Thursday, March 31, 2011

Chemical Month | Robert Bunsen

Robert Bunsen was born 200 years ago today. His famous burner is used in laboratories around the world

[Editor's note: Today is the last day of "Chemical Month." From bisphenol A to endosulfan, from dioxin to antioxidants, from hexane to methyl iodide, 13.7 Billion Years looked at some of the key chemicals and chemical-based issues that make up the vast laboratory of our daily lives. For the last post in this series, 13.7 focuses not on a substance, but on a person -- Robert Bunsen, a German chemist who was born two centuries ago today.]

If you've ever taken a chemistry class, chances are you've used Robert Bunsen's ubiquitous burner, an invention that has been critical to the development of modern chemistry.

Perfectly and reliably producing a single open gas flame that was hot, sootless and non-luminous, the Bunsen burner represented a huge improvement on the burners that were used at the time. An exercise in simplicity, it is perfect for heating, sterilization and combustion. And its non-luminous flame was critical -- it did not interfere with the test material's own colored flame.

Though he is most known for his eponymous burner, the German chemist also made some significant discoveries. With Gustav Kirchhoff, he discovered two elements -- caesium and rubidium. He was also pioneer in photochemistry, organoarsenic chemistry, gas analysis and spectroscopy.

Known for never patenting his discoveries as a matter of principle (though they could have made him extremely wealthy), Bunsen was much-loved during his lifetime. According to the Chemical Heritage Foundation, "Young chemists flocked to him, including Julius Lothar Meyer and Dmitri Mendeleev."

But he also paid the price for his curiosity. The foundation also notes that his early research in organic chemistry "cost him the use of his right eye when an arsenic compound, cacodyl cyanide, exploded."

Thankfully, curiosity didn't kill this chemistry-minded cat. He died at the age of 88 in Heidelberg, ten years after he retired. His last years were spent studying rocks and minerals. But Robert Bunsen's hot, sootless and non-luminous flame lives on.

GET INVOLVED
  • Do some kid-safe chemistry experiments at home
  • Buy a Bunsen burner (and protective goggles, of course)
  • Know the ingredients in your personal care products (from Environmental Working Group)
  • Sign a Greenpeace petition urging President Obama to create a cancer prevention plan that stops the use of cancer-causing chemicals in products used every day
  • Buy "Do It Gorgeously: How to Make Less Toxic, Less Expensive, and More Beautiful Products," which provides healthy, sustainable DIY alternatives to most personal care products (part of 13.7 Billion Year's "test household")
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
RELATED POSTS
13.7 BILLION YEARS 2011 CALENDAR
URGENT ACTION ALERTS
  • Help Japan
  • Help children in Japan: Donate to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF's emergency appeal to help quake victims
  • Help animals in Japan: Donate to HSI International Disaster Fund
  • Sign the Humane Society 2011 Boycott to Save Seals
Also on 13.7 Billion Years: "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions.

image: Robert Bunsen (credit: F.J. Moore, Wikimedia Commons)
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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Chemical Month | 126 Ingredients

There are an average of 126 ingredients in your personal care products that you've probably never heard of

[Editor's note: March is "Chemical Month" on 13.7 Billion Years. From the neurotransmitters in our brains to the pesticides on our produce, from toxic substances found in most households to disease-preventing antioxidants, chemicals are both critical and dangerous to life on Earth. Each weekday this month, 13.7 Billion Years takes a look at a general chemical-based issue or a specific chemical from the vast laboratory of our daily lives.]

Unless you're a chemist, chances you have no idea what DMDM hydantoin is. Or imidazolidinyl urea. Or methylchloroisothiazolinone. Or guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride. Or triethanolamine.

But if you use non-100% natural personal care products like soaps, shampoos, lotions and the like, these and more bizarre-sounding chemicals are part of your everyday life. And if you do, you just trust that the companies that are using these ingredients really care about your health and the health of the environment, right?

According to Environmental Working Group (EWG), "Most people use around 10 personal care products every day, with an average of 126 different ingredients."

"We'd like to believe that the government is policing the safety of all of the concoctions we put on our bodies, but it's not," said EWG in an email. "Instead, these unregulated products pose uncertain dangers for our health and our environment."

The group has put together some helpful tips on how to choose better body care products.

EWG calls for greater transparency, more "truth in labeling," as it's called. But absent governmental legislation, consumers are left to fend for themselves in order to find safe and sustainable products.

"Better products are truthful in their marketing claims and free of potential worrisome ingredients," says EWG. "Some products might make claims that a product is 'gentle' or 'natural,' but since the government does not require safety testing, personal care product manufacturers can use almost any chemical they want, regardless of risks."

The best advice? Read the label before you buy.

GET INVOLVED
  • Know the ingredients in your personal care products (EWG)
  • Buy "Do It Gorgeously: How to Make Less Toxic, Less Expensive, and More Beautiful Products," which provides healthy, sustainable DIY alternatives to most personal care products (part of 13.7 Billion Year's "test household")
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
RELATED POSTS
13.7 BILLION YEARS 2011 CALENDAR
URGENT ACTION ALERTS
  • Help Japan
  • Help children in Japan: Donate to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF's emergency appeal to help quake victims
  • Help animals in Japan: Donate to HSI International Disaster Fund
  • Sign the Humane Society 2011 Boycott to Save Seals
Also on 13.7 Billion Years: "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions.

image: alles banane
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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Chemical Month | Dioxin

For three weeks, British families unwittingly ate carcinogenic dioxin-tainted eggs. Thousands of German farms were shut down

[Editor's note: March is "Chemical Month" on 13.7 Billion Years. From the neurotransmitters in our brains to the pesticides on our produce, from toxic substances found in most households to disease-preventing antioxidants, chemicals are both critical and dangerous to life on Earth. Each weekday this month, 13.7 Billion Years takes a look at a general chemical-based issue or a specific chemical from the vast laboratory of our daily lives.]

Yesterday, the Belgium-based SGS Consumer Testing Services said that "the recent health scare in Germany has once again focused international attention on the necessary measures required to avoid the contamination of the food chain by dioxins."

In January, supermarkets in Great Britain stripped their shelves of products made from eggs from Germany that were found to be contaminated with dioxin, which the EPA classifies as "a likely human carcinogen." (The most potent dioxin, 2,3,7,8-TCDD, was classified as a "known human carcinogen" in 1997 by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer.)

"The source of the dioxins has been traced to Harles & Jentzsch, a firm in Schleswig-Holstein where oils intended for use in bio-fuels were sold to 25 animal feed producers in November and December," according to the Daily Mail.

"Operations at 4,700 German farms have been closed and thousands of hens culled to prevent food supplies becoming contaminated. More than 8,000 chickens were ordered slaughtered and tainted food fears spread to Germany’s pork industry."

According to the EPA's website, "Dioxin levels in the environment have been declining since the early seventies and have been the subject of a number of federal and state regulations and clean-up actions; however, current exposures levels still remain a concern."

A group of 210 chemicals that share similar properties and structures, dioxins are some of the most toxic pollutants known to man. They are not intentionally produced. They have no known use. They are a by-product of industrial processes, such as waste incineration and the manufacturing of pesticides. They exist in the air, soil, water, sediment and animal fat.

According to a Michigan Department of Environmental Quality report, "Exposure to low levels of dioxins can cause a variety of effects in animals, such as cancer, liver damage, and disruption of hormones. In many species of animals, dioxin weakens the immune system and causes a decrease in the system’s ability to fight infection. In other animal studies, exposure to dioxin has caused reproductive damage and birth defects. Some animal species exposed to dioxins during pregnancy had miscarriages. The offspring of animals exposed to dioxins during pregnancy often had birth defects including skeletal deformities, kidney defects, weakened immune responses, and neurodevelopmental effects."

"Men have no ways to get rid of dioxin other than letting it break down according to its chemical half-lives," according to EJnet.org, an environmental justice web resource maintained by the Pennsylvania-based non-profit environmental research group ActionPA.org.

"Women, on the other hand, have two ways which it can exit their bodies: It crosses the placenta into the growing infant [or] it is present in the fatty breast milk, which is also a route of exposure which doses the infant, making breast-feeding for non-vegan/vegetarian mothers quite hazardous."

Noting that "blood dioxin levels in pure vegans have also been found to be very low in comparison with the general population," the group asserts that "the best way to avoid dioxin exposure is to reduce or eliminate your consumption of meat and dairy products by adopting a vegan diet."

GET INVOLVED
  • Learn more about transitioning to a healthy, ethical, animal-friendly and Earth-friendly vegan diet
  • Do you know these famous vegetarians?
  • Sign Pamela Anderson's pledge to explore vegetarianism for 30 days
  • Download a free vegetarian starter kit from FARM (Farm Animal Rights Movement)
  • Read the Yale College Vegetarian Society's "Top 10 Reasons to Become Vegetarian"
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  • Help Japan
  • Help children in Japan: Donate to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF's emergency appeal to help quake victims
  • Help animals in Japan: Donate to HSI International Disaster Fund
  • Sign the Humane Society 2011 Boycott to Save Seals
Also on 13.7 Billion Years: "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions.

image: michaelpickard

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Monday, March 28, 2011

Chemical Month | Lead

Unsafe limits of toxic lead in consumer products is still widespread

[Editor's note: March is "Chemical Month" on 13.7 Billion Years. From the neurotransmitters in our brains to the pesticides on our produce, from toxic substances found in most households to disease-preventing antioxidants, chemicals are both critical and dangerous to life on Earth. Each weekday this month, 13.7 Billion Years takes a look at a general chemical-based issue or a specific chemical from the vast laboratory of our daily lives.]

Enacted in 2008, the Lead Renovation, Repair, and Painting Rule and the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act set U.S. federal limits on lead content in products in an effort to protect children from dangerous lead exposure.

But according to a recent study published in The Journal of Environmental Health, these measures do not address "a newly recognized pathway of exposure to lead from the use of used consumer products in the home."

In the study, researchers from the State University of New York, Oregon State University and the University of California at Berkeley purchased and tested 28 used consumer items in the U.S. in 20034. Nineteen of the items exceeded the federal safe limits.

The study authors note "an ongoing public health threat involved in exposure to lead that is not addressed by current laws on regulations. Addressing the risk involved in this threat requires continued research, public education, and targeted regulatory action."

Last fall, the EPA denied a petition calling for the ban of lead ammunition, which filed by several environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), American Bird Conservancy, Association of Avian Veterinarians, Project Gutpile and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

"Lead is an extremely toxic element that we’ve sensibly removed from water pipes, gasoline, paint and other sources dangerous to people," according to a CBD statement.

"Yet toxic lead is still entering the food chain through widespread use of lead hunting ammunition and fishing tackle, poisoning wildlife and even threatening human health. At least 75 wild bird species in the United States are poisoned by spent lead ammunition, including bald eagles, golden eagles, ravens and endangered California condors. Thousands of cranes, ducks, swans, loons, geese and other waterfowl ingest lead fishing sinkers lost in lakes and rivers each year, often with deadly consequences."

GET INVOLVED
  • Learn more about the Center for Biological Diversity's "Get the Lead Out" campaign
  • Sign a Greenpeace petition urging President Obama to create a cancer prevention plan that stops the use of cancer-causing chemicals in products used every day
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
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URGENT ACTION ALERTS
  • Help Japan
  • Help children in Japan: Donate to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF's emergency appeal to help quake victims
  • Help animals in Japan: Donate to HSI International Disaster Fund
  • Sign the Humane Society 2011 Boycott to Save Seals
Also on 13.7 Billion Years: "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions.

image: A little antique toy truck. It was for sale at an antiques store for $39. It had more than 50,000 parts per million of lead. (credit: Oregon State University)
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Friday, March 25, 2011

Chemical Month | Pesticides and Dementia

A new study of French winegrowers has linked pesticide exposure to dementia

[Editor's note: March is "Chemical Month" on 13.7 Billion Years. From the neurotransmitters in our brains to the pesticides on our produce, from toxic substances found in most households to disease-preventing antioxidants, chemicals are both critical and dangerous to life on Earth. Each weekday this month, 13.7 Billion Years takes a look at a general chemical-based issue or a specific chemical from the vast laboratory of our daily lives.]

A study published in last month's issue of the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine has found that long-term exposure to pesticides may be linked to dementia.

The findings are based on neurobehavioral tests performed on over 600 farmers who work on vineyards in the Bordeaux region of France over a six-year period.

According to the study, the "evolution of performances over the follow-up period demonstrated that exposed subjects had the worst decreases in performance," suggesting that "long-term cognitive effects of chronic exposure to pesticides and raise the issue of the risk of evolution towards dementia."

"The mild impairment we observed raises the question of the potentially higher risks of injury in this population and also of the possible evolution towards neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease or other dementias," the researchers say, according to a British Medical Journal (BMJ) press release.

The researchers adding "numerous studies have shown that low cognitive performances are associated with risk of dementia" -- certainly not something that will make anyone raise that glass of Bordeaux.

GET INVOLVED
  • Download the Shopper's Guide to Pesticides (PDF or iPod version)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
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URGENT ACTION ALERTS
  • Help Japan
  • Help children in Japan: Donate to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF's emergency appeal to help quake victims
  • Help animals in Japan: Donate to HSI International Disaster Fund
  • Sign the Humane Society 2011 Boycott to Save Seals
Also on 13.7 Billion Years: "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions.

image: epeigne37
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Thursday, March 24, 2011

Chemical Month | Methyl Iodide, Part 2 (The Story of the Strawberry Continues)

The EPA is asking the American public: Should we ban the use of a carcinogenic pesticide?

[Editor's note: March is "Chemical Month" on 13.7 Billion Years. From the neurotransmitters in our brains to the pesticides on our produce, from toxic substances found in most households to disease-preventing antioxidants, chemicals are both critical and dangerous to life on Earth. Each weekday this month, 13.7 Billion Years takes a look at a general chemical-based issue or a specific chemical from the vast laboratory of our daily lives.]

On March 17, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson opened a public comment period on a legal petition by the non-profit Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) calling for a nationwide ban on the use of the pesticide methyl iodide, a known carcinogen.

This follows the controversial approval in December by California's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) for the use of methyl iodide on the state's extremely valuable strawberry fields.

PANNA has hailed the decision to open up the public conversation about a chemical that has been linked to late-term miscarriages and neurological disorders, what UCLA chemistry professor John Froines said was "without a question one of the most toxic chemicals on earth," according to CaliforniaWatch.org.

In a statement, PANNA said that after working for over 5 years to ban the pesticide, it was a "big break" that the EPA was "reconsidering its decision on methyl iodide -- despite intense pressure from Arysta, the largest private pesticide company in the world, to keep it on the market."

In their public petition, PANNA is urging Ms. Jackson to "initiate a public process with USDA and President Obama to direct agricultural spending toward a green agricultural economy. Federal spending should support innovative farmers who grow food without reliance on toxic chemicals including synthetic fumigant pesticides, and scientists who document effective practices for fumigant-free farming. These farmers and researchers steward our natural resources and offer important engines for rural economic growth."

Public comments will be accepted through April 29.

The future of California's strawberry fields and the public health hangs in the balance.

GET INVOLVED
  • Sign the PANNA petition to ban the use of methyl iodide
  • Submit your comment on the petition to ban methyl iodide to the EPA
  • Stop eating pesticide-covered strawberries -- just grow your own
  • Stop eating strawberries from far away -- just eat locally-grown strawberries
  • Download the Shopper's Guide to Pesticides (PDF or iPod version)
  • Follow 13.7 Billion Years on Twitter
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  • Help Japan
  • Help children in Japan: Donate to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF's emergency appeal to help quake victims
  • Help animals in Japan: Donate to HSI International Disaster Fund
  • Sign the Humane Society 2011 Boycott to Save Seals
Also on 13.7 Billion Years: "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions.

image: Colin Grey, Wikimedia Commons
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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Chemical Month | The Pellet with the Poison

This week is Poison Prevention Week, a reminder to beware the "pellet with the poison"

[Editor's note: March is "Chemical Month" on 13.7 Billion Years. From the neurotransmitters in our brains to the pesticides on our produce, from toxic substances found in most households to disease-preventing antioxidants, chemicals are both critical and dangerous to life on Earth. Each weekday this month, 13.7 Billion Years takes a look at a general chemical-based issue or a specific chemical from the vast laboratory of our daily lives.]

Hawkins: I've got it! I've got it! The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true! Right?
Griselda: Right. But there's been a change: they broke the chalice from the palace!
Hawkins: They *broke* the chalice from the palace?
Griselda: And replaced it with a flagon.
Hawkins: A flagon...?
Griselda: With the figure of a dragon.
Hawkins: Flagon with a dragon.
Griselda: Right.
Hawkins: But did you put the pellet with the poison in the vessel with the pestle?
Griselda: No! The pellet with the poison's in the flagon with the dragon! The vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true!
Hawkins: The pellet with the poison's in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true.
Griselda: Just remember that.

-- The Court Jester, 1956

The Court Jester is a 1956 musical-comedy starring Danny Kaye (as ex-carnival entertainer Hubert Hawkins), Glynis Johns, Basil Rathbone and Angela Lansbury about a struggle to restore the throne to the rightful heir, a baby. Poison was involved in the scheme.

The use of poison goes far back, recorded in Mesopotamian times. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all utilized what has been called the "coward's weapon."

But while a poison is generally considered to be a substance that can cause some kind of biological disturbance in a living organism, many chemicals become poisonous by virtue of quantity. An example is salt -- it is necessary in small amounts; a lot of it is fatal.

As 19th-century toxicologist and "father of British forensic medicine" Alfred Swaine Taylor famously noted, "a poison in a small dose is a medicine, and a medicine in a large dose is a poison."

Here are two statistics to consider this week, which is Poison Prevention Week:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2006, 74 percent of the 37,286 poisoning deaths in the United States were unintentional.

According to the 2008 Annual Report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers’ National Poison Data System, U.S. poison centers receive one call every 12.7 seconds.

And remember, "The pellet with the poison's in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true."

GET INVOLVED
  • Find out how to protect you and your family from poison
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  • Help Japan
  • Help children in Japan: Donate to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF's emergency appeal to help quake victims
  • Help animals in Japan: Donate to HSI International Disaster Fund
  • Sign the Humane Society 2011 Boycott to Save Seals
Also on 13.7 Billion Years: "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions.

image: The EU's standard toxic symbol, as defined by Directive 67/548/EEC. The skull and crossbones has long been a standard symbol for poison (Wikimedia Commons)
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Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Chemical Month | Radon

It is odorless, colorless, tasteless and radioactive. And your home may have dangerous levels of it

[Editor's note: March is "Chemical Month" on 13.7 Billion Years. From the neurotransmitters in our brains to the pesticides on our produce, from toxic substances found in most households to disease-preventing antioxidants, chemicals are both critical and dangerous to life on Earth. Each weekday this month, 13.7 Billion Years takes a look at a general chemical-based issue or a specific chemical from the vast laboratory of our daily lives.]

The noble gas radon, atomic number 86, is a naturally occurring decay product of uranium. And according to the EPA, it is the number one cause of lung cancer among non-smokers, and the second leading cause of lung cancer overall.

Because of its high level of radioactivity, radon has not been intensely studied by chemists, but it has made its mark on society, being responsible for about 21,000 lung cancer deaths in the United States every year. And almost 3,000 of these fatalities are among people who have never smoked. In many cases, it enters people's bodies in their own homes.

A 2005 North American study presented "compelling direct evidence of an association between prolonged residential radon exposure and lung cancer risk," and found "an 11 to 21 percent increased lung cancer risk at average residential radon concentrations of approximately 3.0 picocuries per liter of air, during an exposure period of five to 30 years. The lung cancer risk increased with increasing radon exposure."

One of the culprits -- granite countertops.

In a 2008 New York Times article, Kate Murphy noted a Geiger counter reading of a granite countertop in a New Jersey home found that it "was emitting radiation at levels 10 times higher than those...measured elsewhere in the house."

"The average person is subjected to radiation from natural and manmade sources at an annual level of 360 millirem (a measure of energy absorbed by the body), according to government agencies like the E.P.A. and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," Murphy writes. "The limit of additional exposure set by the commission for people living near nuclear reactors is 100 millirem per year. To put this in perspective, passengers get 3 millirem of cosmic radiation on a flight from New York to Los Angeles."

A granite countertop "might add a fraction of a millirem per hour and that is if you were a few inches from it or touching it the entire time."

"Radon in air is ubiquitous," notes the EPA. "Radon is found in outdoor air and in the indoor air of buildings of all kinds. EPA recommends homes be fixed if the radon level is 4 pCi/L (pico Curies per Liter) or more. Because there is no known safe level of exposure to radon, EPA also recommends that Americans consider fixing their home for radon levels between 2 pCi/L and 4 pCi/L. The average radon concentration in the indoor air of America’s homes is about 1.3 pCi/L."

GET INVOLVED
  • Learn more about the health risks of radon (EPA)
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  • Help Japan
  • Help children in Japan: Donate to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF's emergency appeal to help quake victims
  • Help animals in Japan: Donate to HSI International Disaster Fund
  • Sign the Humane Society 2011 Boycott to Save Seals
  • Sign for stronger animal welfare laws in India
  • Tell Walmart and Supervalu to stop selling endangered fish
  • Sign to stop the burning, mutilating and neglecting of animals at University of Texas
  • Sign to stop abuse of New York City carriage horses
  • Sign to protect radio-collared bears from hunters in Minnesota
  • Sign to support H.R. 835 Puppy Uniform Protection and Safety (PUPS) Act
  • Help America's mustangs survive and SAY NO to $12 million hike in BLM budget which would fund more cruel roundups
  • Tell BLM solar energy needs to be in areas with few environmental conflicts
Also on 13.7 Billion Years: "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions.

image: wchuang
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Monday, March 21, 2011

Chemical Month | Arsenic-Polluted Water in Bangladesh

Looking at the economic effect of the largest mass poisoning of a human population in history

[Editor's note: March is "Chemical Month" on 13.7 Billion Years. From the neurotransmitters in our brains to the pesticides on our produce, from toxic substances found in most households to disease-preventing antioxidants, chemicals are both critical and dangerous to life on Earth. Each weekday this month, 13.7 Billion Years takes a look at a general chemical-based issue or a specific chemical from the vast laboratory of our daily lives.]

In the 1970s, shallow groundwater wells were installed throughout Bangladesh, inadvertently tapping into naturally-occurring arsenic, a metalloid chemical element that is the cause of over 40 major groundwater contamination incidents around the world.

But in Bangladesh, the situation is extreme. Up to 20 million people in the nation are at risk for early death because of arsenic poisoning.

Now new research published online in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics has found that exposure to arsenic in rural Bangladesh is also toxic to the nation's economy, reducing the labor supply by 8 percent.

In a press release, lead author Richard Carson, professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, said, "This is a very large effect, larger than the increase in unemployment in the United States from the 'Great Recession'."

The release also notes that arsenic-contaminated water "is a worldwide problem, with impacts in the West Bengal part of India and parts of Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, China, Argentina and Chile. There are problems in some areas of the United States, too."

"Environment is not a luxury," Carson said. "Our paper shows that the environmentally related health problems are sufficiently large that they're holding back development."

A World Health Organization report estimates that "of the 125 million inhabitants of Bangladesh between 35 million and 77 million are at risk of drinking contaminated water," adding that "the scale of this environmental disaster is greater than any seen before; it is beyond the accidents at Bhopal, India, in 1984, and Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986."

Arsenic poisoning can cause a variety of neurological and cardiovascular problems, including neutropenia, high blood pressure, central nervous system dysfunction, anemia, leukemia and death.

The WHO report called the arsenic contamination of drinking water in Bangladesh the "largest mass poisoning of a population in history."

GET INVOLVED
  • Tell your government to support the Human Right to Water and Sanitation
  • Send a Blue Planet Project letter to your United Nations representative urging them to support the Human Right to Water and Sanitation
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URGENT ACTION ALERTS
  • Help Japan
  • Help children in Japan: Donate to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF's emergency appeal to help quake victims
  • Help animals in Japan: Donate to HSI International Disaster Fund
  • Sign the Humane Society 2011 Boycott to Save Seals
  • Sign for stronger animal welfare laws in India
  • Tell Walmart and Supervalu to stop selling endangered fish
  • Sign to stop the burning, mutilating and neglecting of animals at University of Texas
  • Sign to stop abuse of New York City carriage horses
  • Sign to protect radio-collared bears from hunters in Minnesota
  • Sign to support H.R. 835 Puppy Uniform Protection and Safety (PUPS) Act
  • Help America's mustangs survive and SAY NO to $12 million hike in BLM budget which would fund more cruel roundups
  • Tell BLM solar energy needs to be in areas with few environmental conflicts
Also on 13.7 Billion Years: "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions.

image: Gurumia
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