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Gainesville Representative introduces bill to protect waterways

Maia Botek
News Feed
Monday, November 15, 2021

“Nearly a million acres of estuaries and 9,000 miles of rivers and streams in the state of Florida are verified impaired for fecal indicator bacteria,” Berman said. “Thirty-five percent of the verified impaired bodies have been on the impaired list for at least eight years.”

A state representative from Gainesville filed a bill that could raise awareness about the quality of Florida’s waterways. HB 393 Public Bathing Places was filed by Democratic Rep. Yvonne Hinson of District 20 with SB 604 Safe Waterways Act by Democratic Sen. Lori Berman of District 31 and is now awaiting committee review. 

If passed, the legislation would require the Department of Health to create water quality testing procedures and schedules, post proper signage for contaminated bodies of water and redefine public bathing areas to include fresh, salt and brackish water used for swimming, diving or bathing.

“We’re trying to target areas where human beings tend to swim; but where human beings tend to swim, marine life tends to swim too, '' Hinson said. “We've had difficulty getting the current legislature to acknowledge climate change, which is one of the factors of what's happening to our water.” 

The bills are identical and were written with the assistance of the Calusa Waterkeepers, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting Florida’s coastal waterways. State and county departments routinely test water quality, but there are inconsistencies in signage and alerting the public, specifically inland, according to Berman.  

“Nearly a million acres of estuaries and 9,000 miles of rivers and streams in the state of Florida are verified impaired for fecal indicator bacteria,” Berman said. “Thirty-five percent of the verified impaired bodies have been on the impaired list for at least eight years.”

While Berman and Hinson said they are concerned about water quality, local officials have varying opinions about the legislation’s environmental impact for Alachua County. Lake Wauburg, one of the county’s three public bathing areas, has previously closed and issued warnings due to elevated levels of E. coli.

“I anticipate maybe one to possibly two more places that we might have to review results and issue advisories,” said Anthony Dennis, Alachua County’s environmental health director. “If there's a situation where we have to issue an advisory, is that gonna make the environment any better?” 

Hinson and Berman said the signage would likely be inexpensive to enact and could increase awareness about issues of contamination, something Dennis and Greg Owen, a Senior Planner within the water resources division at the Alachua County Department of Environmental Protection, agree with. 

“If it brings attention to areas that are lacking or susceptible to bacteria contamination, I could see it as being a good thing for raising that awareness,” Owen said. 

Berman said she hopes that with enough notification, the public will become alarmed and motivate local departments to take action in addressing the sources of contamination. 

Both bills are awaiting review, and Hinson and Berman must lobby committee chairs to include their respective bills in upcoming meeting agendas. In order to be presented to the governor, bills must pass through three committees and both houses of Florida’s Legislature. 

Because the bills are identical, only one needs to be signed by Gov. DeSantis in order to become a law, but updates and edits to one bill must be reflected in the other. 

On Nov. 3, the Senate referred Berman’s bill to the Environment and Natural Resources, Community Affairs and Appropriations committees and on Nov. 5, the House referred Hinson’s bill to the Professions & Public Health Subcommittee, Health Care Appropriations Subcommittee and Health & Human Services Committee. 

The bills are expected to be voted on when the committees meet for session in January.


Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of
Maia Botek

Maia Botek is a third-year journalism major and Spanish minor student at the University of Florida who has grown up in South Florida throughout her entire life. As the daughter of a Jamaican father and part-Norwegian mother, an understanding of cultures, diversity and the world around her has always been an important facet in Maia's life which has resulted in a love of the environment, travel and education. She loves spending time outdoors and with friends, especially at the beach, which she loves. Maia is interested in utilizing journalism to educate others on the importance of the Earth's natural resources and ensuring a sustainable and equitable future for all.

Obama, the Protagonist

Vinson Cunningham’s new novel takes the reader back to a time when many thought the nation’s first Black president had an answer for every American ailment.

Like so many others, I first watched him speak on the night of the 2004 Democratic convention, the year John Kerry became the nominee. He was still a state senator then, his face unlined, his head full of dark-brown hair. He humbly told the audience that his presence there was “pretty unlikely.” His Kenyan father had grown up herding goats; his paternal grandfather cooked for a British soldier. In a Baptist cadence, he quoted from the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s words are stirring on their own, but when a certain kind of orator gets hold of them, the effect can feel like thunder, or the Spirit. The country had tumbled into a new century after a contested election and the start of a war in Iraq. Barack Obama spun a convincing vision of the nation as “one people,” in which our ethnic, religious, and ideological differences mattered little.When I think about what Obama meant to me at the time, my eyes pool with water. I was fresh out of college, taken by the force of his intellect and the way his ideas seemed to cohere and hum. His ear for language was evident in his oratory and in his prose. Dreams From My Father, his first memoir, drew from a humanist tradition of American autobiography laid down by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Toni Morrison’s eulogy of Baldwin in 1987 seemed to foreshadow what many would feel about Obama in 2008: “You made American English honest … You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane.”And yet, it wasn’t enough; the reverie wouldn’t, couldn’t last. In Great Expectations, Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel, the New Yorker writer and critic assesses the hope and disillusionment of the Obama years in a thinly veiled political satire-cum-bildungsroman featuring an Obama-like junior senator as “the candidate,” as well as a multifarious cast of supporting characters who employ their savvy, money, and connections to get him elected as president. Cunningham takes the reader back to a time when many thought Obama had an answer for every American ailment: He would usher the country into a post-race era, offering white people grace and absolution while assuring Black people that they would hereafter get a fair shake.The novel is a keen look back at the failed promise of those early years, during which the country’s lofty expectations left little room for the candidate’s human fallibility—and obscured the reality of American politics. In this country, progress has usually happened in complicated, nonlinear ways: Hard-won advances are generally followed by forceful backlash and heartbreaking setbacks. Advances in civil rights, economic equality, health-care access, or environmental policy have often triggered reactionary codas; since at least the end of Reconstruction, momentum toward multiracial democracy has inflamed particularly vitriolic responses. Ultimately, Cunningham’s novel reminds the reader that simple solutions—the passage of one just law, the election of a single great leader—are seldom a match for American problems.[Read: The political novel gets very, very specific]The narrator—based on the author himself, who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign and in his White House—is David Hammond, a 22-year-old single father from uptown Manhattan. Floundering after dropping out of college, he joins the campaign as a fundraising assistant on the recommendation of the well-heeled mother of a teen boy he tutors. As the novel roves from Manhattan to Manchester, New Hampshire; from Los Angeles to Chicago, David, whose true ambition is to be a writer, uses his new role to sharpen his ear and eye. He’s middling at the minutiae of the job but great at interacting with people. He makes friends with his co-workers and stumbles into a tender love affair with another staffer named Regina. Along the way, he loses slivers of his innocence as he sees what lies beneath the campaign’s shimmering exterior: the candidate’s aloofness when he is offstage, the financial improprieties of a few wealthy patrons. Eventually, the blind allegiance of the candidate’s supporters—their belief that the campaign is a “move of God”—begins to feel foreboding.David often invokes the ecstatic mysticism of religious devotion as a metaphor for the candidate’s hold on his supporters. The senator “reminded me of my pastor,” David says early on, his regal posture bringing to mind a “talismanic maneuver meant to send forth subliminal messages about confidence and power.” One night, on the trail in New Hampshire, David tells Regina about a magic trick he’d witnessed as a teenager: While waiting outside of church with his friends, he’d watched as a magician performed a standard sleight of hand, then levitated a few inches off the city pavement. “Everybody screamed. It was mayhem,” David remembers. “Black people love magic,” Regina rejoins, through laughter. It is a detour in a novel of detours and roundabouts, and also a parable that smartly explains how the candidate’s fervent admirers could be so awed by his charisma that they missed the signs of trouble to come.Sometimes David allows himself to get carried away like everyone else. He thinks about how the candidate and his family had begun to embody some kind of national fantasy of a Black Camelot. “Maybe there was the hope that black, that portentous designation, could finally be subsumed into the mainstream in the way that Kennedy had helped Irish to be. That some long passage of travel was almost done,” he thinks at one point. In that same stream of thought, David suggests that the public’s belief in the candidate’s ability to dismantle the racial hierarchy is largely thanks to his symbolic appeal: It was, he observes, “mostly the look” of the candidate and his glamorous family—an elegant wife and two small daughters—that made supporters believe he could overcome racism. Who wouldn’t want to accept them?[Read: Our new postracial myth]Privy to the campaign’s disappointments and its weaknesses, David is clear-eyed where others are credulous. With the benefit of hindsight, the reader knows his skepticism would eventually be validated. In the years since Obama’s election, America has seen the birtherism movement, the rise of the Tea Party, Trump’s presidency, and the dismantling of cornerstone civil-rights victories, including key portions of the Voting Rights Act. Then, of course, there were Obama’s own shortcomings during his presidency, namely his capitulation to forces opposed to his most idealistic visions. He would pass a new health-care bill, but fall short of the goal of universal coverage he campaigned on. He would withdraw troops from Afghanistan but begin a series of what the political scientist Michael J. Boyle called “shadow wars,” which were “fought by Special Forces, proxy armies, drones, and other covert means.” According to the Council on Foreign Relations, drone strikes authorized by President Obama led to the deaths of nearly 4,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; more than 300 of them were civilians.When Cunningham’s novel closes on that fateful night in November, the night of the candidate’s victory, it’s an ending for David, a graduation, even. The book implies that he will go on to work for the new president, but unlike everyone else in that ecstatic moment, he looks to the coming years soberly, acknowledging that the campaign had spoken “a language of signs,” wherein the symbolism of the moment overwhelmed all else. Already, he seems to know that the country will see no grand, lasting transformation. For many Americans, who felt on a similar, actual night, that the world seemed on the precipice of change, the lessons would take much longer to learn.

EU's microplastics ban faces industry pushback

The European Union's bold ban on microplastics is now under threat from industry challenges and regulatory backpedaling.Hélène Duguy reports for Euronews.In short:The EU's comprehensive ban on intentionally added microplastics is being challenged by industry stakeholders seeking exemptions.Microplastics, pervasive and persistent, pose significant health risks, including increased chances of heart attacks and strokes.Regulatory backpedaling includes negotiations to potentially narrow the ban's scope, raising concerns about the effectiveness of environmental legislation.Why this matters:One of the primary difficulties in instituting bans or regulations on microplastics is their widespread use across various industries, including cosmetics, clothing and packaging. These particles result from the breakdown of larger plastic items, making it challenging to control their release into the environment.Check out EHN's extensive reporting on the health impacts of microplastics, including how they disrupt our digestion and microbiome and can combine with pollution to become even more toxic.

The European Union's bold ban on microplastics is now under threat from industry challenges and regulatory backpedaling.Hélène Duguy reports for Euronews.In short:The EU's comprehensive ban on intentionally added microplastics is being challenged by industry stakeholders seeking exemptions.Microplastics, pervasive and persistent, pose significant health risks, including increased chances of heart attacks and strokes.Regulatory backpedaling includes negotiations to potentially narrow the ban's scope, raising concerns about the effectiveness of environmental legislation.Why this matters:One of the primary difficulties in instituting bans or regulations on microplastics is their widespread use across various industries, including cosmetics, clothing and packaging. These particles result from the breakdown of larger plastic items, making it challenging to control their release into the environment.Check out EHN's extensive reporting on the health impacts of microplastics, including how they disrupt our digestion and microbiome and can combine with pollution to become even more toxic.

Poor dental health is linked to the heart disease and dementia. So why do we neglect it?

Research has repeatedly linked good oral hygiene with brain and heart health, yet insurance doesn't prioritize it

A new study published in The Journals of Gerontology Series A finds that if you don't take care of your teeth, you are more likely to suffer inflammation, reduced brain size and damage to your heart. At first glance, this may seem like a reach — what do teeth have to do with the brain and heart? But as one of the researchers, Dr. Benjamin Trumble, told Salon, our culture errs when "the way we think about health is that we split the body into two parts," with the mouth in one category and everything else in the other. "Somewhere along the line we lost this understanding when it comes to overall health and dental health." In fact, the health of your mouth profoundly impacts other areas of your body. The scientists behind the recent paper learned this by examining more than 700 sets of teeth — all among members of a little-known South American tribe. The Tsimané, an Indigenous people of lowland Bolivia, lead much simpler lives than the vast majority of humans. While the rest of us flourish/wallow in our world of post-industrial technology, this community leads a traditional lifestyle of foraging and growing their own food. They are not as exposed to the problems of pollution, low physical activity and poor diet that cause epidemic levels of heart and brain disease in industrialized societies. As a result, when researchers drew links between each individual's oral health and their cardiovascular and brain health, they could feel more comfortable that the findings were not confused by unrelated variables. The study found that though this community has generally poor oral hygiene, it also had low rates of dementia and cardiovascular disease. Nevertheless, individuals who had large amounts of damaged teeth possessed higher rates of inflammation, brain tissue loss and aortic valve calcification. By contrast, damaged and lost teeth were not associated with coronary artery calcium or thoracic aortic calcium. "I think that this really highlights the importance of oral health in overall health," Trumble, a professor at Arizona State University's Center for Evolution and Medicine, told Salon by email. Trumble pointed to the famous expression "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" as proof that people have always suspected a connection between health and examining an animal's teeth. Yet humans often culturally fail to apply the same logic to themselves that they do to horses. Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. "We are essentially living outside of the manufacturer's recommended warranty for our bodies." "Somewhere along the line we lost this understanding when it comes to overall health and dental health," Trumble said. "Now we differentiate health insurance from dental insurance, but really they both impact our health and aging." So why do we arbitrarily divide dental into its own separate form of health care, one that isn't covered equally by insurance? Indeed, teeth are often treated as a "cosmetic" problem, despite clear evidence to the contrary. In fact, the website for Covered California, the largest state-based health insurance marketplaces in the U.S., spells it out plainly: "Dental coverage for adults is not considered an essential health benefit, so dental coverage for adults is offered separately from health insurance plans. No financial assistance is available to purchase these dental plans." Yet even before this study, scientists had established strong links between oral health and inflammatory, cardiovascular and brain health. The new paper adds more clarity to that connection, however, by showing that it exists in a population that is free not only from the environmental scourges of industrialism and factory farming, but also its social injustices — particularly those that negatively impact oral health. The Tsimané "have far less of a socioeconomic gradient, and very little access to modern dentistry at all," Trumble said. "This makes it possible to actually examine associations between oral health and chronic disease without confounding social factors" — namely, the fact that industrialized societies like the United States tend to provide inferior dental care to people in lower socioeconomic conditions. "That is what really sets this paper apart — we can assess the association between dental health and cardiovascular and brain health independent of any confounding from socioeconomic status," Trumble said. The new paper also provides useful context to research done into how oral health is connected to other forms of health. A January paper in the journal BMC Oral Health found that dental cavities decrease the cerebral cortical thickness of the BANKSSTS, a region of the brain crucial for language-related functions and the most affected area in Alzheimer's disease. Similarly, a January paper in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology determined that people who use dentures are more likely to have coronary artery disease, strokes, myocardial infarctions, heart failures and type 2 diabetes. And a 2022 paper in the International Journal of Dentistry also determined that people with significant tooth loss and diabetes mellitus, as well as those with just significant tooth loss, were more likely to have elevated levels of serum C-reactive protein (CRP), a liver enzyme that indicates inflammation. It also found that people who regularly floss are more likely to have higher CRP levels. There is plenty we just don't understand about how our mouth and the rest of our health are intertwined. Just last week, researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle reported in Nature that a bacterium that lives in our mouths, known as Fusobacterium nucleatum, is linked to an increase in colorectal tumors. However, much of this previous research exists with the possibility of some outside factor, such as diet or environment, that could explain the link between the mouth and these conditions. Because of Trumble and the extensive research team that joined him — including anthropologists, cardiologists, neurologists, radiologists and dentists — researchers can now look at a study with a large cohort in which post-industrial society simply does not exist. The experience wasn't just educational — Trumble found it inspirational. "It has been one of the great honors of my life to get to work with the Tsimané for the last decade and half," Trumble said. "Modern urban life is evolutionarily novel — we were hunter gatherers for 99% of human history. The sedentary lifestyle we live today is very different from the rest of the human past." Because post-industrial city life is so unusual compared to what our physiology was designed to do, "we are essentially living outside of the manufacturer's recommended warranty for our bodies," Trumble said. "Most of human evolution occurred in traditional subsistence populations, but nearly all health research is done in urban centers, so we really don’t have a great idea of what health was like before electricity, cars and grocery stores." Trumble added, "Getting to work with a population like the Tsimané is an amazing experience, and gives a better idea of the health issues that people had prior to city life." Read more about teeth and health

Electric cars are the future. Why is the EPA pumping the brakes?

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I am willing to believe that electric cars are the future. In fact, I think they probably are. And that future can’t come too soon: America’s vast fleet of gas-powered vehicles emits noxious combustion byproducts that not only contribute to global warming but also can be hazardous to human health. Especially in cities, it will be better when these pollution machines are replaced by cleaner, quieter electrics.Naturally, the Biden administration wants to race toward that future. And just as naturally, there are better and worse ways to make that happen. And with its new tailpipe emissions rules, which would require more than half of all new cars to be electric by 2032, the administration has chosen one of the worse ones — the kind that risks delaying the brighter, greener tomorrow officials are trying to bring about.The only way to reach that tomorrow is in EVs that are undeniably more appealing than the gas guzzlers they’re meant to replace. For one thing, most American drivers are also American voters, who can unelect any politician who foists an unwanted EV on them. More important, most of the drivers who will steer the future aren’t Americans at all: They’re the billions of people living in poorer countries who would like to adopt a more comfortable, higher-carbon lifestyle.We are fooling ourselves if we think we can stop them from doing so by cutting back our own consumption to set a good example. They want to emit more carbon not because turnabout is fair play but for the same reasons you live in a home filled with electric lights and appliances, perhaps vacation in far-flung places, and might drive to the grocery store instead of walking.We’re rich enough that we’re often willing to pay something extra to make those choices cleaner and greener. But most of us aren’t that willing, which is why even Democratic politicians are frantic to keep gas prices from rising too high, never mind that costlier gas would obviously help reduce our emissions. Poorer people in other countries are likely to be even less willing to make those sorts of sacrifices for the sake of the environment.So the best way to get everyone into electric cars is to invest in research and development for the technologies that will make them the clearly superior choice: better batteries (and renewables to power them), better materials, cheaper production methods. The second-best way is to build infrastructure, such as charging stations, that will make it easier for consumers to choose EVs — and therefore for companies to invest in designing and building them.The worst way is to just mandate that companies sell them, which is what the Environmental Protection Agency is doing with its new emissions standards. For automakers to meet them, all-electric vehicles will have to account for at least 56 percent of new cars sold in 2032, with plug-in hybrids accounting for an additional 13 percent.This won’t make foreign consumers want to adopt them; indeed, it relieves automakers of the need to make a car that can entice consumers on its own. Yet it also risks a political backlash that actually slows the pace of adoption, if consumers revolt against a technology that’s not ready for prime time. Worryingly, these regulations dropped just as dealers were warning that EV sales — which had been accelerating nicely last year — were slowing down.It turns out there’s a big difference between selling an EV to a gung-ho early adopter and getting everyone else to make the switch from gas. Early adopters tend to be affluent and thus can afford the higher sticker price and insurance costs. So affluent, in fact, that most of those early adopters also own a gas-powered vehicle, which helps allay one of the most pressing concerns people have about buying an EV: “How do I charge it?”Charging is a snap if you own a single-family home with a garage, can afford to have a fast home charger installed and rarely drive farther than an EV can go on a single charge. But if you live in an apartment or have to park on the street, you are suddenly exposed to the maddening world of public charging. A Wall Street Journal reporter recently did a tour of public chargers in the Los Angeles area, which has a relatively robust charging infrastructure, only to find that 40 percent of them had serious issues.To its credit, the Biden administration has been trying to address the charging shortage; the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public chargers across the country by 2030. That said, that’s less than half of what McKinsey estimates will be needed to handle a scenario in which half of all new cars are EVs. Also, by December, we had only built … zero of them.Presumably, that pace will pick up a bit this year as kinks are ironed out. But it hardly inspires confidence that we’ll have the infrastructure necessary to entice most consumers to choose an electric car for their primary vehicle — which is what will have to happen for most cars sold to be electric-only. Mandating that change before you’ve got the infrastructure in place is putting the cart before the horse. Which is what some Americans could end up driving if they can’t figure out where to charge an EV.

Unsafe drinking water in U.S. prisons poses health risks, study finds

Nearly half of U.S. prisons may be exposed to harmful "forever chemicals" in their water supply, raising concerns over health inequities and human rights within the justice system.Sharon Udasin reports for The Hill.In short:A study found that 47% of prison facilities are potentially affected by PFAS pollution, impacting roughly 990,000 people, including juveniles.Researchers stress the vulnerability of incarcerated people to PFAS due to limited exposure mitigation options.The findings underscore environmental justice issues, noting the disproportionate representation of people from marginalized communities within the prison population.Key quote:"If you think of the incarcerated population as a city spread out over this vast archipelago of carceral facilities, it would be the fifth largest city in the country."— Nicholas Shapiro, senior author and medical anthropologist at the University of California, Los AngelesWhy this matters:Research indicates that a significant proportion of America's carceral facilities are located in areas likely contaminated with PFAS, exacerbating health risks for incarcerated populations, which are already in worse health overall compared to the general population. But PFAS is also a broad threat to U.S. drinking water: Last year, the EPA released proposed drinking water standards for six “forever chemicals.” The announcement came after years of pleas from exposed communities, scientists and health and environmental activists.

Nearly half of U.S. prisons may be exposed to harmful "forever chemicals" in their water supply, raising concerns over health inequities and human rights within the justice system.Sharon Udasin reports for The Hill.In short:A study found that 47% of prison facilities are potentially affected by PFAS pollution, impacting roughly 990,000 people, including juveniles.Researchers stress the vulnerability of incarcerated people to PFAS due to limited exposure mitigation options.The findings underscore environmental justice issues, noting the disproportionate representation of people from marginalized communities within the prison population.Key quote:"If you think of the incarcerated population as a city spread out over this vast archipelago of carceral facilities, it would be the fifth largest city in the country."— Nicholas Shapiro, senior author and medical anthropologist at the University of California, Los AngelesWhy this matters:Research indicates that a significant proportion of America's carceral facilities are located in areas likely contaminated with PFAS, exacerbating health risks for incarcerated populations, which are already in worse health overall compared to the general population. But PFAS is also a broad threat to U.S. drinking water: Last year, the EPA released proposed drinking water standards for six “forever chemicals.” The announcement came after years of pleas from exposed communities, scientists and health and environmental activists.

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