, February 2, 2007 (3:30 AM EST): Tune in to listen to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) webcast announcing the Working Group I's approval of their Fourth Asssessment Report. There's no doubt the global warming naysayers will critique the IPCC's report with gusto. But, as Naomi Oreskes writes in "Undeniable Global Warming" in todayâs Washington Post "the chatter of skeptics is distracting us from the real issue: how best to respond to the threats that global warming presents."Â
On the eve of the IPCC's report release, the Senate Committee on…
sb admin | January 29, 2007One of the best ways that mothers, fathers, grandparents, and caregivers can find out about hazardous agents in their homes, communities, and workplaces is by reading the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP). EHP is published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), an agency created in 1966 by the Surgeon General as part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). EHP is published monthly and can be accessed on-line at no cost.  Some of the scientific articles published in EHP may be too technical for some readers, but the journal's Environews…
revere | January 21, 2007Half of us in the US now live in cities, towns or states that ban smoking in public places, including restaurants and bars (it's nice to be more enlightened than Europe in at least a few things):
Seven states and 116 communities enacted tough smoke-free laws last year, bringing the total number to 22 states and 577 municipalities, according to the group. Nevada's ban, which went into effect Dec. 8, increased the total U.S. population covered by any type of smokefree law to 50.2 percent.
It was the most successful year for anti-smoking advocates in the U.S., said Frick, and advocates are now…
sb admin | January 19, 2007Lisa Stiffler at Dateline Earth reports on the newest research on PBDEs (levels of this flame retardant in household dust correlate to levels in breast milk) and gives an update on Washington stateâs proposed PBDE ban.
Jake Young at Pure Pedantry has an update on Eli Lilly's attempts to block the online distribution of documents that show that the company tried to play down the side effects of its schizophrenia drug Zyprexa.
Mead Over at Global Health Policy commends the 22 Members of Congress who wrote to the US Trade Representative in support of Thailand's exercise of a compulsory license…
sb admin | January 18, 2007By David Michaels
Earlier today, President Bush took another step to limit the ability of regulatory agencies to protect the nationâs health and environment.
The President signed amendments to Executive Order (E.O.) 12866, further centralizing the control the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has over agency activities, and making it more difficult for public health agencies to issue regulations or even guidance documents.
OMB Watch had just posted its preliminary analysis of the amendments. Here's an excerpt:
⢠It shifts the criterion for promulgating regulations from the…
sb admin | January 12, 2007By David Michaels
âRisk assessment data can be like a captured spy: if you torture it long enough, it will tell you anything you want to know.â
- William Ruckelshaus, first EPA Administrator,
Risk assessment, explicit and implicit, is the motor that drives regulation. It can be a valuable tool for assisting regulatory agencies in selecting priorities and setting standards. It is also a means through which opponents of regulation can manufacture uncertainty and impede implementation of appropriate public health and environmental protection programs.
The failed White House proposal to…
sb admin | January 11, 2007By David Michaels
In todayâs Wall Street Journal (sub required), Jeffrey Ball reports that ExxonMobil has decided to stop funding several of the groups that have been in the forefront of attacking the scientific evidence on global warming.
The campaign to shame ExxonMobil appears to be working. Earlier this week, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a damning report describing how the oil giant funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science:
In an effort to deceive the public about the…
sb admin | January 8, 2007by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz
Mr. Milkey (for the State of Massachusetts): Respectfully, Your Honor. It is not the stratosphere. Itâs the troposphere.
Justice Scalia: Troposphere, whatever. I told you before Iâm not a scientist.
(Laughter)
Justice Scalia: Thatâs why I donât want to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth. [PDF of arguments here]
We all know that our children lack basic understanding of science and how it works. The dearth of math and science majors in our universities and the huge percentage of kids who know little or nothing about evolutionary theory are…
revere | January 6, 2007My post on "Why are manhole covers round" was made in all innocence. I'm interested in sewers and long ago someone had mentioned this little factoid to me and I thought it was interesting. Little did I know.
Little did I know, what? First, that this is a notorious question. Allegedly it came to notoriety because this was a question asked by Microsoft on job interviews. In addition it is supposedly a Mensa question (couldn't find the cite) and some companies claim to have used it before Microsoft (McKinsey & Co).
Wikipedia has a good entry on manholes with 11 good reasons they are round (…
revere | January 4, 2007I have what some might think is an unhealthy interest in sewers. It's not really unhealthy, because, as I never tire of telling Mrs. R., I'm only interesting in theoretical sewerology, not the kind where I might actually visit a sewer (I tell her this whenever she wants me to do some plumbing repair in the house. I leave that to her. I prefer electricity. Truth to tell, I have actually taken a boat through the Paris sewers and visited a sewage treatment plant, but those were aberrations). I once edited a book that reprinted important papers and documents in 19th century sewer history. I…
revere | January 3, 2007Mercury is a neurotoxin. Neurotoxins are bad for developing nervous systems. Therefore . . .
Five "hotspots" of mercury contamination posing a risk to human health have been found in the eastern states of the US and eastern provinces of Canada.
Average mercury concentrations in many of the region's freshwater fish exceeded the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recommended level for safe consumption by up to 20 times.
[snip]
The EPA safety limit for the consumption of mercury is 0.3 parts per million, yet perch in some locations contained a concentration of about 5 parts per million…
revere | December 26, 2006Our SciBling Matt Nisbet over at Framing Science has called our attention to a WaPo piece about Governor Arnold (The Terminator) Schwarzenegger's emergence as one of the most pro-environment state-house chiefs in the nation. The fact that he runs the biggest state with enormous economic clout makes it all the more significant. Reading the WaPo article Matt points to makes clear he has also picked up on a significant aspect of The Governator's strategy which got by the WaPo staff writer but we believe is significant. As Matt sees, Schwarzenegger is framing is arguments in public health terms.…
sb admin | December 22, 2006The biggest news in science and public health was the tragic, though not unexpected, guilty verdict in the Libyan trial of six medics accused of deliberately infecting patients with HIV. Several members of the scientific community, mobilized by Nature reporter Declan Butler and several bloggers, drew attention to the scientific evidence demonstrating the medics´ innocence in the weeks before the trial, but science lost this one. Declan Butler, reporter has posts chronicling developments in this case; Revere at Effect Measure and Orac at Respectful Insolence have news and commentary on the…
revere | December 18, 2006One of the most important tools in the fight to reduce emissions of toxic agents into the environment has nothing to do with emission controls. It has to do with information. Since 1984 Americans have had access to information about how much individual companies were emitting into their neighborhoods via a publicly accessible database called the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). The Bush Administration is again trying to weaken it, after unsuccessfully proposing new rules that would only require companies to report every two years rather than annually. Now they want to raise the threshold for…
sb admin | December 15, 2006Ruth Levine of Global Health Policy offers the AIDS-Malaria link as a reason disease-by-disease thinking isn't the way to go.
Richard Littlemore at DeSmogBlog reports on which US publishers don't think their audiences can handle George Monbiot's book "Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning."
Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily describes research into improving mood with fast thinking and positive statements.
Jordan Barab at Confined Space has the goods on the nominee for EPA's Inspector General position.
Page Rockwell at Broadsheet considers the prospects for getting HPV vaccine Gardasil to…
sb admin | December 13, 2006Could anyone besides the Economist dare to think it could overturn three of green shoppersâ sacred labels in a mere three pages? Its 12/7/06 article âVoting with Your Trolleyâ tries to debunk organic, Fair Trade, and local foods all at once. I didnât find it very convincing.
Iâm going to leave Fair Trade for those with more expertise in global economics and stick to the organic and local arguments.
Organics
âBut not everyone agrees that organic farming is better for the environment,â the magazine states. The main argument here is that âorganic farming produces lower yields and therefore…
revere | December 8, 2006With all the news about Polonium-210 poisoning and the steady drumbeat of bird flu news, we failed to take note of the announcement that 70% of Thailand's toilets were not up to WHO standards. The shocking news came as Thailand hosted the 2006 World Toilet Expo and Forum in Bangkok. Health Minister Mongkol Na Songkhla announced at the opening ceremonies Thailand was determined to "get it together":
Authorities launched a clean-up campaign after randomly checking 6,149 public toilets across 12 of Thailand's 76 provinces in March and finding that 90 per cent did not pass the standards for…
sb admin | December 8, 2006Health and environmental bloggers have covered a wide array of topics this week. Some highlights:
Steve at Omni Brain (don't click the link while eating) displays graphic warnings from Belgian and Thai cigarette packs
Merrill Goozner at GoonzNews posts an excerpt from his just-published article (cover story of The Scientist, for those with subscriptions) on treating malaria on the Thai-Burmese border.
Revere at Effect Measure challenged those who inveigh against alternative medicine to respond to a study that found chicken soup to inhibit neutrophil chemotaxis, and a lively discussion ensued…
sb admin | December 7, 2006Earlier this year, President Bush nominated Susan E. Dudley of the Mercatus Center to replace John Graham, PhD, as the head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The office oversees all of the Administrationâs regulatory policies, including public health and environmental rules, and is often the last major hurdle faced by agencies like OSHA or EPA before a new regulation can be proposed. As Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) noted at Ms. Dudleyâs November 13 confirmation hearing, OIRA lacks name recognition among the public, but its work has tremendous âimpact on the lives of all…
sb admin | December 7, 2006By David Michaels
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal published last December (by Peter Waldman, 12/23/05), product defense experts at ChemRisk pulled off a particularly audacious scam on behalf of Pacific Gas and Electric, the California utility that was being sued for contaminating drinking water with hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen.
ChemRiskâs scientists went to China to obtain the raw data of a 1987 study that had implicated chromium-polluted water in high cancer rates, paying the lead author $2,000, re-analyzing his data, changing the results to exonerate chromium and…