Brazil successfully hardballs Abbott on AIDs drug

So is it Mondays with Bisphenol?? You know what, the scary thing about this chemical is that its acute (short term, immediate) toxicity at high doses, which is the only safety testing that is ever done, does not correlate with all the subtle effects that are seen at low doses (chronic). Here’s another study where ambient level exposure to bisphenol A interferes with prostate cancer treatment by making the tumor cells androgen independent, so the standard testosterone deprivation therapy will not work any more.

Environmental Health News: New Science

A common plastic molecule to which virtually all Americans are exposed may interfere with the standard medical treatment for prostate cancer, according to new experiments with human prostate tumors implanted into mice. The doses of the plastic molecule, bisphenol A, were chosen specifically to be within the range of common human exposures. Tumor size and PSA levels were significantly greater in exposed animals just one month after treatment.

One of the principal known sources of exposure to bisphenol A in the U.S. is through its use to make a resin that lines the majority of food cans sold in markets. These new results by Wetherill et al. suggest men concerned about prostate cancer may want to reduce their consumption of canned goods and their use of polycarbonate water bottles, another common source of exposure

This is one powerful (if not actually more dangerous) chemical. it is so ubiquitous that finding a substitute is not going to be easy.

That would have been my headline! It was a study of 29 women, and the results show a six-fold increase in the incidence of autism in children whose mothers were close to fields being sprayed with organochlorine pesticides. A factor of 6 is a big number, which is why they found statistical significance at such a low sample size.

Most organochlorine pesticides (the most famous being DDT) are already banned in the first world. The ones suspected here, endosulfan and dicofol are banned in quite a few countries including Belize, Singapore. Cambodia and Germany. The Stockholm convention (international treaty to identify and restrict the use of persistent organic pollutants) has identified endosulfan as a possible addition to its list of POPs.

Of course, the US has not even ratified the Stockholm convention thanks to the pesticide lobbies. So, nothing the Stockholm convention decides about endosulfan will  carry any legal weight. In this country, pesticides and most other chemicals in current use are “innocent until proven guilty”, meaning harm must be conclusively proven in a manner that will withstand court challenge. With industry sponsored research and lobbying, such a burden of proof is often insurmountable and therefore, hazardous pollutants are used in the US well beyond their sell-by dates.

Pesticide link to autism suspected – Los Angeles Times

Women who live near California farm fields sprayed with organochlorine pesticides may be more likely to give birth to children with autism, according to a study by state health officials to be published today. The rate of autism among the children of 29 women who lived near the fields was extremely high, suggesting that exposure to the insecticides in the womb might have played a role. The study is the first to report a link between pesticides and the neurological disorder, which affects one in every 150 children. But the state scientists cautioned that their finding is highly preliminary because of the small number of women and children involved and lack of evidence from other studies.

Clearly, the increase in autism incidence has many more factors linked to it than environmental chemical exposure, but this is interesting and good work. This study will doubtless be severely criticized by the pesticide lobby. After all, it’s only a correlation, no mechanism has been proposed, and the sample size is very small. But, as I mentioned before, you don’t normally see six-fold increases in disease incidences with ambient environmental exposure, so there is definitely something going on here.

Technorati Tags: autism, pesticides

So, Mark Jacobson from Stanford, an accomplished atmospheric chemist and modeler from Stanford, puts ethanol into his modeling mix as an automobile fuel and comes up with increased ozone, peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN, an ozone precursor) and acetaldehyde, leading to a possible increase in mortality. Without reading his paper, I cannot comment on the assumptions used, but this is an additional issue to be concerned about as our politicians continue to binge on alcohol. It’s weird, almost as if there’s something intoxicating and addictive about this fuel :-;

Effects of Ethanol E85 versus Gasoline Vehicles on Cancer and Mortality in the United States

Ethanol use in vehicle fuel is increasing worldwide, but the potential cancer risk and ozone-related health consequences of a large-scale conversion from gasoline to ethanol have not been examined. Here, a nested global-through-urban air pollution/weather forecast model is combined with high-resolution future emission inventories, population data, and health effects data to examine the effect of converting from gasoline to E85 on cancer, mortality, and hospitalization in the United States as a whole and Los Angeles in particular. Under the base-case emission scenario derived, which accounted for projected improvements in gasoline and E85 vehicle emission controls, it was found that E85 (85% ethanol fuel, 15% gasoline) may increase ozone-related mortality, hospitalization, and asthma by about 9% in Los Angeles and 4% in the United States as a whole relative to 100% gasoline. Ozone increases in Los Angeles and the northeast were partially offset by decreases in the southeast. E85 also increased peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) in the U.S. but was estimated to cause little change in cancer risk. Due to its ozone effects, future E85 may be a greater overall public health risk than gasoline. However, because of the uncertainty in future emission regulations, it can be concluded with confidence only that E85 is unlikely to improve air quality over future gasoline vehicles. Unburned ethanol emissions from E85 may result in a global-scale source of acetaldehyde larger than that of direct emissions.