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Health
by Miro Korenha and Alexandra Patel When you visit your doctor it’s usually to remedy something that’s bothering you or a routine preventative visit, but during those visits has your doctor ever talked to you about climate change and how it might be affecting your health? Even if your doctor hasn’t, a growing number of […]
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In 2018, then EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt promised to designate a toxic firefighting chemical called Per/Polyfluorinated Substances, also known as PFAS, as a hazardous substance that could be regulated, but since then has done nothing about the 610 sites in 43 states contaminated by PFAS, including 117 military sites, and the nearly 500 industrial sites that are potentially discharging PFAS into the air and water, according to a recent study by the Environmental Working Group.
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The study in Nature’s Scientific Reports surveyed people about how they felt and how much time they had spent out of doors, and the study’s authors found that the participants were more likely to report feeling well if they had spent more than 120 minutes out of doors over the past week, with little difference between key groups (such as the elderly) or how the outdoor time was spent (longer versus shorter outdoor activities). The benefits peaked between 3 and 5 hours, with no further reported well-being gain after that.
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According to a new study in the journal Science Advances, meeting the Paris Climate Agreement’s goals of keeping the rise of global average temperatures to 1.5° C could substantially mitigate heat-related mortality in U.S. cities. This new study is one of the first to investigate how future climate scenarios might impact heat-related fatalities in […]
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Between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a trail of 150 petroleum factories creates a glaring backdrop of smokestacks behind the Mississippi River and a perpetual fog along the banks. Courtesy of its flat ground, an abundance of carbon-rich decay, and the Mississippi’s inflowing fresh water, Louisiana has been home to one of the most rampant […]
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This Memorial Day we honor the military service of Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice defending our nation. In April of 2018, the Department of Defense provided Congress a list of contaminated U.S. military bases — the document, according to Healthline, identified 401 active installations in the United States with at least one area where […]
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The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), have for more than two decades sponsored a network of centers that study children’s environmental health from before birth, but now the EPA has decided not to renew the support when it runs out in July.
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A jury in California awarded more than $2 billion to a couple who sued Monsanto saying that exposure to the weed-killer Roundup caused them to contract cancer, including $55 million in “compensatory” damages to make them whole for their injuries, and $2 billion in punitive damages to punish Monsanto for its reckless disregard for human health.
Continue Reading 421 wordsIn anesthesiology, there are two primary gasses used to put patients under for their procedures–sevoflurane and desflurane. Generally during surgery whatever the patient does not inhale is pumped outside at a detriment to our planet because both gasses are potent greenhouse gasses. But as anesthesiologist Brian Chesebro discovered, desflurane is 20 times as powerful in […]
Continue Reading 418 wordsCalifornia’s tough environmental regulations — and its divide with the Trump Administration on all things environment — just got bigger. The San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post reported yesterday that California is placing a ban on agricultural use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which is used on a wide variety of crops “from apples to walnuts” because it is harmful to the farmworkers who spray it and children who ingest it.
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The Department of Agriculture (USDA) ordered Tyson Foods to recall nearly 12 million pounds of frozen chicken strips because they may be contaminated with pieces of metal. There were six incidences of consumer complaints of metal in the chicken, three of which resulted in injury.
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This week the Environmental Protection Agency maintained in a new decision that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used herbicide Roundup, does not cause cancer and is safe for human use. This decision comes despite thousands of lawsuits against the chemical’s manufacturer Monsanto and its parent company Bayer arguing that exposure to Roundup causes […]
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