The Navy has agreed, after months of fighting, to fund a study into the health effects of past water pollution at Camp Lejeune on Marines.

Read more: Navy agrees to fund toxic water study at NC base.

What is the biggest killer on our roads? It’s not black ice, or drunk driving, or even badly installed accelerator pedals. In fact, it’s air pollution – and it’s getting worse.

Read more: Pollution: the biggest killer on Britain’s roads.

When fast-food restaurants cook up cholesterol-heavy foods, they spew cholesterol and other particulates into the air, pollution that can affect the health of people with asthma and other breathing issues, researchers say.

Original post:
New Jersey restaurants cooking up pollution along with pizza and hamburgers.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Tuesday called for a moratorium on expanding a toxic-waste landfill in the impoverished Central Valley enclave of Kettleman City, California, where residents have reported a handful of rare birth deformities over a recent 14-month period.

The California Democrat also directed her staff to examine the feasibility of securing federal funds to address the town’s drinking water, which contains high levels of arsenic.

“I am very concerned about the surge in birth defects occurring in Kettleman City,” Feinstein said in a statement. “It is my view that there should be no expansion of the toxic dump site until we know with certainty whether it is a cause of this serious situation.”

Read more: Feinstein calls for moratorium on toxic landfill expansion.

Environmental health researchers from UCLA, the University of Southern California and the California Air Resources Board have found that during the hours before sunrise, freeway air pollution extends much further than previously thought.
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Despite the nagging of diet experts, fitness instructors, public health officials, doctors, nurses and moms, the tide of obesity that has practically engulfed Western civilization over the past two decades shows no sign of reaching its ebb.

In the United States, the percentage of adults who are obese — defined by the National Institutes of Health as a body-mass index exceeding 30 — has doubled since 1990, climbing from 12 percent to a whopping 24 percent in 2005, closely tracking Oregon figures, according to the Oregon Health Division.

For the most part, the blame for the obesity epidemic has fallen on diet and exercise, with particular emphasis on familiar evils such as the proliferation of junk food, the advent of the remote control, trans fat, ever-longer commutes and even the disappearance of physical education in schools.

But now some researchers have identified a new suspect: pollution.

Attributing obesity to diet and exercise is “practically scientific dogma at this point,” says Bruce Blumberg, associate professor of developmental and cell biology at UC Irvine. But, he continues, “diet and exercise are simply not adequate to explain the explosion of obesity in Western countries.”

Instead, Blumberg believes the obesity epidemic actually is due, in part, to industrial pollution — specifically to low levels of toxic compounds he calls “obesogens.”

Just as exposure to carcinogens can trigger cancer, Blumberg and other researchers say exposure to obesogens can trigger a dramatic increase in the amount of fat produced in a person’s body, leading to excess weight and obesity.

The precise mechanism by which these obesogens operate remains dimly understood. They belong to a class of compounds known as “endocrine disrupters” because they block or pervert the operation of the hormones that govern crucial biological processes such as growth, reproduction, sexual development and behavior.

Five years ago, Blumberg was studying the biological effects of various marine pollutants — in particular, tributyl tin, or TBT, a pesticide notorious for its toxic properties, such as bizarre mutations in the shells of mollusks and the sex organs of sea snails.

Blumberg and his co-workers exposed female frogs to extremely low levels of TBT; as expected, TBT did indeed cause sexual mutation among frogs. But what was really striking, he says, was that the hapless amphibians got fat — really fat.

“To be honest, I will have to say we stumbled on this,” he says.

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Survey of students finds health risks for formaldehyde and dichlorobenzene in homes and schools.

Teenagers in Los Angeles and New York City face a substantial — and strikingly similar — cancer risk from breathing the air, largely because of toxic chemicals inside their homes and schools, a new scientific study shows. For the research, 87 high school students, including 41 from Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles, wore backpacks equipped with air monitors that measured what each was exposed to throughout the day.

Although outdoor air in both cities is heavily polluted, indoor air was responsible for 40% to 50% of the teenagers’ cancer risk from the compounds measured.

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I thought I didn’t have to worry about EMFs, since I don’t seem to be bothered by them, but this article has me thinking again. Oy!

Wi-Fi: The Largest Biological Experiment Ever

Organs that have been shown to be especially susceptible to radio waves include the lungs, nervous system, heart, eyes, testes and thyroid gland. Diseases that have increased remarkably in the last couple of decades, and that there is good reason to connect with the massive increase in radiation in our environment, include asthma, sleep disorders, anxiety disorders, attention deficit disorder, autism, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, cataracts, hypothyroidism, diabetes, malignant melanoma, testicular cancer, and heart attacks and strokes in young people. Radiation from microwave towers has also been associated with forest die-off, reproductive failure and population decline in many species of birds, and ill health and birth deformities in farm animals. The literature showing biological effects of microwave radiation is truly enormous, running to tens of thousands of documents, and I am amazed that industry spokespersons are getting away with saying that wireless technology has been proved safe or — just as ridiculous — that there is no evidence of harm.

Discover.com:

A little mercury is all that humans need to do away with themselves quietly, slowly, and surely
By Karen Wright

Let’s start with a straightforward fact: Mercury is unimaginably toxic and dangerous. A single drop on a human hand can be irreversibly fatal. A single drop in a large lake can make all the fish in it unsafe to eat.

Often referred to as quicksilver, mercury is the only common metal that is liquid at room temperature. Alchemists, including the young Sir Isaac Newton, believed it was the source of gold. In the modern era, it became a common ingredient of paints, diuretics, pesticides, batteries, fluorescent lightbulbs, skin creams, antifungal agents, vaccines for children, and of course, thermometers. There is probably some in your mouth right now: So-called silver dental fillings are half mercury.

Mercury is also a by-product of many industrial processes. In the United States coal-fired power plants alone pump about 50 tons of it into the air each year. That mercury rains out of the sky into oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams, where it becomes concentrated in the flesh of fish, shellfish, seals, and whales. Last year the Food and Drug Administration determined there is so much mercury in the sea that women of childbearing age should severely limit their consumption of larger ocean fish. The warning comes too late for many mothers. A nationwide survey by the Centers for Disease Control shows that one in 12 women of childbearing age already have unsafe blood levels of mercury and that as many as 600,000 babies in the United States could be at risk. But that begs a critical question: At risk for what?

TUNA TYPES

One particularly common source of low-level mercury exposure is tuna. Because they are large, long-lived predators, tuna accumulate more mercury in their tissue than smaller, short-lived fish. When tested for mercury in parts per million, flesh from albacore tuna, which take five years to mature, was shown to contain about four times as much mercury as chunk light tuna, which is harvested from younger fish.

Infants born to mothers contaminated by mercury in Japan’s Minamata Bay in 1956 had profound neurological disabilities including deafness, blindness, mental retardation, and cerebral palsy. In adults, mercury poisoning can cause numbness, stumbling, dementia, and death. “It’s no secret that mercury exposure is highly toxic,” says toxicologist Alan Stern, a contributor to a 2000 National Research Council report on mercury toxicity. But high-level exposures like those at Minamata cannot help scientists determine whether six silver fillings and a weekly tuna-salad sandwich will poison you or an unborn child. “The question is, what are the effects at low levels of exposure?” he says.

Data now suggest effects might occur at levels lower than anyone suspected. Some studies show that children who were exposed to tiny amounts of mercury in utero have slower reflexes, language deficits, and shortened attention spans. In adults, recent studies show a possible link between heart disease and mercury ingested from eating fish. Other groups claim mercury exposure is responsible for Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and the escalating rate of autism.

Link

London Free Press:

By SHERYL UBELACKER, CP

TORONTO — Breathing in diesel exhaust fumes at levels typically found in large cities disrupts important blood vessel functions, new research has shown, suggesting a possible mechanism linking higher heart attack rates during periods of high air pollution.

Numerous studies over the last 20 years have shown that the numbers of deaths and hospitalizations due to heart attack and stroke go up as traffic-induced air pollution rises.

The link between air pollution and cardiovascular disease is strongest for fine-particle pollutants, of which the combustion of fossil fuels from vehicles is a major source. Yet the underlying factors responsible for air pollution’s effects on the heart and blood vessels had remained largely unknown.

The study led by Dr. Nicholas Mills, a researcher at the Centre for Cardiovascular Science at the University of Edinburgh, suggests what some of those factors might be.

Researchers found that exposure to diesel exhaust for one hour during exercise caused a significant decrease in the blood vessels’ ability to expand or dilate. Exposure to the air pollution also decreased levels of an enzyme that helps prevent clots from forming in the blood and possibly causing a heart attack.

“Low levels of diesel exhaust are having real effects on our blood vessels and the way in which they function, that may potentially be sufficient to act as a trigger for a heart attack,” Mills said yesterday from Edinburgh, Scotland.

Short-term exposure to air pollution can worsen existing problems and lead to hospitalization for heart attack and other heart and lung conditions. Long-term repeated exposure increases the risk of death from coronary heart disease, abnormal heart rhythms and heart failure.

“Long-term exposure could be contributing to the formation of coronary artery disease,” said Mills, whose study is published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
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