ApocaDocuments (12) for the "Biology Breach" scenario from this week
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Sun, Sep 20, 2009
from New York Times:
Belatedly, Egypt Spots Flaws in Wiping Out Pigs
CAIRO — It is unlikely anyone has ever come to this city and commented on how clean the streets are. But this litter-strewn metropolis is now wrestling with a garbage problem so severe it has managed to incite its weary residents and command the attention of the president... When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.
The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba. ...
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This pig in a poke went to hell in a handcart.
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Sat, Sep 19, 2009
from Agence France-Presse:
Car sales spike in Beijing, capital nears 4 million auto mark
Sales of new cars in Beijing have spiked to about 2,000 a day, a trend that will put up to four million vehicles on the streets of China's capital by year's end, state media said Friday.
About 60,100 cars were sold in the month of August in Beijing -- the largest number of auto purchases this year and nearly double the amount of vehicles sold in the same month in 2008, the China Daily said....an increase of one million cars in just two years. ...
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It's the Carpocalypse!
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Sat, Sep 19, 2009
from Washington Post:
Left in the Flat-Screen Dust
...America's unquenchable craving, even in a recession, for the latest and greatest in electronics, and the nation's switch to digital television broadcasting in June, have combined to send consumers racing for flat-screen TVs -- and has made them anxious to rid their homes of their tube-based relics... nobody will take their old TVs, not even for free, and local governments are scrambling to stop the rejects, laden with lead, from being dumped in landfills or poor Asian countries.... As new TVs enter the home, many people hide the old ones in basements, garages or closets. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 99 million TVs were stored this way two years ago. But many TVs are simply tossed. In 2007, 27 million units were discarded, and 77 percent of them were tossed out with the trash (most of the rest are recycled). ...
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I know! Let's turn the TVs into aquariums — to replace our collapsing ocean and lake ecosystems!
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Sat, Sep 19, 2009
from The Denver Post:
Chemicals fuel ailment debate
Meggan Smoler buries her face in her hands and collapses into the back seat of the Subaru she has called home for the past four months... Smoler is crippled, she says, by encounters with routine chemicals such as pesticides, perfume, paint, air fresheners and car exhaust. She is joined by as much as 16 percent of the U.S. population who describe ailments that remain a medical mystery. Sufferers call their disease multiple chemical sensitivity, or MCS.
While many doctors and scientists call their physical symptoms an eruption of psychological stress, some research is uncovering scientific underpinnings to MCS. Japan, Germany, Canada, Austria and Great Britain have acknowledged the disease as real and eligible for insurance coverage. Colorado has even given MCS its own special month.
"I literally exist to prove to the world how toxic it is getting," says Smoler, who thinks her big problems started five years ago in a moldy house. "I am the canary in the coal mine." ...
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Multiple ComPLAINer Syndrome, more like.
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Fri, Sep 18, 2009
from New York Times:
Health Ills Abound as Farm Runoff Fouls Wells
...Agricultural runoff is the single largest source of water pollution in the nation's rivers and streams, according to the E.P.A. An estimated 19.5 million Americans fall ill each year from waterborne parasites, viruses or bacteria, including those stemming from human and animal waste, according to a study published last year in the scientific journal Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology...In Brown County [Wisconsin], part of one of the nation's largest milk-producing regions, agriculture brings in $3 billion a year. But the dairies collectively also create as much as a million gallons of waste each day. Many cows are fed a high-protein diet, which creates a more liquid manure that is easier to spray on fields.
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They put the "brown" in Brown County.
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Thu, Sep 17, 2009
from Reuters:
Chemical Pollutants Linked to Fewer Female Births
High exposure to certain now-banned industrial chemicals may lead to fewer female births, a new study suggests.
The findings, reported in the journal Environmental Health, add to evidence that the two groups of related chemicals -- polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) -- may affect human reproduction...
For the current study, researchers used data from a group of Michigan residents who, in the early 1970s, had been inadvertently exposed to high levels of PBBs; the chemicals had been accidentally mixed into animal feed, leading to human exposure through contaminated meat, eggs and milk.
The researchers observed that, from 1975 to 1988, women in the study group had a higher-than-average rate of male births, relative to the national average.
There was also a suggestion of increased odds of a male birth when both parents' combined PBB exposure was particularly high -- above the midpoint for the study group -- compared with couples whose PBB exposure was lower.
Similarly, couples with high PCB levels had a higher rate of male births. ...
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Since pollution is feminizing males won't it all even out soooooo nicely!
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Wed, Sep 16, 2009
from New York Times:
Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering
Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system.
"How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?" said Mrs. Hall-Massey, a senior accountant at one of the state's largest banks.... When Mrs. Hall-Massey and 264 neighbors sued nine nearby coal companies, accusing them of putting dangerous waste into local water supplies, their lawyer did not have to look far for evidence. As required by state law, some of the companies had disclosed in reports to regulators that they were pumping into the ground illegal concentrations of chemicals -- the same pollutants that flowed from residents' taps.
But state regulators never fined or punished those companies for breaking those pollution laws. ...
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What's a few heavy metals, between friends?
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Wed, Sep 16, 2009
from American Chemical Society, via EurekAlert:
Biofuel production could undercut efforts to shrink Gulf 'Dead Zone'
Scientists in Pennsylvania report that boosting production of crops used to make biofuels could make a difficult task to shrink a vast, oxygen-depleted "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico more difficult. The zone, which reached the size of Massachusetts in 2008, forms in summer and threatens marine life and jobs in the region.... the zone forms when fertilizers wash off farm fields throughout the Mississippi River basin and into the Gulf of Mexico. The fertilizers cause the growth of algae, which eventually depletes oxygen in the water and kills marine life. Government officials hope to reduce fertilizer runoff and shrink the zone to the size of Delaware by 2015. But that goal could be more difficult to reach due to federally-mandated efforts to increase annual biofuel production to 36 billion gallons by 2022, the study says. ...
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Our "dead zone" is still smaller than that Texas-sized plastic gyre in the Pacific -- how embarrassing, to be #2.
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Tue, Sep 15, 2009
from Washington Post:
Male bass in many US rivers feminized, study finds
Government scientists figure that one out of five male black bass in American river basins have egg cells growing inside their sexual organs, a sign of how widespread fish feminizing has become.
The findings come from the U.S. Geological Survey in its first comprehensive examination of intersex fish in America, a problem linked to women's birth control pills and other hormone treatments that seep into rivers. Sporadic reports of feminized fish have been reported for a few years.
The agency looked at past data from nine river basins - covering about two-thirds of the country - and found that about 6 percent of the nearly 1,500 male fish had a bit of female in them. The study looked at 16 different species, with most not affected. ...
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Given this, we might consider changing their name from bass to tenor.
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Tue, Sep 15, 2009
from Science News:
Cell phones: Feds probing health impacts
For cell phone users -- all 4 billion worldwide -- a Senate hearing today elicited some observations that should give pause. Such as that the risk of certain brain tumors may increase among people who have been heavy cell-phone users for a decade or more. Or that the type of radiation emitted by cell phones can, at least in cellular studies, damage DNA. Or that children have become major users of cell phones and that the radiation emitted by those devices penetrates further into their brains than into their parents'.... For his part, [National Toxicology Program's John] Bucher said research on the issue was moving ahead as well as might be expected, based on its limited funding. He described a host of federally financed programs now underway. Chief among them, new rodent studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. They're using 21 chambers, each the size of a walk-in closet, to expose unrestrained animals to cell-radiation frequencies for up to 20 hours a day and throughout periods of up to two years. ...
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Wouldn't it be simpler -- and more viable -- to simply give the rodents little cellphones?
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Mon, Sep 14, 2009
from The Columbus Dispatch:
Poisons found in debris landfills
Ohio's 55 debris landfills offer a cheap, final resting place for the millions of tons of waste created at construction and demolition sites each year.
But there's a price.
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency found a lot more than old concrete, bricks and lumber at 30 landfills it inspected. The EPA says arsenic, benzene and vinyl chloride -- all suspected carcinogens -- and lead, which can damage the brain and nervous system, all are found in the water trickling through the rubble...
At each of the surveyed landfills, including two in central Ohio, officials found as many as 29 pollutants at levels that exceed drinking-water health limits, pollution standards for streams, or both. ...
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It's getting so a person can't even throw something away without somebody bitching!
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Mon, Sep 14, 2009
from Miller-McCune:
Divining the Secret of Deformed Roadkill
Hard as it is to be a voice in the wilderness, Judy Hoy has been sounding an alarm in southwestern Montana for more than 13 years.
For years she's been documenting, through autopsies, photos, articles and scientific papers, changes -- mutations, really -- she's observed in various ungulate species in the valley. In particular, she's seen malformed genitalia among male white-tailed deer. Such observations are not unique. More and more scientists are documenting reproductive changes in male animals ranging from cricket frogs to polar bears. But the response from public health and governmental agencies has been underwhelming.... In 1996, the Hoys noticed something strange among the roadkill. "It started with Buck No. 9," Judy said. "We called him that because he was the ninth buck we had seen with malformed genitalia."... The next year, 25 of 49 males had anomalies in their genitals. Between 1998 and 2000, two-thirds of the bucks examined had abnormalities.... She described examining different endocrine-disrupting compounds, like a detective at a murder scene, eliminating suspects until she met up with chlorothalonil, a broad-spectrum fungicide. It had been the go-to fungicide in 1994 when neighboring farmers in Idaho were fighting potato blight. ...
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Hmm... could endocrine disruptors could be used for good, rather than evil?
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