Losing the War on Obesity

There’s little doubt that obesity is bad for your health, and that it is an environmental health problem. And, the news just came out the other day that we as a nation are steadily becoming fatter (under the fatuous title that we need a national strategy to combat obesity). As if on cue, someone is coming out with preliminary research findings that sugary drinks made with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contain reactive carbonyls, which may have a role in the progression of diabetes as well as other diseases.

After reading this though, I can see what’s coming next:

Adding a beneficial antioxidant compound found in tea called "epigallocatechin gallate," or EGCG, to drinks that contain HFCS appears to lower reactive carbonyl levels, Ho said. That could mean that drinking beverages that contain both tea extracts and HFCS may not be as harmful as drinking HCFS-sweetened sodas, he said. However, further research is needed to prove that.

Set your watches, folks, and let’s see how long it takes before “healthy” sweetened beverages spiked with green tea extract start showing up on the shelves. Some strategy.

Why I Need to Keep Writing About Light Bulbs Instead of Something More Profound

I ran across this post the other day, while scrolling through some of the searches that have brought people to IA. It’s an example of why I’ve had to keep up my meager efforts to counteract factoids about compact fluorescent light bulbs. This individual was writing on the “American Thinker” blog, which from the other posts, apparently pulls quite a bit to the right politically. The post was pretty much the standard logic-deficient talking point from the right (mercury from CFLs is bad, therefore environmentalist positions on global climate change are bankrupt), but this time, ornamented with some really bad math:

A quick calculation shows that the 5 mg of mercury in an energy-conserving CFL is enough to fill an average size room (100 cubic meters volume) with the 0.05 mg/cubic meter vapor concentration that is considered hazardous for long term chronic exposure. Since this is the rule for laboratories, it probably does not account for people who might be especially sensitive, including infants, small children and pregnant women. As with allergies, different people can have vastly different responses to exposures to toxins.

The admonition to open the window for 15 minutes after a CFL break does not account for the various sizes / shapes of rooms, placement of windows (or absence thereof) and whether there is adequate cross-ventilation. And of course, it is not so convenient to ventilate a room thoroughly with outdoor air during the dead of winter in a northern clime.

Far be it from me to fuel a scare, but CFL backers are the global warming alarmists, after all, who have much less science to back up their claims for concern about climate change. It might be instructive to review the OSHA regulations concerning handling of mercury employed at CFL manufacturing plants. I bet the precautions are quite stringent.

No, no, no, no and no. Going back to the anecdote “all models are wrong, some are useful” (attributed to statistician George E.P. Box), the flaws in this particular model are: first, all of the mercury doesn’t volatilize in an instant, and second, it doesn’t volatilize into a hermetically sealed box. A few months back, I created an indoor air model of the concentrations in air you might expect if you broke a CFL in a room. It provides a more realistic depiction of the mass transfer of mercury from shimmering pinhead blob on the ground to vapor in air, and accounts, in a simple manner, typical air exchange in a room. I’m not going to insist this model is right, but EPA did calibrate it a bit using actual air monitoring data from other mercury spill situations (thermometers and ritual uses). And, I did obtain air concentrations thousands of times lower than American Thinker’s, which are not in the range considered hazardous for long-term chronic exposure. American Thinker’s cartoon depiction of indoor air modeling (no, strike that, my version is a cartoon depiction – his is a stick figure) reminds me of the IH classroom problem used to teach Ideal Gas Law calculations and dimensional analysis: “a 1-pound chlorine cylinder falls off a table in a closed 12 ft by 16 ft room with a 10 ft ceiling. The cylinder breaks and releases its contents instantaneously into the room. The air temperature is 77 degrees F. What is the chlorine concentration in air, in parts-per-million?” You don’t really use that kind of model for assessing exposures and health risks.

Guys, if you want to beat up “global warming alarmists”, just keep writing editorials. Please don’t try to inject facts into the discussion. You’ll only embarrass yourselves.

More Mercury Factoids: Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs, Part 3 – Stop Reading Steven Milloy and Go Buy the Light Bulbs

Note: this is part of a series: earlier posts can be found here and here. I hope this is the last post I have to write on this topic. It truly is a non-issue. But I doubt that I’m going to be done with this any time soon.

If you’ve come searching for information on CFLs and mercury because you read an article by Steven Milloy (notorious for coining the term “junk science”, and no I’m not dignify his effluvium with a link from Impact Analysis) or a news article which quoted him uncritically, I’m not going to warn you to “consider the source”. Head over to PZ Myers if you want an opinion about the quality of Mr. Milloy “journalism”. However, if Steven Milloy is the one who got you all worried about this, let’s face it, you got owned. Read on, and you might be able to change that.

Mr. Milloy quotes two facts in his article – that the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) detected a mercury concentration in air 6-fold higher than a tolerable level in the bedroom of Ms. Brandy Bridges’s home, and that the DEP recommended she contact a cleanup contractor to mitigate the spill; the problem with a cleanup contractor is that they quoted Ms. Bridges a price of $2,000. Let’s start with the second one. Now the Ellsworth American news article that was the original source for this story also says that the DEP inspector recommended to Ms. Bridges that she didn’t attempt to clean up the spill, and call a cleanup contractor. The state’s version of the story was:

The homeowner expressed particular nervousness about exposures to mercury even in low numbers. Based on that concern, the responder explained two ways to minimize exposures to mercury: one way was to wear respiratory protection and another way was to hire a clean-up contractor. Since the homeowner did not have any respirator protection, the responder referred her to a commercial clean-up contractor. The responder further suggested that the homeowner talk with their homeowner’s insurance company to see if her policy would cover the cost of a professional clean-up contractor.

The DEP inspector also encouraged her to speak with a state toxicologist, who said that the potential mercury exposure was low and of negligible concern. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t feel that Ms. Bridges got the best advice here, with regard to mitigation. Respiratory protection (i.e. wearing respirators) clearly wasn’t the right answer. Respirators are only for limited-duration use, involve professional judgment to select the proper type for a particular hazard, and require user training and fit-testing to be effective. However, telling someone who’s concerned about chemical exposure to simply not worry about it is generally ineffective. It is better if you can recommend that they take some kind of tangible action; it may not be necessary to reduce risks, and it may not have high effectiveness. What it accomplishes is to provide some sense of individual control over the situation, which is a factor in reducing anxiety and outrage over a health risk situation. Taking into consideration the air monitoring data collected by the state, a course of action that could have provided some benefit, could have given the homeowner the sense of managing the situation and would have been much cheaper than calling a cleanup contractor, would have been to go out to a home improvement store, buying a box fan, sticking it in a window, open a second window to provide some draft, and ventilating the room for a day.

Citing data selectively to make your point is a time-honored tactic of deception, and Mr. Milloy used it effectively here. Recall what was said in his news story:

The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges’ house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state’s “safe” level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter.

Dang, and I had just said I wasn’t going to link to him either. Oh, 300 billionths of a gram corresponds to 300 nanograms and, as discussed in a previous post, 300 nanograms per cubic meter of air is EPA’s Reference Concentration (RfC) for elemental mercury. Milloy’s screed about CFLs, global warming and environmentalists and their fruitcake ideas about mercury, all spring from this “fact”. Of course, it’s inaccurate and misleading, and one wonders why he even bothered citing it. As Ronald Reagan once said, “facts are stupid things”.

Ok, so there’s a real story here. Returning to the Maine DEP’s report:

When a Department responder goes to the site of a spill, there are typically two types of instrument measurements that they would take. The first is an evaluation of the source of the spill. This is to identify any hot spots or areas of concern, to determine the extent of the spill, and whether it has been tracked extensively throughout the home. This helps determine the extent of the effort to clean up the spill, if any. This type of measurement is generally at the floor or point of impact. The second type of measurement taken are those readings that are more useful for homeowner exposure and are typically in the “breathing zone”, at an intermediate height for children and a higher height more appropriate for adults.

When the Lumex mercury detector was positioned inches over the spill, the concentration detected was 1,939 ng/m3. The state’s report goes on to characterize this finding as follows:

Moving the Lumex instrument six to eight inches in either direction or up toward the ceiling dropped the value significantly. To visualize the area of high readings, it could be covered by a dinner plate.

So, for Mr. Milloy’s “fact” to really be correct, that the Maine DEP found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state’s “safe” level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter, someone would have to crouch down onto the floor and inhale air from an area within six inches from the broken bulb. And they would have to do this daily for their entire lifetime to be exposed to a level six-fold higher than the safe level.

The state of Maine’s inspector also made some “breathing zone” measurements, sampling room air at a 3 foot level, which provides a better indication of the concentrations in air which someone might be breathing on a regular basis. Those concentrations were 31 and 49 ng/m3, which are less than the 300 ng/m3 RfC. In fact, most of the measurements were below 300 ng/m3, and the state’s report said,

Based upon this information, the State Toxicologist assured the homeowner that the potential mercury exposure would be very low and likely of negligible health concern.

But you don’t hear any of this from Mr. Milloy. At this point there’s only speculation as to why his readers weren’t given a more complete rendition of the facts. Perhaps it’s as creationist Duane Gish said during the McLean vs Arkansas Board of Education trial when accused of misquoting geological data refuting the creationist notion of a “young Earth”, “you have to stop quoting somewhere”.

I guess so. But at some point, you also have to stop listening to claptrap. You probably shouldn’t look to anything Steven Milloy says as a reason to not buy CFL bulbs.

Minneapolis Bridge Collapse: Now Can We Fix the Infrastructure?

You know what’s a really comforting feeling these days in America? Being in your car at a stoplight underneath a railroad overcrossing with a train going over it, and inspecting the crumbling concrete and peeling lead-based paint on the girders. I saw this post in the DMI Blog a few weeks back, after the steam pipe blew out in New York City last month. I bookmarked it for use later as a point of departure for a post about the public health implications of infrastructure – roads, pipelines, water and wastewater treatment plants, and so forth. Things being what they are, the topic got set aside and the post never got written.

As you have probably heard by now, a freeway bridge across the Mississippi River collapsed in Minneapolis this evening during rush-hour traffic. There are injuries, and three fatalities so far. This sort of thing should not be a surprise. In 2005, the American Society of Civil Engineers report card gave U.S. infrastructure an overall “D” average, and concluded that an investment of $1.6 trillion was needed over the next five years for infrastructure improvements.

Of course, we’re heading in the opposite direction. On the ASCE web site, there was also a news item that the Highway Transportation Fund could experience a $4.3 billion shortfall by 2009 (of course that begs the question of why we’re investing in highways with the onset of Peak Oil, but that’s a discussion for another day). The impending infrastructure decay isn’t surprising. The failed disaster response and reconstruction effort from Hurricane Katrina didn’t shake the Bush Administration from its torpor, and this event probably won’t either.

If the idea of a freeway bridge folding up underneath you isn’t a sufficiently graphic depiction of infrastructure collapse, maybe this is.