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How to investigate toxic lead lurking in your community’s soil

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Monday, April 22, 2024

Lead poisoning is often treated as if it’s a problem of the past. But its harmful legacy lingers today, particularly in the soil of urban centers across the United States.  One in every two American children under the age of 6 tested between late 2018 and early 2020 had detectable levels of lead in their blood. Studies show soil exposure is a major reason.  The lead pumped out of exhaust pipes and industrial smokestacks decades ago can still be found in soil. Lead paint used extensively throughout the first half of the 20th century remains on the interior and exterior walls of many homes, degrading to chips and dust that also end up in soil. And although the U.S. began phasing out lead in automobile gasoline and consumer paint in the 1970s, new lead pollution continues to be dumped on communities every year from industrial sites and the aviation gas used by small aircraft.  Yet while the threat of lead exposure via paint and water is well documented, soils aren’t systematically tested and mapped to prevent exposure to this invisible neurotoxin. The Center for Public Integrity and Grist have created a toolkit to help fill these information gaps and arm journalists and community members with the skills needed to do their own testing and analysis. The detailed guide walks readers through how to test the soil, map their results and investigate potential sources, both present and past.  Center for Public Integrity / Grist As part of this effort, Public Integrity and Grist will host several training workshops on the major tools and takeaways from the new guide. For journalists interested in coverage ideas and information about testing, join us either April 23 or April 25, both at 1 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific). For those interested in learning more about how to tackle soil lead contamination in their communities, join us April 30 at 1 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific). Register here. You’ll also get an invitation to an additional brainstorming session to further tailor these approaches to your area. Experts say that identifying the environmental sources of contamination is key to preventing lead poisoning in children. Once a child has been exposed, the damage cannot be reversed, which makes environmental testing and mapping imperative.  Decades of research have shown the lasting harm for children exposed to lead, from brain development impacts — the capacity to learn, focus, and control impulses — to later health risks like coronary heart disease. No amount, scientists say, is safe.  Our toolkit offers suggestions no matter what stage you’re at in your journey to learn about soil lead contamination. If you’d like to know what existing data indicates, for example, this map referenced in the toolkit shows how common elevated lead levels are in children by census tract or ZIP code in 34 states. Public health agencies fail to adequately test children’s blood for lead exposure, research shows, but existing data can point to potential trouble areas for soil, paint, or water exposure.     If you’d like to know whether the soil in your city might be contaminated but don’t have the resources to conduct widespread testing, you can start small by testing in your backyard or a handful of properties in your neighborhood. The toolkit includes information about the online portal Map My Environment, an initiative that allows you to send in test samples to be analyzed for free. You’ll also see recommendations on lead interventions. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to investigate toxic lead lurking in your community’s soil on Apr 22, 2024.

New resources from the Center for Public Integrity and Grist aim to teach residents and reporters how to conduct their own research.

Lead poisoning is often treated as if it’s a problem of the past. But its harmful legacy lingers today, particularly in the soil of urban centers across the United States. 

One in every two American children under the age of 6 tested between late 2018 and early 2020 had detectable levels of lead in their blood. Studies show soil exposure is a major reason. 

The lead pumped out of exhaust pipes and industrial smokestacks decades ago can still be found in soil. Lead paint used extensively throughout the first half of the 20th century remains on the interior and exterior walls of many homes, degrading to chips and dust that also end up in soil. And although the U.S. began phasing out lead in automobile gasoline and consumer paint in the 1970s, new lead pollution continues to be dumped on communities every year from industrial sites and the aviation gas used by small aircraft. 

Yet while the threat of lead exposure via paint and water is well documented, soils aren’t systematically tested and mapped to prevent exposure to this invisible neurotoxin.

The Center for Public Integrity and Grist have created a toolkit to help fill these information gaps and arm journalists and community members with the skills needed to do their own testing and analysis. The detailed guide walks readers through how to test the soil, map their results and investigate potential sources, both present and past. 

Center for Public Integrity / Grist

As part of this effort, Public Integrity and Grist will host several training workshops on the major tools and takeaways from the new guide. For journalists interested in coverage ideas and information about testing, join us either April 23 or April 25, both at 1 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific).

For those interested in learning more about how to tackle soil lead contamination in their communities, join us April 30 at 1 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific). Register here. You’ll also get an invitation to an additional brainstorming session to further tailor these approaches to your area.

Experts say that identifying the environmental sources of contamination is key to preventing lead poisoning in children. Once a child has been exposed, the damage cannot be reversed, which makes environmental testing and mapping imperative. 

Decades of research have shown the lasting harm for children exposed to lead, from brain development impacts — the capacity to learn, focus, and control impulses — to later health risks like coronary heart disease. No amount, scientists say, is safe. 

Our toolkit offers suggestions no matter what stage you’re at in your journey to learn about soil lead contamination. If you’d like to know what existing data indicates, for example, this map referenced in the toolkit shows how common elevated lead levels are in children by census tract or ZIP code in 34 states. Public health agencies fail to adequately test children’s blood for lead exposure, research shows, but existing data can point to potential trouble areas for soil, paint, or water exposure.    

If you’d like to know whether the soil in your city might be contaminated but don’t have the resources to conduct widespread testing, you can start small by testing in your backyard or a handful of properties in your neighborhood. The toolkit includes information about the online portal Map My Environment, an initiative that allows you to send in test samples to be analyzed for free. You’ll also see recommendations on lead interventions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to investigate toxic lead lurking in your community’s soil on Apr 22, 2024.

Read the full story here.
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Forty Years After the Bhopal Disaster, the Danger Still Remains

In many ways, we all live in Bhopal now. We must continue to fight for a future in which we all have the right to live in healthy environments.

Forty years ago this month, a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, sprung a toxic gas leak, exposing half a million people to toxic fumes. Thousands of people lost their lives in the immediate aftermath, with the death toll climbing to more than 20,000 over the next two decades. Countless others, including children of survivors, continue to endure chronic health issues. In the United States, the events in Bhopal ignited a grassroots movement to expose and address the toxic chemicals in our water, air, and neighborhoods. In 1986, just two years after the disaster, this growing awareness led Congress to pass the first National Right to Know Act, which requires companies to publicly disclose their use of many toxic chemicals. In India, Bhopal victims have had a long struggle for justice. In 1989, survivors flew to a Union Carbide shareholders meeting in Houston to protest the inadequate compensation for the trauma they’d suffered. The settlement awarded each Bhopal victim was a mere $500—which a spokesperson for Dow Chemical, Union Carbide’s parent company, called “plenty good for an Indian.”  Union Carbide had the survivors arrested before they could enter the meeting. Meanwhile, their abandoned chemical factory was still leaking toxic chemicals into the surrounding neighborhoods and drinking water.  Nevertheless, Bhopal survivors never stopped fighting. They opened a free clinic to treat the intergenerational health effects caused by the disaster. They marched 500 miles between Bhopal and New Delhi. They staged hunger strikes. They created memorials to the disaster and established a museum to ensure that the horrors of their collective past are not forgotten.    The survivors even obtained an extradition order for Union Carbide’s former CEO, Warren Anderson, but the U.S. government never acted on that request. Forty years later, the factory in Bhopal has never been properly cleaned and is still leaking poison.  Unfortunately, the kinds of chemicals that flow through the veins of Bhopal survivors also flow through ours. The petrochemical industry has brought us together in a perverse solidarity, having chemically trespassed into places all over the world. According to one figure, Americans are exposed to dangerous chemical fires, leaks, and explosions about once every two days. In one dramatic example in early 2023, a rail tanker filled with vinyl chloride derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, forcing the evacuation of 2,000 residents.  Nearly all Americans now carry toxic substances known as PFAS in our bodies. These have been linked to cancer, liver and kidney disease, and immune dysfunction. And the continued burning of fossil fuels is killing millions of people each year around the world through air pollution.  Petrochemical and fossil fuel companies know they can only survive if they avoid liability for the damage they are doing to our health and the planet’s ecosystems. That’s why they are heavily invested in lobbying to prevent any such accountability. Polluting industries are certain to have strong allies in the coming Trump Administration, which plans to open even more land to fossil fuel production and, under the blueprint for conservative governance known as Project 2025, to slash environmental and public health regulations. But we can take inspiration from the people of Bhopal, whose fierce commitment to health and justice sparked a global movement. Earlier this month, on the fortieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, congressional allies of this movement including U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and U.S. Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, and Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, introduced a resolution designating December 3 as National Chemical Disaster Awareness Day. “Chemical disasters are often the result of corporations cutting corners and prioritizing profits over safety,” said Merkley, who chairs the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee. “These catastrophes cloud communities with toxic fumes, upending lives and threatening the health and property of those living and working close by.” He called for “stronger laws to prevent chemical disasters and keep our communities and workers safe.” This growing global alliance, which has been called the largest movement for environmental health and justice in history, is fighting for a future in which everyone has the right to live in a healthy environment. It’s a movement that unites us all. Because in many ways, we all live in Bhopal now. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service. Gary Cohen is the president of Health Care Without Harm and a long time member of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal. Read more by Gary Cohen December 18, 2024 3:25 PM

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Study Miscalculation Has Everyone Talking about Black Plastic Spatulas Again. Experts Are Still Concerned

The scientists behind a popular study on the health effects of flame retardants in black plastic cooking utensils and toys made a calculation error but still say their revised findings are alarming

Should you throw out your black plastic spatula? A recent study that reported alarming levels of several flame retardants in common black-colored plastic items (including cooking utensils, toys and hair products) had many people suddenly taking stock of their inky array of plastic kitchenware and considering wood or metal alternatives. And the reasons for the concern were understandable: the study’s findings, published in Chemosphere, highlighted potential health effects from exposure to the flame retardants, particularly decabromodiphenyl ether (decaBDE)—a chemical the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned in 2021 for its apparent links to cancer and reproductive, developmental and immunologic toxicity effects.But this week the study’s authors issued a correction that suggests exposure to decaBDE from the tested products isn’t as close to the EPA’s safety reference level as they initially thought. The decaBDE exposure they estimated from the screened products is still correct, but it’s one tenth of the reference dose. The study had miscalculated the comparison by an order of magnitude.The amount of flame retardants in such products is “not as harmful, with respect to the EPA guidance, as [the researchers] originally stated, although, with these chemicals, they may be harmful when you’re exposed to small amounts over a long period of time,” says Andrew Turner, a biogeochemist at the University of Plymouth in England, who wasn’t involved in the research and studies the disposal and recycling of plastic consumer goods. “It’s difficult to put numbers on these chemicals.”On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The study authors issued an apology for the mistake in which they maintained that the “calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper.”“Our results still show that when toxic additives are used in plastic, they can significantly contaminate products made with recycled content that do not require flame retardancy,” says Megan Liu, a co-author of the recent study and science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future, an environmental health research and advocacy group. “The products found in this study to contain hazardous flame retardants included items with high exposure potential, such as things that touch our food, as well as toys, which come in contact with kids.”Why might some black plastics contain flame retardants? Flame retardants are required in certain products (often including computers, TVs and other common electronic items) to meet fire safety regulations. To reduce the amount of e-waste and fossil fuels needed to make new plastics, some of these items are recycled into black plastics. But the problem is that “you could also recycle the flame retardants and other chemicals that are associated with that plastic,” says Stuart Harrad, an environmental chemist at the University of Birmingham in England, who wasn’t involved in the paper. “Now that’s fine to some degree, I suppose, if you’re only recycling the plastic into uses like TV sets, where you need to meet fire safety regulations. But the point is here is that that isn’t happening.”The new study’s main goal was to identify any flame retardant chemicals in various common products. The researchers screened 203 items, ranging from plastic sushi take-out trays to toy necklaces—and found 17 of them were contaminated with high levels of flame retardants. Fourteen of those products contained high levels of decaBDE.The U.S. has largely banned decaBDE and other polybrominated-diphenyl-ether-based flame retardants. New electronic goods use safer flame retardants, but older electronics that contain decaBDE could still be in many households or might have been only recently tossed out for recycling, Turner says. “When you talk about some electronic devices, they last quite a long time,” he adds. These older devices might only be reaching recycling plants now.The new study’s findings generally line up with past evidence that recycled plastics—and flame retardants—can end up in toys and cooking utensils, Harrad says. But it’s been unclear whether the mere presence of flame retardants in a cooking utensil pose any health threat to humans; there are many contributing factors, including the source, the dose, the duration of exposure and any other chemicals that may be present. In a 2018 study Harrad and his colleagues tested potential exposure from black plastic cooking utensils and found that uptake through the skin from simply holding them was negligible. But when they tested them in prolonged cooking experiments with hot oil, about 20 percent of the flame retardants in a utensil transferred into the oil on average. “That’s really because the oil, particularly hot oil, is going to be a pretty good way of extracting these chemicals,” Harrad says.How did the miscalculation occur?The authors of the new study estimated humans’ potential exposure to decaBDE from the plastic products by using the calculation in Harrad’s 2018 study. They applied this calculation to the median levels of decaBDE detected in the products they tested. This wound up being an estimated 34,700 nanograms per day of decaBDE. They then compared that figure with the EPA’s reference dose of 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day. (Some researchers note that this measurement was derived from lab tests and animal models, not direct human testing). To better assess human risk, the scientists calculated a reference dose based on a 60-kg (132-pound) person and initially found 42,000 ng per day, a value alarmingly close to the 34,700 ng per day of exposure they estimated from the new data. But 7,000 multiplied by 60 is actually 420,000. This may have been a simple math error, but the correction massively reduces how close the amount of exposure is to the maximum acceptable limit.The figure with the miscalculation was “contextualizing the levels that we saw in our study, thinking that it could be helpful for people,” Liu says. “This was really just one part of our study that isn’t even part of our key findings.”She and her co-authors have emphasized that the error shouldn’t detract from one of the study’s main conclusions: that none of these flame-retardant chemicals, especially those that have been banned, should be found, in any amount, in these products in the first place.“They're probably banging their head in frustration when they found out they made that calculation error,” Harrad says, adding that the rest of their findings “were perfectly plausible.”“The study does highlight the fact that we’ve not sorted this out yet—that we’re still finding these chemicals coming through into new goods that contain recycled plastics,” Harrad says. “We do need to step up our efforts to isolate these chemicals from waste and make sure that they don't get recycled.”So should you really ditch your black plastic spatula? Harrad says you should avoid leaving it in a hot pan or pot for long periods of time. Some experts don’t recommend reheating food in black plastic containers, although studies haven’t confirmed if this causes chemicals to leach into food. Importantly, “if you see that your black utensil is damaged in any way, just [get rid of it] and go for something else,” Turner says—pieces of the plastic could potentially break off into food.When looking for new cooking ware, Turner says that it’d be more sustainable, and potentially safer, to reduce the use of black plastic items and opt for a material or color that’s more easily recyclable. Liu says wood, stainless steel or silicone products are some safer alternatives. She adds, however, that people can’t “shop” their way out of a larger societal issue. “We can’t expect that everyone can immediately switch over to safer alternatives,” Liu says. “That’s ultimately why we’ve been calling on greater regulatory action at both the corporate and government level to regulate and restrict these harmful chemicals.”

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Computer Modeling Shows Carcinogen From Goodyear Plant Is Invading Niagara Falls Neighborhoods

This story was originally published by Public Health Watch and WBFO. Recent computer modeling shows that the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company’s chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, is releasing a bladder carcinogen into nearby neighborhoods at levels up to seven times the state’s safety guideline. The modeling, done by the New York State Department […]

The modeling, by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, shows that levels of ortho-toluidine in some areas are seven times the state’s safety guideline.By Jim Morris and Emyle WatkinsThis story was originally published by Public Health Watch and WBFO.

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Microplastics may be leading to lung and colon cancer, study shows

New research published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology offers evidence that microplastics are harming human health.

When a car rolls down a freeway, a fine spray of microplastics spews out from its tires. When you wash your clothes, millions of tiny synthetic microfibers spill into waterways.And those tiny pieces of plastic may be harming our health, a new study shows.In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco evaluated dozens of studies in mice and humans to learn how microplastics may be harming digestive, respiratory and reproductive health. They found that these shards — which are now virtually everywhere in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat — are suspected of links to colon cancer and lung cancer.

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Are Microplastics In the Air Putting Your Fertility At Risk?

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterWEDNESDAY, Dec. 18, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Microscopic plastic particles in the air could be contributing to...

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterWEDNESDAY, Dec. 18, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Microscopic plastic particles in the air could be contributing to a wide variety of health problems, including lung and colon cancers.Tires and degrading garbage shed tiny pieces of plastic which become airborne, creating a form of air pollution that’s not very well understood, a new review says.“These microplastics are basically particulate matter air pollution, and we know this type of air pollution is harmful,” said researcher Tracey Woodruff, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.Microplastics are less than 5 millimeters in size, smaller than a grain of rice, researchers said in background notes.Companies around the world produce nearly 460 million tons of plastic each year, and that’s projected to increase to 1.1 billion tons by 2050, researchers said.A major source of airborne plastic is driving, researchers noted. Tires wear down as they rub against the road surface, sending microplastics into the air.For the review, published Dec. 18 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, researchers analyzed data gathered on about 3,000 prior studies.The results showed that airborne microplastics can contribute to cancer, lung problems and infertility.Most of the studies in the review used animals, but researchers said the conclusions likely also apply to humans.“We urge regulatory agencies and policy leaders to consider the growing evidence of health harms from microplastics, including colon and lung cancer,” lead researcher Nicholas Chartres, a senior research fellow with the University of Sydney, said in a UCSF news release. “We hope state leaders will take immediate action to prevent further exposures.”SOURCE: University of California, San Francisco, news release, Dec. 18, 2024Copyright © 2024 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

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