District judge dismisses Lejeune water suit

ENCToday reports that:

"After a U.S. District Court judge dismissed the case recently, lawyers of a woman who believes the time she lived aboard Camp Lejeune caused her non-Hodgkins lymphoma said they have filed an appeal."

Read the full story here.

New Clues on Autism

According to a recent study conducted by Stanford University, environmental factors may play an even more important role than genetics in causing autism.
Read the full article here.

This Company Spends Over $5M a Year to Lobby U.S. Government to Make You Sick

According to a recent story published on the Food Consumer website:

"The Monsanto Company spent $1.4 million to lobby the federal government just in the first quarter of 2011, according to a recent disclosure report. That's still less than the $2.5 million Monsanto spent in a single three month period only a year earlier."

Read the full story here.

Is Your Meat Habit Giving You Diabetes?

According to Mother Jones, a leading independent news organization:

A new peer-reviewed study published in the journal Diabetes Care found a strong link between diabetes onset and blood levels of a group of harsh industrial chemicals charmingly known as "persistent organic pollutants" (POPs), most of which have been banned in the United States for years but still end up in our food (hence the "persistent" bit—they degrade very slowly).

Read the full story here.

Pharmacyclics lymphoma drug shows continued promise

Reuters reports that:

"The latest results from a small, early stage trial of Pharmacyclics Inc's experimental drug for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma showed about 49 percent of patients responded to it, the company said on Saturday."

Read the full story here.

Anniston residents march against alleged corruption

According to The Anniston Star:

"The protesters, including several children, marched around the courthouse seven times to protest the spending of the settlement money won in a lawsuit against the Monsanto Corporation for PCB contamination in Anniston. Protesters "

Read the full article here.

House bill wants review of Fort McClellan Army base

According to the Albany Times Union:

"A bill introduced by Rep. Paul Tonko, D-Amsterdam, would have the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs investigate the health of soldiers who trained at Fort McClellan in Alabama to see if they were made ill by toxic substances at and around the former Army base."

Read the full story here.

Native American teenagers have legacy of PCB pollution

Environmental Health News reports that:

"Youths from the Mohawk Nation are contaminated with persistent organic pollutants at levels higher than the young adults studied in another national survey. Both past and current lifestyle factors – especially diet through eating fish and being breast-fed – influence exposure to and the concentrations of both the long-lived and less persistent POPs varieties in the Akwesasne Mohawk youth."

Read the full article here.

Pollutants still leak from plant property

Greenville Online reports that:

"Carcinogenic PCBs still seep into Pickens County waters 20 years after a Superfund cleanup of a capacitor manufacturing site where the toxins contaminating the Twelve Mile River and Lake Hartwell originated."

Read the full story here.

More PCB Fish Contamination in California

According to the Las Angeles Times:

"Mercury and PCBs contamination is widespread in sport fish in urban coastal waters across California, though mostly in moderate concentrations, a survey released Thursday by the state Water Board found.
Nineteen percent of the urban coastline sampled by researchers had fish with mercury in such high concentrations that they shouldn’t be eaten by young women and children. Fourteen percent of locations had similarly elevated levels of PCBs.
The findings are part of the largest statewide survey to date of contaminants in sport fish along the California coast. The report was based on the first year of a two-year survey, which examined more than 2,000 fish from threedozen species gathered in 2009 from waters near Los Angeles and San Francisco, including San Francisco Bay."

Read the entire story here.

Postnatal exposure to PCB 153 and PCB 180, but not to PCB 52, produces changes in activity level and stimulus control in outbred male rats

The 7th Space Interactive reports on a recent study dealing with the certain effect of postnatal PCB exposure:

"Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are a class of organic compounds that bioaccumulate due to their chemical stability and lipophilic properties. Humans are prenatally exposed via trans-placental transfer, through breast milk as infants, and through fish, seafood and fatty foods as adolescents and adults.

Exposure has several reported effects ranging from developmental abnormalities to cognitive and motor deficiencies. In the present study, three experimental groups of rats were orally exposed to PCBs typically found in human breast milk and then behaviorally tested for changes in measures of stimulus control, activity level, and responses with short IRTs."

Read the results of the study here.

93% of Unborn Babies Have GMO Food Toxins in their Blood

According to a recent Salem News article:

A new medical study on the impacts of genetically modified (GM) foods, shows that toxins from GM crops designed to strike down pests are actually showing up in the bloodstreams of women and unborn babies.
The new study, "Maternal and fetal exposure to pesticides associated to genetically modified foods in Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada" by Aziz Aris and Samuel Leblanc with the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, at the University of Sherbrooke Hospital Centre in Quebec, Canada, brings to light many of the fears that GMO food awareness groups and writers like our own April Scott, have been attempting to illuminate to the public.

Read the full story here.

State of California fines Chemical Waste Management for PCBs

According to a recent San Fransisco Chronicle article:

State officials have ordered the operators of a massive toxic waste dump in Central California to pay $46,000 in penalties for failure to report releases of hazardous waste.
The Department of Toxic Substances Control on Friday fined Chemical Waste Management for failing to report four separate releases of PCBs into the ground in early 2010.

Read the full article here.

Study finds PCBs are decreasing in the Spokane River, but are still at unhealthy levels

A newly released Department of Ecology (Ecology) study on PCBs in the Spokane River concludes that significant reductions in polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) levels have occurred over the last two decades but concentrations still don’t meet state and Spokane Tribal standards.

Read the study here.

More Problems with Glyphosate: US Rice Growers Sound the Alarm

The Center for Research on Globalization just released an article stating:

Adding to the natural rice industry’s woes after Bayer CropScience contaminated a third of the US rice supply with transgenic rice in 2006, the widespread application of Bayer’s glufosinate and Monsanto’s glyphosate is reducing crop yields, and burning and deforming rice plants that survive.

Read the entire article here.

Monsanto targeted by organic farmers

According to a recent Financial Times article:

A group of organic farmers in the US have filed suit against Monsanto, the world’s biggest seed business, to pre-empt patent infringement actions against them.

Read the full article here.

Sauget area residents file more suits over PCB exposure

According to the Madison County Record:

Three groups of Illinois residents who live in or near Sauget have filed separate lawsuits over the release of various hazardous substances they claim have created a severe health risk and have contaminated their properties.

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Read the full story here.

Researchers find exposure to dioxins and PCBs increases wheezing in babies

Scandinavian scientists have demonstrated that prenatal exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls and dioxins is associated with increased risk of wheeze and infections in infants in a study published this week in Food and Chemical Toxicology.

Read the full article here.

Why Is Damning New Evidence About Monsanto's Most Widely Used Herbicide Being Silenced?

Here's a crazy article from Axis of Logic:

"Dr. Don Huber did not seek fame when he quietly penned a confidential letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack in January of this year, warning Vilsack of preliminary evidence of a microscopic organism that appears in high concentrations in genetically modified Roundup Ready corn and soybeans and "appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals and probably human beings." Huber, a retired Purdue University professor of plant pathology and U.S. Army colonel, requested the USDA's help in researching the matter and suggested Vilsack wait until the research was concluded before deregulating Roundup Ready alfalfa. But about a month after it was sent, the letter was leaked, soon becoming an internet phenomenon..."

Read the full story here.

EPA unveils New Bedford Harbor Cleanup-specific web site

A new EPA sponsored website was recently launched detailing the past, present, and future of the New Bedford Harbor cleanup. The site centralized information regarding the project including: documents,studies and charts and graphs.

This new site will likely be used as a model for other Superfund-specific sites across the county.

Read the full story here.

99% of Pregnant Women in U.S. Test Positive for Banned Chanmicals

According to a new study, practically all women in the U.S. carry multiple chemicals in their bodies, including some that have been banned for decades.

Science Daily reports:

"Among the chemicals found in the study group were PBDEs, compounds used as flame retardants now banned in many states including California, and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), an organochlorine pesticide banned in the United States in 1972."

Read the full story here.

Feds: Gowanus Canal A Cancer Threat & Among Nation’s Most Polluted Waterways

The feds recently warned the public not to swim in or consume fish from the Gowanus Canal.

"The US. Environmental Protection Agency — which is overseeing a $500 million Superfund cleanup of the 1.8-mile canal — released a study confirming what many already assumed: the Gowanus is a cancer-causing cesspool and among the nation’s most polluted waterways."

Read the full story here.

Genetically Modified Foods and the Justice System

I found a really good article about genetically modified foods, and a possible turning tide.

This past August, a federal judge ruled that a genetically modified crop should be destroyed because of concerns over dangers posed to humans.

In August 2010 US District Judge Jeffrey White of California ruled that all of the future plantings of Monsanto’s GM beets should stop until the United States Department of Agriculture could conduct an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) that would prove the safety of the crop.
Not surprisingly, the USDA violated the ruling. They permitted Monsanto to plant the genetically modified beet crop.
Consequently Judge White ordered the crops destroyed.

This caused “the equivalent of a tantrum” on the part of Monsanto. They claimed the equivalent of the sugar beet apocalypse would occur if they were forced to destroy this crop.

To continue in this vein, the jury is still out on genetically modified (GM) foods. It has been shown that GM foods have caused organ damage in rats, which can lead to a whole host of problems, including non-hodgkins.

NY Schools Part 2

The news about New York schools being filled with PCBs is everywhere. A school in Staten Island was closed a couple weeks ago after a check on a “leaky light” showed that two classrooms had PCBs at 1,000 to 12,000 ppm. The acceptable level is 50 ppm.
That has started something of a firestorm, resulting in ANOTHER Staten Island school being shut down for the same problem.
Apparently, the city doesn’t consider the leaking lights to be an immediate health concern, but it also admits that replacing all of the light fixtures in its 800 schools would cost $1 billion, so there’s probably some correlation between those two factoids.
Now those problematic lights have been fixed, and the schools have been reopened. But I have to wonder whether or not the problem has been solved, or if they’ve just put a band-aid on it.

EPA vs. NYC Schools

So the city of New York is apparently “downplaying” the potential danger of PCB contamination in schools, and as a result the EPA is planning to inspect classrooms for potential dangers. Apparently the city says claims that there is no danger, and that to fix the problem would cause the layoffs of 15,000 teachers. And there’s more:
“the city's estimate(s) that it would cost $1 billion to replace the aging fluorescent lighting fixtures that are the chief suspects of PCB contamination in schools.
The EPA has recommended the city immediately begin removing the older fixtures suspected of leaking PCBs, or polychlorinated byphenyls, a potentially cancer-causing chemical linked to numerous other health problems, including reproductive and immune disorders. PCBs were often used in construction and electrical components starting in the 1950s, but were banned in 1978.
The city contends there is little scientific evidence to show that inhaled PCBs like those in the schools pose an immediate health risk. “
I find all of this hard to swallow. I know schools have tight budgets, along with numerous other problems, but I find it hard to believe that replacing the light bulbs in their schools would cost $1 billion, as they estimate.
And even if it did, then I’d challenge them to figure out how many new PCB-free schools they could build instead for a billion dollars. Either way, you can’t put a price on the health of children.

Test Kits for Everyone

While talking about Wikileaks in school today, I started wondering if there was some way I could cheaply test my environment for toxic chemicals such as PCBs and report them to the authorites. The best answer I could find was not ideal, and required you to send samples to a lab for $100. Another that I found actually sends you a kit and lets you test your pee to see how much exposure you've had to the list of items below, and costs $197. It has taken me almost three months to save $120.

Mercury
Arsenic
Lead
Dioxins
Polyvinylcholide
Damage from Alcohol
Pesticides
Toxicity from Prescription Drugs

I've heard that the toilets in Japan will test your pee for pH and sugar levels. With all our advances in technology, we should be able to test ourselves daily for exposure to toxins. Grocery stores should test samples of their foods. Sushi restaurants should test for mercury. Too bad businesses don't have enough money to take such life improving steps to clean up, and keep the earth clean.