Toxicology
Mesopotamia or Midlothian – Burning is Bad
Here's a great story from Wired that reports the results of the first tests done in and around the places where the military's "burn pits" were located during the most recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Not familiar with "burn pits?" If you grew up in rural Texas you are because it's exactly the way your grandfather got rid of his family's trash – by putting it in a big pile and then putting a match to it. Besides turning a ravine into an impromptu landfill, burn pits are the most popular way of disposing of your garbage when Waste Management just can't get to you.
In the military, burn pits were the disposal option of choice for everything: human waste, paints and paint removers, asbestos insulation, plastic and styrofoam containers, old computers and monitors – any waste you can imagine being generated at a front line military base.
Not surprisingly, troops that spent time around these open-air waste incinerators have been complaining about chronic bronchitis, neurological disorders, and rare cancers – just like people who live dowwnind of waste burning at cement kilns and incinerators. Military spokespersons have reassured these whiners that there was "no specific evidence" of the pits doing any human health damage. To which all of you who've been doing this for a while will respond: "How many times did anyone look for such damage?" The answer is zero – until now. Pulmonologist Dr. Anthony Szema of the Stony Brook School of Medicine, just released the results of an experiment that links the burn pit dust to immune system damage. Dr. Szema exposed 15 mice to the dust from the remains of a burn pit in Iraq. When collected on-site, the pit still stunk with the incinerated remains of animal carcasses, lithium batteries, printers and glues. This lovely cocktail of toxins was then inhaled by the mice and researchers tracked their respiratory system and spleen for signs of strain. And they got them.
Lung inflammation occurred within two hours of exposure, and T-cells dropped by a third. T-Cells are a critical component of the human immune health originating in the bone marrow but then going to the Thymus to finish their development. AIDS and other immune destroying diseases kill T-Cells. After two weeks of being regularly exposed to the burn pit dust, the mice had lost 70% of the T-cells they started with. "I can't even imagine what this date shows when you think about someone coming back from Iraq," Szema says. "these guys weren't inhaling the air once. They were working in it, sleeping in it, exercising in it. For days on end." Despite being limited to mice, Szema is confident that the results are transferable to humans. The symptoms of his mice line up with those being reported by veterans to a database at BurnPits360, a website dedicated to tracking the health of exposed servicemen and women. It's also one more step in understanding why different people react to pollution differently. With your immune system offline everyone is vulnerable to different inherent health weaknesses that are exacerbated. Dr. Szema isn't surprised at the results of his groundbreaking tests. "Based on the patients I've seen, this is a no-brainer. If anyone tries to say, ' Oh dust is just dust,' I can tell them that's simply not true."
Four Years After Kiln Waste-Burning Ends, ATSDR’s “Evaluation” of Midlothian Keeps Going
Although on any given day there's a lot of competition, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry might be the most irrelevant government bureaucracy going. Thursday it announced that the latest installment of its years-long "health consultation" of Midlothian will be the subject of yet another community meeting in that town on Thursday May 24th from 7 to 8:30 at the Midlothian Conference Center. The ATSDR evaluation started in 2005 at the request of Midlothian Citizens when TXI was still burning hazardous waste. It then was the subject of a 2010 Congressional investigation that revealed how the Agency mostly neglected to do any real science in the course of its evaluation. This new meeting concerns an analysis of air monitoring information that "will support public health evaluations for many of the pollutants of concern." Of that we have no doubt. Since ATSDR does no monitoring of its own, it's completely reliant on the monitoring done by theTexas Commission on Environmental Quality. Does anyone know of any instance where TCEQ monitoring has shown anything to be concerned about? If citizens complain about getting sick from industrial pollution, it's TCEQ position that it's the fault of anything but the pollution itself. No amount of empirical evidence collected by citizens in the field from their own sampling or experience can convince Austin otherwise. TXI quit burning waste in 2008. ASTDR's evaluation of Midlothian? It just might outlast the plant itself.
Study: Low Levels of Hydrogen Sulfide Linked to Asthma
You may not know the name of the chemical, but you know it by smell. "Rotten eggs" is the olfactory indication you're being exposed to Hydrogen Sulfide. There's a reason it smells like that. Biological sources can emit it. Certain bacteria produce hydrogen sulfide as they decompose waste – like rotten eggs. It also occurs in geothermal situations. Hot water, steam and magma from inside the Earth carry heat, minerals and gases – like Hydrogen Sulfide – to the surface, liberating them in springs, geysers and volcanic lava. If you've ever been to Yellowstone, you know the smell. Industrial sources of hydrogen sulfide include oil and gas drilling, refineries, paper mills, large scale livestock production, waste water treatment and landfills. At high levels of exposure, Hydrogen Sulfide is linked with serious neurologic damage – including death. Lower levels can trigger eye irritation, fatigue and headaches…and asthma according to a new three-year study out of Iceland. Measuring levels of Hydrogen Sulfide near major intersections and power plants in the capital city of Reykjavik that turn geothermal energy into electricity and heating steam, researchers found a weak but constant association between the pollutant and asthma medication rates. It's one of the first studies to find respiratory ailments at low levels of Hydrogen Sulfide – much like you'd find in the Barnett Shale or any gas or oil patch. The fact that oil drilling has been around for over a century, and yet only now are we actually studying what happens when people are exposed ti it at exposure levels found in real life, tells you all you need to know about the risks of allowing drilling so close to people.
Pollution Makes you Fat
Prenatal exposure to high levels of air pollution double the likelihood of children becoming obese in a new study by Columbia University's School of Public Health released last week. Its one of the first reports to definitively link chemical pollutants to weight gain. Pregnant women who lived in areas where they were exposed to abnormal amounts of Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons, or (PAHs), were more than twice as likely to have children who were obese by age seven than women who had lower exposure to the chemicals. PAH's are a pretty common pollutant which come mostly from the burning of fossil fuels. This news comes on the heels of a new study of the danger of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors, which can reek havoc with a person's hormones. Animal studies had already shown that PAHs inhibit the release of fat in the body, decrease IQ increase behavioral disorders. And oh yeah, PAHs can also give you cancer. There are many causes for weight gain in the US. Could one of them have anything to do with our swimming in a sea of 80,000 chemicals, only a handful of which are fully understood, much less regulated to reflect the current science?
Yep, Diesel Exhaust is Really Bad For You
In maybe the least surprising air quality news this week, a long-term study involving thousands of participants concluded that exposure to diesel pollution increases your risk of lung cancer significantly. For those most heavily exposed, the risk was three to seven times higher.
Because the subjects were all miners who were working eight or more hour a day in underground chambers full of diesel engines, the results were predictable to anyone tracking the science in the 20 years since the study began. But it was the association of disease with diesel pollution at even “low levels” that will drive the debate over how and where highways are built or expanded. There’ve been a rash of studies coming out over the last year or so linking road traffic pollution to asthma, heart attacks, strokes and all the other ailments caused by bad air.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the study is that so much energy was expended by the diesel lobby to keep it from ever seeing the light of day. To the point of requiring the the Department of Health and Human Services to turn over documents and be held in contempt for not doing so.