- PFAS on our shelves and in our bodies
- Fractured
- Exposed: BPA science
- Agents of Change
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- Climate catastrophe in the South
- Cancer risk in Pittsburgh
- PFAS contamination
- Breathless: Childhood asthma
- Peak Pig: The soul of rural America
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This past week, I distinctly heard the sound of a butter knife clinking against the bottom of a four-ounce jar.
Dijon mustard had joined the list of edible climate victims.
NPR sent its veteran Paris correspondent Eleanor Beardsley to the Bordeaux region. Not to report on the threat to Bordeaux wine, mind you, but on the region’s Dijon mustard. It turns out that genuine Dijon requires mustard seeds from Canada, and last year’s brutal, record-setting “heat dome” ruined the hot mustard crop.
And there’s more concern at the other end of the condiment aisle.
Olive output has suffered in recent years as more frequent winter waves of warm and chilly Mediterranean weather impact the trees’ flowering and fruiting. And as olives go, so goes olive oil.
And with our olive oil, so goes tomato sauce for pizza and pasta. About thirty percent of the world’s canned tomato crop comes from California’s Central Valley, where near-catastrophic drought threatens not a bad year, but a bad forever in one of the world’s key food-producing zones.
So, if Marie Antoinette were around to witness this, would she offer a tomato sauce workaround? Maybe, “Let them eat white clam sauce?”
Well... even for those of us who can stand white clam sauce, clams and other mollusks are vulnerable to the oceans’ rising levels of acidification.
And then there’s the wheat flour that’s turned into traditional pasta. Breadbaskets like Ukraine and the U.S. heartland are increasingly subject to drought, and nutritionists predict that rising CO2 levels could rob wheat, rice and other grains of nutrients.
As early as 2011, a study predicted problems for all manner of fruits and nuts grown throughout the world’s temperate regions. Pistachios, walnuts, cherries and peaches are among the crops that need warm summers and chilly, but not frigid winters to prosper. Warming winter temps may be a problem from Israel to Georgia.
So let’s take a break
Enough about our food for now. Let’s have a drink to relax. Are you a wine person? Well, get some Bordeaux while you can. It’s expected that the world’s prime grape-growing regions may shift with the climate.
Beer? Subtle changes in hops, barley –the yeast that turns sugar into alcohol– and other brewing essentials may not kill your favorite microbrew, but we have no idea how it will taste.
And if you prefer to inhale your escape, the folks at www.mjbizdaily.com have some news for you. The publication, which seems to regard itself as the Wall Street Journal of weed, projects marijuana growers as following the vineyards’ paths on the where cannabis will struggle, and the new places where it could thrive.
The 800-pound steer in the room
Liam Ortiz from Pixabay
Of course, our current diet is a big factor in the climate crisis. Beef, pork and chicken, all raised factory-farming style, greatly contribute to methane release and other air-pollution issues. In regions where cattle are still raised on pasture, they are to blame for the clearing of tropical rainforests, like the Amazon, wiping out one of the world's great carbon sinks.
I could lose five pounds just writing down why I’m a climate-writing, meat-eating, climate-destroying hypocrite.
Prefer seafood? Sensitive to water temperatures, forage fish like sardines and anchovies are de-camping for warmer waters. On the North American East Coast, lobsters are deserting the southern New England coast for the cooler waters of Maine. But lobstermen worry that the crustaceans are merely biding their time to dodge the thermal draft and eventually will head to Canadian waters.
For their part, North Carolina fishermen, rigged and experienced to capture summer flounder, have to chase their target hundreds of miles up the coast to New Jersey.
So some of our food is leaving us. Other food is running and hiding.
Thanks, climate change!
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.
His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
A trove of well-documented research has linked the endocrine-disrupting weedkiller to birth defects, low sperm counts, and fertility problems.
So, it’s not surprising that the herbicide notorious for sticking around on landscapes and waterways long after it’s applied is now banned or being phased out in 44 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.
Yet here in the United States atrazine remains the nation’s second-most used pesticide, with more than 70 million pounds used each year on just three crops: corn, sorghum, and sugarcane.
Industrial-scale, monoculture farmers have become so dependent on this nasty poison that when the Environmental Protection Agency proposed last month to implement reasonable use guidelines based on atrazine levels in a grower’s watershed, Big Ag unleashed a sustained misinformation campaign falsely suggesting using less atrazine would contribute to the global climate crisis.
Although it’s good news that the EPA is taking steps to reduce the well-documented harm atrazine is causing to wildlife, the reality is that the agency’s proposal is very measured and won’t come close to adequately protecting waterways that have already been shown to contain harmful levels of the pesticide.
Baby steps on atrazine
The EPA’s plan proposes to have farmers implement a few management practices from a list of 13 that will conceivably reduce atrazine runoff into nearby rivers, lakes, and streams. These management practices — like cover cropping or putting in a buffer strip between the crop and a water body, and not using atrazine before planting a crop — are only required for the 18% of U.S. watersheds with levels of atrazine that the EPA has found can kill or injure aquatic organisms.
Those baby steps contrast sharply with the dozens of countries around the world that have banned atrazine. The fact that the Big Ag messaging campaign is challenging whether the EPA should take even minimal action on atrazine offers an insightful glimpse into how industrial farm interests constantly work to keep the agency on the defensive — for even its most minor, common-sense actions to protect human health or the environment.
Big Ag's PR campaign
Big Ag interests linked to pesticide-intensive farming practices are fully aware of the growing body of peer-reviewed, independent research on atrazine’s far-reaching harms. Their messaging playbook is all about diversion: Exploit a crisis that people care about and say that government regulation will, in some convoluted way, make that crisis worse.
For atrazine, the crisis selected by Big Ag’s PR firms is the global climate emergency, which Big Ag of course has played no small part in creating. The industrial agriculture messaging campaign falsely suggests that if farmers don’t use atrazine before they plant their crop, then they will be forced to resort to tilling their fields to suppress weeds. Tilling is known to release carbon into the atmosphere.
But the reality is that many of the options available to farmers in the EPA’s plan would actually facilitate the storage of carbon in the ground, such as cover-cropping and maintaining a buffer of constantly vegetated ground between the crop and waterways. In fact, one of the options is to stop tilling, if that’s a practice you currently employ. If anything, the EPA’s plan will have measurable climate benefits.
Atrazine — carbon bomb
And there are additional factual holes in the Big Ag PR campaign that pesticides are somehow essential for “climate smart” agriculture, beginning with the fact that most pesticides are derived from oil and gas feedstocks. Atrazine, for example, is synthesized from isopropylamine, which is derived from isopropanol – a chemical manufactured by Exxon Mobil and one of the first petrochemicals ever produced.
So not only is atrazine derived directly from oil and gas, but fossil fuels are used during the energy-intensive process of producing it. Add on top of that the fuel it takes to distribute 70 million pounds of the chemical across the country and the tens of thousands of tractor passes needed to spray it.
Simply put, atrazine is a carbon bomb.
And, as the EPA knows, atrazine is also a poison bomb that harms human health and wildlife. To that end, it’s good that the EPA is finally taking some nominal steps to reduce the impact of atrazine. But the reality is that industrial agriculture interests continue to be extremely successful in their efforts of thwarting any truly meaningful action to protect human health or the environment from troubling pesticides like atrazine.
And until the EPA untethers itself from the wishes of the pesticide industry, we can never trust that it is following the science and protecting people and wildlife from the most dangerous poisons.
We’ll know exactly when that sea-change occurs. Because one of the first things the EPA will do is to finally ban atrazine, once and for all.
You can comment on the EPA's proposed revised regulations for atrazine here.
Nathan Donley, Ph.D. is a former cancer researcher who is now the Environmental Health Science Director at the Center for Biological Diversity, where his work focuses on reviewing the risks and regulatory oversight of pesticides.
His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
The report recommends that the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention advise clinicians to offer PFAS blood testing to their patients who are likely to have a history of elevated exposure to the toxins. Those test results should be reported to state public health authorities to improve PFAS exposure surveillance, according to the report, issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, or NASEM.
The testing should be done for people with occupational exposure, as well as those who have lived in communities with documented contamination, and those who have lived where contamination may have occurred — such as near commercial airports, military bases, wastewater treatment plants, farms where sewage sludge may have been used, or landfills or incinerators that have received waste containing PFAS, according to the report.
“Our report shows that we are going to need robust and effective collaboration between local communities, states, and federal agencies in order to respond to the challenge of PFAS exposure,” Ned Calonge, chair of the NASEM committee that authored the report, said in a statement.
'Make PFAS testing available'
“We need to continue to identify communities with elevated PFAS exposure, learn more about specific health impacts, make testing available to patients, and give clinicians more strategies for counseling patients and providing preventive medical care,” Calonge added in the press statement. Calonge is associate professor of family medicine at the University of Colorado, Denver and associate professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health.
NASEM acts as the collective scientific national academy of the United States and its recommendations typically are highly regarded. It was created to provide independent and objective guidance that informs American policy.
The report released today is sponsored by US Department of Health and Human Services.
PFAS, the 'forever chemical'
PFAS is an acronym for a class of chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. PFAS are also often referred to as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down in the environment and bioaccumulate, persisting in the bodies of humans and animals. There are more than 4,000 man-made PFAS compounds used by a variety of industries for such things as electronics manufacturing, oil recovery, paints, fire-fighting foams, cleaning products and non-stick cookware.
People can be exposed through contaminated drinking water, food and air, as well as contact with commercial products made with PFAS. Some PFAS have been linked to cancer, immune deficiencies, thyroid disease, and other health problems.
How PFAS enters the environment
How PFAS enters the environment
Credit: Evich et al., 2022
Last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency identified more than 120,000 locations around the United States where the agency believed people may be exposed types of PFAS. The scope of the list underscored that virtually no part of America appears free from the potential risk of air and water contamination with PFAS.
The Biden Administration has announced a series of steps to try to restrict PFAS from contaminating water, air, land, and food as well as to clean up PFAS pollution and speed up research on other PFAS issues.
Last month, the administration started the process of designating two types of PFAS – PFOA and PFOS – as hazardous substances under the law, which would allow the EPA to deploy recover clean-up costs from companies responsible for contamination and take other steps to address contamination.
NASEM said a large body of scientific literature on PFAS shows there is “sufficient evidence” of association between exposure to PFAS and increased risk of decreased antibody response in adults and children, abnormally high cholesterol in adults and children, decreased infant and fetal growth, and kidney cancer in adults.
The report found there was “limited or suggestive evidence” of increased risk of breast cancer in adults, liver enzyme alterations in adults and children, pregnancy-induced hypertension, increased risk of testicular cancer in adults, thyroid disease and dysfunction in adults, and increased risk of ulcerative colitis in adults.
The NASEM report warned that people with PFAS in their blood above 2 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL) but below 20 ng/ml may face the potential for adverse effects, especially “sensitive populations,” such as pregnant women. Clinicians should encourage reduction of PFAS exposure for these patients and prioritize screening for a range of health problems that include hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, breast cancer, signs of kidney and testicular cancer and of ulcerative colitis, according to NASEM.
People found with PFAS in their blood at levels higher than 20 ng/ml potentially face a higher risk, the report states.
The report noted that more information is needed on how PFAS affects children and pregnant women, and recommends the gathering of data to address those groups.
Environmental justice and systemic racism
The report notes that systemic racism and issues of environmental justice could compound the “challenge of responding clinically" to PFAS contamination.
The report notes: “While environmental justice research specific to PFAS contaminants has been limited, place-based factors that may put individuals at greater risk of exposure (siting of chemical companies, refineries, and industrial sites), coupled with insufficient access to environmental screening, information, and adequate health care, have disproportionate impacts on Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities, as well as low-income populations.”
“PFAS contamination did not just randomly occur in rural communities serviced by well water that happened to be near industrial sites. Rather, the locating of certain industrial sites and decisions to dispose of PFAS with limited regard for the surrounding community’s access to safe water are rooted in the relationship and history of these industries and communities.
The disposal of these chemicals did not occur as single events lacking context, but reflected a pattern of decisions made over time. Understanding the historical and social context influencing how and where PFAS are distributed is an essential part of identifying effective mitigation strategies.”
This story was originally published in The New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group, and is republished here with permission.
What is environmental health?
Environmental health is a branch of public health that monitors the relationship between human health and the environment, examining aspects of both our natural and human-made environment and their effect on human wellbeing.
What is an example of environmental health?
Living near factories or heavy traffic worsens air quality and leads to health impacts on the lungs and heart.
Credit: Kouji Tsuru/Unsplash
Environmental health is a broad area of study — everything from the climate to the food we eat to the air we breathe plays into environmental health. A few specific examples include:
- Air pollution: Living near factories or heavy traffic worsens air quality and leads to health impacts on the lungs and heart such as asthma and increased risk of heart attacks or stroke.
- Water contamination: Drinking lead-contaminated water can cause IQ loss, behavioral issues, learning disabilities and more. Infants and young children are most at risk.
- Toxic chemicals in consumer products: Phthalates, a class of chemicals that are widely used in consumer products, are known endocrine-disruptors, meaning they hijack your body’s hormones and can cause a wide array of health impacts including increased risk of cancer and fertility issues.
What is the role of environmental health?
The role of environmental health research is to examine areas of the environment that impact our health so that we can make personal and policy changes to keep ourselves safe and improve human health and wellbeing.
Why is environmental health important?
Credit: Viki Mohamad/Unsplash
Environmental health impacts every one of us.
We reap the benefits of clean air, clean water, and healthy soil. If our environment is unhealthy, with toxic chemicals saturating our resources and pollution abundant, then our health also suffers.
It is also an important field of study because it looks at the “unseen” influences on your health.
Many individuals may not associate their health problems with air or water quality, or with what clothes they wear, makeup and household goods they use, or food they eat.
That’s because not every example of environmental health problems are obvious: some chemicals, for example, build up slowly over time in your body: a small dose may not seem to bring harm, but repeated small doses can lead to later impacts.
- BPA absorbed through plastic containers, cans, receipts, etc. lingers in the body and the build-up over time increases risk of cancer, diabetes, liver failure, and more.
- PFAS are known as ‘forever chemicals ’— they don’t break down and are widely used, so small exposures are frequent and contribute to immune system and reproductive damages, heightened cholesterol levels, and more.
- Mercury from eating seafood and shellfish can impact neurological development of fetuses in the womb, and populations that regularly consume mercury-heavy seafood have shown mild cognitive impairment.
Also, individual susceptibility can differ: for example, one member of a household can experience illness, asthma, migraines, etc. from chemicals found in their water supply while another member of the same household is just fine, such as the case in a young girl’s reaction to benzene in her water from living near fracking wells.
Certain variables play a role in susceptibility and level of adverse health effects such as age, gender, pregnancy, and underlying health conditions. Studies suggest fetuses, infants and children are much more at risk to experience lifelong health problems from toxic chemical exposure.
Rate, duration, and frequency of exposure to toxic chemicals and other influences from our environment all factor into our health.
Good environmental health = good human health.
What environmental health problems affect our health?
Two women extracting from a well in Senegal.
Credit: JordiRamisa
There are many environmental health issues that affect human health. These include:
Air pollution — nine out of 10 people currently breathe air that exceeds the World Health Organization’s guideline limits for air pollution worldwide. This mainly affects people in low and middle-income countries, but in the United States, people that live in cities, or near refineries or factories, are often affected as well.
Air pollution also ramps up during wildfire season.
Read more: Breathless: Pittsburgh's asthma epidemic and the fight to stop it
Water pollution — as of 2014, every year more people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war. Water is the ‘universal solvent’, meaning it can dissolve more substances than any other liquid on Earth. Thus, it is too easy for toxic chemicals to enter our water supply.
Read more: Sacred Water: Environmental justice in Indian Country
Lack of access to health care — yes, this is an environmental health issue! Having an accessible health care system is part of one’s environment. Difficulty getting health care can further impact one’s health.
Poor infrastructure — from “food deserts” to lack of transportation services, living in an area with poor infrastructure can impact your health.
Read more: Agents of Change: Amplifying neglected voices in environmental justice
Climate change — climate change-induced heat waves, increased frequency and severity of large storms, droughts, flooding, etc. have resulted in health problems and even death.
Chemical pollution — chemical pollution can be sneaky: the chemicals in your everyday products, from shampoo to deodorant to your clothing to the food you eat, can directly affect your health. These chemicals are often not on the label or regulated at all.
Read more: Exposed: How willful blindness keeps BPA on shelves and contaminating our bodies
How can we improve our environmental health?
Credit: instaphotos
Educate yourself. Environmental health is a broad topic, so this can seem overwhelming. Start by taking stock of your own personal environment. Look up air pollution monitoring in your area. Get your water tested to see its chemical makeup. Evaluate the products you use in your life — personal products like shampoo and deodorant, household cleaners, air fresheners, the foods that you eat — and see what you’re bringing into your home.
Explore the Environmental Working Group's guides to check your products for toxic chemicals.
We have additional guides to help you learn more about environmental health. Find guides to plastic pollution, environmental justice, glyphosate, BPA, PFAS and more in the Resources tab at the top of our website.
As individuals we have the power to improve some of our environmental health, but there is a pressing need for systemic change and regulation on a policy level.
We’re actively working with scientists to share their research and knowledge with politicians to advocate for science-backed policy change. But we need your help. Contact your representatives to let them know that environmental health is important to you — whether it’s air pollution in your area, contaminated water, plastic pollution, food deserts in your area, or chemicals in consumer products.
Subscribe to Above the Fold, our daily newsletter keeping you up-to-date on environmental health news.