By The Defender Staff

New Cancer Cluster Feared in N.J. Neighborhood

NJ.com reported:

Ginger Morris can point to any house on the block and tell you who lives there. And whether or not they have cancer. “That white house had cancer. He left,” she told NJ.com on a recent walk through her neighborhood in Keyport. “Then the next house, Kim’s house. Jim had cancer and the girl that moved in there also had lung cancer.”

She motions to a mint green multi-story home with white pillars. “He had colon cancer and a couple other types of cancer,” she says. “I don’t know what she had.”

The 72-year-old — a 5-foot-tall Matawan transplant who goes by Ginger, not Ginlia or God forbid Mrs. Morris — noticed all the illness about a year ago, when her husband, Richard, started his own chemotherapy treatments for prostate cancer. Every call she made to her son, Rusty, who grew up in Keyport but now lives in Florida, seemed to come with a new mention of someone else fighting for their life. Rusty didn’t think it could be a coincidence.

New Study Ties Industrial Air Pollution in Louisiana to Increased Risk of Pregnancy Complications and Learning Disabilities

Verite News reported:

Louisiana residents living near industrial areas are at a greater risk of experiencing learning disabilities, anemia miscarriage and many other health conditions according to a new research study based on data from Medicaid claims made in the state.

 The Collaborative Data Analysis (CoDA) research team — which included researchers from Dillard University, Virginia Tech and the University of California San Francisco — looked into the negative health impacts of residential exposure to industrial pollution using data from Louisiana Medicaid claims from 2017 to 2019. The results of the report were presented at Dillard on Tuesday (April 14).

The study identified a wide range of potential health risks tied to industrial pollution. Researchers found that children living in zip codes with high rates of pollution had an elevated risk of nutritional anemia, learning disabilities, dermatitis and eczema and that young girls have an elevated risk of early puberty. For non-smoking adult women, there was a higher risk of uterine fibroids and breast cancer.

Among non-smoking adults who have been pregnant, the risk of complications such as miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy and preeclampsia was also elevated. For adults overall, the risk of nutritional and other types of anemia was found to be higher in industrial areas.

The EPA Weighs Loosening Rules Over Cancer-Causing Gas Emissions

Bloomberg reported:

After teacher Janet Rau learned that a carcinogenic gas was being released from an industrial plant near her school in 2019, she started a campaign for more oversight. Five years later, the Environmental Protection Agency issued rules requiring facilities that use the gas to better monitor and cut their emissions of it.

Those rules were set to take effect starting this month. But the Trump administration has granted dozens of temporary exemptions, including to the Atlanta-area facility near Rau.

Now, as part of a sweeping deregulatory push, the EPA wants to ease the new regulations for the gas — ethylene oxide — permanently. The push to get tighter rules was maddeningly slow, says Rau, but “this is worse. The things that we’ve done have essentially been erased.”

Lead Paint Falling From Baltimore-Area Bridges Raises Health Concerns

CBS News reported:

Lead paint is falling from six Baltimore-area bridges, contaminating waterways, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE). Three of the bridges are managed by Baltimore, and three are managed by the Maryland State Highway Administration (SHA).

The Baltimore City bridges and overpasses impacted are:

• • Overpass at W. 28th Street
  • Orleans Street overpass at Guilford Avenue
  • Bridge over Interstate 83, Exit 8, in Hampden

The SHA bridges and overpasses impacted are:

• • I-95 overpass at the intersection of Arbutus Avenue and Potomac Avenue in Halethorpe
  • I-95 overpass at Park Entrance Road
  • I-695 and Putty Hill Avenue overpass in Parkville

“We are reviewing response plans from the city and SHA and will work with them to be sure they are taking action both short-term and long-term,” a spokesperson for the MDE said. “This includes identifying bridges and surrounding areas with peeling lead paint and chips, taking action to prevent more chips from falling, and collecting fallen paint chips that can be a health hazard if ingested and can potentially pollute waterways.”

The More Pesticides, the Fewer Birds

Pesticide Action Network Europe reported:

A recent French study shows that common birds are far less abundant in agricultural areas where more pesticides are purchased. Negative effects were found for over 84% of the species studied. A reduction in pesticides would be a turning point in halting biodiversity loss, according to the scientists. But instead of addressing this, the EU is paving the way to keep harmful pesticides on the market indefinitely.

Researchers from the National Museum of Natural History in France (MNHN) compared local sales in France of 242 pesticide active substances with citizen-science data on 64 bird species. They found negative effects for more than 84% of the species studied. This negative relationship was significant for 25 species, with only one species displaying a significantly positive correlation between abundance and pesticide quantities.

“That is to say the more pesticides are sold, the fewer birds there are,” Anne-Christine Monnet, co-author of the study, explained to AFP.  “We can conclude now that a reduction in pesticide use is necessary to mitigate current losses of agricultural biodiversity,” the researchers stated.

According to the study, the impact of pesticides on birds can be either direct or indirect. Direct exposure occurs when granivorous birds ingest treated seeds or when insectivorous birds, raptors, or scavengers consume contaminated prey. On the other hand, indirect effects come from the depletion of food sources.

The post New Cancer Cluster Feared in N.J. Neighborhood + More appeared first on Children’s Health Defense.

 

IPAK-EDU is grateful to The Defender as this piece was originally published there and is included in this news feed with mutual agreement. Read More