Category: Environmental health

Lead Workshop for Communities

Date: Tuesday, September 26, 2017, from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm
Location: Metcalfe Federal Building, 77 W. Jackson Blvd. Chicago, IL
For more information and to register: https://www.epa.gov/publicnotices/forms/lead-workshop-communities

EPA Region 5 is hosting an introductory workshop for communities and their partners about lead poisoning prevention. The workshop will cover a range of tools, strategies, and resources to help eliminate lead poisoning. Speakers are expected to include federal, state, and local governments, community leaders, and non-governmental partners with experience in working to eliminate lead poisoning. The workshop will also include time for dialogue and networking to foster the exchange of ideas and support a growing community of practice in this important area of environmental and public health protection.

Renewable Energy Prevented 12,700 Premature Deaths Over Nine-Year Period, Study Says

Read the full story in e360 Digest.

The expansion of wind and solar energy, and the resulting avoided emissions from fossil fuels, helped prevent up to 12,700 premature deaths in the U.S. from 2007 to 2015, according a new study in the journal Nature Energy.

A comprehensive framework for evaluating the environmental health and safety implications of engineered nanomaterials

William K. Boyes, Brittany Lila M. Thornton, Souhail R. Al-Abed, Christian P. Andersen, Dermont C. Bouchard, Robert M. Burgess, Elaine A. Cohen Hubal, Kay T. Ho, Michael F. Hughes, Kirk Kitchin, Jay R. Reichman, Kim R. Rogers, Jeffrey A. Ross, Paul T. Rygiewicz, Kirk G. Scheckel, Sheau-Fung Thai, Richard G. Zepp & Robert M. Zucker (2017). “A comprehensive framework for evaluating the environmental health and safety implications of engineered nanomaterials.” Critical Reviews in Toxicology, online ahead of print.

Abstract: Engineered nanomaterials (ENM) are a growing aspect of the global economy, and their safe and sustainable development, use, and eventual disposal requires the capability to forecast and avoid potential problems. This review provides a framework to evaluate the health and safety implications of ENM releases into the environment, including purposeful releases such as for antimicrobial sprays or nano-enabled pesticides, and inadvertent releases as a consequence of other intended applications. Considerations encompass product life cycles, environmental media, exposed populations, and possible adverse outcomes. This framework is presented as a series of compartmental flow diagrams that serve as a basis to help derive future quantitative predictive models, guide research, and support development of tools for making risk-based decisions. After use, ENM are not expected to remain in their original form due to reactivity and/or propensity for hetero-agglomeration in environmental media. Therefore, emphasis is placed on characterizing ENM as they occur in environmental or biological matrices. In addition, predicting the activity of ENM in the environment is difficult due to the multiple dynamic interactions between the physical/chemical aspects of ENM and similarly complex environmental conditions. Others have proposed the use of simple predictive functional assays as an intermediate step to address the challenge of using physical/chemical properties to predict environmental fate and behavior of ENM. The nodes and interactions of the framework presented here reflect phase transitions that could be targets for development of such assays to estimate kinetic reaction rates and simplify model predictions. Application, refinement, and demonstration of this framework, along with an associated knowledgebase that includes targeted functional assay data, will allow better de novopredictions of potential exposures and adverse outcomes.

Amid California’s toxic dumps, local activists go it alone

Read the full story in High Country News.

Eastern Coachella Valley migrants like Barrera power a highly profitable agricultural region, but they live at the center of environmental ruin. Workers deal with an unrelenting list of health threats, from substandard housing to pesticide pollution, hazardous waste and water contamination. Promotoras have become increasingly involved in dealing with urgent local issues on this side of the border — the unending problems that endanger migrant communities. But in the Coachella Valley, the promotoras and their allies are starting to see their efforts bear fruit.

Monsanto continued selling PCBs for years despite knowing health risks, archives reveal

Read the full story in The Guardian.

Monsanto continued to produce and sell toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs for eight years after learning that they posed hazards to public health and the environment, according to legal analysis of documents put online in a vast searchable archive.

More than 20,000 internal memos, minuted meetings, letters and other documents have been published in the new archive, many for the first time.

Most were obtained from legal discovery and access to documents requests by the Poison Papers Project, which incorporates the Bioscience Resource Project, the Center for Media and Democracy and Chiron Return.

Panel supports six disinfection byproducts as potential carcinogens

Read the full story in Environmental Factor.

A panel of scientific experts, convened June 24 by the National Toxicology Program (NTP), recommended that six chemical compounds known as haloacetic acids (HAAs) be classified in the Report on Carcinogens as reasonably anticipated to be carcinogens. HAAs are byproducts created when chlorine, chloramine, or chlorine dioxide are used to disinfect drinking water.

What You Need to Know About the Hidden Health Cost of Fossil Fuel Subsidies

Read the full story in Triple Pundit.

Fossil fuel companies receive billions of dollars in government subsidies each year. A major argument for ending those subsidies these days, is the effect that carbon-based pollution has on the atmosphere – what scientists now say causes climate change.

But new research suggests that there is another compelling reasons for halting reconsidering that funding that our tax payer dollars cover: our health.

According to a study by the European not-for-profit organization, Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL), fossil fuel subsidies from G20 countries amount to $444 billion per year. That amount, say researchers, is actually small compared to the health costs that are incurred as a result of fossil fuel industries. Researchers found that the use of fossil fuels resulted in health-related costs of more $2.76 trillion across the globe, or six times the total cost of those government subsidies.