Impact Analysis

Redirection

2010-01-05T04:27:00.000-08:00

Impact Analysis has moved and can be found now at http://impactscienceonline.com/wordpress/. Please update your bookmarks and links accordingly, and I'll see you there.

Doesn't Meet Expectations

2009-06-06T06:23:00.000-07:00

The recent episode where the minutes were leaked from the recent meeting of the BPA (bisphenol-A) Joint Trade Association, attended by Coca-Cola, Alcoa, Crown, North American Metal Packaging Alliance, Inc., Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), American Chemistry Council, Del Monte has some moments of humor. I can't say I'm surprised that BPA users turned to an ad campaign over constructive engagement with stakeholders or the shocking alternative of committing to looking for a lower-toxicity or non-toxic alternative for lining canned foods and packaging beverages.

The ham-handedness of the strategizing is surprising though. After reading Trust Us, We’re Experts, I had expected these guys to be a little smoother about their framing: suggesting in so many words that they use fear tactics such as telling consumers they will no longer have access to affordable baby food without BPA; finding "pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA" as their 'holy grail' spokesperson, because they don’t feel they can find a scientific spokesman; directing messages at historically exploited populations including "Hispanic and African Americans and the poor"; and, befriending people that are able to manipulate the legislative process.

My kids are grown, so it’s been awhile since I’ve bought baby food, but isn’t it also packaged in glass jars? Also, a “pregnant young mother” isn’t a spokesman for the safety of BPA. Some nice-looking heading-towards-middle-age mom with an honors student in high school, who could say “look, my kid and I ate food from epoxy resin-lined cans and drunk out of polycarbonate bottles, and my kid is smart and I don’t have breast cancer.” Maybe they couldn’t afford a good communications consultant. There are references to passing the hat to raise the $500K needed for the ad campaign.

It's interesting that you don't see them reaching out to the big plastics manufacturers. The plastics manufacturers might have a parallel effort, or the food container market isn't a big loss to them. It would be interesting to know which, because that might help proponents of a BPA ban in food containers practice a divide and conquer strategy. A total ban on BPA use might not be necessary to have some effective exposure reduction - just phasing out uses such as food containers and dental appliances. I wonder if anyone has done that homework yet (the EU's risk assessment may be a good starting place). Though ACC was in the room, one reason the petrochemical and plastics manufacturers weren’t represented more might be that BPA in food containers isn’t a big portion of their market share.

Another thing that makes the food industry folks appear out of touch is that they don't seem to get social marketing techniques, which might be a good thing because that will slow down their messaging. There’s already a “ban BPA” Facebook page. The activist messaging isn’t that slick yet either, if the clutching-at-their-pearls I’m-shocked-that-industry-is-trying-to-manipulate-us e-mail I got from the Environmental Working Group is any indication (no, I’m not going to bother writing a letter to Coca-Cola telling them to ban BPA; I’m going to continue to not buy their really bad for my health product in un-ecologically sound packaging, which seems to me a better approach to persuade them to change their ways). Hasn’t the activist community thought about accusing these industries of being anti-capitalists, and conspiring to sabotage businesses who are responding to market forces and producing BPA-free products?

Research Tidbits

2009-05-14T04:33:00.000-07:00

Some more quick topics of interest while I labor to generate some real content:

The National Cancer Institute just published a occupational epidemiology study of formaldehyde exposure based on a based on a cohort that’s been followed for over the past 30 years. The study suggests a possible relationship between formaldehyde exposure and leukemia, and possibly Hodgkin lymphoma and multiple myeloma. This sounds like a prospective cohort study which would make it some of the strongest epidemiological evidence available. Still, the authors are recommending more follow up and exploration of molecular mechanisms of toxicity. More of the story is forthcoming, once I get a copy of the paper from the Journal of the National Cancer Institute which behind a payment firewall.

Researchers at Michigan University’s School of Public Health have shown that antibiotics in waste water treatment plants are providing an optimal environment for breeding antibiotic-resistant superbugs, which are then discharged to surface water in the effluent. Treatment plants aren’t designed to fully degrade small organic molecules such as antibiotics. I’ve been hearing similar news about effluents from feedlots for cattle operations, where antibiotics are also used. Beyond becoming more thoughtful about using antibiotics (didja hear that livestock industry?), we may start having to land-dispose of them, rather than following the conventional advice of flushing them down the toilet.

Speaking of unintended consequences, silver nanoparticles, which are becoming more common in consumer products to make socks that inhibit odor-causing bacteria, and washing machines that disinfect clothes (where would we be without these technological marvels, I wonder), get discharged in wastewater streams and kill bacteria used for secondary treatment in wastewater treatment plants.

Back to the paper that’s overdue.

Evolution-Proof Insecticides

2009-05-13T05:42:00.000-07:00

The title of this article in PLOS-Biology was at first a little scary. Insect resistance to insecticides is the bane of malaria control programs, but I jumped to the conclusion this was talking about making the Anophales mosquito extinct. Wouldn't there be unintended consequences?

Turns out that was an error on my part. The authors put forward an intriguing idea that shows the problem-solving abilities of evolutionary theory (could ID ever come up with something like this? I wonder). Insecticides used in malaria control kill lots of mosquitos, which imposes intense selection pressure for resistance. The females bite and feed on blood, make eggs and lay them in water, every few days. They go through this cycle only a few times before they die. The development cycle of the malaria parasites is longer, so that there will be some biting/feeding/egg laying cycles where the female mosquito is not yet capable of infecting someone with malaria. The authors draw the conclusion from this:

These facts together lead to one of the great ironies of malaria: most mosquitos do not live long enough to transmit the disease.

The strategy then is to only kill mosquitos after they've reproduced, but before the malaria parasites become infective. The goal is to find insecticides that minimize selection pressures by killing only older mosquitos who have had some opportunity to breed. While noone is actually doing this yet, the authors discuss the modes of action of "late-life acting" (or LLA) insecticides and identify the kinds of research needed to test this concept.

Let's hope someone gives it a try.

Quick Links

2009-05-12T04:22:00.000-07:00

Some topics of interest I’ve run across, while I try to generate some real content:

Ok, so hexavalent chromium is carcinogenic when you ingest it in drinking water. Just what we need, another chemical we’ll find difficult to make decisions about. That needs a little bit of context, but it’s taking awhile to create.

Climate modeling goes local. This has a lot of promise – increasing the usability of climate modeling for decision-making; building more acceptance of the need for action to mitigate climate change. More details can be found here. The EPA grant seems to have run out, and hopefully these folks can find some more funding.

Huffington Post is exasperating because it’s 95 percent a waste of my time, but will produce gems like this the remaining 5 percent of the time, so it’s just marginally useful enough for me to keep checking into it. We’re going to need initiatives such as the Pileus Project because, according to Joe Romm, the mainstream media sure seem to be agents of disinformation when it comes to climate change issues.

Matt Nisbet must think that Monsanto needs help framing itself as a sustainability company.

DDT is really bad for human health and should be used sparingly. I was taught that was true for all pesticides, but I guess the lesson hasn’t sunk in yet. What’s surprising is how active health effects research is with DDT.

Have to run. The paper I’m overdue on isn’t going to write itself.

Culture War, Obesity and the New Puritans

2009-05-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

I almost forgot I’m a blogger. Nah, not really, but it’s been difficult to keep up lately. I write longer posts, and want to take care to do the homework, so that I’m not producing something that’s misleading. For example, take this recent post by Paul Campos over at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Paul objects to the idea that public health measures involving promoting changes in lifestyle, specifically with what we eat or drink, might help reduce health care costs, or as he says it:

[i]n any case the notion we can cut health care costs significantly by getting people to drink less soda and eat fewer Doritos is unsupported by any evidence.

Riffing off of a post by Matthew Yglesias, Campos also makes lifestyle intervention – public health matters an outpost in the culture war, putting those of us who are interested in the social benefits of exercise and healthy eating into the bin of “cultural Puritanism. We’ll put aside for a moment the point that equating “puritan” with someone who disapproves of pleasure is a bit of historical misdirection. You can even find some evidence for his point that long-term health care costs are driven by old age and not lifestyle choices.

Last year, RIVM published a study modeling lifetime health care costs for cohorts of obese people, smokers and “healthy living” folks, defined as non-smokers with BMIs between 18.5 and 25. The results were that annual health care costs were highest for obese people earlier in life, until age 56, and were highest for smokers in later years. However, the overall highest lifetime health care costs were for the healthy-living folks. Life expectancy from age 20 is reduced by 5 years in obese people and 7 years in smokers. Healthy-living people live on to incur greater medical expenses, more than compensating for the expenditures related to smoking or obesity.

So, I should start smoking again and eat like this to do my part to control health care costs. However, before you shout “gotcha”, take a look at the commentary traveling along with this article. Compare a lean and obese population with the same age and sex distribution, and the latter will have greater health-care costs throughout life. So during the productive adult years of your life, when you should be spending money on other things, such as books, vacations and family, your're spending it on health care. There are other costs associated with obesity such as absences from work and lost productivity, in addition to health care costs. In the UK, these extra costs are estimated to be about four times as great in obese than in lean people.

The problem in the health care debate that no-one seems to want to talk about is that people want to live forever, and it in those years at the end where the health care costs are highest. However, living longer shouldn’t be the goal, rather maximizing the number of years free of disease burden. For me at least, I’d rather not be clomping around on knee or hip replacements, being treated for diabetes or putting up with erectile dysfunction.

Holding ED at bay. . . ok, now we’re getting to why I really pay attention to exercise and what I eat. I’m so transparent. See you in the gym.

Journalism is Dead, Long Live Journalism (Part I)

2009-03-23T05:28:00.000-07:00

Ever since I read Breaking the News by James Fallows, I’ve had carried around this sense of unease about how media and professional journalists were executing their roles in a democratic society. In particular, whenever I encountered a newspaper or magazine story about my own little niche, toxic chemicals and the adverse effects associated with them, I often came away feeling dissatisfied that the writer didn’t get it quite right. Still, where would blogging be without newspapers?

We may find out soon, because the number of failing newspapers is piling up. Clay Shirky has written an essay about how the internet is shredding newspaper business models. According to Dr. Shirky, it wasn’t that newspapers didn’t see the internet coming. It’s just that all of the plans and ideas for business models at a time when technology supported freely passing around content, had unraveled, until the unthinkable scenario – newspapers becoming obsolete – started becoming more real. We’re observing a revolution, in which the old rules (“we can still make people pay for our content”) no longer apply.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

Essentially, the problem being solved by a publishing industry, making information available to the public, has gone away presumably with the onset of the internet. It might not be so easy, though. Newspapers benefit society as a whole (even if “you’ll miss us when we’re gone” isn’t much of a business model), and it’s difficult to say what’s going to replace them. Two key points are: 1) we should be experimenting with lots of forms of newsgathering, and 2) journalism has always been subsidized, by advertisers, by someone rich with an axe to grind (think Randolph Hearst or Richard Mellon Scaipe), or these days, by ordinary people donating our time. As Dr. Shirky notes, there are models that seem to be working, such as Consumer Reports and NPR, ProPublica and WikiLeaks; I’d add SourceWatch to that list too. There are going to be gaps, such as who’s going to go investigative reporting, something that has to be someone’s day job backed by an organization with some clout so that reporters get their phone calls returned. In the end, what we need is journalism, not newspapers. I wouldn’t call myself a journalist, but in some ways I have to wonder if what I’m doing as a blogger represents a piece of the future for environmental journalism.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason?

2009-03-14T16:06:00.000-07:00

An essay written by Dennis Perrin suggests that critical thinking is overrated, especially as practiced by the public intellectuals and other smart people around here. He argues that critical thought needs to occur within some distinct boundaries, if you want to remain relevant particularly within political and media circles:

To write for the New York Times, for example, you have to seriously believe that the United States is a force for Good in the world, sometimes mistaken, but always sincere. I've known or chatted up a smattering of Timespeople, and while privately they were some of the most cynical types I've ever met, none of their personal critiques would appear in the Times, simply because they'd never dare submit such nonsense. And these are supposedly the "smart ones," those who set the journalistic/critical/aesthetic standard.

An he's not terribly sanguine about things changing with the onset of the now-the-adults-are-here Obama administration. Though we seem to be on the precipice with environmental collapse, financial meltdown and a half of dozen other unpleasantries, he feels that "nothing substantial will change because too many people don't want substantial change" - and this is referring to educated people who presumably know better but are anxious to maintain whatever perks they enjoy:

Such degraded conditions are anathema to real critical thinking -- if anything, this inspires further devotion to the main narratives. Think all those reporters who've lost their jobs are gonna become an army of I. F. Stones? It's a nice idea, and if probable, I'd certainly champion it. But as you can see, there's no money or honor in such tawdry pursuits. If you want to eat using your words, become really good at selling shit. That's where critical minds are most needed.

Which doesn't bode well for our ability as a society to weather crises. NPR recently interviewed Jarred Diamond, author of Collapse, published back in 2005. Diamond concludes that a society’s fate in response to these crises is determined by how well its leaders and citizens anticipate problems before they become crises, and how decisively a society responds. In the NPR interview, he amplifies that one of the predictors of successfuly resolving a crisis is the role of the elite, the decision-makers, the politicians and/or the rich people within the society:

If the society is structured so that the decision-makers themselves suffer from the consequences of their decisions, then they're motivated to make decisions that are good for the whole society, whereas if the decision-makers can make decisions that insulate themselves from the rest of society, then they're likely to make decisions that are bad for the rest of society.

Uh-oh. We're so screwed, aren't we?

He observes that part of the foot-dragging in New Orleans about flood and disaster preparedness that led to the disaster following Hurricane Katrina occurred because the well-off people recognized that they lived on higher ground that wouldn't be flooded. In contrast, the Netherlands takes flood control more seriously because the rich folks are living below sea-level along with the proles.

So, if we're going to steer ourselves into making better choices, the rich and powerful need to feel more of the pain, so they become the agents of change.

Speaking of inability to feel pain and steer us in the right direction, the Senate is fighting the Obama Administration's plan to pass cap-and-trade legislation for greenhouse gas emissions. The opponents are bipartisan, and the dividing lines are betwen regions, depending on who's mining, generating or using a lot of coal-fired electricity. There isn't a lot of critical thinking going on here, since the longer we delay acting on climate changes, the slimmer our hopes are of resisting it.

Not that I think cap-and-trade is going to accomplish all that much in terms of addressing adverse climate change.

Even in places where you think paradigms whould be shifted, the critical thinking stays within its lanes. Worldchanging.com recently had a post about the spectrum of environmental thought, showcasing "bright green", "dark green" and "light green". It's interesting that Worldchanging offered no label for those who might be drawn to James Lovelock's pronouncements that planetary feedback mechanisms have been perturbed past a self-correcting point (i.e. we've killed Gaia), so that we're now the stewards of the Earth. Under this scenario, none of the shades of green offered here are meaningful environmental management strategies. No color scheme is offered for the combination of high technology projects for energy generation, transportation, agriculture and medicine, to hold civilization together while global geoengineering and bioenginering projects attempt to correct the climatic and biodiversity injuries we've created. What would that be, blue green?

I'm not confident that bright green will slow the trajectory of adverse changes in time, especially after reading the work of John Sterman at MIT (the "bathtub effect" guy). Dark green is Rapture for deep environmentalists; simply an invitation for death on a grand scale from war, disease and starvation. Light green is irrelevant on the scale of problems that need correcting.

Pres. Obama's stimulus package, as misguided as it is (particularly with spending on GM, the banks and fixing roads) at least gets people accustomed to spending money on a grand scale and to seeing something of the magnitude of the effort needed to turn this ship. It still needs to translate into the will to create the mother of all global scientific and engineering projects (one that makes the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project combined look like entries at a junior high science fair) to make sure humanity has a future over the next few centuries.

Maybe I'm just not thinking critically enough about these matters.

Honest Brokers and Concern Trolls

2009-02-27T20:50:00.000-08:00

While it’s not based on a systematic study, I get the sense that Roger Pielke, professor of environmental policy at the University of Colorado has been an annoyance to many environmentalists. See this somewhat contentious interview (which apparently was spiked, but which Pielke publishes here) with Brad Johnson with the Center for American Progress. At one point, Dr. Pielke makes allusions to McCarthyism in the interview process (you know, the “are you now or have you ever been a Communist” routine) which while a bit over the top, provided some amusement. I suppose it doesn’t help your environmentalist cred though to be interviewed by professional concern troll John Tierney.

Tierney complains that President Obama’s science advisors aren’t sciencey enough, and are injecting their personal agendas along with the science used to inform the government’s policy making. Not to put too fine a point on things, he asks, “[t]o borrow a term from Roger Pielke Jr.: Can these scientists be honest brokers?”

It’s possible I’m reading too much into this, but trust Tierney to take a reasoned analysis of the interactions of scientists in policy making (Pielke’s book, The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics) and make it into an indictment of science policy for the administration in power:

A scientist can enter the fray by becoming an advocate for certain policies, like limits on carbon emissions or subsidies for wind power. That’s a perfectly legitimate role for scientists, as long as they acknowledge that they’re promoting their own agendas.

But too often, Dr. Pielke says, they pose as impartial experts pointing politicians to the only option that makes scientific sense. To bolster their case, they’re prone to exaggerate their expertise (like enumerating the catastrophes that would occur if their policies aren’t adopted), while denigrating their political opponents as “unqualified” or “unscientific.”

Ok, it’s time to stop the hyperventilating. Dr. Pielke’s book is actually a very useful guide for scientists about the kinds of options they have in advising decision makers, when given the opportunity. The nature of scientific advice will depend on how politicized the issue is (i.e. is there values consensus) and how much scientific uncertainty is present. Depending on the circumstances, one could adopt the stance of a Pure Scientist, summarizing the state of knowledge in a particular field, to help reduce uncertainty and inform a decision, but not engaging in the normative or values debates. When engaged to consider specific policy options, one might adopt the role of a Science Arbiter, similarly focusing on a technical role (framing the problem and presenting the state of knowledge) but again staying above the debate.

However, problems with no values consensus cannot be resolved by reducing scientific uncertainty (Pielke’s context for this is “abortion politics”). The scientist can then choose to help reduce the range of options by becoming an Issue Advocate, aligning with a particular political agenda. If a scientist seeks to expand the range of options to be considered, they can become Honest Brokers of Policy Alternatives, clarifying existing options and identifying new ones. As described in a book review published in the journal Minerva:

Honest Brokers explicitly integrate stakeholder concerns with available scientific knowledge. The former U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, for example, produced reports that identified a range of policy options and showed how they related to disagreements over both science and policy (pp. 17, 95). Interestingly, because Honest Brokers must draw on diverse perspectives to integrate scientific knowledge and policy options in context of uncertainty, they usually take the form of interdisciplinary advisory bodies rather than individual experts (pp. 151, 154-56).

Dr. Pielke views all four of these roles as appropriate, but cautions that issue advocacy should be done transparently, acknowledging political values rather than asserting that the scientist’s preferred policy flows directly from their scientific evidence. This becomes Stealth Issue Advocacy, which politicizes scientific advice and undermines the credibility of science in the eyes of the public.

Seen in this light, Tierney’s use of the term “honest broker” in discussing Steven Chu and John Holdren provokes in me an Inigo Montoya moment. After reading this column, I can only be glad that John Tierney isn’t interested in borrowing any of my ideas. In addition, keeping in mind that Dr. Pielke’s book was published in 2007, I wonder if it occurs to Tierney that it could be referring just as much to the war on science waged by the Bush Administration as to John Holdren’s role as a stealth issue advocate in criticizing Bjorn Lomborg.

Alternative Futures in a Post-Stimulus World

2009-02-16T08:48:00.000-08:00

There’s an air of unreality surrounding this week’s passage of economic stimulus legislation. I suspect that many are expecting things to “get back to normal”, if we just fix the foreclosure crisis, get the banks lending again, and get consumers buying stuff again. In the mainstream media I sample, I don’t get a sense that with the economic downturn we’ve turned a corner to a considerably different future.

One vision of that future is the crash of our energy intensive way of life, with scenarios that range from a post-Peak Oil collapse (the progressive version of the Rapture) to a sort of post-industrial feudalism as envisioned in James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. In this future, the Amish may be the epitome of high technology.

There’s a Green crowd which feels that if you shout “no clean coal” loud enough, this and a lot of hard work will create a vision where life is much better by moving to cleaner production, mass transit and renewable energy. These are the kinds of investments that should be made, because building windmills, weatherizing buildings and restoring strip-mined mountaintops are more useful ways to create jobs than building freeways, but I’m no longer convinced this path alone is going to save us, particularly from adverse climate change. Take John Sterman’s greenhouse gas simulator for a spin and see. You have to drag emissions down quite a bit, very quickly, to have a meaningful impact. However, we’re having a hard time even getting started – people still seem to be confused about the imminence and magnitude of the risk, and long lead time needed to produce any changes, with a significant fraction taking a wait and see attitude on greenhouse gas reductions.

And, according to Dr. Sterman, even smart people are kind of clueless about stock and flow kinds of problems in general (look at the wishful thinking many people engage in when trying to manage their weight), misjudging how feedback loops work with climate change – it seems that people expect climate change to abate quickly once emissions are reduced. The most recent evidence suggests otherwise – we’re stuck with adverse climate change. The challenge is to keep from making it worse.

In contrast to the hunker-down philosophy of getting through the next few centuries (see The Long Emergency), James Lovelock argues in a new book that preserving civilization in the face of adverse climate change will require a massive infusion of high technology. This is seemingly contrary advice from the author of the Gaia hypothesis, but it really is consistent with his message that we’ve now made ourselves stewards of the Earth – wish us luck. You can argue over the details (I think he overstates the effectiveness of nuclear power) but he does make me wonder if the Green crowd is thinking hard enough about what it takes to save us as a species.

This wanders away a bit from the economic stimulus package, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves about what it’s accomplishing. The economic stimulus is really focused on trying to regain our past rather than take us into the future, and the consequences of that choice aren’t pleasant to contemplate.

Another Reason to Avoid HFCS? Trying to Get a Handle on How Much Risk There Is

2009-02-15T05:42:00.000-08:00

[Continued from previous posts, here and here.]

Making sense of what the risks are based on the available information about mercury contamination in high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is challenging because there is so little of it. And, I’m trying to get to some kind of blogging closure because there are other topics to move on to. However, before the news cycle leaves it completely behind, I wanted to explore further what kinds of risks there might be from consuming mercury in HFCS, because there doesn’t to seem to be a lot of risk information being provided.

The paper published by Dufault et al., 2009 used the maximum concentration of mercury detected in their samples of HFCS, 0.57 ug/g (parts per million), along with the assumption that an individual consumed 50 g/day HFCS from all sources of food, to calculate an intake rate for mercury of 28.5 ug/day. That 50 g/day ingestion rate was obtained from a study of the amount and sources of dietary fructose among US adults and children conducted as part of the third National Health and Examination Survey (NHANES).

The results from the dietary fructose study were that the mean consumption of fructose was estimated to be 54.7g/day across all age groups and accounted for 10.2% of total caloric intake. The mercury analytical data used to estimate the 28.5 ug/day intake rate was from samples of HFCS straight from the factory. This makes this mercury intake rate a theoretical upper bound, assuming that someone consuming their 54.7 g/day HFCS is getting it all the time from sources that are contaminated with the maximum concentrations reported in the study (0.57 ug/g, or parts per million). Also, in imagining what this exposure scenario looks like, I get the mental image of someone eating HFCS “straight”, and not in food products. In addition, 28.5 ug/day intake rate is appreciably higher than other estimates of total mercury intake rate (the EU estimates dietary inorganic mercury intake to be around 4 ug/day). HFCS being a dominant source of dietary mercury would be a startling finding.

In contrast, the study published directly by IATP (data presented here) used a “market basket” approach, and analyzed mercury concentrations in ready-to-eat foods. Those concentrations are much lower than found in “raw” HFCS from the factory. This is not unexpected, because HFCS will be blended in other ingredients, presumably uncontaminated or less contaminated with mercury, to make the ready-to-eat foods. The highest concentration in food reported by IATP was 350 ppt or parts per trillion (pg/g, or picogram per gram), while the highest concentration reported in HFCS syrup was 570,000 pg/g (0.57 ug/g x 1,000,000 pg/ug). Combining IATP’s residue data with the consumption rates for food groups from the FDA’s Total Diet Survey corresponding to the foods analyzed in IATP’s study gives much lower mercury intake rates associated with HFCS consumption.

The highest mercury intake rate calculated for the ready-to-eat foods is 0.032 ug/day, which is for males aged 14 to 16 (the calculations are here). This isn’t an aggregate exposure analysis because it focuses only on the foods analyzed by IATP and almost certainly neglects some sources of dietary mercury. It would seem implausible this estimated intake rate is neglecting 99.9% of the dietary mercury sources related to HFCS consumption, though someone with more refined tools (and more time, meaning someone getting paid to do it) needs to map the IATP residue data to some other databases, perhaps USDA’s table of foods with added sugars, to get an idea of the total dietary intake of mercury from HFCS consumption.

When the mercury intake rates are converted to a body weight basis then compared with EPA Reference Doses for either inorganic mercury or methylmercury, the results suggest that HFCS consumption is probably a small contribution to someone’s overall risk from exposure to mercury. Again, the caution with this analysis is that it doesn’t account for all dietary sources of inorganic mercury, but the results leave me with the sense that mercury exposure isn’t the best reason to avoid consuming HFCS.

Another Reason to Steer Away from HFCS? The Outdated Study

2009-01-29T21:03:00.000-08:00

(Continuation from previous posts – here and here)

Well, I wanted to finish exploring the risks from potential mercury exposure in foods containing HFCS, to flesh out the somewhat cryptic posts I’ve been writing (you write long posts, you end up writing not very many of them). But tonight I have to stop and explore the pedigree of the data instead.

This came about because the Corn Refiners Association challenged the relevance of the mercury residue testing study of HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) published earlier this week:

“This study appears to be based on outdated information of dubious significance. Our industry has used mercury-free versions of the two re-agents mentioned in the study, hydrochloric acid and caustic soda, for several years. These mercury-free re-agents perform important functions, including adjusting pH balances,” stated Audrae Erickson, President, Corn Refiners Association. “For more than 150 years, corn wet millers have been perfecting the process of refining corn to make safe ingredients for the American food supply.”

“It is important that Americans are provided accurate, science-based information. They should know that high fructose corn syrup is safe,” continued Erickson. “In 1983, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration formally listed high fructose corn syrup as safe for use in food and reaffirmed that decision in 1996.”

“High fructose corn syrup contains no artificial or synthetic ingredients or color additives and meets FDA’s requirements for the use of the term ‘natural.”

I’ll glide by for now the statement that HFCS meets FDA requirements for use of the term natural, which is no doubt accurate, but brings questions to mind about what “natural” really means.

The press release didn’t cite any product stewardship information which would support the assertion that caustic soda and hydrochloric acid used in food manufacturing is mercury-free. Maybe the individual manufacturers provide that information, but it sure seems like we have to search it out. . . . EPA states there are five operating mercury cell chlor-alkali plants in the U.S., with one of these plants planning to convert to non-mercury technology by 2012. Based on the most recently available industry census (2002), there are 40 alkali and chlorine manufacturing plants of all sizes in the U.S. Twenty of those facilities have 20 employees or fewer, so there is only a limited pool of facilities to supply the needs of a large food processing industry. I haven’t searched out international data on chlor-alkali manufacturing (look, the industry association should be doing this research, not me). If you make a chain of assumptions, it’s possible to assert that the corn refining industry uses mercury-free reagents, but right now, it doesn’t look supportable. The best course of action for the moment is to make the rebuttable presumption that the corn refining industry buys at least some reagents manufactured using a mercury cell chlor-alkali process to manufacture a couple of billion of dollars worth of HFCS each year, and that there could have been some mercury exposure (or continues to be some exposure) from HFCS and let’s continue assessing the health risks from potential mercury exposure.

Returning to risk assessment stuff now.

Another Reason to Steer Away from HFCS? Some Rough Calculations

2009-01-29T05:56:00.000-08:00

(Continuation from a previous post)

[See the update from 1/31/2009, which corrects an error in the calculations in the original post]

Last night, I took a run at calculating the mercury exposure from IATP’s residue data, using the food ingestion rates from FDA’s Total Diet Study (TDS). I obtained a maximum intake rate similar to the recently published study (my value, 23.2 ug/day, DuFault et al., 2009, 28.4 ug/day), though they are basing their calculations on a total estimated intake of HFCS, while the result I obtained was for a single carbonated soft drink (I’ll be uploading the spreadsheet with the calculations shortly). I get a somewhat higher number when I add together all of the intakes from the TDS food items, but I’m confirming how TDS results are supposed to be presented before publishing a number. Doubtlessly, the estimates of exposure will be refined as more people weigh in on this topic.

For the sake of discussion, how does a mercury intake rate from 23 to 28 ug/day compare with other estimates? The European Union in its examination of dental amalgam exposure cites an inorganic mercury intake rate of 4.3 ug/day, so the findings for HFCS would seem to be a little unexpected. A better idea will come from a comparison with EPA’s oral Reference Dose.

More analysis forthcoming.

UPDATED 1/31/2009

I found an error while doing some more work with the spreadsheet. It was a units error: IATP reports their results in parts-per-trillion, which is also expressed as picograms per gram. I had originally expressed IATP’s results as nanograms per gram, three orders of magnitude higher. Picogram per gram is one trillionth of a gram, which is consistent wit parts per trillion. Serves me right trying to do analysis around the news cycle.

This changes my results by three orders of magnitude, so the mercury intake rate for a single carbonated beverage is 0.0232 ug/day, and is well below the published value. This makes more sense now – one product made from HFCS shouldn’t provide a dose comparable to the dose from total HFCS consumption. My apologies for any misinformation that has resulted.

Another Reason to Steer Away from HFCS?

2009-01-28T18:06:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy published a report of laboratory analyses for mercury in food products containing high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The report can be linked here. A table with the analytical results can be linked here. In addition, a preliminary report of analyses of batches of HFCS has been published in the Open Access journal Environmental Health. It seems that chemicals used in processing HFCS, and that are manufactured using a mercury chlor-alkali process, are contaminated with traces of mercury. There’s a little flurry about this in the news (this article in the Guardian is pretty informative), but it doesn’t look like anyone has cranked the mercury concentrations through a risk assessment to see how significant the contamination is.

I will be interested in what the risks look like once someone gets around to assessing them. Of course, I’m still thinking that the best reason to stay away from HFCS has nothing to do with the contaminants.

PFOA Toxic Torts and the Future of Risk Assessment

2009-01-23T20:06:00.000-08:00

Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) has been used used to manufacture Teflon and other non-stick and stain-resistant products. It is highly persistent in the environment and bioaccumulates efficiently through the foodchain and into biota. Therefore, PFOA contamination has been found in drinking water and house dust, and has been detected in significant portion of human blood samples. PFOA affects primarily the liver and can cause developmental and reproductive toxic effects at relatively low dose levels in experimental animals. It’s increased tumor incidence in rats, mainly in the liver. Epidemiological studies in PFOA-exposed workers do not indicate an increased cancer risk. Some have shown associations with elevated cholesterol and triglycerides, or with changes in thyroid hormones, but overall there is no consistent pattern of changes. In recent studies, PFOA exposure of pregnant women, measured by maternal and/or cord serum levels was associated with reduced birth weight. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) noted that these observations could be due to chance, or to factors other than PFOA. EPA has recently developed a drinking water health advisory, based on reproductive effects in laboratory animals.

PFOA exposure has been the subject of multiple class-action lawsuits, filed on behalf of residents who have been exposed through contaminated groundwater. More information about the regulatory and litigation issues can be found on SKAPP’s web site. According to a January 20th news item published in the InsideEPA.com Risk Policy Report (“PFOA Rulings May Stymie Plaintiffs’ Use of EPA Risk Methods in Tort Suits”), Federal judges in West Virginia and New Jersey declined class-action status to plaintiffs seeking medical monitoring from DuPont due to contamination from perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). These rulings were based in part because the plaintiffs used EPA-backed risk assessment methods to argue their cases.

According to the West Virginia court, plaintiffs seeking medical monitoring must show significant exposure, meaning exposure to higher levels or for a longer duration than the general public. Next, plaintiffs must show they experience a significantly increased risk of contracting a particular disease relative to that in the absence of exposure. The court agreed with DuPont that the plaintiffs as a class could not show an increased health risk, because each class member’s risk would vary based on variations in PFOA exposure and variations in each individual’s background risk in the absence of PFOA exposure (background risk may vary from person to person depending on individual characteristics and habits). Rejecting class action status creates an obstacle in the plaintiffs obtaining reimbursement from DuPont for the costs of medical monitoring. Just this month, the federal district court in New Jersey rejected a similar class action suit against DuPont.

An interesting development was the courts analyses of the role and limitations of regulatory risk assessment. In the opinion of the West Virginia judge, risk assessments were of limited utility in a toxic tort case especially for the issue of causation. Risk assessments have largely been developed for regulatory purposes, and serve a protective function in identifying levels below which there is no appreciable risk to the general population; they do not provide information about actual risk or causation. Risk assessments use appropriately prudent assumptions when there are limited data, and therefore intentionally present the upper range of possible risks. Other court decisions are cited for rejecting the use of regulatory standards as measures of causation because their role is to reduce exposure to harmful substances, and for determining that upper-bound risk estimates developed with EPA risk methods appropriately overstate risks for regulatory purposes (where caution is warranted), but are inappropriate for determining whether medical monitoring should be instituted.

The New Jersey court observed there is a difference between a “safe” level for public policy and regulatory purposes and the “significant exposure” that creates excessive risk triggering medical monitoring, and also concluded that a risk assessment methodology “does not work in the tort litigation context”, where a plaintiff must prove there is an actual increased risk of disease in order to receive medical monitoring.

Several things come to mind about the implications of these rulings, beyond setting the bar higher for plaintiffs exposed to toxic substances to be able to get relief through class-action suits. They reinforce the conventional wisdom that regulatory risk assessments are highly conservative and that they overstate the health risks associated with exposure to toxic substances:

While risk assessment information about a chemical can be somewhat useful in a toxic tort case, at least in terms of setting reasonable boundaries as to the likelihood of causation, the impetus for the development of risk assessment has been the regulatory process, which has different goals. Because of their use of appropriately prudent assumptions in areas of uncertainty and their use of default assumptions when there are limited data, risk assessments intentionally encompass the upper range of possible risks.

This isn’t a uniformly held view. There is a compelling argument made that the relationship between uncertainty and conservatism in risk assessment is complex, and that the conventional wisdom includes several unstated assumptions such as there is some underlying “true” risk that could be reflected by a “best estimate” of risk but which is being overstated by the regulatory risk assessment, and that decisions to manage that “true” risk can be made an unbiased manner without consideration of issues such as trust or equity.

In addition, it is possible that our current concepts of risk assessment, which grew out of the National Research Council’s (NRC) “Red Book”, and further articulated in the NRC’s “Blue Book” and the Presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management, have been superseded by more recent thinking about what biomarkers and toxicogenomics might be saying about the relationships between exposure and adverse effects, how cumulative risk concepts affect our notions of what’s a significant risk and what’s causation, and how risk assessors, regulators and the public (and judges and attorneys) should interact in understanding risks and decisions made to manage them. In particular, the variability in exposure that the courts used to reject the class action status might very well be the key to identifying the individuals who are at risk. However you can’t identify them without a monitoring program which evaluates variability. I think there is more work to be done here to get to a satisfactory remedy.

Clean Coal

2008-12-26T08:21:00.000-08:00

For politically progressive types, “clean coal” is an outrage, and is fairly criticized as a greenwashing technique designed to prolong the life of an energy technology that, in a post-carbon future, should be on its last legs. Shouting repeatedly “no clean coal” is something that needs to be done but isn’t the entire answer to making coal go away. Reversing fossil fuel consumption won’t happen overnight even with heroic efforts, and the danger of dismissing the issue with “no such thing as clean coal” is that it cedes the topic to the utilities and mining industries, permitting them to frame the terms of the discussion.

Which they’ve done. “Clean coal” proponents seem to have successfully framed the topic only in terms of carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, deflecting attention from mountaintop removal, New Source Performance Standards, worker health and safety, management of coal combustion wastes and environmental justice, while progressives squabble about whether toxic metals or radionuclides are the bigger risk resulting from the Kingston Fossil retention basin failure.

The right answer is probably “neither”, However, it scarcely matters that the several feet of crud deposited on your front porch or running off into nearby streams is not dangerously toxic, though part of EPA’s handwringing since 1993 about regulating disposal of coal combustion wastes is whether or not to list them as hazardous wastes. Beyond the outrage about Kingston Fossil happening at all or the lackluster media response, this could provide an opportunity. If the utility and mining industries have embraced “clean coal”, don’t dismiss it, rather wrap it around their necks like an anchor. Make it a dialog that includes restoration and management of runoff during mining, protecting the workers, sustaining the communities that are home to coal mining, retrofitting plants with emissions controls for particulates and mercury, reusing rather than landfilling coal combustion wastes – as well as sequestering the carbon dioxide emissions. If the proponents really believe in “clean coal”, then let them stand behind it with dollars and the willingness to submit to regulation for all of coal’s environmental and health problems.

Of course, these changes will make electrical power from coal less affordable, and make utility company stock less desirable to shareholders. Maybe that will give alternatives such renewable energy and conservation more of an edge in the energy marketplace.

Adult Supervision

2008-12-20T05:25:00.000-08:00

I've been looking around for some different blogs to read, because if I'm going to waste my time I at least want to be entertained, and I have developed a very low tolerance for earnest progressive chest-beating. Barack Obama inviting homophobic pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration isn't something to get the vapors over, as the time for that is if the policies aren't getting us out the very deep hole Republicans everywhere have dug for us.

Who is IOZ ruminated on another blogger's ruminations about Star Trek, and it's overall spirit of optimism and human endeavor, so reminiscent of JFK at least while Gene Roddenberry was running things. Later on, though, TNG and DS9 would get pretty grim and militaristic. Recalling how Kirk said to Trelaine, the immortal, godlike six-year-old how he was missing out on "the terror of murder, the suspense - the fun",** I guess the producers just couldn't hold out, giving in to the notion that watching shit get blown up was more fun than optimism and human endeavor.

IOZ skewers the fatuousness that would infect particularly the later Star Trek programs, saying,

You'll often hear the claim that Star Trek posits an ideal of a cooperative, post-scarcity, universally tolerant and largely utopic future, when in fact its fictive universe presents a deracinated, militaristic hierarchy as humanity's destiny. Which, when you think about it, is Kennedy-esque, isn't it? Star Trek was mostly zippity-doo space opera, and I feel a little guilty for picking on its tissue-paper politics, but you do have to wonder why enlightened humanity chooses to whisk among the stars in a bad facsimile of a 19th-century navy? In that regard, the missing detail is a realistic portrayal of sodomy.

In that same vein, other missing details in a realistic portrayal of a 19th-century navy were rum and the lash.

While it's nice to speculate about the hope of a post-scarcity utopia, we're going to have to get through the scarcity phase, which we're beginning to make the transition into. This brings me back to President-elect Obama selecting a homophobic bigot as the pastor to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. I find it deplorable, but in a tiresome sort of way because it distracts progressives whose energies should be devoted to other areas such as, say our unsustainable way of life, a topic that is relentlessly ignored by the media. Unfortunately, we as progressives are going to have to be the adults here (since the Rick Warrens of the world apparently aren't enlightened enough for that yet), which means sometimes sucking it in for certain aspects of life such as, say a finger stuck in the eye of homosexuals everywhere, to focus on bigger picture stuff. . . such as, say our unsustainable way of life. Being dead from starvation, disease or conflict makes it harder in the long run to combat hate and bigotry.

Therefore, I'm much more impressed with President-elect Obama appointing Jane Lubchenco as administrator of NOAA, than I am discomfited by selecting the Purpose-Driven-Life guy to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Very adult-like.

** And if that just went past you, you need to question how much of a Trekkie you really are.

Greetings to President-Elect Obama's Transition Team

2008-11-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

Hi President-elect Obama’s transition team and thanks for stopping by. You’re asking people for their ideas on energy and the environment, and here’s my contribution. My apologies in advance for not using the dinky comment box provided on your website, but this does allow me to develop ideas a little more fully. I’ll be brief.

Vapor intrusion is a growing problem with hazardous waste sites being cleaned up under Superfund and RCRA Corrective Action. Vapor intrusion occurs where there is contamination of soil or groundwater with volatile chemicals such as the solvent TCE, the dry-cleaning chemical PCE or petroleum hydrocarbon constituents such as benzene. If there are buildings located near the volatile contaminants in soil and groundwater, these can migrate into indoor air and can be inhaled by the occupants. Residents in communities affected by vapor intrusion are concerned about the health risks from inhaling these volatile chemicals. I speak about this issue as someone who has investigated vapor intrusion at hazardous waste sites across the U.S., and has participated in many national conferences on vapor intrusion sponsored by EPA, Air and Waste Management Association and other organizations.

One solution to vapor intrusion is to install engineering controls to prevent the volatile chemicals from entering a building. These are the same types of engineering controls that have been used for many years to prevent radon from entering buildings. These engineering controls work by preventing the leakage of air through the floors and walls of a building, a fact which spawned the idea of linking mitigation of vapor intrusion with building energy conservation. “Green building” techniques increase energy efficiency and improve indoor air quality in buildings by eliminating air leakage and by reducing the pressure differences between outdoors including the subsurface and indoors - the same strategy as used for mitigating vapor intrusion.

Linking green buildings concepts and vapor intrusion provides a significant opportunity to promote vapor mitigation and reduce health risks, while achieving co-lateral environmental benefits such as energy conservation with corresponding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. An example of the growing importance of building optimization is shown in the principles of building design that are incorporated into Executive Order (EO) 13423, enacted in January 2007. This EO requires federal agencies to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and energy use. Some of these reductions will occur through the sustainable design and operation of buildings.

There are some barriers that need to be overcome to achieve this linkage of hazardous waste cleanup and energy conservation. Guidance and new regulations may be needed to change the mind-sets of regulatory agencies which don’t see these engineering controls as permanent measures for reducing vapor intrusion risks. A regulatory bias against vapor-resistant construction as a remedial measure for controlling vapor intrusion can delay final cleanup decisions and can represent a barrier to the development of brownfield sites. There may also be research needs to fully integrate building energy conservation methods with the control of vapor intrusion. Another important question to be answered is how to give responsible parties – those on the hook for cleaning up the Superfund or RCRA sites – “credit” for doing and paying for more work than what’s specifically required for cleanup.

Green jobs and new forms of collaboration and teamwork in hazardous waste site cleanup are some of the benefits from linking vapor intrusion and building energy conservation. I am working with my colleagues to flesh out these ideas, and give them wider visibility. I cordially invite you to be a part of that effort. Thank you.

Precaution and Risk Assessment – A Counterpoint

2008-11-26T12:09:00.000-08:00

Last year, Adam Finkel and Peter Montague exchanged views on the precautionary principle and risk assessment, which Dr. Montague kindly published. The occasion was Dr. Finkel’s review of Cass Sunstein’s book Risk and Reason. I much appreciate Dr. Finkel writing the review. The shorter Cass Sunstein I gleaned from Dr. Finkel’s review is: risk assessment beyond its role in managing environmental protection, is also anti-stupid medication for the millions of people who can’t think rationally about risk. I’ve already seen enough examples of risk analysts talking down to the other participants in environmental management, so I’ll probably pass on reading the book. I also wonder if it’s escaped Dr. Sunstein’s notice that the attitudes many people have about risks and risk assessments are shaped by a lack of trust, frequently justifiable, in experts, regulators, and responsible parties, coupled with the inability of analysts to articulate clearly the nature of health and environmental risks and the inability of decision makers to define how risk management activities address those risks.

My thinking about the precautionary principle has evolved of late, to the point that I recant my statement that it’s probably inarticulate as being overly harsh. Still, I feel that the way the precautionary principle is expressed by many is more as of a series of aspirations rather than a framework for reducing risks, and it still needs something like risk assessment yoked to it to be useful for decision makers. But as valuable as Dr. Finkel’s and Dr. Montague’s debate is, I don’t look at risk assessment/precautionary principle as a duality or even a continuum. And I know that Dr. Montague’s statement that “[r]isk assessment is the most powerful intellectual tool that the poisoners and destroyers of the planet have ever invented” isn’t correct - otherwise I wouldn’t be having to fight so hard to get funding for the risk assessments I’m responsible for preparing.

Several years ago, Dr. Finkel captured some interesting thoughts about risk assessment in a paper titled, “Disconnect Brain and Repeat After Me: Risk Assessment is Too Conservative”. When I return to the “debate” of risk assessment versus precautionary principle, I’ll provide some observations based on this paper.

Evil Corn

2008-11-23T07:28:00.000-08:00

For me, reading political blogs is akin to smoking – it’s a filthy habit. These days, I read largely for amusement because the amount and quality of actual information I glean from them is generally pretty small. And it soaks up more of my time than is really good for me. While it doesn’t justify the time I expend, I do run across a nugget from time to time. For example, here’s a tidbit about GM (genetically modified) foods breathlessly posted by Christy Hardin Smith over at Firedoglake. She’s alarmed because there may be some recent and preliminary evidence that corn modified to produce Bacillus thuringensis (Bt) toxin may produce infertility in mice, and therefore we’re all going to become sterile. Per standard operating procedure with ideologues who slice the world into good guy/bad guy narratives (GMOs = Monsanto = BAD), the post was thin on details, but there was a trail of breadcrumbs pointing to some richer sources of information which looked interesting enough to break my blogging fast. As I peeled this onion, I found that this issue has more complexities which, if you want to do more than foam at the mouth about how evil Monsanto is, need to be explored and incorporated into the policy discussion. For now, I’m going to pass on commenting on her subsequent handwringing about linkages of Bt corn and infertility with reproductive health risks associated with endocrine disrupting chemicals. The liberal blognoscenti can get educated about cumulative risk assessment some other time.

Gourmet magazine online has more of the story on Bt corn here. The Center for Food Safety press release has a link to the study. The study itself is published by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Health, Family and Youth, which is responsible for regulation of genetically-modified organisms under European Union directives. There, that wasn’t so hard was it? I’m not going to demand that folks wade through the entire 105 page report, but they could at least struggle through the page and a half executive summary.

The researchers fed mice a diet of 33% genetically modified corn which produces Bt toxin along with control groups fed 33% non-genetically modified corn. Two different kinds of reproductive studies were performed, a multi-generation study where the mice were fed GM (or non-GM) corn and bred over four successive generations, and a “reproductive assessment by continuous breeding” where the same generation of mice were fed GM (or non-GM) corn but delivered four successive litters. These studies were designed to identify reproductive hazards, and don’t directly reflect the risks associated with the patterns or levels of consumption of GM corn by humans (this kind of work is combined with other research to address those questions).

The multi-generation study is probably inconclusive; the differences in numbers of offspring between the GM and non-GM groups were not considered to be statistically significant. The experimental design involved 24 breeding pairs of mice per study group. Would larger study groups produce more statistical power? The “reproductive assessment by continuous breeding” (RACB) study showed significantly reduced numbers of offspring in the mice fed GM corn. The investigators state that the multi-generation study design is less physiologically demanding on the animals compared with the RACB design – suggesting that the RACB study might have been more sensitive.

The Austrian investigators did some admittedly cool genomic testing, which reportedly identified some differences in metabolic pathways between the GM and non-GM mice. This kind of genomic testing is in its infancy, so there isn’t a lot of experience in how to use the data. But many feel there’s a lot of potential value in genomic techniques.

Monsanto questions these results, noting the overall higher offspring mortality in both the GM and control (i.e. non-GM) groups in the RACB study, and pointing to flaws and limitations in the presentation of the results. Its position is that when the results are correctly interpreted, they don’t indicate a reproductive effect. Monsanto also questions the data quality of the genomic testing as well as the interpretation of the results.

This is as it should be. Think what you will of Monsanto, but I found its comments a useful counterpoint in my understanding of the Austrian study. Monsanto might have a fair criticism in blasting the Austrian government by doing science by press release. When you do that, someone with a megaphone, who might not worry over the details, is bound to broadcast the wrong message. The question people should be concerned about is not “is GM corn in my food going to make me sterile”, but rather why we are examining long-term reproductive effects of genetically modified foods, consumed by hundreds of millions of people, years after they’ve been introduced into the foodchain.

However, solving that puzzle requires revisiting the history of the safety assessment of GMOs, and is just going to have to wait for another day (that blogging versus day job tension again).

Footnote: there’s a nice primer on genetically modified Bt corn over at the Science Creative Quarterly, published by the University of British Columbia.

Sweating the Small Stuff

2008-10-25T03:00:00.000-07:00

As with many others, I’ve watch the value of my 401K account drop as markets tumble through greed, fraud and incompetent financial practices. I’m glad I’m eating my vegetables and taking my antioxidants and fish oil to give me a long working lifetime to rebuild my assets after the “meltdown” has subsided.

So the financial markets tank because the Masters of the Universe have been strip mining them, and Congress and the administration drop everything to wrestle with the resulting crisis (does anyone know if they’ve passed the 2009 federal budget yet?). The current financial upheaval is being used by climate-change-denier-fugitive-from-reality Rep. James Imhofe as an excuse to put global climate change mitigation on the blocks, an unbelievably stupid idea, since climate change mitigation represents the largest public works opportunity since the Bureau of Reclamation started building dams, potentially putting millions to work.

I’m sure that people across the country worrying about their retirement accounts aren’t interested in hearing about this, but in perspective, the financial crisis is the small stuff. The BBC has recently reported on a study recently published by the EU which estimates that the global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis.

That study, titled The Cost of Policy Inaction: the case of not meeting the 2010 biodiversity target (COPI for short), part of the first phase of the EU’s The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program, is well-written and densely informative. Sound bites do not jump out of it, so it completely unsuited for American short attention spans, and I wonder if anyone on this side of the pond is going to bother to read even the 16 page executive summary. The 2010 biodiversity target refers to the EU’s Potsdam Initiative proposed by the German government during a meeting in March 2007 of the environmental ministers of the G8 countries and five major newly industrializing countries. The Potsdam Initiative recognizes the economic importance of biodiversity and “ecosystem services”. Ecosystem services include water purification, sequestration of greenhouse gases, natural products (pharmaceuticals), fisheries, timber, erosion control and nutrient cycling. These are public goods with no markets and no prices, so unlike toxic mortgages, there are no economic warnings that go up when ecosystem services are imploded.

A taste of what the COPI report provides is with the trends in fisheries. The executive summary of the COPI report contains this cheery plot of the unsustainability of global marine fisheries, projecting that they are all fully exploited, over-exploited or have crashed. In terms of the societal consequences of collapsing fisheries, the report states:

It is estimated that 1 billion people worldwide are dependent on fish as their sole or main source of animal protein, while fish provided more than 2.6 billion people with at least 20 percent of their average per capita animal protein intake. The expected decline of ocean fisheries will therefore have severe social consequences.

And speaking of where my next bottle of fish oil will be coming from from, the report didn’t even get into the cognitive decline from inadequate consumption of omega-3-fatty acids, which are essential for brain development in children. So, we’re not only starving succeeding generations but leaving them less equipped to deal with global ecological crises.

Since a lot of people can’t come to grips with this issue in terms of starvation and human suffering, the COPI report thoughtfully breaks this down monetarily. The study concluded that the world is expected to have lost land-based ecosystems services (such as forests) worth around 1% of the world Gross Domestic Product in 2010 or 545 billion Euros (733 billion dollars), due to biodiversity losses between 2000 and 2010. This is acknowledged to be an underestimate, and one objective of the second phase of TEEB is to account for what’s missing (oceans, coral reefs, watersheds, ecotourism, pollination services, invasive species (biodiversity as pest control), biochemicals and pharmaceuticals. There are also cumulative impacts not accounted for; one example is that much of the land-based losses are in carbon storage, which increases climate change impacts, and there may be costs associated with adapting to impacts from climate change (think about the disaster response and recovery from Hurricane Katrina). And, according to a new report from the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Federation), climate change is accelerating faster than predicted in the most recently published IPCC report.

So, we have to mount the most revolutionary economic and social transformation of the human species ever seen in recorded history to respond to the twin challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss, with the time available to intervene running short. And, based on all of the indicators, we can’t even get it started.

I’m full of good news today.

Setting the Bar Low on Houston Air Quality

2008-10-11T07:26:00.000-07:00

The Pump Handle passes along a news report that Bill White, the mayor of Houston is crossing swords with Lyondell’s refinery over benzene emissions. He wants the refinery to achieve further emissions reductions, and wants the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to monitor more stringently emissions and fenceline concentrations in air. Benzene emissions from the refinery are below TCEQ permit limits, but the story in the Houston Chronicle says it’s not clear how those limits were developed.

I’m for reducing emissions to as low as reasonably achievable, because it’s a sign that you’re committed to the best industrial practices. However, there's another perspective here. When the Mayor's own task force on Houston air quality concluded:

Air pollution levels in the City of Houston are considered to be unacceptable by knowledgeable experts and the general public and are likely to cause air-pollution related health effects for Houston residents. Pollutant levels are driven by many sources including: tailpipe emissions from cars, trucks and buses; toxic pollutants emitted into the air by more than 400 chemical manufacturing facilities, including 2 of the 4 largest refineries in the U.S.; the petrochemical complex along the Houston Ship Channel and the Port of Houston; and many small operations spread geographically across Greater Houston, such as surface coating processes, dry cleaners, gas stations, printing processes, restaurants, charcoal barbecues, and gasoline-fueled lawn maintenance equipment,

what does he hope to accomplish by singling out Lyondell?

The leaders and citizens of Houston and the state of Texas made their choices long ago to become "business-friendly" which correspondingly meant a lack of commitment to environmental quality; they also chose to become highly reliant on motor vehicles (which by the way are probably the more widespread and significant sources of exposure to air toxics such as benzene). If Mr. White is really interested in improving air quality and public health in Houston, he really should be aiming his sights a little higher than one oil refinery. Lyondell could reduce its benzene emissions to zero and I would defy anyone to show any meaningful reduction in community exposure to benzene, without any action to control the mobile and area sources. I suppose focusing on Lyondell is a start, but at the same time, couldn’t he try to persuade Houstonians not to drive their cars so damn often?

Irony is Really and Truly Dead

2008-09-22T03:38:00.000-07:00

What are the chances that we see the announcement of a trillion dollar cash infusion from the taxpayers to the large and largely insolvent financial institutions, in full view of our media, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day?

EPA’s Draft Toxicological Review of PCE and (Once Again) What’s Wrong with Risk Assessment?

2008-09-19T10:05:00.000-07:00

I wasn’t sure I was going to play in this sandbox again. I’m not really involved with volatile organic compound risk assessments anymore. I’ve expressed the opinion that what we need is not another toxicological assessment, but some action to replace the highest-exposure uses with some implementable alternatives. Outside of the workplace, perc isn’t terribly high on the list of environmental health hazards. But there is a framework in place for replacing it with lower-toxicity substitutes which could be template for other, more hazardous, compounds.

But instead, we have a draft toxicological assessment that is intended to provide toxicity values on EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System, which can then be used for risk assessments.

Just by eyeball, the estimated risks are similar to the last risk assessment conducted, done by Cal-EPA in the late 1990s. So, I’m not sure what’s been gained here – while it seems to be well-written, I’m wondering how this risk assessment is going to help us make faster or better decisions about managing PCE risks, given that it doesn’t say anything terribly different from what we knew a few years ago, and does not put much energy behind PCE risk-based decision making. In fairness, I should note that it’s not intended to be a policy document – its purpose is to make sure that good science and the right values are put up on IRIS.

At a high level, EPA’s assessment says that PCE is “likely to be carcinogenic” in humans by all routes of exposure and that the primary non-cancer toxic effects of PCE exposure in humans occur to the central nervous system, kidneys, liver and developing fetus. On the quantitative side, EPA judges the cancer potency of PCE to be slightly higher compared with its previous risk assessment, conducted in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Also, EPA judges PCE to pose slightly more of a non-cancer health risk, compared with previous assessments.

Once again, I’m wondering how we address what’s broken about risk assessment. I’m apparently not the only one:

However, risk assessment is at a crossroads. Despite advances in the field, risk assessment faces a number of significant challenges including lengthy delays in making complex decisions; lack of data leading to significant uncertainty in risk assessments; and many chemicals in the marketplace that have not been evaluated and emerging agents requiring assessment.

This is from the teaser from a forthcoming book from the National Academy of Sciences, Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment. This book promises to build off of the original framework for risk assessment, published in the book published in 1983 by the NAS, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government (also known as the Red Book). The Red Book established a framework for much of risk assessment as it is practiced today Science and Decisions, “embeds these concepts within a broader framework for risk-based decision-making.” Maybe it will contribute to “fixing” risk assessment. We’ll see. I’ve ordered a copy and will discuss it in a future post.

How to Read

2008-09-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

It almost seems to be a redundant topic, but I found value in this post from the Copyblogger. The audience for it consists of the people who have managed to get past the gossip, innuendo, unsubstantiated opinions, disconnected facts and plainly incorrect stuff which makes up the preponderance of written material today. It expands from the topic of “information” (described by Wilson as “. . . a full, accurate, and properly nuanced body of knowledge about important matters. . .”) and goes to how to read for discovery and to achieve understanding.

The focus of the article is on reading to make yourself a better writer, however the concept can be expanded to reading to make yourself a better citizen and more enlightened voter. As David Brin points out, human nature always conspires against Enlightenment. And there is a substantial fraction of American citizens today who in on that conspiracy.

Geoengineering and Stewardship

2008-09-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

Over on David Brin’s blog, there is some discussion of an interesting idea for greenhouse gas mitigation – modifying ocean chemistry to increase carbon sequestration:

Adding lime to seawater increases alkalinity, boosting seawater's ability to absorb CO2 from air and reducing the tendency to release it back again. The process of making lime generates CO2, but adding the lime to seawater absorbs almost twice as much CO2. The overall process is therefore 'carbon negative'. However, the idea, which has been bandied about for years, was thought unworkable because of the expense of obtaining lime from limestone and the amount of CO2 released in the process. Shell is so impressed with a newly developed approach that it is funding an investigation into its economic feasibility. (Note an added benefit. Increased alkalinity would also compensate for potential acidification if iron is added to seawater to boost plankton and foodchain productivity in “desert” sea areas, pulling out even more CO2.)

This is from the post for August 24th – scroll down because there’s no permalink.

A paper published last year in Environmental Science and Technology (linked here) provides a feasibility study of the technology. As with any sequestration technology, implementation could be decades off, even if funded appropriately (and we’re talking trillions of dollars, euros or whatnots, here). However, Shell is supposedly funding a company to develop this technology.

Shell Oil has funded a proposal by Cquestrate to investigate atmospheric carbon removal by adding lime to sea water. This process is heavily energy intensive, but could still be cost-effective near oil fields that have un-utilized natural gas resources. Instead of flaring the gas, it could be harnessed to create lime from limestone. Notably, the company developing this proccess plans to use an “Open Source” development process so that anyone can use the technology.

It’s a neat idea of trying to solve this problem by crowdsourcing it. David Brin has offered up other examples of increasing online public participation in creativity and problem solving. Currently these have the feel of gimmicks, but they may be the seeds of ways for harnessing smart mobs, particularly if you start adequately compensating the smart people. Maybe it will become a trend that produces some robust collaborative tools. Returning to Cquestrate, the sense I get from the website is that this initiative doesn’t exactly have the billions it needs driving it – not if we’re going to get ocean sequestration technology going any time soon (I’m not going to say “greennwashing”, but I did think it just for a moment. . .).

When the topic of geoengineering comes up, there is the accompanying handwringing over making drastic and possibly irreversible changes to the planet:

The idea of deliberately tampering with Earth's climate system raises the specter of unintended consequences, especially because the interventions would be imposed on a climate system already significantly perturbed by the unintentional consequences of human activity. Many scientists are averse to opening that Pandora's box, preferring to mitigate climate through emissions reductions and worrying that those reductions might be undermined by a premature faith in a technical fix.

I suspect it’s too late to have those conversations. As James Lovelock has argued, we may already have significantly perturbed the self-correcting mechanisms governing planetary processes, to the extent that we humans now have stewardship over those mechanisms. We’ll need all of the luck we can muster – along with trillions invested in research and engineering (an effort that will make the Manhattan Project look by comparison like a junior high school science fair project) to pull off climate change mitigation. Just something to think about during this Presidential election season – I don’t think either candidate really gets it.

An Update (09/05/08):

Speaking of the need for extreme measures, I ran across this article today:

Political inaction on global warming has become so dire that nations must now consider extreme technical solutions - such as blocking out the sun - to address catastrophic temperature rises, scientists from around the world warn today.

Figures it would be in the Guardian – you can’t get a US newspaper to cut through the fog like this. It refers to a collection of papers published by the Royal Society, which can be found here. More on this topic soon.

The Geopolitical Angle of Public Health

2008-08-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

Conflict is never good for public health, though for some commentators that’s such a limp-wristed reason not to fight. The bellicose bloggers such as Ralph Peters and Victor David Hanson reminds one of the bit of apocrypha said of George S. Patton by some, “our blood, his guts” (rendered sardonically by an actor playing a dogfoot in the movie “Patton”). It also brings to mind the saying “amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics” (yep, we’re going to be able to mount any sort of meaningful response to Russia’s incursion in Georgia while in the midst of two other conflicts). However, when your mind is in the clouds maneuvering squadrons, fleets and brigades around, there just isn’t time to pay attention to the fallout, such as hunger, dislocation, and epidemics.

Or maybe public health has more of a role in generating conflict than these bush-league Clausewitzs will acknowledge. There are some interesting perspectives on this in a recent article in the Asia Times – actually, there are several interesting perspectives, including the one that all Russian politicians are clever because the stupid ones are dead, whereas we currently have the stupid ones running everything right now. But what drew my attention was Russia’s demographic dilemma and how that might be a cause for its aggressive behavior (though the US and EU trying to extend NATO up to Russia’s doorstep might also have a role. . .).

The article paints a bleak picture demographically for the Russians running things in the country – falling birth rates among ethnically Caucasian Russians, abortion used as a means of birth control, declining life expectancy – and probably a whole host of other issues (I need to take a stroll over to the WHO web site sometime and review the statistics). The geopolitical angle around Russia trying to reclaim its old republics is:

Demographics stand at the center of Putin's calculation, and Russians are the principal interest that the Russian Federation has in its so-called near abroad. The desire of a few hundred thousand Abkhazians and South Ossetians to remain in the Russian Federation rather than Georgia may seem trivial, but Moscow is setting a precedent that will apply to tens of millions of prospective citizens of the Federation - most controversially in Ukraine.

We’ve only explored the fertility angle, and haven’t drilled into other issues of morbidity (caring for the millions made ill from poor diet, alcoholism and smoking), demographic troughs (fewer younger people to care for millions of elderly) or, most speculatively, fertility and neurobehavioral disorders from exposures to persistent organic pollutants and mercury. It may seem presumptuous to elevate pollutant exposures as a significant demographic contributor to geopolitical conflict. However, it’s probably prudent not to neglect them in strategic analysis, given the widespread nature of human exposure to these substances, coupled with the kinds of health effects they might be associated with, along with the uncertainty regarding occurrence and magnitude of those effects.

It’s interesting that we obsess on the resurgent Russia, an energy and geopolitical player on the world stage, and don’t give any consideration that behind the façade is a country full of sick and aging people. It’s both a warning to us, as well as a clue for how to manage Russia’s aggressive tendencies. No word yet on how we manage our aggressive tendencies.

Precaution and Triclosan

2008-07-30T05:01:00.000-07:00

The other day I was pointed to an article by Cass Sunstein in the Boston Globe online, about the precautionary principle. I agree with Dr. Sunstein that fundamentally the precautionary principle is incoherent as a risk management tool, at least in the way a lot of the “deep green” people view it. All policy choices entail risks of some form; these may be disparate risks that fall differentially across the population, but we risk making irrational decisions if we don’t try to wrestle with them. Some of his examples are pretty dim, but then again he’s writing for the general audience, who is pretty dim when it comes to making decisions where uncertainty is involved.

In most or nearly all cases where risks are being assessed, you’ll be making a decision based on incomplete information. It may not be prudent to allot the time or resources to do the studies to more fully assess a risk before deciding to act on it. Indeed, the call for more study has become a strategy used by some corporations for deferring action on controlling health risks associated with their products, or with chemical substances that their workers are exposed to. It’s effective too, because, like the general audience, nearly all policy makers are genuinely bad dealing with environmental decisions under uncertainty.

There’s a “strong” version of the precautionary principle, which in effect is to take action to stop something that poses a significant risk until you prove it’s safe. That’s a recipe for either precipitous action or inaction, with Dr. Sunstein’s favorite example being invading Iraq. The more reasonable version of the principle suggests that a lack of decisive evidence of harm should not be grounds for not taking action. For example, the 1992 Rio Declaration, setting out principles for sustainable development, states, "Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation" (see Principle 15).

Of course, matters become more difficult to resolve in practice. A good example is antibacterial soaps containing triclosan. Soaps containing triclosan were no more effective than plain soap at preventing infectious illness symptoms and reducing bacterial levels on the hands. Also, several laboratory studies demonstrated evidence of triclosan-adapted cross-resistance to antibiotics among different species of bacteria. The conclusion of a recent review was:

The lack of an additional health benefit associated with the use of triclosan-containing consumer soaps over regular soap, coupled with laboratory data demonstrating a potential risk of selecting for drug resistance, warrants further evaluation by governmental regulators regarding antibacterial product claims and advertising. Further studies of this issue are encouraged.

Triclosan is used extensively in consumer products, including personal care products, textiles, and plastic kitchenware. The triclosan molecule has some structural similarities to phenols, diphenylethers and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). It is widespread in low levels in waterways throughout the U.S., and has the potential for bioaccumulation in the environment. Biological monitoring performed by the CDC in 2003 and 2004 has detected triclosan in 75 percent of the urine samples collected from a representative sample of the U.S. population. In other words, traces of triclosan are detectable in a large number of people. Finally, triclosan was recently screened using mammalian cell lines for endocrine disrupting potential, and yes, there’s a possibility it’s an endocrine disruptor (potentially interfering with cell signaling that occurs in brain, heart and other cells, according to the UC Davis researchers).

Antibacterial soaps and consumer products have been identified as risk factors for antibiotic resistance. Infections from Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) are becoming a growing concern for hospitals and healthcare professionals. Recommendations for managing MRSA in the community aren’t calling yet for getting rid of soaps and products containing triclosan. Noone is calling triclosan a threat to human reproduction yet (for example, CERHR isn’t investigating it).

However, it does raise the question of when action is warranted to reduce exposure to triclosan. There’s limited evidence that it isn’t terribly effective as an antibacterial agent in consumer products, and may contribute to antibiotic resistance. It’s widespread in the environment, bioaccumulative, detectable in humans, and now has emerging evidence of subtle adverse effects that might affect future generations. Absolutely nothing conclusive about any of it, but with the currently regulatory framework and political environment, it could involve decades of study and deliberation before a decision is made that widespread use of triclosan poses a risk or not. Then, if the determination is yes, it poses a risk, several more years would be required before it’s out of the product distribution chain.

This seems like a perfect application for the precautionary principle. However, until the precautionary principle develops some intellectual rigor, and possibly a quantitative framework, it’s going to remain a nice idea without a lot of decision-making punch.

We Need Biomarkers

2008-07-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

As desirable as the idea sounds, we might have to finally admit to ourselves that reducing human exposure to toxic substances by curtailing their use isn’t working. There are a lot of good initiatives out there in green chemistry, and there’s REACH, but these are years in the future before they start having any effects on really reducing human exposure. The time factor bites here; there’s a progression from research initiative and legislation to regulatory programs and enforcement, pilot testing, redesign and startup of new production plants, and distribution of the new toxic-free products through the supply chain – a process that requires many years. Existing products, such as polycarbonate plastic baby bottles or computer cases with polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) fire retardants, may remain in use for many years even after production and sale of them ceases, providing a continuing source of exposure. Once exposure ceases, additional time passes before human body burdens decline; the amount of time depends on the persistence of the substance in the environment and in the human body.

Bisphenol-A is metabolized rapidly in humans, and body burdens should decline quickly, once we get around to removing it from food and beverage containers. However, even with nearly a decade of intensive scientific study, we still haven’t been able to come to a decision of whether or not bisphenol-A poses a threat to human health that warrants its replacement in plastics. PBDEs will be with us for generations, even if we eliminated all of them from all products today, because of their persistence in soil, water and the foodchain. A concerted effort has been made over the past 15 years to reduce dioxin exposures, which has resulted in decreases in body burdens. The question remains as to whether that effort has been sufficient – we still don’t have an accepted assessment of dioxin health risks.

Note this doesn’t mean “giving up” on clean production. Elimination of high-toxicity substances and substitution with lower toxicity materials is always the first choice in reducing human exposures (next in the hierarchy are engineering controls, personal protective equipment and lastly, administrative controls). Adhering to good design philosophy, and attempting to use smaller quantities of lower toxicity materials along with lower amounts of energy, should remain an objective for all types of manufacturing. But at the same time, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that clean production is going to have a measurable effect on human exposure to toxic substances anytime in the near future. It would be helpful if we had a robust set of biomarkers of toxicity in humans.

Regardless of where you fall on the “yes they do”/”no they don’t” continuum about environmental chemicals causing cancer, you have to admit that the National Academy of Sciences nailed the problem when it said last year:

Many cancer patients are diagnosed at a stage in which the cancer is too far advanced to be cured, and most cancer treatments are effective in only a minority of patients undergoing therapy. Thus, there is tremendous opportunity to improve the outcome for people with cancer by enhancing detection and treatment approaches. Biomarkers will be instrumental in making that transition.

Even further, the NAS’s report on cancer biomarkers says, “. . .recharacterization of disease in pathophysiological terms via the use of biomarkers is the key to the future of medicine.” Wow. If true, biomarkers taking off could really move the “war on cancer” out of the slash and burn (i.e. surgery and chemo/rad) mentality to something more sublime, less painful and scary and probably more effective in protecting health and improving quality of life.

Postscript: A companion post is in preparation that talks more about what are biomarkers and what we can do with them, beyond saying they are early indicators of processes or events in the body that might in the future lead to disease.

Wrong Answer

2008-07-06T06:52:00.000-07:00

A few days back I was driving around running an errand and happened to catch on the radio “MarketPlace”, that annoyingly smug business program carried on NPR stations. I try not to listen to NPR any more, but it’s one of those things that’s hard to stop once you’ve started, like cigarettes or heroin. Anyway, they carried a story about energy independence blah blah blah, and how someone was trying to commercialize plasma gasification as a waste to energy technology. Plasma gasification uses high temperatures to convert organic materials into “syngas”, or a gas stream composed mostly of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. These two substances then can be catalytically rearranged to form methane, hydrogen, and hydrocarbon fuels. It's been tried as a means of biomass conversion in a few places.

There was a hint of conspiracy theory about why this technology just isn’t all over the place, making truckloads of money for its proponents.

You know, we would be taking away a large business for the landfill people and the incinerators, so waste company do not want to see this technology come out. On the other hand, if we produce power, we will be infringing on the coal business and fossil fuel burning business.

I guess the energy consumption and expense involved have little to do with it. The other point that was brought up in the article as a reason we “need” this technology is that we’re running out of landfill space. . . .

The “running out of landfill space” argument is always a sign that you’re talking to someone who doesn’t really know much about environmental issues. We’re not running out of landfill space these days, so much as we’re running out of political will to site landfills where they are needed. Landfills also are a sign of mismanaged resources. For example, a significant chunk of the copper from the entire lithosphere is in landfills, a fact coupled with rising demand in China, which helps explain why thieves are starting to strip copper fittings out of abandoned forclosed homes. This article points to more examples of metals whose stocks may be approaching exhaustion. I found it from a Daily Kos diary “Peak Metal”, which has a nice analysis of the problem, but then mars it by indulging in liberal handwringing about how hard metals reclamation will be, and engaging in NIMBY-ism about how you don’t want a landfill mine as a neighbor (knee-jerk NIMBY thinking being another sign you’re talking to someone who doesn’t really know much about environmental issues).

So, we don’t need to be melting garbage to make fuel or electricity – we have other ways of getting those things. However, we are probably past the point where we need to start reclaiming and reusing the crap we’ve been tossing away so blithely. Noone yet is talking seriously yet about landfill mining, but if we’re arresting people for stealing copper, digging up landfills for it can be only a matter of time.

We Knew That

2008-06-29T05:33:00.000-07:00

I just picked up an abstract from the open access journal Environmental Health which presents a review of cancer epidemiology studies at hazardous waste sites. Epidemiology is the science and art that attempts to identify the relationships between disease and environmental factors. Some of the most painstaking investigative work in science occurs in epidemiological investigations. A classic example is the investigation of occurrence of cholera in London, conducted by John Snow As a part of this investigation, Snow mapped the locations where cholera cases occurred along with the locations of the local water pumps, thus creating the story of “the pump handle”.

The conclusion from this study was that epidemiological investigations generally did not provide a lot of information about whether communities near hazardous waste sites experienced an increased cancer risk or not. Limitations in the study design and limited information regarding levels of exposure were cited as support for this conclusion.

This study was funded by the City of New York. Why the City of New York is interested in drawing attention to the limitations of hazardous waste epidemiology isn’t made clear. However, it isn’t really news that hazardous waste epidemiology is grossly imperfect. We knew that already back as 1991. What is surprising is how little appears to have changed in the intervening years.

Most of the studies reviewed in this recent paper were identified as ecological studies, which examine rates of diseases between different groups (i.e. a community using contaminated groundwater compared with a community using an uncontaminated supply). Detailed information on the health status of individuals or detailed exposure information generally is not part of an ecological study. An ecological study is most useful for generating hypotheses and scoping more detailed epidemiological studies. Limited modeling or sampling data were incorporated into these studies, particularly measurements at the locations where individuals were most likely to come into contact with hazardous waste contaminants.

There’s a whole litany of things that could be done better here. We’ve known about these for a long time, but haven’t bestirred ourselves to deal with them.

The exposure data for assessing hazardous waste site contaminants is very limited, but we can’t all be tobacco epidemiologists who get to work with human populations who dose themselves like they were laboratory animals. There hasn’t been enough emphasis on community-based participatory methods for increasing community cooperation with exposure studies, as well as not enough emphasis on risk communication to help explain that simply looking for exposure doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a significant risk. From personal experience, I am aware that residents get understandably edgy when you want to come in to collect air samples from inside their homes or soil samples from their yards. They naturally run to the conclusion that there must be a problem (if there wasn’t, we wouldn't be looking, right?). However, because risk assessors are unable to discuss exposure and health risk in simple English, decision makers really don’t have a clue about what’s really going on, and everyone is afraid to speak up without a bunch of hedging and qualifying when the lawyers are in earshot, the people who have the biggest need to understand what’s going on – the neighbors to a hazardous waste site – routinely don’t get a straight story.

There’s the two-part problem of the lack of conclusiveness of epidemiology, coupled with the extremely sensitive perceptions of risks, both of which contribute to the sense of anxiety and uncertainty in the neighbors of hazardous waste sites. Both parts, the relative risk of 2.0 as evidence of causation, and the excess lifetime cancer risk of 1 in 1,000,000 as a threshold of acceptable risk, do not appear to be grounded in any sort of public health reality. It’s an obscure point, which is the topic for another post (because this one’s getting too long. . .).

We don’t seem to have learned anything from epidemiology to better inform hazardous waste decision making. Therefore, we fall back on making cleanup decisions using the crudest of risk assessment methods, which either don’t address real and significant health risks, or are a wasteful expenditure of resources in relation to the amount of risk reduction that occurs.

The Sad State of Environmental Health Policy Today, Redux

2008-06-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

My first essay on this topic is posted here.

Keeping to my New Year’s resolution to blog more has been difficult. I moved our household across the country in preparation for a new job, and for the past several weeks, I was busy studying for my examination for recertification as an industrial hygienist (update: I took the test last month – and just received notice that I passed, so I’m still a CIH). I’ve also felt pretty played out on the blogging front, so I took a vacation from it.

Not that there haven’t been things to blog about. Revere weighed in on EPA’s “streamlining” of its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), a data warehouse of focused toxicity profiles and values for use in quantitative risk assessment. That post is spot-on in terms of how the Bush Administration is tinkering with transparency and accountability with yet another environmental health system. Where I differ with Revere is in the overall value of IRIS, which was characterized as:

Considered authoritative by many states and countries, its judgments have become the basis for official standards. It's been around since the start of Reagan's second term (1985) so there is no claim it is some kind of fringe environmentalist fantasy. It's not the Last Word but it's a loud voice and taken seriously by anyone tasked with protecting the public from toxic hazards.

Having been an IRIS power-user for many years, I would argue that IRIS wasn’t that even in its heyday. It’s true that the usability has been further reduced from the slowdown of profiles being posted on it. However, IRIS profiles for several of the highest profile chemicals have lagged for years, sometimes predating the first Bush Administration. Hundreds of other profiles aren’t consistent with the most current data or risk assessment methods (which is actually less of a problem than you’d imagine – I would argue that many of these aren’t significant environmental regulatory drivers anyway). We don’t just have a problem with politically meddling in regulatory science, but a problem with how toxicity assessments get done. Actually, we have a problem in general with how risk assessments are getting done these days (see here, here and here), but I’d rather not get into that now, because I’ll just start to rant incomprehensibly. . . .

IRIS isn’t the real travesty in health standards. That honor is reserved for OSHA’s Permissible Exposure Limits (PELs). Twenty years ago, OSHA published a final airborne contaminants rule amending the PELs, making values more protective for 212 chemicals, and promulgating values for 164 more, the first widespread update of the PELs since the OSH Act was enacted in 1970. At the time, there was a lot of hand-wringing about this streamlined approach for developing standards for nearly 400 chemicals, particularly in relying on TLVs. Ziem and Castleman have been prominent critics of TLVs – a summary of their arguments along with a historical perspective on the airborne contaminants rulemaking is presented in Chapter 7 of Illness and the Environment: A Reader in Contested Medicine. That rule was overturned in court in 1992 [AFL-CIO v. OSHA, 965 F.2d. 962], with the court concluding that OSHA needed to do an independent risk analysis on nearly 400 chemicals. So, currently, the PELs in force are based on the TLVs from the late 1960s. The exceptions are PELs that have been promulgated more recently as part of chemical-specific standards, such as benzene, vinyl chloride or hexavalent chromium. OSHA hasn’t attempted to promulgate new standards, and Congress apparently hasn’t seen fit to act in this matter either. This is just another example of how occupational and environmental health is important enough for the public to wring their hands over, but not important enough to deal with effectively.

An aside: what is interesting to me is how their reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated, since anti-regulatory critics have aimed their sights at TLVs. Celeste Monforton summarizes that controversy on Defendingscience.org.

You could run down the list of standards, advisory values, criteria and find similar situations. EPA’s Ambient Water Quality Criteria were created in the 1970s and early 1980s, and have not been updated in the intervening years, which ties in with the fact that most of the IRIS profiles haven’t been updated either. Same story for the drinking water standards, or Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs), most of which were last updated in the mid and late 1980s. National Ambient Air Quality Standards are updated at a glacial pace.

I’ve wondered why environmental regulations don’t keep pace with the emerging science. My current speculations go like this: the methods for toxicity and risk assessment have become more complex. Thus, the analyses take more time, and perhaps provide more opportunities for criticism by stakeholders such as industry groups and federal agencies such as DOD. Rulemaking processes are adversarial, which provides further scope for criticism and manufactured uncertainty. Public desires for no uncertainty regarding understanding of health effects, along with assurances of zero risks push us to the very margins of what laboratory studies can provide in terms of prediction of adverse effects (bisphenol-A is a good example of what science can and cannot say about adverse effects).

It seems that the regulated industries have articulated a strategy (including slowing regulatory processes with doubt and backing the winning horse politically) for how to address environmental and health hazards from chemical contaminants, which these days appears to routinely outmaneuver environmentalist and other progressive stakeholders. With a political sea-change in the offing, it will be interesting to see environmentalists will make some progress in altering how chemical hazards are managed.

A Resolution of Sorts on Bisphenol-A (BPA)

2008-05-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind." -- Aristotle, with thanks to the Biomes Blog, which is probably a lame excuse for why I struggle with how to blog about important but difficult-to-make-interesting-or-compelling topics such as bisphenol-A in polycarbonate plastics. There’s been plenty of handwringing about cancer, developmental health effects, obesity, etc, from BPA exposure, since the National Toxicology Program (NTP) issued its draft Brief last month (read it here if you dare). Some of the best handwringing is in these articles in Discover, including this nicely-done interview with Philip Landrigan (never heard of him? Shame on you.), who refers to environmental chemicals in general as a vast, uncontrolled human exposure study.

The NTP’s Brief on BPA says nothing new about this substance, really, but the document does that with great authority. The NTP stated, “yes”, people are being exposed to BPA. The NTP stated that BPA can possibly affect human reproduction. Effects on reproduction and development have been observed in laboratory animals at low doses that are within the range of human exposures. These include effects related to neural and behavior alterations, precancerous lesions in the prostate and mammary glands, altered prostate gland and urinary tract development, and early onset of puberty in females. The NTP says there is scientific controversy regarding the interpretation of these low dose effects, but follows with the statement, “[w] hen considered together, the results of “low” dose studies of bisphenol-A provide limited evidence for adverse effects on development in laboratory animals.”

There are a myriad of reasons for why these studies doesn’t give direct answers about bisphenol-A risks, and the NTP’s brief goes on at length, and the even longer and more complex expert report at greater length, about: whether or not adverse effects are reproducible, which is influenced by factors such as the strain of animals studied, animal care and feeding, experience of the investigator in low-dose endocrine methods and the source of funding for the study; are the results biologically plausible, a question that is embroiled in a controversy about the applicability of a dose-response relationship (the gold standard in toxicology as to whether or not exposure to a chemical causes adverse effects) to endocrine disruptors; are the observed effects really adverse effects, etc. Once again, we’ve studied the daylights out of a chemical (as with dioxin, perchlorate and TCE), and still don’t seem to have a definite answer about whether or not it poses significant health risks.

You would think that the risk management thing we need to do here seems reasonably clear. Low levels of this stuff is in the bloodstreams of nearly everyone. There are hints of evidence that similar levels tested in laboratory animals produce adverse effects, though as with all laboratory animal evidence, we don’t really know what that means for humans. The kinds of adverse effects that might be associated with exposure to BPA could extend into the next generation – if it does cause developmental behavioral effects, you might speculate about the implications of a generation of adults with behavioral and learning disabilities. We might be on our way there now, which is why initiatives such as the National Children’s Study are of critical importance.

However, as stated before, the uncertainties in the assessment of BPA don’t point directly to a decision. The easy answers (be precautionary and ban all uses; don’t be hasty, the evidence doesn’t indicate a problem) aren’t the optimal ones. At the end of the day, the most extensive risk assessment in the world isn’t going help inform a decision if the affected public isn’t going to think clearly about its values and choices; and it’s clear that we’re not good at making risk-informed decisions where uncertainty is present.

The lesson from all of this is that the debate over BPA health effects is one about values and politics, not science. It’s probably true that the precautionary principle is incoherent as a decision making tool. At the same time, inaction is a decision, and in the case of restricting BPA from food and beverage containers, one that might have long-term consequences that are severely adverse and virtually irreversible.

We seem to be groping towards a resolution, no thanks to our moribund Congress and regulatory agencies. There’s a little bit of market transparency for parents regarding BPA in plastic food and drink containers for newborns and small children. Nalgene, a major manufacturer of plastic containers is phasing out use of BPA. Though it’s expected to take several months to complete the phase out, Nalgene is, ha ha, claiming it’s products are BPA free now. I suppose it’s a victory of sorts, but I’m not going to get too excited until I see evidence that body burdens are decreasing.

Vegetables and Sex

2008-04-18T09:33:00.000-07:00

No, that’s not what I’m talking about, you kinky people. . . .

It’s one of those indisputable bits of knowledge that you need to eat enough fruits and vegetables to stay healthy. There are perhaps two basic ways you could go about promoting more fruit and vegetable consumption:

Harass people with boring, gloomy statistics such as:

- Up to 2.7 million lives could be saved annually with sufficient fruit and vegetable consumption.
- Low fruit and vegetable intake is among the top 10 selected risk factors for global mortality.
- Worldwide, low intake of fruits and vegetables is estimated to cause about 19% of gastrointestinal cancer, about 31% of ischaemic heart disease and 11% of stroke.

OR

Now, that’s what I call social marketing.

(Image courtesy of Copenhagen Wholesale Markets)

The Other Story About the Airline Debacle

2008-04-13T07:53:00.000-07:00

Last year, I was on the road about 30% of the time. I grew to loathe airline travel, the cramped accommodations on planes, security theater, boredom, hurry up and wait, the nutritional dead zones called airports, the physical effects from disrupted sleep, eating and exercise habits, and that was before airlines started grounding their fleets to check the planes and make sure they aren't going to fall out of the sky. My sympathies are with the travelers inconvenienced by American Airlines. I may be one with you soon - I'm scheduled to fly towards the end of this month. However, one bright spot is that the present disruptions - grounded fleets and bankrupt airlines - might crystalize in peoples' minds just how broken air travel really is. Maybe they'll even start to think about how unsustainable air travel really is.

There's no way to sugar coat that last one. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution published an analysis of the impacts of air travel back in the dim past of 2002. That report raises concerns about air travel providing a disproportionate contribution to global climate change compared with other human activities and modes of transportation, in particular rail and marine. Global climate change is increasingly being viewed as a national security issue (here's the latest rumination from that corner), suggesting that matters such as air travel cannot solely be left up to CEOs; of course as events have shown in Iraq, it also may not be a good idea to leave such matters up to the national security technocrats, either.

With a new call for reducing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to 350 ppm (James Hansen's paper on the topic can be found here), it might be time to begin viewing air travel as something that becomes rare in our future. There are alternatives that can offset flying less, such as videoconferencing and high speed rail, but pressure needs to be applied, particularly to get high speed rail going in the US. Of course, this means airline executives will have to find something else to do, and probably see a decrease in their bloated standard of living in the process. Don't expect them to go down quietly, though.

Seven Ideas Lost on Americans

2008-03-31T21:54:00.000-07:00

Americans aren’t stupid. I have come to the conclusion that we are either in a state of perpetual denial or in a fog of permanent confusion. Whatever the case, we are overlooking some pretty important ideas that contribute to the current environmental crisis.

Jerald Schnoor, the editor of Environmental Science and Technology and the author of those words is going pretty easy on us. A reasonable person probably couldn’t rule out the possibility that we Americans are stupid. However, he makes up for it in his list of seven ideas lost on Americans. I’ll summarize here, with my own perspective, but the article should be read on its own merits (go ahead, it’s not behind the firewall).

1. Our unsustainability is immense. It’s true. You have to be seriously deluded to believe otherwise. Unless you living at a subsistence level, you’re not really helping (spare me about how green you really are). We really don’t have a clue, and many of the solutions we’re working on, such as biofuels or hybrid cars, provide only little benefit, or actually make matters worse.

2. Tipping points are irreversible. His closing point is educational – people don’t really believe a severe storm or a fire is going to destroy their home, yet they invest in insurance against that possibility. Why can’t we do the same with climate change?

3. Time lag bites. Another thing we don’t get is that the atmosphere doesn’t turn on a dime, even if we summon the will to reduce greenhouse gases. The effects, even if we begin in earnest today, won’t be apparent for over a century.

4. Species matter. This doesn’t involve getting misty-eyed about endangered species. I think that people tend to forget that beyond being beautiful and wondrous, Nature is also FUNCTIONAL.

5. Free markets aren’t free. This should be tattooed mirror-wise on the foreheads of every idiot libertarian, neoconservative economist, nitwit pundit. . . and maybe all Republicans, for that matter. Ecosystem services cost something, even if you don’t want to acknowledge they exist.

6. Inaction can be more expensive than action. There’s money to be made in energy retrofits, carbon sequestration, building mass transit, restoring habitat, rehabilitating soils, etc. etc. Global warming deniers and uncertainty manufacturers are agents of chaos and disinformation in the service of those economic interests who will are fighting a rearguard action to avoid being the big losers in the climate change economy. The fact that a large fraction of us are listening makes us idiots by default.

7. Technology can’t do it alone. We’re going to need a new worldview for how we regard nature in addition to the mother of all Manhattan Projects. I wonder if we’ve got it in us – the current worldview in the US advocates human domination of nature.

Note to self: next time, write the post before cracking open the wine. You’ll sound less cranky that way.

A Resolution of Sorts on TCE

2008-03-30T07:55:00.000-07:00

TCE is a prime example among many of the difficulties we face trying to assess and manage the risks from low levels of chemicals in the environment. EPA has been undergoing a torturous risk assessment process since 2001 in order to set regulatory limits. The original TCE risk assessment received abundant criticisms from stakeholders, principally DOD and industries undergoing cleanup of TCE-contaminated sites. Some of those comments could be considered exercises in “manufactured uncertainty”; however, others were on the mark in identifying flaws in EPA’s analysis. Eventually the TCE risk assessment ended up with the National Academy of Sciences, which in 2006 issued a report that partially vindicated EPA, and partially confirmed what EPA’s critics were saying, but in the end, recommended that EPA revise its risk assessment, and quickly. Last year, Congress started getting into the act, sponsoring legislation to set a timeline for EPA to complete its scientific review and propose numbers that could be used for setting cleanup and drinking water standards. This only heightens the unreality of the situation; one would think with war, global climate change, economic meltdown and a crisis in healthcare, Congress would have better things to do with its time than debate the cleanup standards of ONE Superfund contaminant, no matter how prominent it is.

Earlier this month, there was a bit of a resolution on this issue, as reported in the March 18, 2008 Risk Policy Report, published by Inside EPA. At the meeting of federal facilities managers sponsored by the Association of State and Territorial Solid Waste Management Officials (ASTSWMO), EPA announced they it had reached an agreement in principle with the Department of Defense (DOD) on cleanup levels to address inhalation exposures to TCE associated with vapor intrusion. According to the Risk Policy Report:

The move will provide DOD and industry a long-sought consistent national approach to the issue, a DOD source says, as well as allow regulators across the country to make long-delayed cleanup decisions to address vapor intrusion, a previously unrelated pathway that results from toxic vapors from underground solvents that enter homes, offices and other structures

EPA has developed provisional guidance that will adopt the risk assessment prepared by the California Environmental Protection Agency for purposes of setting cleanup standards for vapor intrusion pathways. This will provide some badly-needed consistency in cleanup policy, which will allow remedial actions to move forward (I’ve personally observed sites where action has been stalled over differences in opinion about appropriate risk-based standards for TCE). Currently, state and federal agencies are using a variety of risk assessments which provide up to a 65-fold range in cleanup levels, for the same target cancer risk. EPA states that cleanups should achieve indoor air concentrations ranging from 1 to 10 ug/m3; the ability to protect public health with these levels in air is a matter for further discussion (I’m working on a longer post discussing that issue), but it’s possible that 1 to 10 ug/m3 in air represents levels that can be reasonably achieved with Superfund remedial technologies.

I’ll be back with more on this topic.

A Placeholder for Interesting Things – Trash Pickers and Sustainability

2008-03-26T04:24:00.000-07:00

Keeping my pledge to write more frequently means there will be posts like this one which are placeholders until I have the time to explore a topic in more detail. I ran across this fascinating article about trash pickers, the poor around the world who scrape out a living salvaging recyclables from the street and landfills. Someone has written a book about them, which I will pick up and review. After reading this paper a few years ago, which observed that a significant fraction of the global stock of copper resides in landfills, maybe the idea is possible that the despised (or ignored) trash pickers could become a global economic force.

The CDC Great Lakes Report: A Lesson in Transparency

2008-03-22T08:56:00.000-07:00

Influential people ranging from Nixon to Clinton (Bill, that is) to untold numbers of Republicans in the Bush administration habitually have been too puffed up with their own importance and perceived invulnerability to comprehend that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. A recent case has been the report regarding potential human exposures to hazardous waste sites around the Great Lakes, which has been in draft by staff of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) for the past several years.

The International Joint Commission (IJC) commissioned the report in 2001, according to a report published in the Detroit News and, as of 2004, was undergoing peer review. It was supposed to have been released in July 2008, but the CDC has held up publication. The author of the report, Chris DeRosa, senior toxicologist for ATSDR subsequently was demoted for reasons not specified by CDC.

The Center for Public Integrity has done a good job in bringing this matter to light, and particularly in disclosing portions of the report in question. Most of the liberal blogs and the mainstream media took this information to the wrong place, highlighting the supposed public health threat from contaminated sites around the Great Lakes, which suggests that most of them didn’t read the excerpts of the report all that carefully, if they read them at all. Others such as Revere, did identify a key issue associated with this news, which is another example of the Republican war on science, with Bush administration officials suppressing scientists who have identified environmental health problems that pose a threat to entrenched economic interests.

The House Energy and Commerce committee has gotten into the act, calling CDC into account with regard to this matter. So now the CDC, blithely not mentioning any of this back story, has issued the report in draft along with a statement “scientific concerns” which says that the report is not ready for release to the public. Senior management reviewed the report in 2007 and identified what was felt to be several deficiencies, which they were concerned would lead to misinterpretation of the report by the public. However, due to the inept handling of the review process, it’s a bit late to prevent misinterpretation. A revised draft is being prepared for a review by the Institute of Medicine, which presumably will occur sometime this year.

I must be missing something here. I’m curious about what was so troublesome about the report from a political perspective that it warranted being bottled up for the better part of three years, and demoting a senior toxicologist. According to the latest Detroit News article, the report cost $92,000. It’s hard for me to do more than speculate, not knowing anything about the schedule or the original scope (you can’t find a workplan or protocol or anything similar on IJC’s or ATSDR’s web sites), but for a report assessing potential adverse impacts associated with Superfund sites across multiple states in the Great Lakes region, $92K seems to be a fairly small budget. Awhile back, I took a peek at the draft version circulated on Public Integrity’s web site. It looks like what the authors did was to identify hazardous waste sites and other releases to air and water from publicly available databases, and lined these up with county-level disease burden statistics. This study scarcely produced smoking guns, and is most useful for identifying priorities for more definitive health assessments. And the authors of the study pretty much say these things in the report.

It’s good that CDC has now posted the draft study, along with the comments provided by various reviewers, though it’s a shame that the agency apparently had to be slapped around a bit by Congress before coughing it up. And, if they had simply posted the report without any fanfare, perhaps on a late Friday afternoon which a standard ploy for agencies who have to report unpleasant news, it might have been months before anyone in the press had found it (so when’s the last time you’ve visited ATSDR’s Great Lakes web page). Not in the spirit of transparency, but it would have represented much smarter bureaucratic maneuvering.

Beyond the tempest in a teapot story about suppressing a relatively routine health assessment report useful for identifying future research priorities, and folks who characterize it as anything more really need to get over themselves, there are much more important stories to explore. Revere points to one of them, which is the pattern of harassing scientists who are simply doing their jobs which is identifying public health problems for use in informing policy. Another story is the progressively growing limitations in EPA’s command and control tools (TRI, NPDES, Superfund) for understanding and managing big regional environmental health problems, such as the Great Lakes. Then, there’s the question about why this story didn’t stimulate broader interest in other environmental health research on the Great Lakes, which points to much better documented problems.

Turning the Corner on Coal-Fired Power?

2008-03-01T09:48:00.000-08:00

Last month, Lowbagger had an article about the cancellation of 59 coal-fired power plant projects in 2007. The article, which links to an entry in Sourcewatch, lists several reasons including concerns about climate change, coal being taken out of regional long-range integrated resource planning (whatever that means), renewable energy playing a more important role in utility profiles, and plants cancelled due to market forces (community or regulatory objections, lack of demand, excessive costs or lack of financing).

Champagne corks may be popping at this news, but I prefer to wait until I start seeing carbon dioxide concentrations trending downward in the atmosphere before getting too excited about this outcome. Beyond compiling the list of projects, Sourcewatch didn’t provide a lot of commentary, which meant that if I wanted to read any further exploration on this topic, I was going to have to write it myself.

“Cancellation of 59 plants” isn’t a terribly significant fact by itself. It doesn’t directly reflect carbon emissions averted; after all, the power generation is going to come from somewhere, and the replacement sources won’t entirely be renewables. However, it might be an indication of a trend. Earlier this month, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) published a report (actually, a wordy Powerpoint presentation) summarizing the status of new coal plant starts in the U.S.

One tidbit from this report is that 36,000 megawatts of coal-fired plants were commissioned in 2002, while only 4,500 megawatts of capacity were built by 2007. Project delays have shifted some plants out several years. Delays and cancellations have occurred due to regulatory uncertainty regarding climate change, or unfavorable economics brought on by increasing industry costs. The drought in power plant construction reduces the skilled labor available for engineering, procurement, project management and construction; if you can’t find work designing and constructing coal-fired plants, you find something else to do and therefore are less available if future projects are announced. The reduction in available human resources further reduces the viability of bringing more new coal plants on line.

The NETL report indicates that projected growth rate in electricity generation has been declining, which some parties (i.e. the North American Electrical Reliability Council) suggest that electrical generation capacity might become inadequate to maintain reliability and to keep electricity prices from rising. What do these folks (i.e. NERC and NETL) suggest? Why, build more coal-fired plants. The outcome if that doesn’t happen is an increase in the use of natural gas for electrical generation, and with concerns about natural gas resources, there might an increase in liquid natural gas imports.

And, while noone responsible for writing these assessments has said it, you might as well get ready for the climate change skeptics to chime in, “and then the terrorists win, because we’ve given them an opportunity to blow up Boston Harbor”.

In these reports, there hasn’t been any mention of renewable energy or conservation picking up the slack in electrical generation needs. But that’s perhaps because the NETL is oriented towards fossil fuel generation. It would be interesting to see what the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) says about all of this.

GEOblogging – an Introduction to the Global Environmental Outlook report

2008-02-23T07:43:00.000-08:00

Natural resources and ecosystems underpin all our hopes for a better world.

These words, from the recently-issued UNEP Global Environmental Outlook GEO 4 report, should be tattooed mirror-wise on the foreheads of every politician and on every officer of suitably large corporations, so they can see them when they get up and look in the mirror every morning.

The forward to GEO 4, over the signature of the UN Secretary-General Bai Ki-Moon, strikes the familiar themes of dire events awaiting us if we as societies don’t come to grips with climate change, resource depletion and loss of biodiversity. For a lot of Americans, I’ll wager that the message is being received with all of the enthusiasm with being told to “eat your vegetables”, something else we in the US aren’t doing enough of either.

Issued on the 20th anniversary of the World Commission on Environmental and Development report “Our Common Future” (also known as the Brundtland Commission) which coined the term “sustainable development”, GEO 4 promises to be another in the series of “global integrated environmental assessment reports aimed at providing comprehensive, reliable, scientifically credible, and policy relevant assessments on the interaction between environment and society”, which scarcely anyone will read. Perhaps blogging about it will present GEO 4 in more digestible packets, disseminating a more nuanced view of the report beyond the monotonic and childishly simplistic “we’re doomed as a species” message which I’ve seen in more than one newspaper article.

Before the Brundland Commission’s report, development corresponded to industrialization and measured solely by economic activity and increases to wealth, with protection of the environment seen as an obstacle to development (Chapter 1, page 10). Today, with the emergence of concepts such as natural capital and ecosystem services, the linkage between environment and development is more strongly perceived. Indeed, it is possible to say with conviction that the voices who would oppose the message that we need to be stewards of natural resources and ecosystems are either speaking from ignorance or serving as agents of disinformation for stakeholders who would be required to relinquish wealth, status and power in order for our societies to provide this stewardship.

Don’t wait for me – go ahead, dig in, start reading, start blogging about this.

What Sense of Urgency?

2008-01-09T16:27:00.000-08:00

The events of last month with the EPA denying the state of California’s application for a waiver from the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from mobile sources should give pause to anyone interested in quickly implementing solutions to climate change.

The solutions are out there. Sandia National Laboratory is developing the Counter-Rotating Ring Reactor Recuperator (CR5), a device that uses solar energy to break the carbon-oxygen bond in carbon dioxide, forming carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide can then be reacted with oxygen to form methanol. So, this might be a way to create renewable fuels while achieving some carbon sequestration. Sandia calls it the “Sunshine to Petrol” project. Here’s a description of an earlier version of the CR5 for trying to create hydrogen (which has been set aside for the current methanol version, which is apparently more practical). Then, there’s a group at Ohio State University who is developing a bioreactor with algae which uses photosynthesis to trap the carbon dioxide in a gas stream. The algae are then harvested for livestock feed or biodiesel production. A plant the size of a Walmart would be needed to sequester the carbon emissions from a power plant, but it sounds do-able.

However, there’s the tiresome and time-consuming process of overcoming the resistance of entrenched economic interests, of which Charles Stoss says hopefully that “[c]apitalism will clean up its own shit — once it acquires a new set of taste buds and realizes it's delicious,” and which David Brin characterizes not as free-market advocates but rather anti-market kleptocrats. The question which arises is whether or not we have the time for all of the bullshit which is part of the regulatory and political ground-clearing needed prior to actually start engineering changes in consumption patterns, manufacturing processes and infrastructure to achieve a lower carbon footprint, before the life-changing climate-change really kicks in.

New Year’s Resolutions

2008-01-05T04:16:00.000-08:00

Here’s my list of resolutions:

Stop reading political blogs. I’ve read a post by David Pollard (“How to Save the World”, in the blogroll) which simultaneously celebrates folks such as the political bloggers, especially the liberal ones, for their ideals and sense of community, while at the same time observing that their zeal for political solutions is a distraction which actually serves “The Man”, the 1% of all of us representing the political and economic elite. I’ve come to agree with him that they’re a distraction from other things I really should be doing. His solution, which is to just walk away and form communities of love and conversation while civilization lasts, sounds beguiling but seems to be an invitation for chaos, conflict and megadeath to join the party early (a bit more about apocalyptic visions in a minute). I’d rather go down fighting for civilization, but I agree with David that fighting doesn’t involve worrying about which presidential candidate is going to win the New Hampshire primary.

Stop paying attention to apocalyptic visions. Most everyone has their own version – for many Christians, it’s the Rapture. Science fiction-reading geeks have the Singularity. Deep Greens have Peak Oil and the ecological footprint. Greenpeacers have “Our Stolen Future”. Neocons have the Long War. I recognize this tendency as identity politics. David Brin points out that human nature always conspires against Enlightenment. Another perspective is that perhaps there is a bit of a human longing for catastrophic events. There is probably a nasty fall of one sort or another waiting for us humans, but hoping for it just to be able to say “I told you so” is the coward’s way out.

Have less stuff. We’re moving soon, and I am in the process of giving away a lot of stuff and hauling away more in the mother of all dump runs (yes, I know that’s a BAD THING; but we might as well get use to the fact that we will be mining landfills for resources some day soon). David Brin, who’s going on the blogroll, had an interesting perspective on our trade deficit and Walmart culture, noting that our penchant for buying stuff may have lifted a chunk of the Third World into the middle class. Still, it’s unsustainable, and as a species, we’re going to need to find a better way to spend our time and to make money beyond making and buying stuff (see below).

Start finding something else to do. I could probably spend the rest of my productive life cleaning up hazardous waste. But over the next few years, I’m going to turn my efforts to working on climate change. Very, very soon, we need to exert an effort reminiscent of the New Deal, the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project combined to reverse the damage, and it’s going to be a better way to spend our time than packing Walmarts with cheap Chinese-made stuff then buying it. So over time, I’ll be taking my existing skills developed from 20 years of hazardous waste investigation and cleanup and applying them to issues such as increasing energy efficiency in buildings and implementing carbon sequestration.

Celebrate the sparks of human ingenuity and initiative when I encounter them. For example, the Z Recommends consumer information site, which published a survey of baby bottle and cup manufacturers, ranking those using polycarbonate which could leach bisphenol-a as opposed to those manufacturers who use other plastics. Or Nanosolar, which manufacturers extremely thin and flexible solar panels. Or MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) program, allowing you to take college-level courses online for free.

Start writing more: more posts to Impact Analysis. I write when I learn about stuff, so perhaps the more I write the more I’ll learn. Look at it as exercise for the brain, and, if you’re going to exercise, pick something that’s strenuous and that you’ll enjoy. “Exercise” and “enjoyment” don’t go together for most people, which might help account for the epidemic of overweight and obese people in the U.S. Also, I’m starting another blog that chronicles my adventures in fitness. Over the past several years, I’ve steadily lost body fat and become stronger. There’s a lot to share about how those things happen. I want to publish something that makes money, perhaps a book or an e-book or an article; I have ideas in all those directions. The wealth-creating aspect is not driving this resolution. Most writers don’t sustain themselves by writing along. But it would be a kick to have people pay to read something I’ve written.

Neglected Tropical Diseases and “The Other America”

2007-12-30T04:39:00.000-08:00

The other day, I ran across this analysis of income distribution (posted here and here), which quantifies the class war that has been declared on most Americans. It shows 80 percent of Americans have been steadily losing ground financially over the past 25 years, with the people at the top 1% of the income distribution making out like bandits.

It’s interesting to lay that observation alongside a recent editorial in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) journal, Neglected Tropical Diseases, which suggests that large numbers of the poorest Americans suffer from the same diseases as low-income peoples in Africa, Asia and Central America.

The popular conception of parasitic tropical diseases consisted of hookworm infestations, which combined with pellagra and malaria, sapped the intellect and vitality of poor rural Southerners for generations until the New Deal “transformed the region from an economy based on subsistence agriculture into an urbanized one with higher wage earning and improved quality dwellings”. Hookworm is no longer considered endemic in the U.S., though this hasn’t been studied recently. Other parasitic diseases that have been recently studied include toxocariasis, which might be linked to the prevalence of asthma in poor black and Hispanic children, cysticercosis, which is emerging as the leading cause of epilepsy among Hispanics in Los Angeles County and toxoplasmosis, which poses risks of mental retardation, and hearing and vision losses to newborns of black and Hispanic mothers.

The closing sentence in the NTD editorial says it best, “There are no excuses for allowing such glaring health disparities to persist in one of the world's wealthiest countries.”

Environmental Health Tools – e.hormone

2007-12-22T04:53:00.000-08:00

Wading through the bisphenol-a morass in an effort to tell a coherent story about this substance has taken me into endocrine hormone territory. Hormones are a fascinating but high complex topic, but in the course of my journey, I’ve rediscovered the e.hormone site hosted by the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane/Xavier Universities. The CBR conducts research on environmental signaling. On the “about” page, they say this about environmental signaling:

Environmental signaling encompasses the many ways plants and animals use chemical signals to communicate life-driving information, to respond to physical or biological stimuli, and to talk to each other. The internal and external signals police interactions within and between cells and organs as well as among individuals and species. Sometimes, certain natural compounds and synthetic chemicals incorrectly trigger signaling mechanisms – turning them on and off at the wrong times or changing signal intensity that may affect reproduction and health.

Endocrine disruption is one of the most studied areas of inadvertent environmental signaling. Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) – the pesticides, plasticizers, pharmaceuticals, and other pollutants that interfere with estrogen and other hormone system signals – can affect cells to ecosystems and invertebrates to vertebrates. Humans and animals are exposed to EDCs through food, water, and air and can experience health effects ranging from subtle changes in blood hormone levels to overt reproductive abnormalities, infertility, and cancer. Facing the most risk are women of childbearing age, due to increased exposure through lifestyle choices, and infants and children, due to their small size, higher exposure, and fast growth.

EDCs are something that we’re probably going to have to learn to live with, since I don’t see us moving very quickly with reducing exposure to the pesticides, plasticizers, and pharmaceuticals which might be responsible for inadvertent cell signaling. e.hormone (which is also on the blogroll now) is going to be a handy resource for me, and I hope for you too.

Quick Notes on Antibacterial Soaps

2007-12-10T01:10:00.000-08:00

Antibacterial soaps with triclosan are coming under fire for being no more effective than plain soap as disinfectants, while at the same time promoting antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Now, recent findings from studies in laboratory animals suggest that triclosan is an endocrine disruptor.

This topic deserves a more detailed discussion, but since I’m getting on a plane this morning, that will have to wait for a later time.

Perhaps triclosan in soaps won’t turn out like bisphenol-a, TCE, perchlorate or dioxins, where we spend the better part of a generation wringing our hands about managing the human health risks.

Perhaps.

The Tangled Story of Bisphenol-a – The NTP’s Expert Report is Out

2007-12-09T04:50:00.000-08:00

The Center for Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) has finalized its Expert Panel report assessing the reproductive and developmental toxicity of bisphenol-a (BPA). CERHR will be accepting public comments on the report through the end of January 2008. Once comments have been received, the NTP will prepare a NTP-CERHR Monograph for BPA. The Monograph contains the NTP Brief, the Expert Panel Report and the public comments on the Expert Panel Report. The NTP Brief is a summary for decision makers and presumably will represent a milestone in determining what steps are needed (if any) to reduce exposures to BPA.

What will happen after that is anyone’s guess. The NTP does not regulate chemicals – the EPA and FDA do that. It can be anticipated that the NTP’s report will churn slowly through the processes those agencies have for assessing health risks from chemicals; if the weight of evidence persuades regulators that BPA poses a significant human health risk, there will be rulemaking and negotiation with manufacturers. If you’re expecting regulations to be enacted banning BPA, be prepared to wait several years for them. Under that scenario, you can also anticipate manufacturers being given a few years after that to get BPA out of the production stream. Then, there will still be tens of millions of sports bottles and sippy cups in use for years to come after that.

Hopefully, there isn’t anything terribly bad associated with BPA exposure, because we’re all exposed to low levels of it, and probably will be for the better part of a generation.

The first draft of the Expert Panel report was prepared by an NTP contractor, Sciences International (SI). In March 2007, the Environmental Working Group reported that SI had working relationships with companies manufacturing chemicals being assessed by CERHR. CERHR apparently required contractors to make conflict of interest disclosures but didn't place any further restrictions on them. Officials at the National Toxicology Program terminated SI's contract with CERHR on April 13, 2007, but stood by the quality of the previous assessments conducted by the contractor. Representative Henry Waxman's Governmental Oversight Committee has looked further into the conflict of interest matter, but does not appear to have started an investigation as yet.

In March 2007, the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) conducted an audit of two key activities carried out by SI as part of the bisphenol-a (BPA) review: (1) selection of literature relevant for review by the expert panel on bisphenol A (BPA) and (2) incorporation of input from expert panel members into draft reports. The NIEHS audit concluded that the draft BPA expert panel reports "include consideration of all relevant references and reliably include changes requested by the expert panel members. NTP concludes that the draft expert panel reports are useful for the CERHR evaluation of BPA". (Note: the expert panel members are selected by a CERHR Core Committee consisting of scientists in government service.) What this appears to mean that NIEHS was satisfied that the comments from the CERHR's expert panel, which issues the authoritative decision-makers' summary on a chemical, were incorporated into the report. Some of the public comments on the BPA report, for example from Fredrick Vom Saal, give a different perspective about how well the available scientific literature has been incorporated into the BPA review (particularly how his papers were incorporated into the review). The Pump Handle provides a summary by NRDC of the overall criticisms related to the BPA review process.

The NTP also convened a working group of the Board of Scientific Counselers to assess its contracts for conflicts of interest (COI). The methods and results as described in their report were described as follows:

In conducting their review, the WG analyzed each NTP contract and Statement of Work (SOW) as well as the extent of government oversight to determine the degree of risk for potential conflicts and/or impaired objectivity. Questions were sent to a crosssection of NTP contractors in an effort to assess the compliance of their COI policies with law and regulation, and to determine the existence of any COI. The WG relied on the contractor’s self-certifications regarding conflicts with current clients as the HHS Office of the General Counsel (OGC) has indicated that this is normal, reasonable business practice in the absence of specific factual allegations of impropriety. To gain a better understanding of the contracts and how they operate and interrelate, the WG also held discussions with NTP project officers responsible for various contracts including the NTP contract for pathology support. Based on the data provided, the WG did not find any evidence of actual or apparent COI in any of the cross-section of contracts reviewed.

The WG identified a number of best practices and specific areas where improvements could be made by NTP/NIEHS, as well as by the entire NIH, that could result in identifying COI as early in the acquisition process as possible in order to avoid, neutralize or mitigate those COI.

Representative Waxman's committee criticized those methods, stating that the contractors's processes for identifying and disclosing COIs were not adequate.

The working group's reliance on contractor reports is a questionable way to assess conflicts of interest. Most of the contractors do not appear to have adequate systems for tracking such conflicts. According to the report, although "most" of the ten contractors that completed questionnaires had a designated official to solicit and review financial dislosure statements from their investigators, "[f]ewer" contractors collected disclosure statements listing significant financial interests from their investigators. "Even fewer" contractors updated these disclosure statements during the life of their NTP contracts. And "very few" conractors kept the disclosure statements for the mandatory three-year period following the completion of their NTP contracts. In other words, many of the contractors that provided self-certifications to the working group did not collect or retain the information necessary to determine whether individual conflicts of interest existed under their NTP contracts.

I'm immune to the censorious tone of the NRDC and Representative Waxman ("I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"). It's hard to find a party, institution or organization that is free of conflict of interest (didja hear that, Congress?). For myself, there seem to be sufficient checks and balances with the BSC review alerting us that the BPA assessment might contain uncertainties that understate the developmental toxicity risk, the public comments from academic scientists which critically review the CERHR's scientific report, and supplemental reviews such as the Chapel Hill Consensus. Perhaps out of this event will come better contracting procedures and business practices for disclosing and managing conflicts of interest. In the long run, consulting firms who wish to keep their client lists confidential might have to forgo the pleasures of performing work for government agencies. In the meantime, there are enough points of view available that the BPA story needs to be brought up to date. For the moment, what's been done is to point out that some care may need to be taken in using the information developed from the government's review process.

And, if you're not willing to wait for a definitive, authoritative statement about BPA risks to emerge (not like that's going to happen anyway), you can start doing the precautionary thing now.

Explain to Me Again Why Ethanol from Corn for Driving Cars Makes Sense

2007-12-02T07:09:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it’s time to start paying attention when the AEI-Brookings Joint Institute, that bastion of conventional Beltway thinking, starts bad-mouthing producing ethanol from corn as a replacement for gasoline. However, as I got further into this, I found that AEI/Brookings is still very much part of the problem. Hat tip to Environmental Valuation and Cost Benefit News for the link.

The results from a study just released by the Joint Institute (link not up yet) “strongly suggests that the case for ethanol is lacking”. Their analysis is based on data from “a recent Environmental Protection Agency report on the economics of mandating the production of alternative fuels”. The AEI-Brookings press release doesn’t say which EPA report they are talking about, but I suspect it’s this one. Under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the EPA is responsible for developing regulations to ensure that gasoline sold in the United States contains a minimum volume of renewable fuel. The Renewable Fuel Standard program will increase the volume of renewable fuel required to be blended into gasoline to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. The Renewable Fuel Standards program was developed in collaboration with refiners, renewable fuel producers, and many other stakeholders (with the refiners and renewable fuel producers around, one wonders how prominent the “other stakeholders” were in the rulemaking).

The AEI/Brookings report cites the statistic that using all of the corn grown in the U.S. for distilling ethanol would offset about 12% of the gasoline demand, based on the 2005 demand level. That statistic comes from a life cycle analysis of biofuel production from corn and soybeans, published last year by researchers at the University of Minnesota. In addition, while there may be modest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels production (soybean biodiesel is the better alternative than corn-produced ethanol in this regard), any biofuel production has other impacts, including degradation of soil quality, ecological impacts from fertilizer and pesticide runoff, and depletion of nonrenewable water resources. The UMN study identified many of these impacts, but did not appear to incorporate them quantitatively into the life cycle analysis – a difficulty with LCA is aggregating dissimilar impacts into an overall metric. The other issue arising is the rise in food prices, both from converting corn production to ethanol and from the overall rise in energy prices.

The AEI/Brookings press release offers some helpful suggestions, such as discontinuing the tax credit for domestically-produced ethanol and removing the tariff on imported ethanol (if fermenting ethanol from corn is such a great idea, the market will validate it, right?). It suggests putting research emphasis into other endeavors to increase energy security and influence climate change. The examples for these other endeavors that it offers are a bit weak – geoengineering the atmosphere and biomass for electrical generation. What about upgrading urban mass transit? Read down a ways to Charles Pierce’s item about an intercity rail concept which makes entirely too much sense.

But the following statement by AEI/Brookings was just too much for me:

Congress might never have bet so much of the taxpayers' money on corn-based ethanol if an unbiased accounting of the consequences had been available early on.

. . . [momentary pause in blogging]. . .

. . . sorry about that, I’m back now. I was laughing so hard that I think I pulled a muscle. It goes beyond sheer naïveté to suggest that facts would get in the way of a splendid way of making money, with today’s Congress.

And, as for the AEI/Brookings closing recommendation. . .

We could use a separate agency, shielded in part from political considerations, whose sole mission would be to analyze the costs and benefits of regulations and government programs. Without such an agency, interest-group logrolling will continue to trump science and economics in major policy choices.

. . . words fail me. It sounds like something a policy wonk would say after a couple of bong hits. There’s no recognition in such a statement that the “political considerations” are a major part of the “ethanol problem”, and that campaign finance and lobbying reforms, along with a rejuvenated mainstream media that gave a shit about journalism, might also be helpful here. I think we're doomed.

If I had to speculate as to what the game here really is, the AEI/Brookings Joint Institute is attempting to establish its bi-partisan cred, by wagging its finger at Congress, the big growers and the renewable fuels industry, while at the same time offering up a completely toothless solution. As I said earlier, part of the problem.

Nutrigenomics in the News

2007-11-27T02:50:00.000-08:00

In a way, it’s kind of cool that genetic testing is now available at the drugstore. The New York Times today carries a story about Sorenson Genomics which has started selling a paternity test kit through Rite Aid stores in California, Oregon and Washington. Left unexplored in the Times story was the backstory about why uncertain paternity might be a significant problem to the point of being a market segment for a test kit (if that’s too oblique, it’s the question about who’s banging who). But what’s of interest to me is the spread of genetic testing directly to consumers. Genetic tests, for health and diet advice, ancestry and paternity, are already available directly to consumers through the Internet.

Nutrigenomics holds the promise of being able to identify how genetic variability and diet might combine to create health disparities in human populations. According to the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD) Center for Excellence in Nutritional Genomics, the goal of nutrogenomics is to. . .

. . . reduce and ultimately eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities resulting from environment x gene interactions, particularly those involving dietary, economic, and cultural factors. Our goal is to devise genome-based nutritional interventions to prevent, delay, and treat diseases such asthma, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and prostate cancer.

In addition, there is an evolution in the field of toxicogenomics, which attempts to understand health effects associated with the interaction of genes and environmental toxicants. Advances in toxicogenomics have been spawned by the results from the Human Genome Project, which has characterized in detail the composition of DNA in human cells. Toxicogenomic methods have allowed researchers to begin studying toxicant-induced genomic expression, with applications such as screening chemicals for hazard identification, monitoring toxicant exposure, assessing mechanisms of toxicity, and predicting individual variability to exposure to toxicants.

Toxicogenomics holds the promise of enhancing our ability to estimate the risks from chemicals in the environment. While the value of toxicogenomics in assessing health risks is widely recognized, there are limitations to the methods and data currently available, and further work is needed to fully understand and apply the results from toxicogenomic studies. As yet, there is no coherent regulatory framework for managing environmental health hazards with toxicogenomic methods. Finally, there are social implications to be considered from toxicogenomic applications. For example, there are legal and ethical consequences associated with the ability to specifically identify individuals who may be genetically susceptible to exposure to specific toxic substances.

The National Research Council (NRC) has recently published a report examining the potential impacts of toxicogenomics on predictive toxicology. This report was prepared at the request of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The report recommends that regulatory agencies enhance their efforts to incorporate toxicogenomic data into risk assessments. However, these data currently are not adequate to replace the current testing programs used in regulatory toxicology. The report makes recommendations for improving the capabilities of toxicogenomics in the areas of exposure assessment, hazard screening of chemicals, and evaluation of population variability and individual susceptibility. Toxicogenomics also has the promise of improving dose-response assessment by providing insights on mechanisms of action, improving the confidence in cross-species extrapolation, and improving understanding of effects with low-dose exposures, particularly developmental effects that might occur with early-life exposures.

Which brings us back to over-the-counter genetic testing. The Times story draws attention to Myriad Genetics which markets a test for the presence of mutations in the BRAC gene which is an indicator of susceptibility to breast cancer. Apparently the BRAC1 and 2 genes are intellectual property of Myriad’s, a development that has some people salivating at the financial opportunities and at the same time, made me rapidly aware of how little I know about this expanding market segment. Last year, the National Academy of Sciences published a study, at the request of the National Institutes of Health, on the granting and licensing of intellectual property rights on discoveries relating to genetics and proteomics and the effects of these practices on research and innovation.

According to the Times, Myriad engendered some controversy over releasing a breast cancer test kit, though it doesn’t go into any of the details (while that’s a topic for another day, a little of the story is here).

Congress asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate Internet companies which offer health or nutritional counseling based on genetic testing. The GAO’s results, true to form, identified the potential for fraud and abuse, with testing companies recommending expensive nutritional supplements to address so-called genetically-related health problems. Legislation may be forthcoming. I’m in faint agreement with the author of the American Spectator article about the usefulness of additional regulation. What we need instead are better-educated consumers.

What’s New with TCE?

2007-11-24T15:35:00.000-08:00

Not a lot, it seems. TCE has been in the center of a regulatory tangle going back over seven years, which has delayed the development of health criteria based on the most current health effects data. Over 15 years ago, EPA withdrew the cancer slope factors used to assess human cancer risks from TCE, because it was questioned that those values, derived from studies in rats and mice, adequately reflected the cancer hazard in humans. About seven years ago, the EPA began reassessing the science associated with the health risks of TCE, and issued in 2001 a draft report of that reassessment. That report concluded that evidence for TCE being a human carcinogen was stronger than previously believed, and that TCE was a more potent carcinogen than previously believed. After a contentious public review period with the science in EPA’s draft reassessment being closely questioned, the National Academy of Sciences took up a review of the EPA reassessment in 2004. Over a year ago, the National Academy of Sciences published its findings, validating some of EPA’s conclusions, and sending others back for further study; for example, EPA’s conclusion that TCE was a more potent carcinogen was judged by the NAS to be based on weak evidence.

EPA’s TCE web page doesn’t provide a schedule for when its risk assessment is going to be updated. There doesn’t appear to have been a lot of new data generated in the past year, based on what’s available in PubMed. One meta-analysis of occupational epidemiology of TCE exposure and liver cancer attempts to rebut the finding from the NAS study that high-dose TCE exposure, such as found in some workplaces, may be relevant to human cancer risk. This is relevant with regard to liabilities for past exposures (and is probably the origin for the study), but may eventually become a moot point. TCE releases are decreasing with time according to the TRI, which suggests that between pollution prevention initiatives and lingering concerns about groundwater contamination and exposure liabilities, businesses using metal cleaners or solvents are finding alternatives for TCE.

Another study investigated the association between TCE exposure and mutations in the von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) gene, which has been identified as a mechanism for kidney cancer. They examined several kidney cancer patients who may have had high TCE exposures in the past but didn’t observe a relationship between VHL mutations and TCE exposure. This doesn’t necessarily mean that TCE isn’t a kidney carcinogen in humans (the NAS concluded it’s likely there’s a relationship between TCE exposure and kidney cancer), but that further investigation may be needed to understand the mode of action for kidney cancer.

EPA scientists published a paper earlier this year discussing the difficulties in understanding the mode of action for TCE (in this case, with regard to liver cancer), which I suppose explains in part why a finalized risk assessment isn’t available yet. Congress is getting into the act with TCE, a development that absolutely floored me when I first heard about it back in August of this year. Senate Bill 1911 (S.1911), sponsored by Sen. Hillary Clinton and with bi-partisan support, would “amend the Safe Drinking Water Act to protect the health of susceptible populations, including pregnant women, infants, and children, by requiring a health advisory, drinking water standard, and reference concentration for trichloroethylene vapor intrusion (note: someone should remind Congress that the RfC doesn’t address cancer effects), and for other purposes”. It’s currently in the Senate Environment and Public Work Committee. Nothing has happened yet, but it’s still surprising that Congress is getting involved. Three years ago, I asked the question:

What’s next if the NAS can’t provide some good recommendations? Take it to Congress? I can’t wait to see that: “quick, we need to put aside the war on terror so we can debate this drinking water standard for TCE”.

This is one case where I hate being right.

The Tangled Story of Bisphenol-a – A Preview

2007-11-23T17:20:00.000-08:00

So we’re all carrying around small traces of the chemical bisphenol-a (BPA), used to make polycarbonate food and drink containers, epoxy coating for canned foods and sealants in dentistry.

And, according to the Chapel Hill consensus published in August 2007 in Reproductive Toxicology (Volume 24, Issue 2 behind a firewall, but I found a draft copy here), these levels of exposure are within the range at which very subtle, adverse health effects have been observed in laboratory animals. As yet, the occurrence of similar effects in humans hasn’t been attributed to bisphenol-a exposure; then again, it’s very challenging to link specific health effects observed in human populations to specific environmental exposures (for example, where do you find an unexposed control population).

Many conservative and libertarian types prefer that government keep out of the business of regulating chemicals in the environment, particularly those chemicals associated with commercially successful products. Their preference is to let the market squeeze out the problem chemicals – if those products are objectionable or harmful, then people won’t purchase them, and those products with the offending chemicals will disappear from the marketplace and won’t be a source of exposure.

However, markets work imperfectly when information is imperfect. There’s potentially a long latency period between exposure and the occurrence of health effects (breast and prostate cancer; adverse behavioral effects) with bisphenol-a. These effects in human populations are not unique to bisphenol-a, and might be attributable to other causes and sources of exposure. Without being able to draw a convincing exposure-effect relationship, the costs of treating cancer cases, or educating behaviorally-impaired kids or adults, which might have been related to bisphenol-a exposure cannot be incorporated into the price of plastic products made from this substance. It is difficult to inform consumers about the risks associated with bisphenol-a; the scientific issues surrounding the health effects are complex, fraught with significant uncertainty and a little scary, particularly if you’re a women of childbearing age. The economic footprint of polycarbonates and epoxy coatings is large, meaning those affected industries have the resources to shape the public debate around this substance.

This wasn’t the bisphenol-a post I wanted to write, but I’m still bogged down trying to connect the dots on this chemical, and the story is taking longer to pull together than I’ve expected. The story has become extremely tangled and hard to follow, with both scientific and political elements to it. See for yourself, at the National Toxicology Program’s Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) web site. While it is important to remain open to the possibility exists that leaching doesn’t produce significant health effects, making a decision that the risks from bisphenol-a are insignificant (i.e. take no further steps to regulate polycarbonates and epoxy resins contacting foods) with the current state of knowledge would be more of an act of faith rather than reason. In addition, it is sadly apparent that the mainstream media in its current form is not up to the task of informing people adequately about this issue. A good story, which I’ve discussed previously, can be found at PLOS. However as I’ve dug into this issue, I’ve found that that story only scratches the surface of this issue. Still it’s a better start than you’ll find in the mainstream media.

There are alternatives to polycarbonate sports bottles and childrens’ sippy cups. For those of you who don’t wish to wait for the scientific assessment to grind to completion, a precautionary approach in the face of the uncertainties about the health outcomes could be to turn to those alternatives. The alternatives to canned foods might be a bit more difficult, but there are some resources available online to find those alternatives (I’m compiling that information too for later posting, but feel free to Google “bisphenol-a free” if you want to read ahead).

Flotsam and Jetsam III – Thinking About Agricultural Fumigants (Makes Me Tired)

2007-10-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

Still unpacking from my trip last week.

Methyl bromide is to strawberries what fuel is to cars or water is to plants. That being the conventional wisdom, it was not surprising that the alternative to methyl bromide would be methyl iodide.

Well, why not? Once you get accustomed to the idea of protecting crops from soil pests by chemicals which are neurotoxic to humans, carcinogenic in laboratory animals, and migrate through soil to groundwater like. . . water, why not?

I’ve mentioned before in these posts that I started my career with the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), which at the time was responsible for health and safety regulation of pesticide use. Years after I had left, enough of the California legislature was finally convinced that the same agency responsible for promoting agricultural productivity which inevitably meant (and means today) promoting pesticide use, should not also be regulating safe pesticide use and transferred those functions to the newly-created California Environmental Protection Agency.

At the time though, I had many opportunities to see California agriculture and pest control up close. I observed an entire subculture in places such as El Centro, Lemoore, Patterson, Woodland, Yuba City, Watsonville and Castroville involved with the industrial-strength farming, performing workplace monitoring and sampling of pesticide mixing operations, ground spraying, aerial spraying, soil fumigation, chamber fumigation, even fumigating squirrel holes in an almond orchard using methyl bromide. These observations have led m to the conclusion that most people in urban communities have only the foggiest idea of what has to happen for fruits and vegetables to magically appear in the grocery store, and the price some in rural communities have to pay for all of us to eat well.

After the debacle with DBCP, use of which as a soil fumigant contaminated groundwater throughout California, and the hassle of fumigating with methyl bromide, which is sufficiently hazardous and volatile that acres of polyethylene sheeting need to be pulled across the newly-fumigated fields to keep the stuff in the soil, one would have thought that we as a society and our land-grant agricultural colleges would have been working diligently to transform agricultural pest control and reduce reliance on pesticides by instituting Integrated Pest Management (IPM).

However, we can’t just leave these things in the hands of regulators and scientists. Lots of people will need to care and will need to develop more of an appreciation for the risks and benefits from agricultural pesticides, and start making noises about pesticide hazards, before we start to have more sensible pesticide regulations. It’s a nice idea, but we’re having problems getting more people to pay attention to global climate change even with Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize for promoting awareness about it. As long as the strawberries keep showing up in the stores, I wonder who’s concerned about this beyond the activists.

Flotsam and Jetsam II – Spectator at a Health Care Debate

2007-10-21T10:43:00.000-07:00

Many of the passing events during my blogging hiatus I had observed while lurking over at Scienceblogs. For example, there was this little call-and-response between Revere and Orac about whether or not drug quackdom extends to pharmaceutical manufacturers, whether or not physicians serve as “pharma shills” and other associated whatnot concerning drugs. I come down on Revere’s side in this matter; further evidence offered by Revere of how Big Pharma marketing practices are perverting the concept of evidence-based medicine are with this post concerning another side effect associated with the use of Viagra. Just an aside: now, I’m pleased that because of erectile dysfunction, that at least on TV, you get to hear something about middle-aged guy sexuality. But it was painful to watch the “Viva Viagra” ad, with the middle-aged garage band guys singing about their limp wieners. The problem with prescribing PDE inhibitors is that erectile dysfunction can be a symptom for some major underlying lifestyle health problems. This makes me wonder if the physicians prescribing Viagra are also prescribing lifestyle changes for their middle-age male patients. Sex is better when you’re fit, but spinach, olive oil and gym memberships don’t generate revenue for pharmaceutical companies. While Viagra is evidence-based and pharmacologically active, it is still being marketed in a manner designed to strip mine the assets (either through their insurance or personally) of unhealthy people, without accomplishing any other preventive health benefit beyond the ability to get laid once in awhile. I think the “quacks in business suits” argument applies here.

Flotsam and Jetsam I – Travel Blues

2007-10-21T04:36:00.000-07:00

Ships' goods which are lost at sea. Also used figuratively in non-nautical contexts to means odds and ends, bits and pieces.

A lot of these are piling up right now as the impending start-up of another blog, the day job and travel pull me away from blogging here. Business travel is especially galling these days, as airline executives are no longer ashamed to just say it to their customers’ faces, “fuck you, we’ll treat you any way we please because you don’t have a choice but to fly with us”. Congress, with war, a storm-ravaged city not rebuilt yet, health-care crisis, housing market crisis and global climate change, having time for hearings about JetBlue holding passengers hostage for hours on the tarmac, is more evidence that things must be pretty bad travel wise. My recent air travel experience included arriving to my destination four hours late, partly unavoidable because of a weather delay, and not being late on the return only because of the foresight to have a long layover. I was overbooked on one flight, a fact that wasn’t revealed until I reach my seat to find someone else with an identical boarding pass in it. Only through the dedicated effort and persistence of a flight attendant in finding me a seat on a theoretically sold-out flight did I avoid missing getting home Friday night. The long layover was key because we departed late while my seating was being sorted out. While I was on the road this week, several people wondered at my plan to drive 300 miles to get to Friday meeting, which entailed greater expense than flying in addition to hours behind the wheel. I had reasoned that, from an inconvenience perspective, driving wasn’t any worse than cooling my heels in an airport. I don’t have the insane productivity skilz to get a lot of work done in airports (and unlike many people, flipping through my e-mails and typing ungrammatical responses with my thumbs on a Blackberry doesn’t really constitute “work”), there’s always a battle for a seat next to an electrical outlet in the terminal, and the need to guard your stuff from thieves, terrorists and TSA means you can’t get up when you please and walk away to grab some coffee, something to eat or to use the can, without shutting down the computer and packing everything along. Besides, this was a meeting I simply couldn’t be late to, and I’ve lost faith that any airline these days can get me anywhere within four hours of my designated arrival time.

So, with things such as airline travel draining the life force from me, several events have passed by during my blogging hiatus. Hopefully, there will be more later.

The Sad State of Environmental Health Policy Today

2007-09-02T07:42:00.000-07:00

The other day, Revere was discussing John Edwards’s presidential platform on cancer, and expressing disappointment that Senator Edwards gives virtually no attention to prevention, including regulatory approaches for reducing carcinogenic exposures and incentives for promoting “green chemistry” in manufacturing. I checked over at Hillary Clinton’s web site, which has a bit more meat on this topic: smoking prevention in young people, getting junk food out of schools, and improving biomonitoring of exposure to toxic substances. However, it’s only a slight improvement over what John Edwards would provide for us. To the credit of both of them, they appeared at Lance Armstrong’s cancer forum earlier this week (most of the Republican candidates bailed on it).

It seems so hard for our politicians to inject the environmental health focus into the debate over health care. Perhaps it’s too difficult for them. Too much of our economic system would have to change. For example, in a paper published last month in Environmental Health Perspectives, the cancer risks from organic hazardous air pollutants were ranked for a non-occupational and non-smoking population. The chemicals providing the largest contribution to total estimated cancer risks in the U.S. were benzene, butadiene, formaldehyde, dioxins and chloroform.
Mobile sources (cars and trucks) are a large part of the emissions of benzene, butadiene and formaldehyde into the air. So, by inference, a key strategy for reducing exposure to these substances could be to reduce the amount that we drive, or ship stuff around by truck. The alterations to our daily lives could range from minor, such carpooling, greater proportion of working from home, or buying locally, to fairly life-changing stuff, including redesigning cities for walking and urban biking, substantially increasing the urban mass transit infrastructure, changing patterns of employment, old industries collapsing while new ones flourish. . . more examples are provided here. There would be collateral benefits, too: redesigning our built environment to be more friendly to pedestrians and bicyclists could create a health benefit, and possibly cut into health care costs, by increasing the amount of exercise people get (NIEHS had a conference on this topic in 2004); in addition, reducing vehicle-miles traveled also reduces our consumption of oil, which promotes energy independence and begin reducing greenhouse gas emissions, both of which pose a risk to national security. Oh, and all of the upgrading of our infrastructure that would be needed to accommodate fewer cars and trucks in our lives would create jobs. . . . Stop me if all of this is making too much sense.

Chloroform occurs in drinking water as a disinfection byproduct (most chloroform exposure occurs indoors when we use that water – either from drinking, or inhaling chloroform that volatilizes from hot water during showering or using a washer or dishwasher). While the disinfection of drinking water using chemicals such as chlorine has been a major public health success story by reducing the risk of disease, elevated levels of disinfection byproducts may be associated with an increased risk of bladder, rectal, and/or colon cancers and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Many water utilities use chlorine gas for disinfecting drinking water, and chlorine is transported around the country in rail cars. Derailments have created hazards and caused fatalities to communities in the past (I’ve blogged about one such story in Graniteville, SC in 2005; as discussed here, further work is needed to increase the safety of rail cars transporting hazardous materials). However, alternatives are available for disinfection of drinking water that can reduce the formation of disinfection byproducts and at the same time reduce accidental releases from derailments by limiting the amount of chlorine transported around the country. There would need to be an investment made to fund the retrofitting of water treatment plants – but again, you could look at this as an opportunity for job creation.

The story is bit different for dioxins. People are exposed to dioxins principally through the food supply, particularly by eating animal fat, dairy products and fish. In 2003, the Institute of Medicine published a report discussing strategies for reducing exposure to dioxins in foods. Overall, about 34 percent of the calories in American adults’ daily diet come from fat, and one-quarter to one-third of that is from saturated fat, which is largely animal fat. Recommendations for reducing dioxin exposure in the diet (which, by the way, would also reduce exposure to other lipophilic persistent organic pollutants) include changing agricultural production methods to interrupt the cycle of dioxins through forage, animal feed, and food-producing animals, particularly with regard to the use of animal fats as livestock feed. In addition, they recommend educating people about reducing the amount of fat consumed in their diets. In general, making people more aware of the consequences and benefits associated with what they eat can provide health benefits beyond reducing exposure to dioxins and persistent organic pollutants.

There are pollutants not covered in the EHP article, because they aren’t hazardous air pollutants, but that still are examples of how attention to environmental health can have collateral economic benefits. For example, nearly 2 billion pounds per year of bisphenol-A are used in the production of polycarbonate plastics. Polycarbonates are used to manufacture all types of plastic components, including food and drink containers. There potentially are problems with using polycarbonates in food and drink containers – bisphenol-A can leach from them and be ingested. This makes bisphenol-A a textbook example of an environmental toxicology and health policy problem. It's a commercially important chemical substance. Nearly all of us are constantly exposed to low levels of it. The mechanisms for potentially adverse health effects are subtle and occur at low levels of exposure. The most vulnerable populations for these effects are young children, both during pre-natal development and in infancy. The kinds of biological effects observed in laboratory animals with low levels of exposure include stimulating the growth of prostate (in males) and mammary tissues (in females), potentially increasing susceptibility to carcinogenicity later in life; alterations in hormonol with effects such as early onset of sexual maturation; and neurobehavioral effects. Recently, one study provided indications that BPA might promote insulin resistance, a risk factor for diabetes. These effects can be observed at levels around 10-fold greater than levels of exposure in humans, which is not a comfortable margin of safety. As yet, adverse effects have not been observed in humans, though there hasn't been a concerted effort made to examine human populations.

Bisphenol-A is not the only component in plastics manufacturing with health concerns. Health effects potentially associated with phthalates, used as plasticizers, and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), the precursor used to make Teflon, are also under scrutiny. As with bisphenol-A, these substances are in widely used products, and we all carry around a small body burden of them. As can be imagined, there is a strenuous scientific debate about the presence and significance of adverse health effects from exposure to bisphenol-A, phthalates and PFOA, a debate which may never be satisfactorily resolved. However, there is an opportunity to promote the research, development and manufacturing of lower-toxicity materials for use in consumer products, which could help to reduce the uncertainty regarding health risks from plastics. There are many initiatives promoting “green chemistry” (the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production and the Clean Production Action project are resources for learning more about this topic). However, while the chemical manufacturing industry acknowledges the importance of green chemistry, redirecting it onto a more sustainable path will happen faster if political pressure is applied.

Which brings us around to what our presidential candidates have said about cancer prevention, and more importantly, what they haven’t said. Dealing with disease burdens such as cancer is more than just fixing health insurance and giving more money to NIH. It is taking a more holistic view of how physical and socioeconomic factors can affect human health. Environmental health is very much a democratic issue. The Democratic candidates for president should be able to say more about it than they currently are doing.

Losing the War on Obesity

2007-08-28T02:45:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-16T02:32:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-08-01T18:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Formaldehyde in Trailers and Other Things You Thought Were Taken Care of Years Ago

2007-07-20T04:45:00.000-07:00

It’s been a bit of a surprise to hear about this issue of refugees from Hurricane Katrina being exposed to formaldehyde emissions from the wood paneling in their trailers. Not because of the fact that thousands of people are still living in emergency trailers two years after the disaster; indifference and sometimes callous behavior, especially directed at the most vulnerable members of society, is a calling card of the Bush Administration. Not because FEMA’s lawyers advised not performing air sampling because it would imply FEMA ownership of the problem; I’ve seen lawyers give that kind of advice before. But that 20 years after this problem had first been discussed, we’re still having the problem of people breathing formaldehyde emitted from pressed-wood products. The IARC has concluded there is sufficient evidence both in humans and laboratory animals that formaldehyde is carcinogenic.

Air monitoring sponsored by the Sierra Club has shown that 83 percent of the trailers tested in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama have concentrations of formaldehyde in air above 0.1 ppm. This study reported formaldehyde concentrations as high as 0.34 ppm, which is higher than the ACGIH short-term exposure limit (it is recommended that worker exposure to the short-term exposure limit be held to 15 minutes, with no more than four excursions per day). NIOSH recommends a short-term exposure limit of 0.1 ppm. These are worker exposure limits, intended for use by industrial hygienists for controlling workplace exposures, and not for use with the general public. For the public, ATSDR has developed Minimal Risk Levels for different durations of exposure. The MRL for “intermediate” duration exposure (from 14 to 365 days) is 0.03 ppm, while a MRL for “chronic” duration exposure (365 days or greater) is 0.008 ppm.

According to testimony given yesterday at the House Oversight Committee hearing, what FEMA was using as a level of concern was 0.3 ppm. Now, there isn’t any statement describing what action is taken if that level was achieved, but one hopes it was to relocate the residents to safer housing. However, there is a whiff that FEMA’s response was to largely study the problem to death, and figure out methods for mitigation. However, some of what they came up with for mitigation was laughable, including increasing ventilation with outside air, while keeping indoor temperatures and humidity low – a bit of a challenge under Gulf Coast conditions. The industrial hygienist who testified yesterday hit on the solution, being that FEMA should focus attention on getting residents into permanent housing, and out of the trailers for good.

In demonstration of the power of the Intertubes, someone has started a blog focusing on the issues of indoor air quality in “temporary” trailers.

Soft Drinks: and You Worry About the Benzene?

2007-07-15T03:33:00.000-07:00

Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, and in particular, carbonated soft drinks may be a key contributor to the current epidemic of overweight and obesity. High-fructose corn syrup, a principal ingredient in these beverages has been suggested as a cause of the increased incidences of obesity and metabolic syndrome in the US. sugar-sweetened soft drinks contribute more than 7 percent of Americans’ calories, making them the largest single source of calories in the US diet. They contribute to the erosion of tooth enamal and dental caries. Consumption of caffeine and phosphoric acid in colas may have an adverse effect on bone mineral density in older women. Consumption of sugar-sweetened foods, including sweetened beverages and soft drinks, are being investigated as risk factors in pancreatic cancer. As if that isn't enough, Coca-Cola has been studied as a possible animal carcinogen.

With all of that, what is it that people worry about? Trace levels of benzene formed from the reaction of sodium benzoate and ascorbic acid. While I'm pleased that action is being taken to get a carcinogen out of the food supply (though the term "food" applies very loosely to sugar-sweetened beverages and soft drinks), I question the wisdom of being concerned about the benzene at all; there's more than enough evidence to persuade a reasonable person that drinking sugar-sweetened beverages, and particularly carbonated soft drinks is a really bad idea for your health. If you sat down and did the math, you might find that the cancer risks from the benzene exposure are probably trivial by comparison.

Getting Carbon Neutral Just Got a Bit Trickier

2007-07-14T06:43:00.000-07:00

Awhile back, the non-profit group Clean Air-Cool Planet conducted an independent review of retail carbon offset providers. The goal of the report, is to encourage more transparency and quality across retail offset providers. Carbon offsets in concept allow an individual or an organization to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by making payments for activities that overall mitigate emissions. Examples of offset methods include reforestation, investment in renewable energy or energy conservation projects, or purchasing emissions trading credits.

Offsets are controversial, in that it can be difficult to verify that they achieve real emissions reductions. Some providers offer certification to demonstrate that “their” offsets are reducing emissions. The Clean air-Cool Planet report discusses in further detail the intricacies and pitfalls of becoming carbon neutral. Some are frankly scathing of the process, damning it as a way of maintaining business as usual without making any real effort to reduce emissions. George Monbiot likens the process to the selling of indulgences in the Middle Ages, for people wishing to pay to redeem their sins without actually having to do anything to stop sinning (though there is something appealing about equating SUV ownership with sin. . . .).

Now, a new report from Integrated Sustainability Analysis-UK, a consultancy (what the British call “consulting firms”), raises more questions about the definition of the carbon footprint.

Despite its ubiquitous public use however, the scientific literature is surprisingly void of clarifications, let alone definitions of the term 'carbon footprint'. This report explores the apparent discrepancy between public and academic use of the term ‘carbon footprint’ and suggests a scientific definition based on commonly accepted accounting principles and modelling approaches. It addresses methodological questions such as system boundaries, completeness, comprehensiveness, units and robustness of the indicator.

It makes sense when you think about it. You’re plugging your airline miles into a web page, and it tells you how much more your ticket costs to be “carbon neutral”. That’s scarcely transparent. You can’t even be sure that the arithmetic is being done correctly, even before considering the more substantive methodological questions raised in ISA-UK’s report. Those who are truly interested in going the offsets route for reducing your contribution to greenhouse gas emissions need to get themselves more educated about these matters. Joel Makower over at WorldChanging has a good summary of the CA-CP report for those not sufficiently interested to wade through it. His take home point is:

You've got to ask good questions when buying offsets; the report suggests several questions to ask. Whether you'll fully grok the answers, of course, is a whole 'nother thing.

His article is informative, but he sort of leaves it up to you to figure out specifically what questions to ask. I’m ok with learning about it, but then again, I already know where to find the GHG Protocol.

Must Read Article on Bisphenol-A in the Public Library of Science

2007-07-11T03:07:00.000-07:00

There’s a great piece of science journalism over on the Public Library of Science – Biology written by Liza Gross, highlighting Fred vom Saal with the University of Missouri and his work studying the developmental effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals, particularly the plastic monomer bisphenol-A (BPA).

Dr. vom Saal started his research with the risks of exogenous estrogens with diethylstilbestrol (DES). From 1938 to1971, U.S. physicians prescribed DES to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages and avoid other problems with pregnancy. At the time, it was thought that miscarriages and premature births occurred because some pregnant women did not produce enough estrogen naturally, and that the use of DES was safe. It is estimated that 5-10 million pregnant women and the children born of these pregnancies were exposed to DES.

However, what Dr. vom Saal is best known for is the controversy regarding the possible health risks from the endocrine effects associated with low-dose exposure to BPA. BPA is used as the monomer to manufacture polycarbonate plastic. Polycarbonate is used as the lining for most food and beverage cans, as dental sealants, and as an additive in other widely used consumer products. BPA is one of the highest-volume chemicals produced worldwide. Heating of containers to sterilize food, the presence of acidic or basic food or beverages, and repeated washing of polycarbonate containers have all been shown to result in an increase in the rate of leaching of BPA. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), most everyone in the U.S. is exposed to trace levels of BPA, based on urinary monitoring data.

BPA is a textbook example of an environmental toxicology and health policy problem. It's a commercially important chemical substance. Nearly all of us are constantly exposed to low levels of it. The mechanisms for potentially adverse health effects are subtle and occur at low levels of exposure. The most vulnerable populations for these effects are young children, both during pre-natal development and in infancy. The kinds of biological effects observed in laboratory animals with low levels of exposure include stimulating the growth of prostate (in males) and mammary tissues (in females), potentially increasing susceptibility to carcinogenicity later in life; alterations in hormonol with effects such as early onset of sexual maturation; and neurobehavioral effects. Recently, one study provided indications that BPA might promote insulin resistance, a risk factor for diabetes. These effects can be observed at levels around 10-fold greater than levels of exposure in humans, which is not a comfortable margin of safety. As yet, adverse effects have not been observed in humans, though there hasn't been a concerted effort made to examine human populations.

Assessment of the human health risks from exposure to BPA gets really bogged down in arguments over the weight of evidence considered by different groups reviewing the evidence, disagreements about what really constitutes a significant adverse human health effect, the financial sponsorship of those groups, and arguments over differences in testing methods used by various investigators. Whether or not a low-dose estrogenic effect can be detected seems to depend on numerous factors including the strain of test animal used, purity of the chemicals used, timing of the dosing, composition of animal feeds and whether or not a positive control (a test group dosed with a known endocrine disruptor such as DES). The history of the scientific review of BPA further obscures the public debate. Ms. Gross chronicles the progression from government agency (the National Toxicology Program) concluding in 2001 there was credible evidence of low-dose estrogenic effects, to review by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis report sponsored by the American Plastics Council which concluded that the evidence was weak that low-dose estrogenic effects were present in the animal studies, to the rebuttal co-authored by vom Saal in 2005 that called for a new risk assessment of BPA, to the 2006 follow-up by Gradient Corporation which amplified the conclusions from the HCRA report.

The article brings up the topic of the "expertise-for-hire" syndrome which produces scientific information that calls into question our understanding of potential occupational or environmental health risks, particularly when the studies in question indicate there may be adverse health effects. The outcome is the call to delay or defer risk-reduction activities until further studies can be conducted, because there isn’t sufficiently compelling evidence that a health risk exists and warrants action. David Michaels and Celeste Monforton, at George Washington University have written extensively on this topic (I blogged one of their articles a few years ago). More information on this subject of "manufactured uncertainty" can be found at the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy website. What the manufactured uncertainty tactic accomplishes is to provide a counter-point which responds nicely to the media's urgent need to create a simplistic, dramatic narrative of two opposing points of view; an approach that is used sell airtime, newspapers or magazines, but isn't terribly helpful for informing the public about an important environmental health policy issue.

The commentary co-authored in 2005 by vom Saal and endocrinologist Claude Hughes observed that most of the industry-funded studies concluded that adverse estrogenic effects were weak or non-existant, while the studies that were government-funded identified adverse effects. While there's no cry of foul play or anything like that, vom Saal suggested many investigators were unfamiliar with the methods used to study low-dose estrogenic effects:

“The moment we published something on bisphenol A, the chemical industry went out and hired a number of corporate laboratories to replicate our research. What was stunning about what they did,” vom Saal says with a mix of outrage and bemused disbelief, “was they hired people who had no idea how to do the work. Each of the members of these groups came to me and said, ‘We don't know how to do this, will you teach us?’”

There's always a risk in placing a lot of emphasis on findings from one lab that others can't replicate. However, a quick search of PubMed seems to show recent papers from multiple investigators observing low-dose estrogenic effects, so it seems that there is some reproducibility, one of the gold standards of scientific evidence. Another controversy with BPA research is that the source of funding seems to influence whether or not adverse effects are detected in an animal study. It's a complex matter. According to vom Saal and his co-author, Claude Hughes, the industry-funded studies lacked positive controls or used insensitive animal strains. Hughes does allow for the possibility of publication bias in the government-funded studies (i.e. do the studies with negative results get published?). To further complicate matters, there are various opinions regarding what gets considered as an adverse health effect in a laboratory animal, and how that is considered in a human health risk assessment. Coincidentally, NTP has recently published proceedings from a workshop on the relevance of rodent bioassays in assessing hormonally-induced reproductive tumors, which expresses a concern that currently available animal models aren't adequate for assessing these hormonally-induced effects.

Sorting through all of this must be tough for the non-specialist public and decision makers. The kinds of adverse effects being observed in laboratory animals sound like really bad things, but they seem to be pretty hard to detect and its difficult to say how they relate to human health. At the same time, how conclusive does the evidence from animal studies need to be before you start taking steps to reduce exposure? With DES, the evidence of adverse effects was first observed in humans, then confirmed with animal studies, which is not exactly the environmental health surveillance model you'd want to emulate. It comes down to a policy and philosophical judgment with the competing philosophies being "sound science", deferring action until we know or have fully assessed the health risks and the precautionary principle of taking protective action based on a more conservative interpretation of limited data. Such arguments can only be partially informed by the science.

I'm wondering if we could split the difference, while we're figuring out what the rodent data are telling us about BPA. There's probably enough evidence to argue that a sensible course would be to act now to restrict the uses with the highest potential for human exposure. These probably would be the food and beverage containers and dental appliances, where BPA is being leached and ingested. There are other uses that we probably don't have to worry about just this moment - how much BPA are you going to absorb through your fingertips from a polycarbonate compact disc? However, I'm not optimistic that a policy of moderation is going to have too many takers. As Jim Hightower said, "the only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos"; the plastics industry is going to stubbornly defend all uses; the endocrine disruption activists will stubbornly argue that we need to ban polycarbonates; both sides will have their experts, which prolong rather than resolve the scientific controversy; and the mainstream media gets to have conflict, narrative and drama, which might be great for attracting readers or viewers, but provide little for informing them.

Altogether this was a nice piece of science journalism, and as you can see, gave me a bit to think about. If you are new to the topic of BPA and confused by the sound bites you read in the mainstream media, this is a great place to start learning about this chemical and the associated environmental health issues.

Warning – Incoming Screed About Tiresome Liberal Bromides

2007-07-01T05:55:00.000-07:00

Reading Huffpo is a guilty pleasure and I really need to discipline myself to stop it. Then, I’ll have additional time to do more useful stuff, such as reading Fark. And, I won’t have to read blog editorials titled, “Will Congress Derail Attempts to Reduce the Terrorist Threat from Toxic Trains,” from Charlie Cray, director for the earnest-sounding Center for Corporate Policy.

The ride started out a little bumpy for me:

By virtue of the fact that it is unwilling to phase out the production of chlorine -- a gas that was eliminated from use in warfare after WW I -- the chemical industry and its major customers that use and transport the deadly green-yellow substance have condemned towns across the country to be perpetual potential targets for terrorist attacks.

The industry's claim is that they don't need to make safer substitutes so long as their plants are guarded by the 4 G's -- guards, guns, gates and gadgets.

Ok, let’s hold up here for a moment. In all of that, was there even a flash of realization that WE ultimately are the major customers of the chemical industry? If we didn’t have a fondness for safe drinking water and PVC, there wouldn’t be a lot of chlorine moving around by rail.

Some in Congress understand the threat and have attempted to taken action. Rep. Markey (D-MA) led the way in the House with an amendment to the Rail and Public Transportation Security Act of 2007 (H.R. 1401) that would dramatically enhance rail security and safety by re-routing ultra-hazardous cargo, such as chlorine gas, around high threat urban areas.

The bill was adopted in the House by a bi-partisan vote (299 to 124) on March 27th. Nevertheless, there is still plenty of resistance to the re-routing language in the Senate, where it would likely need approval from both the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.

Congress can reduce the threat to tens of millions of people immediately with this rerouting requirement. . .

Can anyone see Congress doing anything that’s going to reduce any threat “immediately”? H.R. 1401 was referred to the Senate on March 28, 2007. The status of the bill according to THOMAS is, “Received in the Senate and Read twice and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.” It’s not even on the Senate committee hearing schedule right now. Since Congress has punched out for the summer, this probably won’t get any traction until fall, unless it gets lost in the 2008 budget shuffle. Until the time when the Senate leisurely takes up this matter, or the next chlorine tank car derails (which will speed things up a bit). Until then, you can do some reading up on this issue, courtesy of the CRS.

The top-down approach of time-consuming arguing and horse-trading in Congress, followed by time-consuming rule-making in a regulatory agency, followed by time-consuming implementation by the chemical and rail industries, is no way to get something done “immediately” (does anyone else fail to understand the process of how you get from legislation to something tangible being implemented). How about a grassroots approach? For example, what about providing funding for communities, particularly the small communities such as Minot, ND and Graniteville, SC which are in the rail corridor hazard footprints, along with funding for some nonprofit organizations such as EWG, to work on this issue? It would be kind of like a secular version of faith-based initiatives. They could use that money for litigation, social marketing or public relations campaigns to create financial pain and adverse corporate image which might persuade transportation companies into providing safer routing.

. . . but ultimately, to eliminate the threat we need to phase chlorine out of industrial use, just as we've for the most part eliminated it as a tool of war. The way to do so has been described many times, including by Joe Thornton in his book, Pandora's Poison (MIT).

This is blindingly obvious to the point of absurd. There’s a lot of stuff like this we have to get done, like we have to stop driving our cars and trucks so much, to keep oil imports from becoming critical national security and economic problems; and we should eat our (minimum) five servings a day of fruits and vegetables and exercise an hour a day to stave off chronic diseases that mushroom health care expenses to 16 percent of our total economic output; and we should adopt energy conservation measures to stave off disastrous climate change. We’re not moving too fast on any of them. For myself, I’m skeptical that Congress is going to be more than marginally effective in addressing any of these problems, including hazmat transport safety. The argument of “let Congress do it” smacks of serious inside-the-Beltway-out-of-touch-with-reality thinking. The kind of thinking almost enough to persuade one to believe that Matt Taibbi’s obnoxious article about liberals makes a good point.

Maybe now I will have to read Pandora’s Poison to see what the magic formula is for phasing out chlorine. I’m ok with adding to the list I’ve started finding alternative disinfectants for drinking water. Here’s where you can start doing your reading on the subject, if you want to convince your local politicians and water treatment operators to make the change. Kicking the PVC habit could be tougher, but if you’re interested in looking into that, you can start here. Right now, I’d be happy with a baby step, such as phasing out PCE for dry cleaning.

Oh, and I’m not that sure that phasing out chlorine as a war gas is a good analogy for phasing it out as an industrial chemical. I think chlorine was replaced in World War I because we found better toxic gases to poison soldiers with.

More Mercury Factoids: Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs, Part 2

2007-06-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

Note: part of a series. Other posts are here and here.

So, why aren’t you going to get mercury poisoning if you break a CFL bulb in your home? First, it’s going to release only a very tiny amount of mercury into the air for a fairly limited period of time (as was discussed in the previous post). Second, we’re comparing that tiny amount of mercury in air with a health-based level that is highly protective - the Reference Concentration (RfC).

From studies of exposed human populations, it’s been observed that the most sensitive effects of low level exposure to elemental mercury occur in the nervous system. The most sensitive neurobehavioral effects were observed at levels in air as low as 25 ug/m3 (that’s microgram per cubic meter of air) with exposure occurring over a period of several years, as confirmed in multiple studies of exposed workers. This lowest-observe-adverse-level (LOAEL) is further reduced with uncertainty factors to protect sensitive individuals and to address where we don’t know much about inhaling elemental mercury (such as effects to the fetus from exposure to pregnant women, or to young children). The value you then get as the RfC is 0.3 ug/m3, which is about 100-fold below the level at which the most sensitive adverse effects have been observed with long-term inhalation exposure to mercury.

In addition, the definition of the RfC further confirms it’s protective nature:

In general, the RfC is an estimate (with uncertainty spanning perhaps an order of magnitude) of a daily inhalation exposure of the human population (including sensitive subgroups) that is likely to be without an appreciable risk of deleterious effects during a lifetime. (see Note 1, below)

Recall that I had done some calculations of mercury concentrations in air that could result from the emissions from breaking a CFL bulb indoors. The modeled concentrations rose to 0.48 ug/m3 after a day, and drop below the RfC (i.e. below 0.3 ug/m3) after three days, and remain below it all times after that (see Note 2, below). After three days, the modeled concentrations in air continue to decrease. They won’t go to zero, because that’s the nature of a model with an exponential term in it. However, for the folks who believe they need to have zero exposure to be “safe”, the 5 milligram mass of mercury that’s been released will eventually volatilize completely, and at some point in the future, the mercury concentrations in air will become undetectable (which is a little different than “zero”; sorry about that). Things should remain that way until the next time you break a bulb, which should be fairly infrequently (for myself, I try to not break light bulbs because I don’t like taking the risk of stepping in the broken glass).

So what about those couple of days where exposures are over the RfC? There isn’t a published health effects level covering that situation According to the ATSDR as with EPA, the LOAEL for less serious effects (i.e., the most sensitive effects) in humans were neurobehavioral effects such as tremors and poor performance in neurological testing observed at exposures ranging from 14 to 25 ug/m3 over a period more than half a year to 41 years (sorry it can’t be more precise, but that’s the nature of observational data). There’s lot’s of information about neurological effects in humans with high-level short duration inhalation exposure, but no exposure information. However, the levels in air producing adverse neurological effects in lab animals such as rats or rabbits typically are around 1,000 ug/m3 in air or higher for a period of days or weeks. Taking these things into consideration, along with the underlying philosophy that occasional exposures above the RfC don’t imply adverse effects are going to occur, it doesn’t appear that a few days of slightly elevated exposure to mercury vapor from breaking a CFL bulb would produce the shakes. This isn’t really a reason to not buy CFL bulbs. (For more information about mercury-related health effects, here’s the ATSDR public health statement).

As mentioned before, the RfC includes uncertainty factors to address what we don’t know yet about developmental effects to a fetus. This is prudent – in the ATSDR profile, there is one study with laboratory animals in which pregnant rats were exposed to 50 ug/m3 in air for a few hours a day over seven days, where the offspring exhibited neurological impairment. This is different from the other developmental studies in animals, in which short term exposures of ranging from 500 to 1,800 ug/m3 in air were producing neurobehavioral effects in the offspring, which is a thousand-fold higher than the short-term levels potentially associated with breaking a CFL bulb. As before, it doesn’t seem that a few days with slightly elevated exposures constitutes “appreciable risk of deleterious effects”. Not enough to require hiring a cleanup contractor if a bulb breaks in your house, and not enough to deter a reasonable person from buying CFL bulbs.

Note 1: the RfC isn’t a fixed line – above it you’re risking your health, below it you’re safe. It doesn’t work that way. Levels below it are unlikely to be associated with adverse health effects, and are considered protective and of no concern to regulatory agencies. However, as the magnitude and frequency (both are important) of exposure to levels above the RfC increases, the probability of adverse effects occurring increases. However you can’t say categorically that all levels of exposure below the RfC are safe, and that all levels above the RfC are associated with adverse health effects. Welcome to the real world of toxicology.

Note 2: no, I don’t know why the Ellsworth American and Steven Milloy said that the Maine DEP finding was the mercury level was in excess of six times the "EPA standard" in Ms. Bridges home. As typically occurs with the media reporting environmental stories, they didn’t provide enough information. Maybe the inspector made the measurements at carpet-level, while the EPA’s study (and the model) evaluated general room air. Maybe it’s because the inspector was making a measurement with a real-time instrument, and the level represents a short-term peak concentration, while the EPA’s study (and the model) are calculations of time-weighted average concentrations. I won’t speculate about quality control, instrument calibration or operator experience because that’s pointless, but these are also factors that affect the reliability of the measurements.

More Mercury Factoids: Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs

2007-06-15T17:00:00.000-07:00

Note: part of a series. Other posts on CFLs are here and here.

So I’m online getting some consumer information about compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs, the latest weapon in the war on carbon dioxide, and I happen to run across this tidbit published last month from the Junkman himself, Steven Milloy. Mr. Milloy has used the misfortune of one Maine woman, who broke a mercury-containing CFL bulb in her home and got a raft of really bad advice for what to do about it, as a springboard for bashing all environmentalists about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The news media had taken up the chase on this issue, and from them we find that the facts in this matter were as follows: According to an article in the Ellsworth American, Brandy Bridges dropped one of about two CFL dozen bulbs she was installing in her home, which broke on a shag carpet. Alert to the potential hazards of mercury exposure, Ms. Bridges called Home Depot, where she had bought the bulbs. Home Depot warned her not to vacuum the glass and directed her to a poison control hotline, which in turn referred her to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. The DEP sent a specialist to test the mercury vapor levels in her home.

Here’s where the story starts to become fact-free: In her daughter's room near the broken bulb the mercury level was in excess of six times the EPA standard. This is completely accurate as far as the journalist knows – but at the same time, an utterly useless piece of information for trying to understand if there is a real health risk associated with a release of mercury from a broken CFL. Mr. Milloy gratuitously adds that the “safe” level for mercury is 300 billionth of a gram per cubic meter of air, a framing that tells you he really isn’t that concerned about the mercury exposure, but this was just too good an opportunity to pass up to beat up again on the folks who are concerned about global warming. I guess he doesn’t own any Philips stock.

Back to our story. DEP specialist told Ms. Bridges not to clean up the glass herself, but to call an environmental clean-up firm. The firm gave Ms. Bridges an estimate of $2,000 to clean up the broken bulb. Keep in mind this advice was completely inconsistent with the recommendations that EPA and many other regulatory agencies provide for disposal of broken bulbs. If anyone should be scraping together the money to deal with this, it should be the state of Maine, not Brandy Bridges.

The final irony in this misfortunate episode is that there probably was no real risk to begin with. Think about it for a moment. Mercury is a substance that requires cumulative exposure over a period of months or years to produce its adverse effects. And, a CFL contains around 5 milligrams of mercury, scarcely a pinhead’s-worth. No doubt that it will volatilize into a room, but how much mercury could that produce in the air, and for how long?

Quite a number of investigators have examined the problem of indoor air pollution from elemental mercury resulting from breaking mercury-containing thermometers, ritualistic uses and just playing around with mercury beads. In 2005, EPA published a series of studies examining mercury emissions and indoor concentrations under controlled conditions. I used the empirical model published in that report to estimate the air concentrations potentially associated with emissions of the 5 mg of mercury that would be released from breaking a CFL light bulb in a small bedroom under “average” air exchange conditions. The modeled mercury concentrations slightly exceed the “EPA standard” (the Reference Concentration, or RfC – which is not a standard, but that’s a story for another day) for a couple of days, but then drop below it, and fall well below it within two weeks. I hear the objections now, “but that’s not what the news story said”, but the factoid “six times higher than the EPA standard” is so poorly described and poorly informed, as to not even qualify as a factoid, and scarcely the basis for making environmental health decisions around CFL light bulbs. It’s certainly not persuading me to avoid using them.

Part 2 of this post coming to a blog near you discusses why being exposed for a couple of days to mercury concentrations in air higher than the RfC isn’t a public health problem, certainly not one warranting scaring people off from using CFL light bulbs. In addition, we can further discuss the matter of the choices we make to optimize environmental health and climate protection. But until then, don’t be afraid of CFL light bulbs because of the mercury in them (particularly if you’re getting the news from the Junk Science guy himself; consider the source).

Why It Seems Hard to Get Some Traction

2007-05-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

Beyond the obvious reasons that it requires overwhelming evidence to overcome the influence of vested economic interests, I’ve speculated from time to time why it’s so hard for us to come to grips with large intractable environmental problems (climate change, resource depletion, regional and global impacts to health from some environmental pollutants, lifestyle-related chronic disease burden). Here’s a couple of points I’ve found:

Our perception of the potential impacts (melting glaciers, flooding, disease and starvation, a generation of reproductively and cognitively impaired people, the list could go on. . .) is so awful that it numbs us into complacency.

As a society, we are really good at engaging in wishful thinking. An example is the current craze for The Secret, where optimistic worldview lapses into delusional thinking (note: John Gavois threw the baby out with the bathwater, but there are still some good points made here).

We’ve succumbed to “learned helplessness” by an inability to correctly perceive and assess relative risks. In my line of work, I observe people blithely accept major risks (lung cancer from smoking; Type 2 diabetes from improper diet and lack of exercise; premature death from regional air pollution with particulate matter), while being acutely concerned about fairly smaller risks to their health (for example, from exposure to low levels of certain other environmental pollutants such as benzene, trichloroethylene or dioxins and furans).

This is just a placeholder. The posts are few and far between because there’s no real time to write. The day job is all-consuming right now. I want to come back to this topic later.

Lead, Your Child’s Brain and Our Future

2007-05-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

The generations coming after us are going to need all the brains they can get to manage the crises that we’ve failed to manage. And, low-level lead exposure to young children has been associated with decrements in cognitive performance. It’s not something like global climate change, where we now have less than a decade to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avert the worst effects of the temperature increases. But childhood exposure to neurobehavioral toxicants such as lead is also a situation we should take care of sooner rather than later. Many other toxic effects, chemical carcinogenicity included, fade into insignificance next to the vision of a generation of low intellectual performers in a steadily more complex, challenging and hazardous world.

With that scenario in mind, there’s reason to be concerned about a study published by investigators at Duke University, and currently in press in Environmental Health Perspectives. It examined the relationships between blood-lead surveillance data and educational performance of 4th graders. Children in several counties in North Carolina were tested for blood-lead levels at ages ranging from 0 to 5 years. Later, the test scores from standardized testing administered at the end of 3rd grade for the same group of kids were compared with blood-lead test results. The study results were a bit surprising. The investigators concluded that discernable effects on test scores occurred with as little as 2 ug/dL blood lead (micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood). A blood-lead level of 5 ug/dL was associated with significant declines in test scores. In making sense of these results, keep in mind that the Centers for Disease Control intervention level (the level at which the local health department takes action to reduce lead exposure) is 10 ug/dL.

This is a consistent message with the CDC’s most recent report on childhood lead exposure, which also concludes that, that while some uncertainty still remains, the overall weight of available evidence supports an inverse (negative) association between blood lead levels less than 10 μg/dL and the cognitive function of children. The reason this is an issue is that, while a lot of progress has been made in reducing lead exposures, there are still a lot of children in the U.S. with blood-lead levels between 3 and 5 ug/dL (levels that the Duke investigators identified as levels of concern for educational performance).

Not everyone is convinced about the importance of the lead exposure-childhood cognitive effects relationship, particularly in Europe. A recent paper by experts in the UK concluded that efforts to minimize childhood exposure, while important, need to be seen in perspective. They state that the magnitude of the lead-IQ dose-response relationship is small on a population basis and should be set against the far greater combined effect of socioeconomic status and quality of parental care.

It has been argued that, instead of "chasing after an ever-receding lead threshold," attention and funds should be focused on "the more complex social ills that are associated with continued lead exposure in a small segment of the population" (Gee and McKay 2002). Current lead exposure accounts for a very small amount of variance in cognitive ability (1-4%), whereas covariates such as social and parenting factors account for 40% or more (Weiss 2000).

Whatever. Elevated lead exposures go along with low socioeconomic status and substandard housing, which means these need to be treated and addressed holistically as a social problem, rather than simply as a reduction in lead exposure. Better housing would be a start. How about subsidized day care and living minimum wage, while we’re at it? It’s probably going to be cheaper in the long run than remedial education and jails.

Environmental Health Tools – Addicted to Oil: U.S. Oil Policy Simulation

2007-04-28T16:44:00.000-07:00

A paper published last year by Resources for the Future made the point that our oil vulnerability has less to do with the amount we import than simply with the staggering amounts we consume period. In addition, energy independence, a favorite rallying cry of politicians, is an unachievable myth.

Energy independence has been a rhetorical and political rallying cry for nearly 40 years—President Nixon presided over the massive 1974 Project Independence Report—and it is as flaccid a concept today as it has been over the decades.

There are for sure excellent reasons for reducing dependence on oil, particularly imported from unfriendly or unstable countries. If you are interested in understanding better what’s involved with moving towards reduced dependence on oil, you’ll want to check out this cool tool I heard about from reading the Water Cooler Games web site. This is a simulation game (a sim) that’s available free from Forio Business Simulations. In this sim, you have the goal to reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil within a specified time period.

In this sim, you are the President of the United States. You’ve been elected on a platform of reducing U.S. dependence on oil imports. There are a variety of options available to you to alternately reduce consumption and increase production. These range from opening oil fields in Alaska to mandating improved fuel efficiency of new vehicles. After selecting your policy options, you write a speech to the American people outlining your policies and click the “start” button. The simulation then shows if you were able to achieve your goals.

These are the policy options:

Transportation Initiatives

- Alternative fuels research.
- Encourge production of hybrid vehicles.
- Launch a nationwide promoting carpooling.
- Improve jet engine and airplane technology to reduce airline fuel consumption.
- Convert trucks and trains running diesel to biodiesel or other alternative fuels.

Domestic Supply Initiatives
- Open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil development.

Residential and Commercial Initiatives
- Launch a campaign to encourage Americans to lower their thermostats during the winter.
- Sponsor a nationwide conservation program to reduce residential and commercial uses of petroleum.

Industrial Initiatives
- Sponsor a nationwide program to replace industrial use of petroleum with synthetic alternatives.

Electric Utility Initiatives
- Convert oil-based electrical generation to natural gas, solar and wind technologies, and nuclear power

The goal is to reduce oil imports by 25% of the 2005 level by 2025. Here are some simulation results with various scenarios I tried, along with the percent increase or decrease in oil imports, and the percent of U.S. oil that comes from imports:

1. Do Nothing – 43% increase in imports, 72% of U.S. oil will be imported in 2025. This requires no sacrifices from Americans, but fails to meet the simulation goal.

2. Open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil production starting in 2008 (in three years) – 29% increase in imports, 65% of U.S. oil will be imported in 2025. Again, this requires no sacrifices from Americans, but also fails to meet the simulation goal (ANWR performed better than I had expected – I had thought it was the proverbial “drop in the barrel”).

3. Implement all initiatives to improve transportation energy use except for conservation (carpooling). This represents a relatively modest improvement in energy efficient transportation, though probably not from the political perspective: 1) in 2007 (in two years), start selling new vehicles that run on ethanol, cellulosic ethanol or biodiesel - 25% of all new vehicles sold will run on alternative fuels within three years of the start date (i.e. by 2010); 2) in 2007 (in two years), start selling hybrids that achieve 50 miles per gallon fuel efficiency, to be achieved within three years of the start date (by 2010); 3) starting in 2008 (in three years), reduce jet fuel use by 25%, to be achieved within four years of the start date (2012 – the airlines and aircraft manufacturers have better lobbyists); 4) in 2008 (in three years), reduce diesel consumption in trucks and trains by 25%, to be achieved within three years (2011 – Congress takes pity on the trucking and rail industries). This doesn’t involve much sacrifice on the part of most Americans, except perhaps for some new taxes for incentives and research, and possibly some job dislocations (layoffs or relocations), but reduces oil imports by 21%. There is still 58% of U.S. oil consumption being imported.

3a. As a variant, I tried more aggressive measures to reduce transportation energy use (doubling all of the goals to 50%). This does achieve the goal, reducing oil imports by 42%. However, 51% of U.S. oil consumption is still imported in 2025. Moreover, the simulation does not explore the technical feasibility of, say, reducing jet fuel consumption by 50%, much less the political feasibility. There probably would be some sacrifices required of Americans to achieve this goal because the research, engineering and manufacturing effort required to reshape the transportation sector probably would rival the Manhattan Project.

4. Vice President Cheney said in 2001 "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy". So how about it? The conservation scenario involves: 1) instituting carpooling starting in 2007 (two years out) in order to reduce an individual’s vehicle-miles traveled by 25% with two years; 2) turning down thermostats 5 degrees, starting in 2007 (two years out), and instituting a residential and small business conservation program starting in 2009 (four years out) to reduce petroleum consumption by 25% within three years of the start of the program. Conservation results in reduced oil consumption, but petroleum imports still increased 16%, with 67% of U.S. oil consumption being imported by 2025. When you double the percentages conserved (to 50%), oil consumption is reduced by 6.67 million barrels per day, but overall imports only decrease by 8%, and 62% of oil consumption is imported. [Wingnut note: before you shout heh, indeedy – Vice President Cheney is right, be aware that conservation when combined with technology initiatives is probably the edge we need for energy independence, and what do you have against personal virtue anyway?]. However, this would involve considerable reshaping of our work and leisure lives, so there would be significant sacrifices involved with conservation alternatives.

5. Large manufacturing and utilities scenario: this involves 1) industries finding substitutes for petroleum feedstocks and fuels starting in 2008 (three years out – they have better lobbyists), achieving 25% reduction in petroleum consumption in four years (2012); 2) utilities replacing petroleum-fired electrical plants with natural gas, solar, wind and nuclear starting in 2008 (three years out), within 5 years. The sacrifices involved may include higher prices and utility rates, since this again may involve a Manhattan Project-style effort. And, it isn’t terribly effective by comparison, with oil imports increasing 31% by 2025, and 70 % of our oil consumption coming from imports. This makes some sense – a relatively small fraction of total petroleum use goes to industrial feedstocks, and fuels such as coal and natural gas are already the major generators of electricity.

There is a wide range of scenarios that you can try out, but it becomes clear how much we need to do in terms of reorienting our lifestyles if the goal is to reduce dependence on imported oil. It’s a consistent message with the Hirsch report, which recommends that we get off our asses now and start working on implementing strategies to reduce oil consumption. This game may help some understand better what’s involved.

This is an example of a “serious game” which can be helpful in understanding a complex issue such as the outcomes energy policy choices (Forio provides some additional information here). “Addicted to Oil” is a bit on the dry side, but probably highly useful as a classroom demonstration. However, Forio does sell web simulation tools, so those who are inclined probably could try to jazz it up a bit (check out their web site for other user-created sims). In addition, I’m always interested in “looking under the hood” and checking out the equations and assumptions used in the modeling – but the game does provide references to its data, and presumably a subscription gets you access to the model equations. However, at the end of the day, I agree with Clive Thompson about sims such as “Addicted to Oil” for understanding environmental problems:

This, ultimately, is the brilliance of using game-like simulations to teach people about politics. Because the best way to learn about a complex system is by poking and prodding it. Indeed, that might be the only way to truly internalize something really complex: You have to experience it for yourself. If you'd explained to me, in words, just how hard-core our conservation would have to be to truly reduce oil usage, I probably wouldn't have believed you. But after playing around with the sim for a while I'm kind of stunned into re-appreciating the magnitude of our oil problem.

Don’t Send and Attorney – An Update on Air Toxics Emissions

2007-04-22T06:24:00.000-07:00

I wanted to quickly return to this topic, before I go out on the road again, and before it gets lost amidst more urgent matters (cell phone- and obesity-induced disappearing honeybee terrorism global warming metabolic syndrome, or something like that).

Last month, I took to task the Environmental Integrity Project for presenting an incomplete picture of the risks from emissions of toxic substances to the air from oil refineries. The Project’s report Refined Hazard" discusses the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) reports submitted to EPA specifically from oil refineries. Specifically, the report examines "OSHA carcinogens", which refers to whether or not a chemical will be identified on the Material Safety Data Sheet as a carcinogen. It provides a "top ten" list of refineries in terms of emissions of OSHA carcinogens, and concludes that, while emissions of carcinogens have declined on an industry-wide basis between 1999 and 2004, there have been substantial increases at some facilities over the same time period. Finally, the report raises questions regarding the accuracy of TRI reporting.

The report acknowledges that TRI data do not reveal actual levels of public exposure to those chemicals. However, this understanding appears to be honored more in the breach; for example, statements such as these can be found in the report:

For example, the La Gloria refinery in Tyler, Texas, was the fourth largest emitter of OSHA carcinogens in 2004, but at 55,000 barrels per day, it is ranked 95th in overall production capacity. La Gloria’s 2004 releases of benzene, a known human carcinogen, at 117,890 pounds, far exceeded those from refineries several times its size. Two small Kansas refineries, National Cooperative Refining Association (“NCRA”) and Coffeyville Resources Refining and Marketing, were also notable for their disproportionately high releases of OSHA carcinogens.

Ok, so we can see that emissions controls may not be as tight in smaller facilities compared with larger facilities run by the major oil companies. Not a real surprise. But what's this mean in terms of potential human exposure?

Probably not as much as you would think. Two major well-conducted studies on exposure to airborne contaminants, the TEAM (Total Exposure Assessment Methodology) Study, completed by the EPA in the 1980s, and the Relationships of Indoor, Outdoor, and Personal Air (RIOPA), published in 2005, suggest that outdoor emission sources might not dominate our exposure to emissions to the air from stationary sources such as refineries. Some sound bites from the RIOPA report:

The investigators measured indoor, outdoor and personal exposure concentrations (from air sampling monitors that people wore) in adult residents in each of three cities with different air pollutant sources and weather conditions: Los Angeles, CA, Houston, TX and Elizabeth, NJ. Homes were selected by distance from various sources.

The homes and subjects selected did not proportionally represent the greater population. Rather, homes close to sources were preferentially sampled in order to examine the impact of possibly high exposures.

So, this study was designed to evaluate the potential influences of stationary source emissions on exposure to air toxics. What it concluded was:

With a few exceptions, mean and median personal exposures and indoor concentrations of VOCs and carbonyls were higher than the outdoor concentrations within each city and for the whole data set. Personal PM2.5 concentrations were higher than indoor and outdoor concentrations. The finding that personal exposure concentrations were higher than outdoor concentrations for many compounds indicates that indoor sources contribute to and in some cases dominate, personal exposures; this is consistent with the results from other studies.

This is consistent with the TEAM study results, which concluded that bringing home dry cleaning, using self-serve gas stations and storing gas cans in your garage, using municipal water supplies that were chlorinated, and having “moth balls” in your home were more important sources of inhalation exposure to tetrachloroethylene (perc), benzene, chloroform and para-dichlorobenzene, than industrial sources. I have yet to see these findings reflected in air toxics control strategies (which are focused on reducing stationary source emissions), and to this day, I don’t understand why that is.

Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder and the Decline of Pollinators

2007-04-19T17:27:00.000-07:00

Buried amidst all of the scare stories this week about cell phones causing Colony Collapse Disorder in honeybees is a more important point: populations of pollinators have been in decline for years. The importance of pollinators to humans should be obvious. If it isn’t, let me restate the pull quote from the recent National Academy of Sciences report:

About three-quarters of the world’s flowering plant species rely on pollinators—insects, birds, bats, and other animals—to carry pollen from the male to the female parts of flowers for reproduction. There is direct evidence for decline of some pollinator species in North America. For many species, there has not been enough monitoring over time to determine whether or not there has been a population decline.

Honeybees are essential in the production of numerous food crops, especially the more nutritious fruits and vegetables, they’ve been slowly disappearing for years, and we have not been investing enough resources to better understand their biology. This is a collection of facts that doesn’t speak highly to our intelligence as a species. Dr. May Berenbaum of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is one of the authors of the NAS report, and also gave testimony to Congress last month on CCD. Dr. Berenbaum’s testimony frames the issue nicely:

Honey bees are in effect six-legged livestock that both manufacture agricultural commodities – honey and wax – and, more importantly, contribute agricultural services – pollination. Close to 100 crop species in the U.S. rely to some degree on pollination services provided by this one species – collectively, these crops make up approximately 1/3 of the U.S. diet, including the majority of high-value crops that contribute to healthy diets. Although economists differ in calculating the exact dollar value of honey bee pollination to American agriculture, virtually all estimates are in the range of billions of dollars. It is difficult in fact to think of any other multi-billion-dollar agricultural enterprise that is so casually monitored.

Dr. Berenbaum points out that grain crops, the primary supply of dietary energy, do not rely on pollinators. So, at least we’re not going to go hungry in terms of calories. However, declines in pollinators will affect the availability of fruits, nuts and vegetables which provide the bulk of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. This is the environmental health angle to CCD.

Just weeks before Dr. Berenbaum’s testimony, the Centers for Disease Control published a survey of fruit and vegetable consumption among adults, conducted as part of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). A diet high in fruits and vegetables is associated with decreased risk for chronic diseases. In addition, lots of fruits and vegetables in the diet are important for maintaining a healthy weight, because the have low energy density (i.e., few calories relative to volume). In simple terms, the survey concluded that Americans do not eat enough fruits and vegetables, a fact that perversely does not come to the surface in all of the hand-wringing about health insurance. With this in mind, we don’t really need another excuse such as higher prices to avoid eating more fruits and vegetables.

The discussions of pollinators and CCD come at a time when the Farm Bill is up for renewal in Congress. Dr. Berenbaum chronicled the dismal state of agricultural research: where the National Research Initiative, the USDA’s tool for basic biological research, is funded for a paltry $180 million, for all grants; where there is no ongoing systematic surveillance program to monitor pollinator health, an astonishing state of affairs given their importance to agriculture; where members of the Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group have been donating time and resources to study this increasingly urgent problem – the season in which crops need to be pollinated is fast approaching, and there still aren’t any good answers yet about causes or prevention of CCD.

It’s hard to know if, with the din of other matters both important and trivial, this is going to receive the attention it deserves. It’s too early to tell, but we should watch the news of CCD closely because it might provide an example of just what an ecological disaster looks like.

So Perhaps Now We’ll Take Global Climate Change Seriously?

2007-04-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

It has always easy for our current Administration to ignore global climate change as long as it remained an environmental problem. When the realization began to grow that it was becoming an economic problem and a business driver, the Bushies needed to at least acknowledge it, because major corporations were getting more involved. Not that acknowledgement meant they had to address it, because climate change still wasn’t the hot button national security was.

Apparently that’s beginning to change. Tomorrow, the CNA Corporation will release a report written by several retired military officials concluding that global climate change presents a serious national security threat that could affect Americans at home, impact U.S. military operations and heighten global tensions.

No kidding.

Nearly ten years ago, Thomas Homer-Dixon began studying the relationships between environmental stress in poor countries, particularly scarcities of cropland, forests, and fresh water, and outbreaks of violent conflict, such as insurgency and ethnic strife. Those studies can be accessed at the Project on Environment, Population, and Security and at the Project on Environmental Scarcities, State Capacity, and Civil Violence. In 2003, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall wrote a paper for the Pentagon discussing the national security implications of “abrupt” climate change which could potentially destabilize the geopolitical environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even wars due to resource constraints including food shortages brought about by decreases in net global agricultural production, decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions through changing precipitation patterns, causing more frequent floods and droughts, and disruptions in transportation of energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess (the report can be downloaded from Grist). Environmental causes such as drought and desertification may be contributing factors to the war in Darfur.

So the only real news here is that important people in government have been able to resolutely ignore years of warning signs.

The CNA report explores ways projected climate change is a “threat multiplier” in already fragile regions of the world, exacerbating conditions that lead to failed states which are the breeding grounds for extremism and terrorism.

As part of its five specific recommendations for action, the Military Advisory Board stated that “the path to mitigating the worst security consequences of climate change involves reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.” According to retired General Gordon R. Sullivan, former Army Chief of Staff, “There is a relationship between carbon emissions and our national security”.

Others put it a little more starkly:

“We will pay for this one way or another,” stated retired Marine Corps General Anthony C. Zinni, former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East. “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we'll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or, we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.”

The report identifies the potential impacts from environmental threats, including massive migrations, increased border tensions, increased need for humanitarian relief operations, and conflicts over important resources, including food and water. It discusses the military and national security implications on a region-by-region basis.

The report includes several formal findings:

- Projected climate change poses a serious threat to America's national security.
- Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world.
- Projected climate change will add to tensions even in stable regions of the world.
- Climate change, national security and energy dependence are a related set of global challenges.

The report also made several specific recommendations:

- The national security consequences of climate change should be fully integrated into national security and national defense strategies.
- The U.S. should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.
- The U.S. should commit to global partnerships that help less developed nations build the capacity and resiliency to better manage climate impacts.
- The Department of Defense should enhance its operational capability by accelerating the adoption of improved business processes and innovative technologies that result in improved U.S. combat power through energy efficiency.
- DoD should conduct an assessment of the impact on US military installations worldwide of rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and other possible climate change impacts over the next thirty to forty years.

These come from the Military Advisory Board that is composed of eleven of the nation's most senior former officers and national security experts. It’s going to be interesting now to watch the Bush Administration beat the drums for the Global War on Terror and not talk about mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

Pediatric Environmental Health Tools from the Physicians for Social Responsibility

2007-04-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

The Physicians for Social Responsibility have a nice page of environmental health information on their web site. First among these is a Pediatric Environmental Health Tool Kit that combines a reference guide and "anticipatory guide" for health providers with educational materials for parents on preventing chemical exposures that can affect infant and child health. According to PSR’s web site, the tool kit is endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The Reference Guide, a four page table of information on several chemical substances of concern for pediatric health, provides reasonable introductions to each substance. However, as with any document that provides an extremely tight summary of hazard information, some useful information is left out, such as what levels of exposure in the body or environment are of concern. It’s an inevitable result of the process of producing a readable summary, and it may be useful to also point health providers to the next layer of detail about specific chemicals, such as the resources provided by ATSDR, including ToxFAQs and the toxicological profiles.

The Anticipatory Guidance Pocket Card is a handy item that:

. . . fits in a large pocket for handy use during a well child visit. The topics on the pocket card are both developmentally appropriate and take advantage of “teachable moments.” For example, at a newborn visit, the provider will naturally discuss infant feeding. Exchanging mercury thermometers for safer digital ones is another easy step that a provider can mention at an early visit. These flexible guidance points provide clinicians with an age appropriate menu of choices to discuss during routine visits.

The advice on it is linked to various development stages. For example, advice during prenatal development includes “avoid eating fish high in mercury or PCBs/dioxins”. Advice for parents with newborns includes “encourage breastfeeding” and “avoid polycarbonate bottles which may leach plasticizers”. There are also safety tips covering carbon monoxide detectors and smoke detectors, encouragement to avoid pesticide use, as well as mention of indoor air pollutants including radon and molds, lead exposure, childhood poisoning prevention, prevention of overexposure to sunlight, healthy eating, TV watching, physical activity, noise exposure, and tobacco use and substance abuse. It’s more of a checklist, without any details on what to do regarding each of these hazards, and presumably the pediatrician provides the specifics during wellness visits. About the only omissions I observed were that it doesn’t mention brominated fire retardants and allergens that could provoke childhood asthma; I call these out because previous studies suggest that carpet dust can be a reservoir for both BFRs and allergens, which should trigger a reminder regarding vacuuming carpets.

However, the 4 page paper “Key Concepts in Pediatric Environmental Health” does include mention of BFRs and asthma. This paper also highlights childrens’ vulnerabilities to toxic substances based on their higher rates of exposure and lesser-developed metabolic defense mechanisms. It mentions the influences of food choices and the built environment on health, setting the stage for preventing childhood obesity. It also focuses on preventing exposure pathways in the built environment, mentioning dust as an exposure medium for pollutants (PCBs, BFRs and lead) and allergens. Other topics addressed in this paper include body burden and breast feeding, “acceptable risk” (or as the paper states it, the declining threshold of harm) and higher risk communities, with low-income or minority populations who experience higher levels of exposure to air pollutants or other hazardous substances.

The most important feature for me is the statement in the paper that “[p]hysicians can protect their pediatric patients by taking environmental/occupational histories of parents and caregivers, and offering appropriate recommendations”. Again, I feel that physicians can be provided with more information regarding the appropriate recommendations, but overall this paper as advertised discusses the “key concepts”.

For the parents, there is a fact sheet “Rx for Prevention”, which goes through the hazards and prevention steps at different developmental stages, and refrigerator magnets and posters with prevention messages. PSR also sponsors training events around the country for health providers.

On a little more political note, PSR also provides a “Prescription for a Secure and Healthy World”, focusing on issues of ending dependence on foreign oil, global climate change and proliferation of nuclear weapons. It contains an online petition that PSR will send to members of Congress, and a resource guide. Another feature of the “prescription” is the “Comprehensive Briefing Book on Key Environmental Health Issues”, addressed to the members of Congress, but a good source of talking points for anyone on fifteen key environmental health issues.

Update on Environmental Health Perspectives

2007-04-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve posted a story over on Daily Kos about the efforts of the NIEHS director to neuter the effectiveness of Environmental Health Perspectives (over in the blogroll), the premier scientific journal on all matters related to the health effects from toxic substances in the environment, global climate change and other matters related to environmental health.

The best sound-bite about this matter is the news that the NIEHS director David Schwartz wanted to outsource publication of EHP because its budget could be better spent on other things — especially research. According to the Society of Environmental Journalists, the plan is to cut EHP's annual budget from over $3 million in 2005 down to about $500,000. That is about half of what Director Schwartz spent remodeling his office after he arrived at NIEHS — an office that had just been remodeled.

Hat tip to Effect Measure and SEJ for being on top of this story.

Memo to Ezra Klein: How Not to Cite a Health Study

2007-04-13T04:34:00.000-07:00

Question for Ezra Klein. Why are you getting your health data from the Cato Institute? It was headache-making for me to read the progression from a rather limited study. . .

Rational decision-makers will take into account forecasts of longevity and quality of life in making their work and savings decisions. Public policy must account for this as well. Every additional year of life after age 65 is associated with about $15,000 of social security and medical care spending, and years spent disabled result in substantially greater medical spending than years spent without disability. . . .

. . . to one sweeping generalization . . .

Americans are getting healthier in spite of a little extra flab.

. . . to another. . .

Americans are actually becoming substantially healthier, even as our waistlines expand.

Let’s first review the quantitative results from the Cutler, Glaeser and Rosen study, and then look at where the authors might have overstated their conclusions a bit based on those findings. First, the results (from the summary):

For the population aged 25-74, the 10 year probability of death fell from 9.8 percent in 1971-75 to 8.4 percent in 1999-2002. Among the population aged 55-74, the 10 year risk of death fell from 25.7 percent to 21.7 percent. The largest contributors to these changes were the reduction in smoking and better control of blood pressure.

So, there’s a reduction in overall mortality, and it might be related to people smoking less and better blood pressure medication (I’m fairly sure people aren’t controlling their blood pressure better using exercise and diet. . . ). However, the authors don’t make clear how this translates to:

Examining these factors as a whole, we show significant improvements in the health risk profile of the U.S. population between the early 1970s and the early 2000s. Reduced smoking, better control of medical risk factors such as hypertension and cholesterol, and better education among the older population have been more important for mortality than the substantial increase in obesity.

Reduction in mortality doesn’t translate directly to “significant improvement in the health risk profile”. For example, the authors didn’t go into why they feel we’re getting healthier if the overall prevalence of diabetes is increasing over time, and if we’re spending more to treat it. I have to wonder if Ezra and the Cato Institute are implying that we’re getting healthier because we spend more money to keep at bay a lifestyle-related chronic degenerative disease. Shades of Mad Hatter economics. . . .

While the underlying purpose for the study isn’t mentioned in the paper, it is interesting to note that it was funded by the Social Security Administration. I have to wonder if it’s intended to figure out how much of an impact there’s going to be to the Fund from the reduced mortality. For example, the Centers for Disease Control have reported:

At least 80% of seniors have at least one chronic condition, and 50% have at least two. These conditions can cause years of pain, disability, and loss of function. About 12 million seniors living at home report that chronic conditions limit their activities. Three million older adults say they cannot perform basic activities of daily living, such as bathing, shopping, dressing, or eating. Their quality of life suffers as a result, and demands on family and caregivers can be challenging.

And, the introduction of the Cutler, Glaeser and Rosen study does state:

Every additional year of life after age 65 is associated with about $15,000 of social security and medical care spending, and years spent disabled result in substantially greater medical spending than years spent without disability.

So, is the Cutler, Glaeser and Rosen study is one piece of information about the impact of increased longevity on social security and medical spending? The study doesn’t really say that, but it’s not an unreasonable inference. But it is a broad overstatement to say the Cutler, Glaeser and Rosen paper is evidence that we’re getting healthier even as we get fatter.

It’s no surprise to me that the Cato Institute would go there. However, I am surprised that Ezra Klein would fall for it.

We’re Right, Who Cares if We’re Boring?

2007-04-09T18:56:00.000-07:00

PZ Myers issues a bit of a screed about scientists framing messages, and why scientists are perceived at being bad at “communicating”. His conclusion is that scientists shouldn’t need to speak so slowly and use such small words in order to frame their topics properly, and that the media and public need to claw their way to the deeper understanding of nature that scientists have.

He implores, “[j]ust don't ask us to do all of a huge subject like evolution in a couple of snazzy sentences. . . .” I would ask, why not? You could start the elevator message with the importance of understanding evolution is, as citizens, to be able to participate in the public debate about a range of issues, including endangered species, global climate impacts, genetically modified foods, pesticides in agriculture. You can’t be a good citizen if you don’t understand evolution. (Here’s some supplemental reading on “elevator messages”, for those who are interested).

How about that for starters? After you get that across, then you can start telling stories about natural history, with themes related to evolution. I’ve always liked how Stephen J. Gould makes natural history and by extension, evolutionary biology, come alive. More scientists could stand to learn to interact with the public in the same way he did.

PZ even has the start of an elevator message:

In the battleground I play in, the evolution/creation wars, I know that the majority of the public are victims. We share common values: they are promoting their particular beliefs not because they are stupid or evil, but because they care about living in a good society, because they want their children to grow up economically successful and personally happy, and they are convinced that evolution threatens their personal bliss. (They're wrong, of course, because they've been lied to, but they don't know that.) One effective tactic for our side is to hammer on those shared values, and point out that good science is essential for economic competitiveness, for medical progress, and to improve everything from agriculture to reproductive biology.

A practical suggestion I would have in crafting this message is that people may not be inclined to listen if they feel that their intelligence is being insulted. This observation is based on my experience with risk communication and public involvement associated with hazardous waste site cleanups – the fact that we experts knew more than the community members about the technical topics actually matters very little in the process of engaging them as stakeholders and trying to get their acceptance of a particular cleanup option.

In the original Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney paper that Myers is commenting on, it says:

On these highly politicized topics, scientists need to stop thinking that technical knowledge, alone, suffices to drive decision-making or change minds. That's simply not how the media works, or how the public perceives and processes information. The article (which I'll post as soon as available) ends with this coda:

Some readers may consider our proposals too Orwellian, preferring the traditional model of safely sticking to the facts. Yet scientists must realize that these facts will be repeatedly misapplied and twisted in direct proportion to their relevance to the political debate and decision-making. In short, as unnatural as it might feel, in many cases, scientists should strategically avoid emphasizing the technical details of science when trying to defend it.

This is an astonishing admission to make nearly 50 years after “The Two Cultures”. Flawed as it might have been, Snow’s essay still should have been a wakeup call for those scientists interested in the social relevance of their work to find tools for communicating to tough audiences.

PZ also takes the media to task for why scientists are perceived as poor communicators:

Now we may suck at giving the attention-grabbing 15-second sound bite, but that's not what we do. We are experts at explaining complex subjects which do not fit into the format expected of television news, but hasn't everyone noticed that television news is utterly useless at transmitting substantive information? Instead of complaining that our culture's class of experts at technical subjects aren't sufficiently pithy for a dumbed-down, low-bandwidth, superficial medium, why aren't we fastening the blame on the media for inappropriately using our experts' talents?

Ok, at this point, it’s useful to recall the phrase, “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel” (supposedly from Mark Twain), or its 21st century equivalent, “never pick a fight with someone who buys bandwidth by the gigabit”. If getting your message out is important, you have to know more about what you’re up against.

The news media are in the business to make money, and must deliver a product that their customers desire. The customers of the media are advertisers, and the product being delivere are readers or viewers. If narrative, violence and conflict are what bring the eyeballs to the advertisers, that's what the media outlets are going to provide. The news media are biased towards what's "new" and "fresh", something not oriented to extended analysis of a topic. Visual depictions get more attention than text. Bad news is more compelling than good news. So, for example, melting ice floes don't do much to highlight the story of global climate change. However, add a couple of drowning polar bears to the picture, and people start to take more notice.

For me, the most important thing to understand about the news media is the need for narrative:

The news media cover the news in terms of "stories" that must have a beginning, middle, and end--in other words, a plot with antagonists and protagonists. Much of what happens in our world, however, is ambiguous. The news media apply a narrative structure to ambiguous events suggesting that these events are easily understood and have clear cause-and-effect relationships. Good storytelling requires drama, and so this bias often leads journalists to add, or seek out, drama for the sake of drama. Controversy creates drama. Journalists often seek out the opinions of competing experts or officials in order to present conflict between two sides of an issue (sometimes referred to as the authority-disorder bias). Lastly, narrative bias leads many journalists to create, and then hang on to, master narratives--set story lines with set characters who act in set ways. Once a master narrative has been set, it is very difficult to get journalists to see that their narrative is simply one way, and not necessarily the correct or best way, of viewing people and events.

It is this hardening of news into master narratives, combined with the media's tendency to reinforce the status quo and to appeal to fairness (i.e. presenting both "sides" of an issue, regardless of how wrong one side might be) that thwart the introduction of scientific thought into public discourse. If the master narrative is that there is disagreement among experts about the fact of global climate change, that's going to resonate more than the fact that those who disagree are marginal scientists or being paid to disagree. If the master narrative is that there is a plausible model in addition to evolution and natural selection to explain biodiversity, that combined with the appeal to "fairness" will compel people to give intelligent design a chance, regardless of how scientifically wrong-headed it is.

Overcoming these master narratives, not complaining about them, is the task faced by scientists who want their ideas heard in by the public. So, I'm lining up with Nisbet and Mooney on this one.

Light Posting

2007-04-07T03:08:00.000-07:00

I've been traveling all week, and will be traveling extensively in April. so posting is going to be light. So I'll get started again next week. It's interesting to note that another group is drawing attention to industrial emissions from the TRI inventory and just asserting a linkage with health risks. I'm still working on a response to this, but I made some progress this week - I found copies of EPA's TEAM report - published 20 years ago and still the definitive statement about exposure to air toxics. They can't be found except from NTIS, but I downloaded these from EPA's online library, the National Service Center for Environmental Publications (NSCEP). Having surfed around it, I think it could take some of the sting out of EPA libraries being closed.

The NAS and PCE

2007-04-01T04:19:00.000-07:00

I missed this before. The National Academy of Sciences has been asked by the EPA to conduct a scientific review of the EPA’s external review draft "Toxicological Review of Tetrachloroethylene (Perchloroethylene) CAS No. 127-18-4 in Support of Information on the Integrated Risk Information System". I suppose this is a bit of a timesaver that reflects lessons-learned from the review of TCE. If you recall, the EPA released a draft risk assessment for TCE in 2001 which was shelled by stakeholders including the DOD, solvents and aerospace industries, prompting a year-and-a-half NAS review which was completed in July 2006. By the way, what’s happening with TCE these days? The NAS report on it came out seven months ago. Haven’t heard a peep from EPA about revising the risk assessment. . . .

EPA is getting out ahead of matters this time –the toxicological review document isn’t even out in draft yet (EPA’s web site for PCE is here). It was requested by the Office of Air and Radiation, for purposes of evaluating PCE as a hazardous air pollutant. I suppose that makes sense, to have verified toxicity values for conducting residual risk assessments that assess the effectiveness of control technologies for dry cleaner emissions, implemented under the Clean Air Act.

At the same time, it’s worth raising the question of whether or not spending the better part of two years updating the risk assessment for PCE is necessary to help us manage the risks associated with its use in dry cleaning. Maybe California’s model is the way to go for addressing health risks from PCE.

Someone Who Enjoys Their Work

2007-03-27T02:59:00.000-07:00

I ran across this interesting profile of Thomas Cahill at University of California, Davis in Esquire magazine (in 1979, I graduated from the Environmental Toxicology program offered by UCD). Dr. Cahill leads the DELTA (Detection and Evaluation of the Long Range Transport of Aerosols) Group and led a key study of air quality at Ground Zero following the World Trade Center disaster. He was later quoted as saying,

"[t]he debris pile acted like a chemical factory. It cooked together the components of the buildings and their contents, including enormous numbers of computers, and gave off gases of toxic metals, acids and organics for at least six weeks,"

and had expressed the conclusion that the conditions would have been "brutal" for people working at Ground Zero without respirators and slightly less so for those working or living in immediately adjacent buildings, which was dramatically at odds with EPA’s finding at the time that the air was safe to breathe just days after the disaster. There was actually no evidence to support such a claim at the time (the White House had put EPA up to it to get Wall Street back up and running, according to EPA’s Office of Inspector General).

The story in Esquire was about a messenger bag owned by Eric Gillan, who was in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. He ran for his life as the first tower fell, then

[a] block into my escape, I made the same decision that got Lot's wife into trouble: I looked back. A twenty-story debris cloud loomed behind me like something Godzilla would fight, and before I could blink or close my gaping mouth, the cloud hit me like a swarm of gravel bees. I was in it and it was in me.

In a few seconds, the sky soured from a pristine blue to yellow to brown to a profound black. Day turned to night. The sky vanished. I stood there in the darkness, my eyes on fire as grit and sand worked its way under my eyelids and into my nostrils, where I got my first whiff of September 11--eau de construction site, with hints of sweet burning plastic and notes of Jiffy Lube. I was being buried alive, right there in the middle of Liberty Street. For five minutes, I gasped for air, but my lungs would not fully inflate, because this was not air. I would've had better luck taking a handful of dirt and inhaling that.

Eric’s messenger bag essentially collected a grab sample of WTC aerosol moments after the disaster. Dr. Cahill:

"This is so exciting," he says to me, actually rubbing his hands together. "We have no other samples from September 11 except your backpack. It will give us a snapshot of what people were actually breathing, which will help the doctors enormously in knowing what to treat." He told me this over the phone, before I arrived from New York to witness the opening. Now, even with me standing there, one of the people who breathed in whatever he's about to discover, he repeats it. Exuberantly. "I'm sorry for you," he says, and he means it. "But I'm also delighted!"

The story was intriguing for me by showing the point of view of a non-scientist watching a scientist at work.

Oh, the dust in his messenger bag? Dry wall gypsum and concrete. Dr. Cahill assures him that the long term respiratory health risks were probably relatively low. So, it probably wasn’t as enlightening as all that.

When Cahill's done, I have a weird thought: Good news! About September 11! Not a lot of people can say that. I hang up the phone and decide to go for a little run around the outside of the building. It's approximately 20 degrees outside, but I'm too excited to sit behind a desk and get on with my life just then. The bogeyman is out of my closet. I'm not one of those people who is going to get sick from September 11 after all. Not yet, anyway. Sure, there are some things we don't know and may never know. Like the kids who grew up at Love Canal or under high-tension power lines, I might wake up in a few years with some unexplainable sickness, some crippling respiratory illness. What are you gonna do? For now, all I want is to feel the air rush in and out of my lungs.

As we know now, the story is different for a lot of people. According to a recently published report of the medical surveillance, approximately 40,000 rescue and recovery workers were exposed to dust and toxic pollutants following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the WTC. These workers included first responders, construction, utility, and public sector workers. Many of these workers, who were at Ground Zero for days, weeks or months without respiratory protection, have experienced long term respiratory symptoms (known as “World Trade Center cough”) and pulmonary function test abnormalities that persisted years after the attacks.

Phthalates and Obesity

2007-03-23T18:26:00.000-07:00

Awhile back, the news cycle was all atwitter about this paper published in the International Journal of Obesity. I had posted about it over on Daily Kos last year, to a lukewarm response (political blogs aren’t really in to environmental health, I guess).

The investigators begin by observing that the relationship between obesity and The Big Two, their term for inactivity and inbalanced diet is based on presumed mechanisms and "ecological studies". An ecological study is a type of epidemiological study that examines broad trends in environmental factors and disease; it is not designed to examine specific relationships between exposure and disease, and is considered more useful for generating rather than testing scientific hypotheses. Food industry apologists use this fact to cast doubt on the relationship between diet, exercise and obesity. The investigators argue this doesn't disprove that relationship, but points to the need to look for other factors to help explain the obesity epidemic.

One of the arguments they explored is the relationship between exposure to endocrine disruptors and increased adiposity. The relationship between endocrine disruptor exposure and obesity is an active area of environmental health research. Last year, I posted about a paper exploring the relationship between exposure to the plasticizer bisphenol-A and insulin resistance in mice, occurring at fairly low levels. More recently, a paper has been published describing the relationship between phthalate exposure, girth in males and insulin resistance.

A bit about insulin resistance. Insulin is a hormone that is released from the pancreas after eating. It signals insulin-sensitive tissues, principally muscle, to absorb glucose, which correspondingly reduces blood glucose levels. In an insulin-resistant individual, the normal levels of insulin secreted do not signal cells to absorb glucose. Years of hyperglycemia, from excess carbohydrates in the diet, are thought to disrupt the release of insulin, resulting in glucose intolerance and subsequently Type-2 diabetes. The mechanism for this phenomenon is not entirely clear, and it has not been fully resolved If this loss of pancreatic function results primarily from excessive secretion of insulin (exhaustion of beta-cells in the pancreas) or toxicity to beta-cells (hyperglycemia or other causes). More recent research seems to point to the latter.

Insulin resistance is part of the metabolic syndrome that includes central obesity, elevated insulin secretion, and elevated fatty acids in the bloodstream. Central (visceral) obesity elevates levels of free fatty acids in serum, which might provoke insulin resistance and disrupt lipid metabolism. Testosterone can reduce body fat and increase insulin sensitivity in men, which is where phthalates come in to the picture. Phthalates have been shown to be antiandrogenic agents in male laboratory animals, disrupting testicular steroid hormone synthesis and reproductive function. Some observations suggest that anti-androgenic effects also occur in humans. These investigators were evaluating the hypothesis that increased phthalate exposure would be associated with increased abdominal obesity and insulin resistance, which correspondingly could be precursors to Type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The short answer from the study was that concentrations of several prevalent phthalate metabolites showed statistically significant correlations with abdominal obesity and insulin resistance. The authors caution that phthalate exposure only explains some of the variability in measurements of girth and insulin resistance, which they chalk up to obesity being a complex, multi-factorial syndrome (critics may conclude this means there’s no meaningful relationship between phthalate exposure and obesity. . . ). The authors also caution this is a snapshot in time (i.e. a cross-sectional study), and that longitudinal studies (which follow trends over time) are needed to better understand the possible relationship between phthalates and insulin resistance. Other factors to consider in judging the significance of phthalate exposure in metabolic diseases such as diabetes include cumulative exposures to multiple phthalates and exposures to other common contaminants including bisphenol-A, PCBs, dioxins and organochlorine pesticides.

The Washington Post has a reasonably carefully worded article about this issue. Sadly, most other newspapers are mangling what is actually a fairly carefully worded study.

Phthalate exposure isn’t going away any time soon (that’s a story for another day), so what do you do about this? Well, we still have control over the Big Two – diet and activity level.

California Phases out Perc for Dry Cleaning

2007-03-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

As long time Impact Analysis readers (all five of you) know, I was on a tear for awhile about perchloroethylene used in dry cleaning (see here, here and here). Perc is the backbone of the dry cleaning industry, which is filled with low-income small businesses. Yet at the same time, dry cleaning is a pathway for exposing millions of Americans to low levels of perchloroethylene. Perc is probably carcinogenic in humans, but at the same time, an apparently relatively low potency carcinogen. However, even a low-potency carcinogen that most everyone is exposed to represents an environmental health matter warranting further scrutiny.

The California Air Resources Board has cut through all of the handwringing, and has amended the Dry Cleaning Air Toxics Control Measure to phase out perchloroethylene use by 2023. The phase-out would happen gradually, replacing the older, less efficient machines first. A training program also will be implemented to have trained operators of dry cleaning machines in all shops in the interim.

According to the ARB’s Initial Statement of Rulemaking, the individual risks from perchloroethylene exposure from dry cleaning emissions was not large – the highest estimated lifetime cancer risk was 75 in a million, for someone located 20 meters downwind from a shop with an older, less efficient dry cleaning machine which emitted higher levels of perc (keep in mind that someone generally doesn’t spend their lifetime at this one location). This risk estimate doesn’t include the doses that dry cleaning customers receive through offgassing from bringing home freshly dry cleaned clothes, a source of exposure that’s potentially more significant.

There’s the usual whining about businesses – in this case, small businesses – being hit harder by a perc ban. However, dry cleaners historically have made the shift from flammable petroleum hydrocarbons, to hepatotoxic carbon tetrachloride to perchloroethylene. In addition, the state appears to be making an effort to assist the industry in converting over to other cleaning agents. Some make the argument that the health risks from perchloroethylene are slight and do not warrant a ban on its use. That’s a point that will continue to be debated, but state, federal and international authorities appear satisfied that perchloroethylene is a probable human carcinogen, and there’s evidence that exposure to it is widespread. Eliminating it from dry cleaning can reduce that exposure. There is a more important issue, though. Perchloroethylene (PCE) in dry cleaning is a poster child for the cause of finding alternatives to toxic chemicals in commerce, in today’s market-driven environment. As a society, if we can’t summon the collective will to solve the problem of implementing lower-risk fabric care products in place of PCE, we’re going to have real problems dealing with other widespread substances with health concerns, such as phthalates or bisphenol-A.

So, let’s hear it for the state of California. Once again, it’s an example of a state blazing a trail where the Federal government (particularly under younger Bush) fears to go.

Don’t Send an Attorney. . .

2007-03-18T17:43:00.000-07:00

. . . to do a scientist’s job. I have no doubt that the staff of the Environmental Integrity Project are fine environmental attorneys. Just a reminder though: emissions do not correspond to exposure or risk. More on this later, because now I have to go through their refinery carcinogens report and line it up with the National Air Toxics Assessment and the Urban Air Toxics Monitoring Program. Be back soon.

New York State’s Going to Get Healthy

2007-03-17T06:20:00.000-07:00

This week, New York state Governor Eliot Spitzer today announced the initiation of a program make New York the healthiest state in the nation. This is going to be accomplished through a comprehensive disease prevention program.

“For years, the health care debate has focused almost exclusively on institutions that deal with various health problems, such as HMOs, hospitals and nursing homes,” Governor Spitzer said. “By shifting focus to the prevention of disease, we can significantly improve public health and help bring exploding health care costs under control.”

AAAUUGH, I can’t see – I was just hit by something blindingly obvious.

As the writer of an environmental health blog, it is very gratifying to hear the announcement of a state sponsoring a disease prevention program. I wish them luck. It’s something that probably needs to be done. Healthcare reportedly is 16 percent of the economic output of the country, A good chunk of that expense is avoidable suggesting that most people apparently can’t or won’t manage disease prevention on their own. All the Presidential candidates are vaporing about the broken healthcare system – principally from the perspective of how to fix health insurance, though disease prevention and quality of life just don’t seem to enter into the political discussion.

I hope the state of New York can make disease prevention interesting and compelling. There’s something so liberal, earnest and dull about public health. Water treatment and smoking cessation isn’t nearly as entertaining as catching criminals or blowing up terrorists. I wonder if part of the appeal of neocon philosophy has been that sowing war and chaos are more fun than behaving responsibly and spreading civilization, especially if you’ not the one fighting in the war, and you’re on the winning side. Candidates for political office also try to appear tough on crime or strong on national defense, not public health. Telling voters that you’re going to be tough on Type 2 diabetes just makes you look weird.

New York State’s agenda is ambitious, and appears to hit all of the high points:

- New public health campaigns targeting cancer, diabetes, obesity, asthma, stroke and heart disease and depression;

- A new program requiring Body Mass Index reporting in schools;

- New legislation requiring healthier school lunches;

- New anti-smoking initiatives, including aggressively promoting tobacco cessation treatment to all Medicaid, Child Health Plus and Family Health Plus enrollees;

- Expanded access to cervical cancer vaccine;

- Enhanced programs to combat HIV/AIDS in minority communities;

- A directive that all state agencies make the elimination of trans-fat a condition of future food service contracts;

- A new program to improve the quality of provider skills in mammography interpretation, colorectal screening and infection control;

- Implementation of a prenatal/postpartum home visitation program for high-risk communities;

- Expanded use of incentives to encourage physical fitness by state employees;

- Expanded childhood lead poisoning prevention efforts;

- Creation of a new Pollution Prevention Institute in the Department of Environmental Conservation to assist businesses in reducing the use of toxic chemicals;

- A new “Green Cleaning” initiative that will help reduce exposure to harmful chemicals in state facilities, schools and worksites; and

- Administrative directives encouraging the use of non-toxic pest control at state facilities, schools and other institutions.

In addition to these disease prevention and environmental measures, the agenda also includes a concerted effort to address infection control in hospitals and nursing homes and other institutions. This effort includes stockpiling of anti-viral medications and public health emergency preparedness exercises across the state.

Funding for the initiatives is reportedly more than $200 million. The governor’s 2007-2008 budget proposal also includes expansion of a program to provide affordable health insurance coverage to the uninsured in the state.

Expect the usual conservative wingnut blogger allusions to food fascism and anti-smoking Nazism. Some of the wingnuttery have even directly compared health promotion advocates to the Nazis.

An agenda is one thing – implementation is another. There will need to be some out-of-the-box thinking to keep this from turning into another juiceless, marginally effective government program. One possibility might be to give it a social marketing spin. There’s more on social marketing as a tool for health communications here and here. I’ve written before about a program sponsored by New York City that appeared to be working for helping diabetics manage their diet, exercise and meds, that is, before the clinics went out of business. More money to be made in amputations than nutritional counseling. . . . Anyway, the story in the New York Times chronicled a client of the program, who was slipping back into her high-risk habits, without the support system provided by the clinic. Perhaps these clinics were providing a social network beyond the medical supervision. Maybe there will be a few dollars to start them back up again, Governor Spitzer?