Health

Scientists advising the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on air pollution issues are criticizing EPA higher-ups for ignoring their scientific counsel. Specifically, they are accusing the Bush Administration of excising science from the process the agency uses to determine how clean the air we breathe should be. The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) challenges EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson.

Along with the usual spooky and spine-tingling sights we have come to expect in caves, another scary inhabitant is turning up — contaminants such as PCBs, pesticides, dioxins, gasoline, fertilizers, sewage, and caffeine. These pollutants, which are leaching into caves from the surface and groundwater, can pose a threat to the delicate underground environments that are prized by many, and that provide benefits to people, plants, and animals on the surface. The presence of these contaminants underground also serves as a blunt reminder of how pervasive pollutants are.

March went out like a lion for adversaries in the arena of food and pharmaceutical crop engineering.

Compact fluorescent lighting reduces energy use, but what's the trade-off in mercury exposure via broken bulbs and disposal? Now a team of Yale scientists has estimated where there will be a net increase or decrease in mercury emissions.

A useful roundup of links and leads for reporters researching the published literature on medical and some environmental health topics is available online at LLRX.com.

EPA is scheduled to announce by March 12, 2008, its final rule for a new ground-level ozone standard, last updated more than a decade ago.

As the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on, new light has been shed on the environmental health impacts of the 1991 Gulf War. On Nov. 17, 2008, the Congressionally-mandated Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses released a major report which concluded that from 175,000 to 210,000 of the nearly 700,000 U.S. veterans of the first Gulf War suffer from Gulf War illness.

How health may be affected; accusation that Bush administration drastically altered CDC testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Oct. 23, 2007.

The Bush White House is rushing through — secretly — a midnight regulation that would hobble the next administration's efforts to regulate workplace environmental risks.