By The Defender Staff
This Herbicide Is so Toxic It’s Been Banned in Over 70 Countries. But Plants in the South Are Releasing It Into the Air.
Wayne County, Mississippi, in a quiet southeast corner of the state, is home to about 20,000 people surrounded by forest and farmland. But Wayne distinguishes itself in two ways: it is home to a Sipcam Agro plant that processes the toxic herbicide paraquat. Within the U.S., the plant is the largest single emitter of paraquat.
Wayne County also sees high rates of Parkinson’s disease deaths, in the top 7% of all U.S. counties that reported Parkinson’s deaths between 2018 and 2024. Troves of evidence have long linked paraquat to Parkinson’s, the world’s fastest-growing — and incurable — neurodegenerative disease.
Due to safety concerns, paraquat is banned in over 70 countries, including China, Brazil, and throughout the European Union. The Environmental Protection Agency warns that “one sip can kill.” It is often used in suicides, since it’s cheap and fatal (for decades, 70% of suicides in Samoa were committed using paraquat). Even wearing PPE does not fully protect applicators from exposure.
Data Centers Have a PFAS Problem
In suburban Virginia, a cluster of monumental gray buildings rise up around the unincorporated settlement of Ashburn in Loudoun County. Ringed by fencing and humming with AC, this is the new front of the digital economy — a place that has become known as Data Center Alley, the biggest data center hub in the world.
Popular large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and MidJourney — marketed as artificial intelligence — need data centers to work. This has caused a boom in the construction of colossal compounds that require a massive amount of electricity and water. The companies building these compounds have brought billions of dollars in investments to Virginia, along with promises of jobs and improvements to the local economy.
For the Virginians living nearby, however, those promises have largely failed to deliver. Data centers take over the landscape, bring air and noise pollution, and guzzle as much as 2 million gallons of water a day. They also hit people in the pocketbook. According to one recent report, energy prices in states like Virginia have skyrocketed by up to 267 percent in the last five years as utilities have scrambled to build out the infrastructure needed to accommodate the data center boom.
All of this is changing local communities in ways that deeply impact quality of life, says Julie Bolthouse, director of land use at the Piedmont Environmental Council, a nonprofit dedicated to land and water conservation in Virginia. “[Data centers] are located in close proximity to houses and schools,” she says. “You’re really changing those communities. These are huge boxes surrounded by fencing. They are not conducive to a walkable, livable environment.”
Pollution Politics: The Uncertain Future of American Air Quality
In America, 46% of those under 18 are living in counties that fail at least one air pollution standard, a new report by the American Lung Association finds. Published on 21 April, the 27th “State of the Air” report is the organization’s annual assessment of U.S. air quality and public health risk. It focuses on two of the most harmful and widespread pollutants: ground-level ozone (also known as smog) and fine particle matter (soot).
Using three years of quality-assured data from 2022 to 2024, the analysis grades air quality by location and ranks cities and counties across the United States. Despite decades of clean air regulation, the report shows that 152.3 million people — 44% of the U.S. population — still live in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution. Children are disproportionately impacted: around 33.5 million live in counties that fail at least one air quality standard, while more than 7 million live in areas that fail all three.
“Clean air is not something we can take for granted. It takes work,” said Harold Zimmer, president and CEO of the American Lung Association. “Children need clean air to grow and play, and communities need clean air to thrive,” he continued, calling on leaders “at every level” to “act to improve and protect America’s air quality.”
Can Vaping Cause Cancer? The Evidence Suggests It Might.
The modern electronic cigarette, or e-cigarette, was invented in the early 2000s by a Chinese pharmacist in response to his father’s death from lung cancer. It was meant to be a nicotine-delivery device that was an alternative to traditional, tobacco cigarettes.
Since their introduction in Europe in 2006 and the United States in 2007, the use of e-cigarettes — a.k.a., vapes — has skyrocketed.
The percentage of U.S. adults who used electronic cigarettes increased from 4.5 percent in 2019 to 6.5 percent in 2023, and sales from brick-and-mortar retailers jumped 34.7 percent, to over 21 million units, between February 2020 and June 2024.
According to the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, almost 6 percent of middle and high school students — 2.25 million children — reported using the devices in the past 30 days.
The World Health Organization estimates that there are more than 16,000 flavors of e-cigarettes and that 88 countries do not require a minimum age to purchase. But while they were introduced as a healthier and less carcinogenic option than tobacco cigarettes, the contents of e-cigarettes and their aerosols can contain harmful or potentially harmful substances that nobody should be eager to introduce to their bodies.
These may include nicotine, heavy metals, particulate matter, propylene or diethylene glycol (found in antifreeze), diacetyl (linked to lung diseases), acrolein (an herbicide) and benzene (a known carcinogen).
$33B Transmission Build-out Leaves Texas Ranchers Fuming
Texas is in the thick of figuring out where to lay power lines through a $33 billion transmission expansion, but changes in how lines are approved have landowners crying foul. The debate is playing out at the state Public Utility Commission, which is weighing where to route more than 3,400 miles of extra-high-voltage power lines that will crisscross the state.
Ranchers and homeowners now also have half the time to object. Texas is among a growing list of places with vocal opposition to electricity projects across the country from Maryland to Maine. At issue are both the physical effects of huge towers and miles of power lines as well as questions about compensation and due process.
The one-two punch of the PUC’s 2025 approval of the mammoth transmission plan and a 2023 law that shortened the review process has been hard to take for Texas property owners, according to Dave Clark, a director with the Friends of the San Saba River nonprofit. “OK, you’ve got to have them, I hear you,” Clark said of the transmission lines. “But let’s have a fair process that allows landowners to really follow along and a reasonable schedule to get through it.”
The impetus for the transmission overhaul in Texas, unlike other states, was not data centers but the state’s massive oil and gas industry — which has seen its need for power skyrocket after the fracking revolution of the 2010s. Texas has since become a hot spot for data centers, ratcheting up the pressure even further to get lines built.
Montana Updates Fish Consumption Guidance for ‘Forever Chemicals’
The State of Montana is providing updated guidance on eating wild-caught fish following a study that found potentially harmful chemicals in some fish populations. The study looked at per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as “PFAS” or “forever chemicals”, in Montana fish.
The Interagency Fish Consumption Advisory Group — consisting of representatives from the Montana Department of Public Health & Human Services (DPHHS), Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) — then updated the consumption guidance based on the results.
“That had never been looked at in fish before in Montana,” said FWP Pollution Biologist Trevor Selch. “DEQ had done monitoring across the state in the water. And so we used the results they had from that water sampling to kind of follow up with fish testing to see if the fish were safe to eat.”
The post This Herbicide Is so Toxic It’s Been Banned in Over 70 Countries. But Plants in the South Are Releasing It Into the Air. + 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
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