Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jodi Rell – Lead or Step Aside, EPA – washingtonpost.com

Gene defense in lead paint case rankles – Yahoo! News

But one of the nation’s largest paint companies has another explanation — bad traits that were simply passed on in their genes. “Their argument is … they have a family history of poor performance. Basically, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” said Michael Casano, who is representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that seeks unspecified damages

Well, take the Bell Curve, add dollops of greed and you can make a transparently racist argument that five families, all poor and black, of course, have some mysterious genetic defect that perfectly mimics the effects of lead poisoning on children.

If not detected early, children with high levels of lead in
their bodies can suffer from:

• Damage to the brain and nervous system
• Behavior and learning problems (such as hyperactivity)
• Slowed growth
• Hearing problems
• Headaches

Hmm, if all these symptoms were genetic in nature, I wonder if the lawyers that make this case would let their children ingest some lead paint everyday for a few years, I am sure their perfect genes will protect them? It would be a great control group, No?

Excellent article, read in full, and let the next mass market pig you eat weigh on your conscience a little bit.

I have attended meetings organized by the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network recently, and Smithfield foods is high on their agenda for the mind blowing pollution that overwhelmingly affects the poor and rural African-American communities, for their appalling safety record, and early American style treatment of its workers. See this PBS video for more. It is truly heartbreaking to hear testimony from people who live near hog farms, how the stench is overwhelming, omnipresent, and travels in your clothes and system wherever you go.

Some Excerpts:

Rolling Stone : Pork’s Dirty Secret: The nation’s top hog producer is also one of America’s worst polluters

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

To appreciate what this agglomeration of hog production does to the people who live near it, you have to appreciate the smell of industrial-strength pig shit. The ascending stench can nauseate pilots at 3,000 feet. On the day we fly over Smithfield’s operation there is little wind to stir up the lagoons or carry the stink, and the region’s current drought means that lagoon operators aren’t spraying very frequently. It is the best of times. We can smell the farms from the air, but while the smell is foul it is intermittent and not particularly strong.Unsurprisingly, prolonged exposure to hog-factory stench makes the smell extremely hard to get off. Hog factory workers stink up every store they walk into. I run into a few local guys who had made the mistake of accepting jobs in hog houses, and they tell me that you just have to wait the smell out: You’ll eventually grow new hair and skin. If you work in a Smithfield hog house for a year and then quit, you might stink for the next three months.

Epidemiological studies show that those who live near hog lagoons suffer from abnormally high levels of depression, tension, anger, fatigue and confusion. “We are used to farm odors,” says one local farmer. “These are not farm odors.” Sometimes the stink literally knocks people down: They walk out of the house to get something in the yard and become so nauseous they collapse. When they retain consciousness, they crawl back into the house.

Successful Farming magazine warned — six years ago. There simply is no regulatory solution to the millions of tons of searingly fetid, toxic effluvium that industrial hog farms discharge and aerosolize on a daily basis. Smithfield alone has sixteen operations in twelve states. Fixing the problem completely would bankrupt the company. According to Dr. Michael Mallin, a marine scientist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who has researched the effects of corporate farming on water quality, the volumes of concentrated pig waste produced by industrial hog farms are plainly not containable in small areas. The land, he says, “just can’t absorb everything that comes out of the barns.” From the moment that Smithfield attained its current size, its waste-disposal problem became conventionally insoluble.

Nice, huh! Still eating factory pork?

No, not Tyra Banks and Riyo Mori, climate models that is.

ES&T Online News: Models underestimate global warming impacts

Modelers don’t purposely err on the conservative side, says Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, but some processes “are just not well understood, and because of that have not been incorporated into climate models.” Holland has published model results on the fate of sea ice and coauthored the recent paper showing that ice is melting faster than models predicted. There are many reasons for the underestimates, she says. For example, models don’t fully capture heat transport between ocean and atmosphere, or faster warming as reflective ice gives way to darker, heat-absorbing waters.
But Rahmstorf says that modelers might unwittingly make models more conservative by applying “one-sided filters”, weeding out models that clearly overestimate the changes seen so far, but hanging onto ones “where everything is too well behaved and stable.”

Scientists are human too. The political and social climate in the US have been harsh to people who overestimate the effects of climate change. So, modeling scenarios that deviate significantly from accepted limits or runaway uncontrollably are discarded. Models are sets of assumptions based on underlying theory. If the theory of a particular sub-process is not clearly understood, then the assumptions become subjective. In a social climate that is waiting to pounce on an overestimate as example of negating the entire global warming phenomenon, assumptions made are conservative. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it comes at a price! As more observations come in, it does become clear that sometimes, things are happening faster and at greater magnitudes than our model predicted.

A friend pointed me in the direction of this letter by EPA union leaders about the upcoming re-registration of some very commonly used organophosphate and carbamate pesticides. This ens-newswire article provides an excellent summary.

In the absence of “a robust body of data” the union leaders remind Johnson that the Food Quality Protection Act requires the EPA to use “an additional 10-fold safety factor in its risk assessments when setting pesticide tolerances.

This is the key point, and the reason that Pesticide industry and the EPA came up with the infamous “CHEERS” study (talk about Kafkaesque naming!) to study children’s exposure knowing fully well that they would not be able to accurately assess health effects on children with an observational study. The hope was that using a short term “study” that assessed acute toxicity, they would be able to “prove” no significant harm to children and get rid of the safety factor. A factor of 10 is big, and the pesticide manufacturers hate it because the tolerances become low enough that people will be over-exposed.

Isn’t that the whole point of a safety factor? We are still figuring out what happens at low levels of exposure to certain pesticides. This is truly an Environmental Justice issue. It is not the children of EPA administrators eating non-organic fruits and veggies that are going to be exposed. The gains from eating organic food vs. non-organic are dwarfed by the incidental exposure of the families of farmworkers and other people applying pesticides. Yes, you guessed it, they do not tend to be particularly rich or influential, but they are most in need of protection from government to ensure that their children do not get exposed to levels that may be harmful. This is not about shopping at Whole Foods, which is where most of elite America hears about pesticides, this is about the people being exposed to much higher doses. The safety factor is a must to keep them safe.

Turns out that the fugitive emission of nasty sulfur gases in New York that had Fox News suspecting terrorism for a while may have come from more mundane sources.

Sniffing Out the Truth – New York Times

But we haven’t, and we think we can support one of the theories of the odor’s source that has been suggested. Based on our familiarity with the local aquatic environment and regional meteorology, we believe that the odor was caused by gases released from saltwater marshes in the metropolitan area. Let us explain. The intertidal sediments in this region are home to micro-organisms that produce sulfur compounds. When these sediments interact with saltwater that contains low levels of oxygen, gases are released. These gases include hydrogen sulfide and a variety of thiols (like the gas additives thiophane and mercaptan) — all of which have an odor similar to rotten eggs.

First, there was a low tide in the coastal marshes from roughly 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. Second, we experienced winds from the south and an atmospheric inversion, which created something like a low-lying bubble of air.

The result of the two factors? The low tide exposed the marsh sediments and hastened the release of sulfur gases into the atmosphere. The inversion trapped the odor close to the groundand the southerly winds then carried it to Lower Manhattan, where it remained until atmospheric conditions changed.

Damn, this is CSI NY (Atmospheric Chemistry and Modeling Division), good stuff!

Our explanation highlights the consequences of excessive nutrient loading and the resulting low oxygen levels in local coastal waters. (By nutrient loading, we mean exposing water to sewage, fertilizer, chemicals or other pollutants.) Of course, these consequences go beyond odor — they kill marsh vegetation, degrade the wider marine habitat and make it unsafe to swim or fish.

Indeed, so the cause, while natural is not really natural, it is from untreated sewage. New Yorkers, stop blaming New Jersey! Look at yourself!

The REACH program from the European Union is an incredibly far reaching (no pun intended, of course!) effort to catalog the effects of chemical compounds on human health. I came across this interesting article at Environmental Science and Technology.

ES&T Online News: Will the EU’s REACH serve researchers’ needs?

Europe’s new chemicals law, REACH (Registration, Evaluation, and Authorisation of Chemicals), will put about $13 billion worth of data on 30,000 substances onto a searchable database made available at no cost on the Internet. It sounds like a dream come true for researchers wanting to design new compounds free of the structures that cause human health hazards. But lack of funding for basic research and concerns about the competence of toxicity tests have dampened expectations among some scientists.

Well, D’uh, any program that big is bound to have some problems. But the shifting of burden of proof away from the regulators to industry is a big deal and will lead to a lot of self regulation. Companies will have to prove that their chemicals are safe.

John Warner, a synthetic organic chemist at the University of Massachusetts, says REACH will be effective at pushing companies to select safer alternatives that are already on the market. But for the many reagents and solvents that have no safe alternatives, safe molecules must be designed, and REACH is not structured to promote the design work, Warner says.

Yes, this is an effort to regulate existing and new chemical entities, not an initiative to spur innovation. From the REACH site:

The REACH Regulation gives greater responsibility to industry
to manage the risks from chemicals and to provide safety information
on the substances. Manufacturers and importers will be required
to gather information on the properties of their substances,
which will help them manage them safely, and to register the
information in a central database.

The innovation is going to be market driven by the fear of this regulation. Maybe we will start calling it OVERREACH!