A Bit of Good News on the Mercury Front

Today I received an email from the staff at Oceana, the group whose report I referred to in the post about mercury releases from chlorine product. They were updating me with this bit of news: The Number One Source of Mercury Air Pollution in Wisconsin Commits to Switch. According to Oceana, this single action will result in a full 28% reduction in mercury air emissions in Wisconsin, nearly cutting the state’s emissions by a third.

I think this is evidence that open dialog and freely available information about the environmental health issues we face can result in change.

From a Utah Coal Mine, To Your Plate, Coal Is Dangerous Stuff

With the trapping of six miners in the collapse of Murray Energy’s Utah coal mine, we are again hearing about the hazards of mining for mine workers. My sympathies extend to the families of the trapped miners, but this incident highlights for me the need for us to move away from coal-fired energy production and into safer—and cleaner—alternatives.

Coal is not only hazardous to those working in the industry, but is also hazardous to all of us. For most of us, coal is unseen, and unthought about, yet in 2005, coal production in the United States peaked at over a billion tons, with almost 92% of it going to use in electrical generation plants. In fact, 1,522 coal-fired plants around the country supply almost half of the US demand for electricity. Some are small local operations, but most are monster facilities that eat pulverized coal dust like candy.

Mercury

Although each ton of coal the monster eats has but a trace of mercury in it, the total impact adds up: globally, burning coal for power and heat accounts for the greatest addition to the global mercury pool each year, and in the US, approximately a third of our annual contribution comes from our coal-fired power industry. When coal is burned in power plants, traces of mercury, which were captured millions of years ago when the coal was formed,are vaporized and released to the atmosphere.

The mercury released by coal burning, as well as mercury released in industrial processes, mining, and the burning of waste, joins the global mercury pool, making it available to the mercury cycle. And one in the mercury pool, it rains down on land and water, to be taken up by microorganisms, and then by higher organisms, including the fish we eat.

Dioxin

Then there’s also the problem of dioxin produced by burning coal. The term dioxin is actually a catch phrase used to denote several hundred chemicals that have similar chemical structure. Most dioxins fall into three main families—the CDDs, the CDFs, and the PCBs. The ‘C’ in all three acronyms stands for chlorine.

“Everybody in toxicology knows that if you add chlorine to something, you make it toxic,” says Suzanne Wuerthele, a career toxicologist with the Environmental Protection Agency in Denver.

CDDs and CDFs are mainly accidental chemical creations that come from (again) the burning of coal, the burning of municipal and medical waste, and certain industrial processes, while PCBs were manufactured and widely used in industrial transformers until they were banned in 1979. All three families of dioxins are found throughout the natural world, and in all individuals who have been tested by the CDC in quantities that are “at or near the level where effects of dioxin and related compounds, such as enzyme induction, changes in hormone levels, and indicators of altered cellular function, have been observed in laboratory animals and humans.” And, according to EPA’s analysis, potentially adverse effects are associated with exposure to dioxin in human populations at or near the background levels we now see in the environment. Like mercury, dioxin family members accumulate in fat, and work their way up the food chain.

Other Contaminants

Coal-fired plants also spew 59% of total U.S. sulfur dioxide pollution and 18% of total nitrous oxides every year, and release about 50% of our particulate pollution, as well as other toxics, such as arsenic and cadmium. Oh, yeah: They also release about 40% of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, a prime contributor to global warming.

When the nitrous oxides that they emit react with volatile organic compounds and sunlight, they form smog, or ground level ozone. Of the six major criteria air pollutants regulated by the EPA, nitrous oxide emissions have historically been the hardest to control, in part because emissions from dirty coal plants in one region can easily pollute areas hundreds of miles downwind. The American Lung Association estimates that almost half of Americans live in areas with unhealthy levels of smog. Just last week, the State of Delaware confirmed in cancer cluster near the Indian River Power Plant that regulators believe is connected to the plant.

Protecting yourself

So what can you do to protect yourself: First, you can reduce exposures by watching what you eat. Several fish species are known for having high levels of dioxins (particularly of the PCB family) as well as mercury. Meat and dairy products also contain elevated levels of dioins, so the best way to reduce you personal dioxin exposure is to reduce the amount of animal fats in your diet: drink low-fat or reduced-fat milk and eat leaner cuts when you select meat.

Also, encourage your state and federal elected officials to close loopholes that allow coal-burning plants to continue spewing noxious and dangerous emissions into our air. To learn more, go to Clear The Air. Check out their power plant locater to learn about dirty plants where you live.

Dirty Diesel

Yesterday I sat in traffic at a stop light, the truck in front of me spewing a noxious diesel cloud. It made me think of a recent report, No Escape From Diesel, I read from the Clean Air Task Force.

“Anyone who commutes in any form of transportation is exposed to unhealthy levels of diesel exhausts,” according to the report, and commuting—even by foot in cities—is responsible for 60% of Americans’ daily exposure to ultra-fine particles "in spite of the fact that the average American spends less than 6% of his or her day commuting."

Ultrafine particles embed deeply in the lungs, and are associated with lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, asthma, increased allergies, increased susceptibility to lung infections (colds and bacterial infections), as well as slowed fetal growth, infant mortality, and DNA damage. Now, an interesting study just released by researchers at UCLA also shows that these fumes are particularly dangerous for people with high cholesterol levels and arteriosclerosis (or hardening of the arteries), because the particles emitted in diesel exhaust act as free radicals, and when mixed with the low density lipids that are often associated with high cholesterol, they activate the genes that promote cellular inflammation — a major risk factor for atherosclerosis, according to Dr. Jesus Araujo, UCLA assistant professor of medicine and director of environmental cardiology at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine.

The Clean Air Task Force says that commuters using light rail or electric trains have the lowest exposure. But not everyone can commute that way, so the Task Force suggests that commuters:
1. Try to avoid the roads that carry the highest numbers of heavy trucks,
2. If you are forced to commute with heavy diesel truck traffic, close the windows and put your air system on recirculation.

The Task Force is also pushing EPA to require all diesel truck engines to have diesel particulate filters installed when engines are overhauled--an effort they say will cost between $2,000 and $7,000 per engine, but that will reduce particulates by up to 85%.

Why Am I Blogging About The Environment and Health

I have a couple of dogs, one adopted on the spur of the moment, when he stopped traffic—literally. There was something white hanging from his neck. Silly me, I thought it was a broken rope. I called him over: come here doggy, come here. Scared by screeching tires, he had plopped down in the middle of the road but came readily when called: any port in the storm, I suppose. I knew I was in trouble when I saw that the dangling white thing wasn’t a rope at all, but a note that said READ ME, sealed in a plastic envelope and wired to his collar.

Hi my name is Tuf, it read. I’m homeless due to unforeseen circumstances. I will love you and protect you with my life. I’m good with cats and kids and other dogs.

Tuf was young and cute and kind of skinny. His snout was a tender pincushion of porcupine quills. He wagged everything when I stroked his back. What was I to do? No other driver was ready to fight me for him. They scurried along as soon as he was out of the way.

Well, Tuf, I said, come on, get in the car.




Tuf is now middle aged in dog years, quite happy, and filled out at about 60 pounds. I share his story because he’s one of those dogs: once he gets hold of a bone, a leather chew, or anything of the sort, he won’t let it go. A team of professional firefighters could try to extricate it with Jaws of Life, but I wouldn’t place my bet on them. Tuf will keep his prize locked firmly in his chops with dogged determination: this is my bone, and I’m not giving it up.

This project became my bone. Once I started investigating chemicals and their links to our ever-worsening health, what I learned kept drawing me in deeper. I couldn’t just let it lay; I had to keep pursuing it.




The issue of environment and health, which I’d already been stewing about for a while, became an obsession a few years ago, after I flew to New Jersey for my mom’s birthday. It was torpid and muggy when I got to her house in the early evening. In spite of the temperature, the air conditioner was off, and she was curled under a blanket on the couch, bald, unable to speak because of canker sores the size of quarters, and too weak to get up. She was in her third month of chemotherapy. It is… disquieting to see a loved one laid so low.

My mother had found the lump one morning in the shower, just the week before Thanksgiving. It was her entry into a sisterhood that’s hidden behind wigs and prosthetic breasts. The breast-cancer sorority is big and getting bigger all the time. In 1940, one woman in twenty-two would join its ranks. When my mother was diagnosed, that number had jumped to one in seven. Some experts predict that by the time my young nieces are older women, their odds will be one in three.

My father died of cancer just thirteen months before my mother found the lump. His began in his intestines, metastasized to his liver. My sister-in-law has MS. My first-born nephew suffered severe colic as a baby, and was placed on Ritalin for ADHD in first grade. As an adult, he has continuing mental health challenges. Another first-borne nephew—on my husband’s side, and 1500 miles away from my blood clan—suffered from a less severe case of ADHD; his younger brother was afflicted with childhood asthma that sent him frequently to the hospital. A friend from North Jersey died at 55 of stomach cancer; another friend who lives in rural Virginia emailed that her 22-year-old son was recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which his sister had been treated for ten years earlier. And yet another friend—this one from Minnesota—was dreadfully sick, devastated by a collection of neurodegenerative symptoms that stymied doctors, including those at the Mayo Clinic, until one of the doctors finally tested her for a number of toxic chemicals and diagnosed her with mercury and lead poisoning. After starting chelation therapy, she was improving slowly but would likely suffer the consequences of her poisoning for the rest of her life.

This list could go on, and on, but you get the gist. Is it an unusual list? Hardly. For most of us, if we stop to take stock of our afflictions or those of our families, our friends, and our co-workers, we recognize a pattern that permeates the web of our modern lives: diseases, conditions, and disorders are everywhere. Over half of Americans are regularly taking prescription drugs; nearly a third take three-or-more drugs routinely. More than 1.2 million Americans hear the words, ‘you have cancer’, each year, and a half million die from it. Alzheimer’s afflicts 4.5 million older Americans; autism is on a steep rise among children; one in ten couples suffers from infertility problems; and perhaps most disturbing of all, fifty percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, birth defects, or chronic health problems such as asthma or ADHD. In spite of the remarkable feats medicine has made in treating what ails us, the ominous truth is we are continually needing more-and-more treatments that individually, and as a society, we can ill afford.

I don’t know about you, but I have to confess that I tended to think of the myriad maladies around me as discrete cases—each a terribly sad story, but nonetheless an individual story. Even as I began researching (initially to satisfy my curiosity about my mom’s illness) I saw them as individual stories, but soon the picture became complex, and I began to comprehend that each individual story was connected. As threads woven into a tapestry create a picture, individual stories of disease and disorder come together to reveal a much bigger story of how we have polluted our bodies and what that personal pollution means for us, and to future generations.

The spark that first fueled my curiosity and started me thinking about the story was something my mom told me when she was first diagnosed. Her doctor explained to her that hers was a type of breast cancer that accounts for less than two percent of all breast-cancer cases. “But there is some good news,” she told me. “He said you don’t have to worry—this form isn’t genetic.”

Those words focused my thoughts on a question: If it wasn’t genes that caused my mother’s illness, what was it?