Health | Mother Jones Mother Jones logo en How Big a Problem Is Lead Contamination in Your County? <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>The crisis in Flint, Michigan, has shed new light on an old problem: Despite <a href="" target="_blank">decades of studies</a> showing the irreversible developmental and neurological effects of lead, no federal agency tracks&nbsp;where&nbsp;lead contamination is a problem, and what the source of it may be.</p> <p>"No one's done the kind of mapping of lead that people are clamoring for," says Dr. Jeffrey Griffiths, a public health professor at Tufts University and the former chair of the EPA's Drinking Water Committee. When it comes to tracking lead, he says, "there's no way you can say we're doing an adequate&nbsp;job."</p> <p>Which got us wondering: What do we know about lead contamination&nbsp;around the country&mdash;and what do we need to find out?</p> <p><b>Where does lead contamination come from?</b> Most of us associate lead poisoning with paint, which until the 1970s often contained&nbsp;lead as a colorant. While&nbsp;extreme cases of lead poisoning often come from kids eating paint chips in old houses, research today&nbsp;indicates that the majority of lead exposure comes from other, less tracked&nbsp;environmental factors. (For more, check out my colleague Kevin Drum's acclaimed <a href="" target="_blank">deep dive</a> on the matter.) Cars used lead-based gasoline for decades, depositing lead particles&nbsp;in soil near streets and highways. While lead was effectively removed from gas in the '80s, a <a href="" target="_blank">number of studies</a> have shown that lead still turns up at alarming levels in that soil, particularly in urban areas&mdash;and that the more lead there is in the soil, the more lead kids have in their bloodstreams.</p> <p>Lead exposure from water is less researched, but Flint has scientists worried that lead water lines could be a major source of exposure, particularly in cities with aging infrastructure.&nbsp;The Environmental Protection Agency requires utilities to test water for high levels of lead, but "what's clear to us now is that the amount of lead testing that's being done isn't enough, and the method itself isn't very good," Griffiths says. "Things can fall through the cracks when it comes to what the state has the capacity to do." It's not uncommon for cities to test only a&nbsp;handful of homes for lead, to discount the highest readings as not representative, and&nbsp;to go for months <a href="" target="_blank">without disclosing</a> high lead levels to the public.</p> <p><strong>Do we know which areas are most contaminated?</strong> The short answer is no. No federal agency tracks lead in urban soil, though&nbsp;scientists have tracked the problem in <a href="" target="_blank">individual cities</a>. Ideally, when lead shows up at high levels in drinking water, utilities report to the state and their customers that they are out of compliance with the rules. But neither the utility nor the state is required&nbsp;to keep a public repository of the data collected, making it nearly impossible to track which communities are most at risk. Henry Henderson, the director of the Midwest division of the Natural Resources Defense Council, attributes this lack of comprehensive data largely to a lack of funding and political will. Lead-related projects, he says, are "often stigmatized as just a sinkhole of meaningless environmental spending."</p> <p><strong>So what data do we have? </strong>The closest&nbsp;we have to a national dataset showing where lead is a problem comes&nbsp;from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In exchange for funding to track lead poisoning, states voluntarily report the number of children with high blood lead levels in each county, based on information gathered during&nbsp;routine doctor's appointments.&nbsp;The result is county-level data showing the number of children under five years old&nbsp;who have blood lead levels higher&nbsp;than 5 micrograms per deciliter (5 &micro;g/dL), which the CDC classifies as "dangerous."</p> <p>This system, as the map below shows, is far from perfect. Only 26 states have supplied the CDC with recent data.&nbsp;In many states, that&nbsp;data is from 2009. And in 13 states&mdash;primarily in the West&mdash;the data isn't reported at all.</p> <p>When asked why the reporting isn't mandatory, CDC spokeswoman Christina Cope wrote, "We do not have a contract or other mechanism to require reporting. In many of the states we don't fund, there are no staff to do this work."</p> <p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="500" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" msallowfullscreen="msallowfullscreen" oallowfullscreen="oallowfullscreen" src="//" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="100%"></iframe></p> <p><strong>Which counties have the highest levels of lead poisoning?</strong> Before we get there, a few disclaimers: Some researchers also have concerns about blood lead levels as a metric, particularly since they spike for only a few weeks or months after exposure. Furthermore, many counties that recorded a high incidence of lead-poisoned kids also tested very few children.&nbsp;Houston County, Alabama, for example, has the highest rate of lead poisoning according to the CDC&mdash;more than 50 percent have levels about 10&nbsp;&micro;g/dL&mdash;but only a dozen children were tested in 2014. And finally, not all cases are reported: The CDC estimates that on average, about 2 percent of cases of children with high lead levels are missing from its data.</p> <p>Here's a spreadsheet of the counties in the 26 states that did report to the CDC:</p> <p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="560" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" msallowfullscreen="msallowfullscreen" oallowfullscreen="oallowfullscreen" src="//" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="100%"></iframe></p> <p><strong>What's next in the world of lead policy?</strong> The latest news is that the US House of Representatives <a href="" target="_blank">passed a bill</a> Wednesday that, in addition to providing aid for Flint, would clarify that the EPA is required to notify the public in the case of high lead levels in water and would require the agency to come up with a better way to communicate between utilities, states, and consumers.</p> <p>But the NRDC's Henderson, with many others, is calling for an overhaul of the way the federal government tracks and reports lead contamination, which would loop in agencies like the CDC, the EPA,<strong> </strong>and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.&nbsp;"There is not an adequate, overarching national plan to deal with the multiple vectors of delivery of this neurotoxin, and we need to address that," Henderson says. So far, there are no signs of that changing<strong>&nbsp;</strong>anytime soon.</p></body></html> Environment Econundrums Health Top Stories Fri, 12 Feb 2016 11:00:15 +0000 Julia Lurie 296336 at Female Veterans Face Pitiful Health Care <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>It's been a big few months for women in the armed forces. In December, Defense Secretary Ash Carter <a href="" target="_blank">announced</a> that for the first time, all military jobs would be <a href="" target="_blank">open to women</a>&mdash;including elite combat positions. On February 4, following the advice of top officials in the Army and Marine Corps, House Republicans <a href="" target="_blank">introduced</a> legislation that would require women to register for the draft.</p> <p>So, how prepared is the Department of Veterans Affairs for the influx of female veterans? When it comes to women's health care, apparently not very ready. If you're among the growing population of female veterans, you might have trouble finding a gynecologist, getting a mammogram,<strong> </strong>or preparing to have<strong> </strong>a baby in many of the country's VA medical facilities. Check out the statistics:</p> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%"> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/veterans_cards2_cp%5B1%5Dsm%5B3%5D-01_0.png"></div> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/veterans_cards2_cp%5B1%5Dsm%5B3%5D_Artboard%201C.png"></div> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/veterans_cards2_cp%5B1%5Dsm%5B3%5D_Artboard%202.png"></div> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/veterans_cards2_cp%5B1%5Dsm%5B3%5D_Artboard%202A.png"></div> </div> <p>The lack of health services for female veterans is partly due to low patient numbers, according to Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain who formerly worked on the VA secretary's advisory committee for women veterans. The veteran population is still about 90 percent male. Some VA facilities don't have enough female patients to get federal certification for mammography services, so women are referred elsewhere. In other cases, facilities only have part-time gynecologists who visit a few times a week, or they refer women to gynecology services through community care providers.</p> <p>And many VA hospitals were built several decades ago with male patients in mind, so there aren't enough private rooms for women. The situation is somewhat better for military women before they become veterans: While they're still active duty, they get health insurance through the Defense Department, whose medical system offers more women-specific treatment because it also cares for military spouses and family members. But the VA's medical system doesn't treat family members. Sometimes, Manning adds, "a woman veteran goes to the hospital and is asked whose wife she is or what she's doing there."</p> <p>"I remember my nurse was taking my vitals," says De'Cha LaVeau, a 38-year-old Navy veteran. "She leaned over and whispers to me, 'I'm so sorry for having to ask you this, but when was your last menstrual cycle?' And I remember thinking to myself, why are you sorry for asking me that? Why are you making me feel embarrassed to tell you what I'm supposed to tell my health care provider?"</p> <p>Female vets also deal with spotty coverage when it comes to family planning. In 2013, President Barack Obama signed <a href="" target="_blank">a law</a> giving active-duty female service women and military family members the right to access abortion with their insurance in cases of rape or incest. But female veterans still don't have this right.</p> <p>The VA has <a href="" target="_blank">made some progress in recent years,</a> including by establishing women's health centers at its medical facilities. Dr. Patricia Hayes, a chief consultant for the VA's women's health services, says three-quarters of female patients have been paired with primary care providers who have been trained by the VA in women's health and can give pap smears or prescribe birth control.</p> <p>And while the VA doesn't provide maternity care itself, it covers the cost of this treatment at outside care centers. In 2012, the Department of Veterans Affairs <a href="" target="_blank">reported</a> that 87 percent of female veteran patients received breast cancer screenings and 92 percent received cervical cancer screenings&mdash;a higher percentage in both cases than women patients in the commercial health care system. But the department also acknowledged that, compared with their male counterparts, fewer women veterans received immunizations or screenings for colorectal cancer and depression, while more of them were prescribed inappropriate medications.</p> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/veterans_cards2_cp%5B1%5Dsm%5B3%5D_Artboard%203.png"></div> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/veterans_cards2_cp%5B1%5Dsm%5B3%5D-07.png"></div> <p>On Tuesday, the House passed <a href="" target="_blank">a bill</a> that would require the VA to examine whether its programs for mental health and suicide prevention are meeting the needs of female veterans. LaVeau, who has PTSD from military sexual trauma, says she has struggled to get timely appointments with counselors. The VA is known for having <a href="" target="_blank">long wait lists</a>. "It's rough," she says, crying over the phone. "You call to get an appointment when you're having a bad day&mdash;you're thinking you're going to get in within a couple of weeks. And it took call after call after call to get a letter saying you have an appointment six months later."</p></body></html> Politics Health Military Sex and Gender Thu, 11 Feb 2016 11:00:15 +0000 Samantha Michaels 296031 at Lead: America's Real Criminal Element <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p><span class="section-lead">When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor</span> of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but it was more than mere posturing. Since 1960, rape rates had nearly quadrupled, murder had quintupled, and robbery had grown fourteenfold. New Yorkers felt like they lived in a city under siege.</p> <p>Throughout the campaign, Giuliani embraced a theory of crime fighting called "broken windows," popularized a decade earlier by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in <a href="" target="_blank">an influential article in <em>The Atlantic</em>.</a> "If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired," they observed, "all the rest of the windows will soon be broken." So too, tolerance of small crimes would create a vicious cycle ending with entire neighborhoods turning into war zones. But if you cracked down on small crimes, bigger crimes would drop as well.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><a href="" target="_blank"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/flint-kids-300.jpg"></a> <div class="caption"><a href="" target="_blank"><strong>Flint Kids Have So Much Lead in Their Blood That the Mayor Declared a State of Emergency. </strong></a></div> </div> <p>Giuliani won the election, and he made good on his crime-fighting promises by selecting Boston police chief Bill Bratton as the NYPD's new commissioner. Bratton had made his reputation as head of the New York City Transit Police, where he aggressively applied broken-windows policing to turnstile jumpers and vagrants in subway stations. With Giuliani's eager support, he began applying the same lessons to the entire city, going after panhandlers, drunks, drug pushers, and the city's hated squeegee men. And more: He decentralized police operations and gave precinct commanders more control, keeping them accountable with a pioneering system called CompStat that tracked crime hot spots in real time.</p> <p>The results were dramatic. In 1996, the <a href=";src=pm%20" target="_blank"><em>New York Times</em> reported</a> that crime had plunged for the third straight year, the sharpest drop since the end of Prohibition. Since 1993, rape rates had dropped 17 percent, assault 27 percent, robbery 42 percent, and murder an astonishing 49 percent. Giuliani was on his way to becoming America's Mayor and Bratton was on the cover of <em>Time</em>. It was a remarkable public policy victory.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><a href="" target="_blank"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/leeanne-w-water-300.jpg"></a> <div class="caption"><a href="" target="_blank"><strong>This Mom Helped Uncover Flint's Toxic Water Crisis </strong></a></div> </div> <p>But even more remarkable is what happened next. Shortly after Bratton's star turn, political scientist John DiIulio warned that the echo of the baby boom would soon produce a demographic bulge of millions of young males that he famously dubbed "<a href="" target="_blank">juvenile super-predators</a>." Other criminologists nodded along. But even though the demographic bulge came right on schedule, crime continued to drop. And drop. And drop. By 2010, violent crime rates in New York City had plunged 75 percent from their peak in the early '90s.</p> <p>All in all, it seemed to be a story with a happy ending, a triumph for Wilson and Kelling's theory and Giuliani and Bratton's practice. And yet, doubts remained. For one thing, violent crime actually peaked in New York City in 1990, four years before the Giuliani-Bratton era. By the time they took office, it had already dropped 12 percent.</p> <p>Second, and far more puzzling, it's not just New York that has seen a big drop in crime. In city after city, violent crime peaked in the early '90s and then began a steady and spectacular decline. Washington, DC, didn't have either Giuliani or Bratton, but its violent crime rate has dropped 58 percent since its peak. Dallas' has fallen 70 percent. Newark: 74 percent. Los Angeles: 78 percent.</p> <p>There must be more going on here than just a change in policing tactics in one city. But what?</p> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%">&nbsp; <div class="caption"> <div class="inline inline-left" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/LEAD_A_960.jpg"></div> Illustration: G&eacute;rard DuBois</div> </div> <p><br><span class="section-lead">There are, it turns out,</span> plenty of theories. When I started research for this story, I worked my way through a <a href="" target="_blank">pair of thick</a> <a href="" target="_blank">criminology tomes</a>. One chapter regaled me with the "exciting possibility" that it's mostly a matter of economics: Crime goes down when the economy is booming and goes up when it's in a slump. Unfortunately, the theory doesn't seem to hold water&mdash;for example, crime rates have continued to drop recently despite our prolonged downturn.</p> <p>Another chapter suggested that crime drops in big cities were mostly a reflection of the crack epidemic of the '80s finally burning itself out. A trio of authors identified three major "drug eras" in New York City, the first dominated by heroin, which produced limited violence, and the second by crack, which generated spectacular levels of it. In the early '90s, these researchers proposed, the children of CrackGen switched to marijuana, choosing a less violent and more law-abiding lifestyle. As they did, crime rates in New York and other cities went down.</p> <p>Another chapter told a story of demographics: As the number of young men increases, so does crime. Unfortunately for this theory, the number of young men increased during the '90s, but crime dropped anyway.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="Chart: The PB Effect" class="image" src="/files/LEAD_PBEFFECT_300.png"><div class="caption">Top: Rick Nevin, USGS, DOJ; Bottom: Rick Nevin, Guttmacher Institute, CDC</div> </div> <p>There were chapters in my tomes on the effect of prison expansion. On guns and gun control. On family. On race. On parole and probation. On the raw number of police officers. It seemed as if everyone had a pet theory. In 1999, economist Steven Levitt, later famous as the coauthor of <em>Freakonomics</em>, teamed up with John Donohue to suggest that <a href="" target="_blank">crime dropped because of <em>Roe v. Wade</em></a>; legalized abortion, they argued, led to fewer unwanted babies, which meant fewer maladjusted and violent young men two decades later.</p> <p>But there's a problem common to all of these theories: It's hard to tease out actual proof. Maybe the end of the crack epidemic contributed to a decline in inner-city crime, but then again, maybe it was really the effect of increased incarceration, more cops on the beat, broken-windows policing, and a rise in abortion rates 20 years earlier. After all, they all happened at the same time.</p> <p>To address this problem, the field of econometrics gives researchers an enormous toolbox of sophisticated statistical techniques. But, notes statistician and conservative commentator Jim Manzi in his recent book<em> </em><a href="" target="_blank"><em>Uncontrolled</em></a>, econometrics consistently fails to explain most of the variation in crime rates. After reviewing 122 known field tests, Manzi found that only 20 percent demonstrated positive results for specific crime-fighting strategies, and none of those positive results were replicated in follow-up studies.</p> <p>So we're back to square one. More prisons might help control crime, more cops might help, and better policing might help. But the evidence is thin for any of these as the main cause. What are we missing?</p> <p>Experts often suggest that crime resembles an epidemic. But what kind? Karl Smith, a professor of public economics and government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has a good <a href="" target="_blank">rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics</a>: If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once&mdash;as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be&mdash;the cause is a molecule.</p> <p>A molecule? That sounds crazy. What molecule could be responsible for a steep and sudden decline in violent crime?</p> <p>Well, here's one possibility: Pb(CH<sub>2</sub>CH<sub>3</sub>)<sub>4</sub>.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="Chart: Did Lead Make You Dumber?" class="image" src="/files/LEAD_IQ_300.png"><div class="caption">Rick Nevin/CDC</div> </div> <p><span class="section-lead">In 1994, Rick Nevin was a consultant</span> working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of removing lead paint from old houses. This has been a topic of intense study because of the growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.</p> <p>But as Nevin was working on that assignment, his client suggested they might be missing something. A recent study had suggested a link between childhood lead exposure and juvenile delinquency later on. Maybe reducing lead exposure had an effect on violent crime too?</p> <p>That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.</p> <p>Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.</p> <p>So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a <a href="" target="_blank">2000 paper</a> (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><a href="" target="_blank"><img alt="How Dangerous Is Lead in Bullets?" class="image" src="/files/smoking-gun-425_0.jpg"></a> <div class="caption"><a href="" target="_blank"><strong>How Dangerous Is Lead in Bullets? </strong></a></div> </div> <p>And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.</p> <p>It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of&hellip;nothing. Nevin's paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it's easy to see why&mdash;Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in <em>Environmental Research</em>, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What's more, a single correlation between two curves isn't all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the '80s and '90s. Lots of things follow a pattern like that. So no matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be a coincidence. You need to do something more to establish causality.</p> <p>As it turns out, however, a few hundred miles north someone was doing just that. In the late '90s, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes was a graduate student at Harvard casting around for a dissertation topic that eventually became a study she published in 2007 as a public health policy professor at Amherst. "I learned about lead because I was pregnant and living in old housing in Harvard Square," she told me, and after attending a talk where future <em>Freakonomics</em> star Levitt outlined his abortion/crime theory, she started thinking about lead and crime. Although the association seemed plausible, she wanted to find out whether increased lead exposure <em>caused</em> increases in crime. But how?</p> <p>The answer, it turned out, involved "several months of cold calling" to find lead emissions data at the state level. During the '70s and '80s, the introduction of the catalytic converter, combined with increasingly stringent Environmental Protection Agency rules, steadily reduced the amount of leaded gasoline used in America, but Reyes discovered that this reduction wasn't uniform. In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's <a href="" target="_blank">exactly what she found</a>.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><a href="" target="_blank"><img alt="Is There Lead in Your House?" class="image" src="/files/house-thumbnail-300.jpg"></a> <div class="caption"><a href="" target="_blank"><strong>Is There Lead in Your House? </strong></a></div> </div> <p>Meanwhile, Nevin had kept busy as well, and in 2007 he published a new paper looking at <a href="" target="_blank">crime trends around the world</a> (PDF). This way, he could make sure the close match he'd found between the lead curve and the crime curve wasn't just a coincidence. Sure, maybe the real culprit in the United States was something else happening at the exact same time, but what are the odds of that same something happening at several <em>different</em> times in several <em>different</em> countries?</p> <p>Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one."</p> <p>Just this year, Tulane University researcher Howard Mielke <a href="" target="_blank">published a paper</a> with demographer Sammy Zahran on the correlation of lead and crime at the city level. They studied six US cities that had both good crime data and good lead data going back to the '50s, and they found a good fit in every single one. In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the <em>neighborhood</em> level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. "When they overlay them with crime maps," he told me, "they realize they match up."</p> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/Lead_NEWOrleans_630%5B1%5D.jpg"></div> <p>Put all this together and you have an astonishing body of evidence. We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with <a href="" target="_blank">higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes</a>. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.</p> <p>Like many good theories, the gasoline lead hypothesis helps explain some things we might not have realized even needed explaining. For example, murder rates have always been higher in big cities than in towns and small cities. We're so used to this that it seems unsurprising, but Nevin points out that it might actually have a surprising explanation&mdash;because big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. And guess what? The difference in murder rates went away too. Today, homicide rates are <a href="" target="_blank">similar in cities of all sizes</a>. It may be that violent crime isn't an inevitable consequence of being a big city after all.</p> <p>The gasoline lead story has another virtue too: It's the only hypothesis that persuasively explains both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and its fall beginning in the '90s. Two other theories&mdash;the baby boom demographic bulge and the drug explosion of the '60s&mdash;at least have the potential to explain both, but neither one fully fits the known data. Only gasoline lead, with its dramatic rise and fall following World War II, can explain the equally dramatic rise and fall in violent crime.</p> <p><span class="section-lead">If econometric studies were all there</span> were to the story of lead, you'd be justified in remaining skeptical no matter how good the statistics look. Even when researchers do their best&mdash;controlling for economic growth, welfare payments, race, income, education level, and everything else they can think of&mdash;it's always possible that something they haven't thought of is still lurking in the background. But there's another reason to take the lead hypothesis seriously, and it might be the most compelling one of all: Neurological research is demonstrating that lead's effects are even more appalling, more permanent, and appear at far lower levels than we ever thought. For starters, it turns out that childhood lead exposure at nearly <em>any</em> level can seriously and permanently reduce IQ. Blood lead levels are measured in micrograms per deciliter, and levels once believed safe&mdash;65 &mu;g/dL, then 25, then 15, then 10&mdash;are now known to cause serious damage. The <a href="">EPA now says</a> flatly that there is "no demonstrated safe concentration of lead in blood," and it turns out that even levels under 10 &mu;g/dL can reduce IQ by as much as seven points. An estimated 2.5 percent of children nationwide have lead levels above 5 &mu;g/dL.</p> <p>But we now know that lead's effects go far beyond just IQ. Not only does lead promote apoptosis, or cell death, in the brain, but the element is also chemically similar to calcium. When it settles in cerebral tissue, it prevents calcium ions from doing their job, something that causes physical damage to the developing brain that persists into adulthood.</p> <p>Only in the last few years have we begun to understand exactly what effects this has. A team of researchers at the University of Cincinnati has been following a group of 300 children for more than 30 years and recently performed a series of MRI scans that highlighted the neurological differences between subjects who had high and low exposure to lead during early childhood.</p> <p><a href="" target="_blank">One set of scans</a> found that lead exposure is linked to production of the brain's white matter&mdash;primarily a substance called myelin, which forms an insulating sheath around the connections between neurons. Lead exposure degrades both the formation and structure of myelin, and when this happens, says Kim Dietrich, one of the leaders of the imaging studies, "neurons are not communicating effectively." Put simply, the network connections within the brain become both slower and less coordinated.</p> <p><a href="" target="_blank">A second study</a> found that high exposure to lead during childhood was linked to a permanent loss of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex&mdash;a part of the brain associated with aggression control as well as what psychologists call "executive functions": emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility. One way to understand this, says Kim Cecil, another member of the Cincinnati team, is that lead affects precisely the areas of the brain "that make us most human."</p> <p>So lead is a double whammy: It impairs specific parts of the brain responsible for executive functions <em>and</em> it impairs the communication channels between these parts of the brain. For children like the ones in the Cincinnati study, who were mostly inner-city kids with plenty of strikes against them already, lead exposure was, in Cecil's words, an "additional kick in the gut." And one more thing: Although both sexes are affected by lead, the neurological impact turns out to be greater among boys than girls.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><a href="" target="_blank"><img alt="How Hidden Lead Can Sicken Your Kids" class="image" src="/files/300-new-kids.jpg"></a> <div class="caption"><a href="" target="_blank"><strong>How Hidden Lead Can Sicken Your Kids </strong></a>Zurijeta/Shutterstock</div> </div> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Other recent</a> <a href="" target="_blank">studies link</a> even minuscule blood lead levels with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Even at concentrations well below those usually considered safe&mdash;levels still common today&mdash;lead increases the odds of kids developing ADHD.</p> <p>In other words, as Reyes summarized the evidence in her paper, even moderately high levels of lead exposure are associated with aggressivity, impulsivity, ADHD, and lower IQ. And right there, you've practically defined the profile of a violent young offender.</p> <p>Needless to say, not every child exposed to lead is destined for a life of crime. Everyone over the age of 40 was probably exposed to too much lead during childhood, and most of us suffered nothing more than a few points of IQ loss. But there were plenty of kids already on the margin, and millions of those kids were pushed over the edge from being merely slow or disruptive to becoming part of a nationwide epidemic of violent crime. Once you understand that, it all becomes blindingly obvious. <em>Of course</em> massive lead exposure among children of the postwar era led to larger numbers of violent criminals in the '60s and beyond. And <em>of course</em> when that lead was removed in the '70s and '80s, the children of that generation lost those artificially heightened violent tendencies.</p> <p>But if all of this solves one mystery, it shines a high-powered klieg light on another: Why has the lead/crime connection been almost completely ignored in the criminology community? In the two big books I mentioned earlier, one has no mention of lead at all and the other has a grand total of two passing references. Nevin calls it "exasperating" that crime researchers haven't seriously engaged with lead, and Reyes told me that although the public health community was interested in her paper, criminologists have largely been AWOL. When I asked Sammy Zahran about the reaction to his paper with Howard Mielke on correlations between lead and crime at the city level, he just sighed. "I don't think criminologists have even read it," he said. All of this jibes with my own reporting. Before he died last year, James Q. Wilson&mdash;father of the broken-windows theory, and the dean of the criminology community&mdash;had begun to accept that lead probably played a meaningful role in the crime drop of the '90s. But he was apparently an outlier. None of the criminology experts I contacted showed any interest in the lead hypothesis at all.</p> <p>Why not? <a href="" target="_blank">Mark Kleiman</a>, a public policy professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who has studied promising methods of controlling crime, suggests that because criminologists are basically sociologists, they look for sociological explanations, not medical ones. My own sense is that interest groups probably play a crucial role: Political conservatives want to blame the social upheaval of the '60s for the rise in crime that followed. Police unions have reasons for crediting its decline to an increase in the number of cops. Prison guards like the idea that increased incarceration is the answer. Drug warriors want the story to be about drug policy. If the actual answer turns out to be lead poisoning, they all lose a big pillar of support for their pet issue. And while lead abatement could be big business for contractors and builders, for some reason their trade groups have never taken it seriously.</p> <p>More generally, we all have a deep stake in affirming the power of deliberate human action. When Reyes once presented her results to a conference of police chiefs, it was, unsurprisingly, a tough sell. "They want to think that what they do on a daily basis matters," she says. "And it does." But it may not matter as much as they think. &nbsp;</p> <p><br><span class="section-lead">So is this all just an interesting</span> history lesson? After all, leaded gasoline has been banned since 1996, so even if it had a major impact on violent crime during the 20th century, there's nothing more to be done on that front. Right?</p> <p>Wrong. As it turns out, tetraethyl lead is like a zombie that refuses to die. Our cars may be lead-free today, but they spent more than 50 years spewing lead from their tailpipes, and all that lead had to go somewhere. And it did: It settled permanently into the soil that we walk on, grow our food in, and let our kids play around.</p> <p>That's especially true in the inner cores of big cities, which had the highest density of automobile traffic. Mielke has been studying lead in soil for years, focusing most of his attention on his hometown of New Orleans, and he's measured 10 separate census tracts there with lead levels over 1,000 parts per million.</p> <p>To get a sense of what this means, you have to look at how soil levels of lead typically correlate with blood levels, which are what really matter. Mielke has <a href="" target="_blank">studied this in New Orleans</a>, and it turns out that the numbers go up very fast even at low levels. Children who live in neighborhoods with a soil level of 100 ppm have average blood lead concentrations of 3.8 &mu;g/dL&mdash;a level that's only barely tolerable. At 500 ppm, blood levels go up to 5.9 &mu;g/dL, and at 1,000 ppm they go up to 7.5 &mu;g/dL. These levels are high enough to do serious damage.</p> <p>Mielke's partner, Sammy Zahran, walked me through a lengthy&mdash;and hair-raising&mdash;presentation about the effect that all that old gasoline lead continues to have in New Orleans. The very first slide describes the basic problem: Lead in soil doesn't <em>stay</em> in the soil. Every summer, like clockwork, as the weather dries up, all that lead gets kicked back into the atmosphere in a process called resuspension. The zombie lead is back to haunt us.</p> <p>Mark Laidlaw, a doctoral student who has worked with Mielke, <a href="" target="_blank">explains how this works</a>: People and pets track lead dust from soil into houses, where it's ingested by small children via hand-to-mouth contact. Ditto for lead dust generated by old paint inside houses. This dust cocktail is where most lead exposure today comes from.</p> <p>Paint hasn't played a big role in our story so far, but that's only because it didn't play a big role in the rise of crime in the postwar era and its subsequent fall. Unlike gasoline lead, lead paint was a fairly uniform problem during this period, producing higher overall lead levels, especially in inner cities, but not changing radically over time. (It's a different story with the first part of the 20th century, when use of lead paint did rise and then fall somewhat dramatically. Sure enough, murder rates rose and fell in tandem.)</p> <p>And just like gasoline lead, a lot of that lead in old housing is still around. Lead paint chips flaking off of walls are one obvious source of lead exposure, but an even bigger one, says Rick Nevin, are old windows. Their friction surfaces generate lots of dust as they're opened and closed. (Other sources&mdash;lead pipes and solder, leaded fuel used in private aviation, and lead smelters&mdash;account for far less.)</p> <p>We know that the cost of all this lead is staggering, not just in lower IQs, delayed development, and other health problems, but in increased rates of violent crime as well. So why has it been so hard to get it taken seriously?</p> <p>There are several reasons. One of them was put bluntly by Herbert Needleman, one of the pioneers of research into the effect of lead on behavior. A few years ago, a reporter from the <em class="char-style-override-13">Baltimore</em><em> City Paper</em> asked him why so little progress had been made recently on combating the lead-poisoning problem. "Number one," <a href="" target="_blank">he said without hesitation</a>, "it's a black problem." But it turns out that this is an outdated idea. Although it's true that lead poisoning affects low-income neighborhoods disproportionately, it affects plenty of middle-class and rich neighborhoods as well. "It's not just a poor-inner-city-kid problem anymore," Nevin says. "I know people who have moved into gentrified neighborhoods and immediately renovate everything. And they create huge hazards for their kids."</p> <p>Tamara Rubin, who lives in a middle-class neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, learned this the hard way when two of her children developed lead poisoning after some routine home improvement in 2005. A few years later, Rubin started the <a href="" target="_blank">Lead Safe America Foundation</a>, which advocates for lead abatement and lead testing. Her message: If you live in an old neighborhood or an old house, get tested. And if you renovate, do it safely.</p> <p>Another reason that lead doesn't get the attention it deserves is that too many people think the problem was solved years ago. They don't realize how much lead is still hanging around, and they don't understand just how much it costs us.</p> <p>It's difficult to put firm numbers to the costs and benefits of lead abatement. But for a rough idea, let's start with the two biggest costs. Nevin estimates that there are perhaps 16 million pre-1960 houses with lead-painted windows, and replacing them all would cost something like $10 billion per year over 20 years. Soil cleanup in the hardest-hit urban neighborhoods is tougher to get a handle on, with estimates ranging from $2 to $36 per square foot. A rough extrapolation from Mielke's estimate to clean up New Orleans suggests that a nationwide program might cost another $10 billion per year.</p> <p>So in round numbers that's about $20 billion per year for two decades. But the benefits would be huge. Let's just take a look at the two biggest ones. By <a href="" target="_blank">Mielke and Zahran's estimates,</a> if we adopted the soil standard of a country like Norway (roughly 100 ppm or less), it would bring about $30 billion in annual returns from the cognitive benefits alone (higher IQs, and the resulting higher lifetime earnings). Cleaning up old windows might double this. And violent crime reduction would be an even bigger benefit. Estimates here are even more difficult, but Mark Kleiman suggests that a 10 percent drop in crime&mdash;a goal that seems reasonable if we get serious about cleaning up the last of our lead problem&mdash;could produce benefits as high as $150 billion per year.</p> <p>Put this all together and the benefits of lead cleanup could be in the neighborhood of $200 billion per year. In other words, an annual investment of $20 billion for 20 years could produce returns of 10-to-1 <em>every single year</em> for decades to come. Those are returns that Wall Street hedge funds can only dream of.</p> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/Lead_ROI_630_0.gif"></div> <p>There's a flip side to this too. At the same time that we should reassess the low level of attention we pay to the remaining hazards from lead, we should probably also reassess the <em>high</em> level of attention we're giving to other policies. Chief among these is the prison-building boom that started in the mid-'70s. As crime scholar William Spelman wrote a few years ago, states have "doubled their prison populations, then doubled them again, increasing their costs by more than $20 billion per year"&mdash;money that could have been usefully spent on a lot of other things. And while some scholars conclude that the prison boom had an effect on crime, recent research suggests that rising incarceration rates suffer from diminishing returns: Putting more criminals behind bars is useful up to a point, but beyond that we're just locking up more people without having any real impact on crime. What's more, if it's true that lead exposure accounts for a big part of the crime decline that we formerly credited to prison expansion and other policies, those diminishing returns might be even more dramatic than we believe. We probably overshot on prison construction years ago; one doubling might have been enough. Not only should we stop adding prison capacity, but we might be better off returning to the incarceration rates we reached in the mid-'80s.</p> <p>So this is the choice before us: We can either attack crime at its root by getting rid of the remaining lead in our environment, or we can continue our current policy of waiting 20 years and then locking up all the lead-poisoned kids who have turned into criminals. There's always an excuse not to spend more money on a policy as tedious-sounding as lead abatement&mdash;budgets are tight, and research on a problem as complex as crime will never be definitive&mdash;but the association between lead and crime has, in recent years, become pretty overwhelming. If you gave me the choice, right now, of spending $20 billion less on prisons and cops and spending $20 billion more on getting rid of lead, I'd take the deal in a heartbeat. Not only would solving our lead problem do more than any prison to reduce our crime problem, it would produce smarter, better-adjusted kids in the bargain. There's nothing partisan about this, nothing that should appeal more to one group than another. It's just common sense. Cleaning up the rest of the lead that remains in our environment could turn out to be the cheapest, most effective crime prevention tool we have. And we could start doing it tomorrow.</p> <p><em>Support for this story was provided by a grant from the Puffin Foundation Investigative Journalism Project.</em></p></body></html> Environment Full Width Health Special Reports Top Stories Thu, 11 Feb 2016 22:58:33 +0000 Kevin Drum 296591 at Flint Is Still a Disaster, But Obama Just Proposed a Giant Cut to Water Funding <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>President Obama <a href="" target="_blank">has called</a> Flint, Michigan's water crisis "inexplicable and inexcusable." But his administration's proposed 2017 <a href="" target="_blank">budget</a>, released today, cuts the Environmental Protection Agency's water infrastructure funding by roughly a quarter billion dollars.</p> <p>The EPA's State Revolving Fund (SRF) provides loans to improve state and local water quality and is the primary source of federal funding for water infrastructure improvements. The 2017 budget proposes a $158 million increase to the <a href="" target="_blank">Drinking Water SRF</a>, which would help municipalities replace pipelines, fix water main breaks, and generally improve aging water infrastructure&mdash;the type of changes that could help places that, like Flint, have an aging water infrastructure. But the budget also proposes a $370 million cut to the <a href="" target="_blank">Clean Water SRF</a>, which goes toward projects making water sources cleaner overall, from reducing urban runoff pollution and improving wastewater treatment to researching how unregulated chemicals in our water supply affect human health.</p> <p>In light of the disaster in Flint, the proposed cuts have provoked criticism from both <a href="" target="_blank">sides of the aisle</a>: Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said he was "grossly disappointed" by the proposal, while Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) accused Obama of prioritizing climate change over water. Overall, federal water infrastructure spending has been relatively stagnant for years:</p> <p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="400" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" msallowfullscreen="msallowfullscreen" oallowfullscreen="oallowfullscreen" src="//" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="630"></iframe></p> <p>Mae Wu, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, equates the proposed budget with "robbing Peter to pay Paul." "Cutting funds that help keep pollution out of our water (CW SRF) and moving the money to remove pollution once it's already in our drinking water (DW SRF) is no solution at all," she wrote in an NRDC <a href="" target="_blank">blog post</a>. "At best it is a short-term band-aid approach to addressing the chronic levels of underinvestment in our water infrastructure by local, state, and federal government."</p> <p>The bigger problem, says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, is that the nation's water challenges overall continue to be woefully underfunded. "We're talking about a hundred million here, a hundred million there," says Gleick, who notes that the single <a href="" target="_blank">F-35 fighter</a> costs roughly $100 million. "Overall, our budget priorities are still distorted."</p></body></html> Environment Econundrums Health Regulatory Affairs Tue, 09 Feb 2016 22:55:28 +0000 Julia Lurie 296406 at Here’s Why Chris Christie’s Zika Quarantines Would Be Pointless <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>During Saturday night's Republican primary debate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he would use quarantines to prevent the Zika virus outbreak from spreading in the United States. <a href="" target="_blank">From<em> </em>a <em>Washington Post </em>transcript</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC MODERATOR): Governor Christie, at the peak of the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, you ordered an American nurse who landed at Newark Airport be detained and quarantined. As fear spreads now of the Zika virus and with the Rio Olympics just months away, is there a scenario where you would quarantine people traveling back from Brazil to prevent the spread in the United States?</p> <p>CHRISTIE: You bet I would. And the fact is that because I took strong action to make sure that anyone who was showing symptoms&mdash;remember what happened with that nurse. She was showing symptoms and coming back from a place that had the Ebola virus active and she had been treating patients. This was not just some&mdash;like, we picked up her just for the heck of it, alright?</p> <p>We did it because she was showing symptoms, and the fact is that's the way we should make these decision. You make these decisions based upon the symptoms, the medicine, and the law. We quarantined her, she turned out to test negative ultimately after 48 hours, and we released her back to the State of Maine.</p> </blockquote> <p>That position might make for a tough-sounding talking point during a debate. But it's totally pointless as a matter of public health, experts said.</p> <p>"Zika is rarely, if ever, spread from person to person, so quarantining infected people will do nothing to stem a Zika outbreak," said Laurie Garret, a global health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.</p> <p>Zika, a mosquito-borne virus, has <a href="" target="_blank">spread to more than 1 million people throughout Latin America</a>. The symptoms of the virus itself are usually mild or nonexistent. But it could be dangerous for pregnant women: Zika has been tentatively linked to a spike in cases of microcephaly, a birth defect in which infants are born with small heads and can have incomplete brain development.</p> <p>Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of California-Davis Children's Hospital, agreed that a quarantine wouldn't be much help in controlling an outbreak. "The vast majority of transmissions are from mosquito bites, and most of the country doesn't have the [Zika-carrying <em>Aedes aegypti</em>] mosquito in high concentrations," he said. "So I don't think [a quarantine] is necessary or would be beneficial in any way."</p> <p>Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, gave a somewhat more measured response when asked a similar question about Zika during Saturday's debate:</p> <blockquote> <p>CARSON: Do we quarantine people? If we have evidence that they are infected, and that there is evidence that that infection can spread by something that they're doing, yes. But, just willy-nilly going out and quarantining a bunch of people because they've been to Brazil, I don't believe that that's going to work. What we really need to be thinking about is how do we get this disease under control?</p> </blockquote> <p>Christie received substantial criticism for his response to 2014's Ebola outbreak. He ordered the quarantine of a nurse, Kaci Hickox, after she returned from fighting Ebola in Sierra Leone. Last October, Hickox <a href="" target="_blank">filed a lawsuit</a> against Christie for false imprisonment and other claims, arguing that she had not, in fact, exhibited any symptoms indicative of Ebola when she landed at New Jersey's Newark airport. Ultimately, she did not end up having the virus. That legal case is ongoing.</p> <p>"The merits of Christie's actions in the Hickox case will no doubt be decided in court, probably long after he has withdrawn from the presidential race," Garret said. "But his Zika comments can be addressed immediately."</p> <p>Garret added that Christie didn't quarantine a <a href="" target="_blank">woman who was New Jersey's first confirmed Zika case</a>, identified in late January while visiting the state from Colombia.</p> <p>Elizabeth Talbot, an epidemiologist at Dartmouth College's School of Medicine, said a more effective solution is to focus on controlling and eradicating the mosquitoes that can carry Zika.</p> <p>"Our public health energies are best invested in providing education about preventing bites and prioritizing the protection of pregnant women by advising them to postpone travel to affected regions whenever possible," she said in an email. "The CDC is also recommending that meticulous attention be given to protect persons from mosquito bites if they are identified with Zika in the US following travel. This is so that our <em>Aedes aegypti</em> mosquitoes in the southernmost US do not become infected with Zika and transmit Zika disease in the US. Preventing mosquito bites for ill patients is not the same thing as quarantine, which can be an inflammatory or even scary word."</p></body></html> Environment 2016 Elections Animals Civil Liberties Climate Desk Health Science Top Stories Chris Christie Mon, 08 Feb 2016 21:56:21 +0000 Tim McDonnell 296291 at We Are This Close to "Designer Babies" <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>On February 1, scientists from the United Kingdom's Francis Crick Institute got the okay to start research on human embryos using a new genome editing technology called <a href="" target="_blank">CRISPR</a>. Their work, which will mark only the second time CRISPR has been applied to humans, will use embryos to try to understand the very early stages of human development and pinpoint the genes causing miscarriages and fetal defects.</p> <p>Not surprisingly, the Crick project has reignited a firestorm of debate over the ethics of human gene editing. "This is the first step in a well mapped-out process heading to genetically modified babies, and a future of consumer eugenics," <a href="" target="_blank">said</a> Dr. David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, in response to the news.&nbsp;</p> <p>CRISPR is essentially a <a href="" target="_blank">cellular scalpel</a>. The small enzyme works by moving through the body's cells and cutting away at precise pieces of the genome&mdash;something that's never before been possible to do with such efficiency and ease. Since 2012, it's been <a href="" target="_blank">used</a> to cut out the gene mutations leading to HIV and sickle cell anemia. Last spring, researchers in China <a href="" target="_blank">became the first</a> to genetically modify embryos with CRISPR after they used the technology to replace a gene in a single-cell embryo.</p> <p>The technology can also be used to edit what scientists call germline cells&mdash;embryos in such early stages of development that any changes will become hereditary and can be passed on to future generations. Using the technique, for example, scientists could potentially edit out the gene for Huntington's disease in a woman before she's born. Not only would she be disease free; she wouldn't be able to pass it on to any future children.</p> <p>Even though the Crick Institute's research is limited to 14 days and the cells they edit won't be implanted, critics still say this type of research might soon lead to something less benign&mdash;that one day we'll be creating "<a href="" target="_blank">designer babies</a>," whose genetic makeup will be determined in a lab. Many scientists, bioethicists, and politicians are <a href="" target="_blank">calling</a> for a moratorium on human embryo editing, which is already <a href="" target="_blank">banned</a> from receiving public funds in the United States. One of those skeptics is Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Berkeley-based Center for Genetics and Society, whose research focuses on biotechnology and reproduction. I caught up with Darnovsky to talk about designer babies, embryo harvesting, and the unforeseen consequences of germline editing. Here are seven takeaways from our conversation:</p> <p><strong>1. </strong><strong>Gene editing with CRISPR is still not very safe. </strong>"It's almost universally accepted that right now it would be crazy to proceed with the technology. Some of the problems that have come up, including in the Chinese <a href="" target="_blank">experiment</a>, is with what's called off-target mutation. There's this thing described as a molecular scissors that's supposed to have a homing device that'll take you to the exact spot on the DNA strand that you want to cut, but sometimes it's not that precise&mdash;it'll go somewhere else and sometimes the change that it makes isn't what you intended. Other times the change is made accurately in some of the embryonic cells but not in all of them, which leads to a condition called <a href="" target="_blank">mosaicism</a> that can lead to problems later in development. Another problem is that the scissors component of the system can hang around in the cell and later on, when you think you're done, it starts snipping away. The term 'gene editing' helps people understand how the technology works, but it also suggests a level of precision and safety that at least for now isn't there."</p> <p><strong>2. </strong><strong>Genome modification isn't the only available method of stopping the transmission of inherited diseases. </strong>"Some of the more cautious and shrewd people are saying, 'We'll only use this to prevent the transmission of diseases.' That does sound like a worthy goal, but here's the thing: You don't need to be editing genes to accomplish this because we already have embryo screening techniques that at this point are pretty standard add-ons in in vitro fertilization clinics. They accomplish the very same thing with far less physical danger for the resulting child and without anything like the level of societal risk posed by germline modification."</p> <p><strong>3. Once the door to editing our genome gets opened, there's no going back. </strong>"Say there was a policy effort to use this gene editing technique to prevent Huntington's disease. Well, it's impossible to really draw a policy line. It's like how the FDA doesn't regulate off-label uses of drugs and devices: Once the FDA approves the drug for one thing, a doctor can use it and prescribe it for anything. No one is telling fertility clinics what they can and cannot do. And maybe that's a good thing, but it also means we could not control fertility clinics that were trying to use CRISPR to push the envelope. So this mission creep would be very difficult&mdash;if not impossible&mdash;to control.</p> <p>And there are Futurists, including a few scientists, who say we're going to produce superior children and improve humanity. A prominent scientist has already <a href="" target="_blank">spelled out</a> a list with 10 conditions, things like stronger bones, slow- and fast-twitch muscles, so that the resulting child could be good at an endurance or sprinting sport, and sleep&mdash;there's a gene that's correlated with people needing less sleep.</p> <p>I think it's very possible that once you unleash this technology onto the market and set it in motion, commercial and competitive dynamics would set in, and you'd see people that wanted to give their future children the best start in life. You can really see the ad copy writing itself."</p> <p><strong>4. So-called "designer babies" would be available only to the rich.</strong> "IVF is already expensive. It's not only rich people who use it&mdash;people take out second and third mortgages on their homes&mdash;but it is expensive. Gene editing would be more so. And so you'd have children born to the more wealthy class that either were genetically superior or even thought to be genetically superior. This would exacerbate trends toward great inequality and could introduce new forms of inequality."</p> <p><strong>5. Harvesting eggs from women carries its own risks.</strong> "The Chinese <a href="" target="_blank">experiment</a> in April was using nonviable embryos that were created but not used in fertility treatments. In the process of fertility treatments, some of the embryos don't turn out right, so they can't be developed into a human child even if they were implanted.</p> <p>But in the UK, they want to use viable human embryos because they want to investigate what goes wrong in early embryonic development. The retrieval of eggs from women is <a href="" target="_blank">invasive</a>, <a href="" target="_blank">it carries risks</a> that are understudied, and the women that are recruited to provide eggs often aren't made fully aware of what the risks are."</p> <p><strong>6. Skepticism of embryonic modification is different from anti-abortion groups' belief that personhood begins at fertilization.</strong> "There are some anti-choice groups that have come to the same conclusions [the Center for Genetics and Society] has. I can't say exactly what their logic is, but it has to do with attempts to <a href="" target="_blank">elevate</a> the status of the embryo. They're concerned with the destruction of embryos. Back when there were headlines about human cloning, some bishops thought that once you produced cloned human embryos it might be better to implant them into a woman's uterus than be destroyed."</p> <p><strong>7. But even the skeptics are excited by the science. </strong>"It's not exactly the technology itself that I'm worried about&mdash;it's with the application of creating genetically modified human beings. The gene-editing technology itself is first of all scientifically exciting, and second of all it could be used to help people who are sick. That could be great."</p> <p><em>This article has been revised.</em></p></body></html> Politics Health Reproductive Rights Science Mon, 08 Feb 2016 11:00:26 +0000 Nina Liss-Schultz 295646 at Hillary Clinton's Flint Strategy <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><div class="article-text-wrap"> <div class="article-text-grid"> <p style=""><em>&nbsp;This story originally appeared on </em><a href="" target="_blank">The New Republic</a><em> and is reproduced here as part of the <a href="" target="_blank">Climate Desk</a> collaboration.</em></p> <p style="">Ever since Flint's water crisis became a national story at the beginning of the year, Hillary Clinton has done everything in her power to own the issue in the Democratic primary, to Bernie Sanders's detriment.</p> </div> </div></body></html> <p style="font-size: 1.083em;"><a href="/politics/2016/02/hillary-clinton-flint-strategy"><strong><em>Continue Reading &raquo;</em></strong></a></p> Politics 2016 Elections Climate Desk Health Hillary Clinton Race and Ethnicity Top Stories Infrastructure Fri, 05 Feb 2016 11:00:14 +0000 Rebecca Leber 295966 at Here’s Why the NBA’s Top Team Stopped Letting Its Players Eat PB&J <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>After the Golden State Warriors' Steph Curry scored 51 points during his game last night, he might have been craving a soft peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But the day before, the favorite snack would've been out of reach: As a part of overhauling the reigning NBA champions' diet, the team recently asked players to cut back on sugar while traveling to games, reports the <em><a href="" target="_blank">Wall Street Journal</a>.</em></p> <p>The champs aren't alone in their quest to eliminate the sweet stuff. Americans are cutting back on sugar more than any other substance these days, according to a January <a href="">Reuters poll</a>. Fifty-eight percent of people polled said they had attempted to limit their sugar intake over the last 30 days, compared to 48 percent who had attempted to cut back on sodium and 50 percent who had tried to cut calories. Nearly half said that labels stating "no sugar added" helped inform their shopping decisions.</p> <div class="inline inline-left" style="display: table; width: 1%"><a href="" target="_blank"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/KrispyKreme_0.jpg"></a></div> <p>Though we may be foaming at the mouth for an <a href="">Odwalla</a> green juice (50 grams of sugar) or a Nature's Valley <a href="">granola bar</a> (11 grams of sugar), the United States Department of Agriculture says we're on the right track in trying to avoid too many sweets. New <a href="" target="_blank">dietary guidelines</a> released earlier this year recommend we drastically decrease our added-sugar intake&mdash;particularly of sweet drinks and processed snack foods. Sugar-laden diets translate to increased calorie consumption and a higher risk for <a href="" target="_blank">heart disease</a>, obesity, and <a href="" target="_blank">diabetes</a>. The feds recommend a daily maximum dose of 12 teaspoons&mdash;less than half our current average of 30. <a href="" target="_blank">(Here's</a> what that recommendation might look like).</p> <p>So just how much sugar is in one of the Warriors' favorite sandwiches? Let's assume you use the same ingredients reportedly stocked in the locker room in Oakland: creamy Skippy peanut butter, Smucker's strawberry jam, and 12-grain whole wheat bread.</p> <div class="inline inline-center" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/iStock_000006191938_Small_1.jpg"><div class="caption"><strong>mikemphoto/ThinkStock </strong>PB&amp;J with Smucker's Jam and Skippy peanut butter is reportedly the team's favorite snack.</div> </div> <p>A whole sandwich, with just one serving of the peanut butter and one serving of the jam, amounts to about 21 grams of sugar&mdash;a little more than 5 teaspoons, and still well within the USDA's daily recommended dose of added sugar.</p> <p>For the Warriors players, who were reportedly on board with giving up Gatorade and sodas, the absence of those homemade PB&amp;Js just couldn't be justified. With help from their assistant coach, the players successfully persuaded their management to <a href="" target="_blank">lift the ban</a> on the beloved sandwich this week. Of course, basketball stars burn on average of anywhere from <a href="" target="_blank">600-800 calories</a> in a game&mdash;surely they can afford to celebrate with a sandwich on <a href="" target="_blank">the long flight home</a>.</p></body></html> Media Health Sports Top Stories Fri, 05 Feb 2016 00:06:52 +0000 Jenny Luna 295876 at Is "Fragrance" Making Us Sick? <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>For Joyce Miller, a 57-year-old professor of library science in upstate New York, one sniff of scented laundry detergent can trigger an asthma attack. "I feel like someone is standing on my chest," she says. "It's almost like a choking feeling&mdash;pressure and choking. And then the coughing starts."</p> <p>Miller is just one of countless Americans who are sensitive to "fragrance," a cryptic category of ingredients manufacturers add to products from cleaning supplies to toiletries. This generic term encompasses thousands of combinations of chemicals that give consumer goods their odors, but the identity of those chemicals is rarely disclosed.</p> <p>For decades, fragrance makers have insisted on treating their recipes as trade secrets, even as complaints about negative health effects have proliferated. A 2009 <a href="" target="_blank">study</a>, for example, concluded that nearly one-third of Americans were irritated by the smell of scented products on others, and 19 percent experienced headaches or breathing difficulties when exposed to air fresheners or deodorizers.</p></body></html> <p style="font-size: 1.083em;"><a href="/environment/2016/01/toxic-chemicals-fragrance-cosmetics-safety"><strong><em>Continue Reading &raquo;</em></strong></a></p> Environment Corporations Econundrums Health Regulatory Affairs Mon, 01 Feb 2016 11:00:11 +0000 Brian Joseph 294956 at The NFL Just Released Its Concussion Count, And It's Not Pretty <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>With a little more than a week and a half before the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers face off in Super Bowl 50, the National Football League has <a href="" target="_blank">released its latest injury data</a>, and it isn't pretty. Its players have suffered 271 reported concussions this season, a steep uptick from 2014-15, when there were 206, and the highest number in the last four years. The NFL also reports that there were 182 concussions during the most recent regular season; there were 115 in 2014.</p> <p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="400" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" msallowfullscreen="msallowfullscreen" oallowfullscreen="oallowfullscreen" src="//" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="100%"></iframe></p> <p>Jeff Miller, the league's senior vice president of health and safety policy, gave a number of <a href="" target="_blank">possible explanations</a> for the rise in concussion reports, such as increased screening for possible head injuries, an "unprecedented" level of players reporting signs of injury, and a rise in participation from spotters and independent neurologists on the sidelines. It's also worth noting that, the number of helmet-to-helmet incidents on the field rose 58 percent between 2014 and 2015 after a two-year drop.</p> <p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="400" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" msallowfullscreen="msallowfullscreen" oallowfullscreen="oallowfullscreen" src="//" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="100%"></iframe></p> <p>The league's figures for the 2015 season differ slightly from PBS <em>Frontline</em>'s <a href="" target="_blank">Concussion Watch project</a>, which bases its data on the NFL's weekly injury reports. <em>Frontline</em> found that there were 199 concussions sustained this year, compared to the NFL's 182. (<em>Frontline</em>'s data does not include the preseason.) Cornerbacks suffered the most this year, with 41 reported concussions, while wide receivers and linebackers bore the next highest number of injuries, <a href="" target="_blank">according</a> to <em>Frontline</em>.</p> <p>This latest injury report comes just as doctors discovered posthumously that Tyler Sash, a 27-year-old former safety for the New York Giants who died of an accidental drug overdose in September, <a href=";action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=first-column-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news" target="_blank">suffered</a> from <a href="" target="_blank">chronic traumatic encephalopathy</a>, a <a href="" target="_blank">debilitating brain disease</a>. Cases so severe are rarely seen in a person his age. The <em>New York Times</em> <a href=";action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=first-column-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news" target="_blank">reported on Tuesday</a> Sash sustained at least five concussions throughout his playing career.</p></body></html> Media Charts Health Sports Fri, 29 Jan 2016 23:45:26 +0000 Edwin Rios 295261 at Pregnant, Sick With Zika—and Prohibited From Getting an Abortion <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>Amid the rapid spread of the mysterious Zika virus throughout Latin America and the growing evidence that it may lead to birth defects, governments in the region have made an unusual request: that women should hold off on having children for as many as two years. The unprecedented directives from heads of state and government officials have shocked many public health and medical experts. They say the prohibition of pregnancy could have untold effects on the birthrate in Latin America, and that managing and terminating a pregnancy is often not an option for many women in the region, where contraceptive access is limited and abortion laws are some of the strictest in the world.</p> <p>"The way these governments are handling the virus is foolish, highly unrealistic, and insensitive to women," says Carmen Barroso, the regional director of the<strong> </strong>International Planned Parenthood Federation in the Western Hemisphere. "Even if a woman is convinced by the governments' messages, she might still get pregnant unintentionally. What the government should be doing, besides combating the virus, of course, is they should make it easier for women to avoid pregnancies they don't want."</p> <p>Women who are already pregnant or become pregnant while the Zika virus is still active will have few resources due to the strict abortion laws in the region, says Paula Avila-Guillen, a program specialist for the Center for Reproductive Rights, which has offices in Colombia (where she also grew up). El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, and the Dominican Republic all <a href="" target="_blank">ban abortion</a>, with no exceptions for rape, fetal anomaly, or the health of the mother. The Vatican city-state and Malta are the only two other places in the world with comparable laws.</p> <p>Of the countries that have called on women to avoid pregnancy, only Colombia allows for abortion in cases of fetal anomaly, and the vast majority of nations in the region don't permit abortion in such cases. Even in Colombia, <a href="" target="_blank">99 percent</a> of abortions are clandestine, because so many women are turned away by doctors who won't perform the procedure. In Brazil, a 2012 Supreme Court case <a href="" target="_blank">created</a> an abortion exception only in the limited instances of anencephaly, a severe fetal brain deformity that causes stillbirth. And of the Latin American countries with active cases, only four offer abortions "on request" or without justification.</p> <p>The Zika virus, transmitted to humans by the Aedes mosquito, was first spotted in West Africa in the 1940s and has slowly made its way across the world.<strong> </strong>Brazil now has more than 1 million cases, and the virus is spreading rapidly across Latin America and the Caribbean; more than 20 countries and Puerto Rico are <a href="">currently</a> battling outbreaks of Zika, for which there is no treatment or vaccine.<strong> </strong>For most people who are exposed, the symptoms are mild, but a small number of people in Brazil and El Salvador infected with the virus have also been treated for Guillain-Barr&eacute; syndrome&mdash;a rare autoimmune disorder that causes paralysis&mdash;leading doctors and researchers to believe there's a connection between the two. And medical experts say there also appears to also be a link between Zika and congenital microcephaly, a neurological disorder that halts brain development.</p> <p>It's this second connection that has regional governments and public health agencies most alarmed. In the four-month period since last October, there have been more than 3,500 reported cases of microcephaly in infants born in Brazil alone, compared with the average of 163 cases reported nationwide each year, according to the World Health Organization. The disorder, which causes babies' heads to remain much smaller than those of other babies, <a href="" target="_blank">can lead</a> to a range of symptoms, both life-threatening and not, including seizures, developmental and intellectual disabilities, and hearing and vision problems. In the past, it's been linked to rubella, severe malnutrition, and exposure to harmful substances. This is the first time the defect has been connected to Zika, though scientists are still studying the relationship between the two.</p> <p>Evidence of birth defects prompted El Salvador, where 96 pregnant women are suspected of having contracted the virus, to request that women stop getting pregnant until 2018. "We&rsquo;d like to suggest to all the women of fertile age that they take steps to plan their pregnancies, and avoid getting pregnant between this year and the next,&rdquo; <a href="" target="_blank">said</a> Deputy Health Minister Eduardo Espinoza last Thursday. And in Colombia, which has the second-highest number of infected people after Brazil, government officials recently said women should wait six to eight months before conceiving. Jamaica, which as of yet has no recorded cases of Zika, <a href="" target="_blank">advised</a> women to delay pregnancy for 6 to 12 months.</p> <p>The US-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also <a href="">urged</a> pregnant women and those trying to become pregnant to reconsider their plans to travel to the countries affected by the virus. The move is the <a href="">first time</a> the CDC has ever advised pregnant women to avoid a specific region.</p> <p>But pregnancy is not a choice for many people in the region because of strict government policies restricting abortion and limiting access to contraception. <a href="" target="_blank">Fifty-eight</a> percent of pregnancies in Latin America and the Caribbean are unintended, compared with 48 percent in the United States and 42 percent in Western Europe.</p> <p>"The price of contraceptives is too high for the very poor," says Barroso, who adds there are still significant obstacles to obtaining contraception throughout Latin America, and particularly for rural women who need to travel several hours to get to a clinic. "They're also not available very easily for young women, who are stigmatized because they're not supposed to be sexually active. And then there's the violence."</p> <p>Each year, 1.6 million women are raped in the region, according to Avila-Guillen. "Latin America has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy and also of sexual violence. What is the government going to do about the women who get raped, if not provide them services and options?"</p> <p>Adolescent women account for <a href="" target="_blank">one-fifth</a> of all births in the region each year. Of the young people in Latin America and the Caribbean getting pregnant unintentionally, <a href="" target="_blank">83 percent</a> were not using contraception.</p> <p>And then there are the strict laws banning abortion. El Salvador's anti-abortion laws have become particularly notorious after a 2013 case in which the country's highest court <a href="" target="_blank">rejected</a> the request of a woman and her doctors that her pregnancy be ended in order to save her life. The woman survived but the baby died following a C-section. Women in El Salvador are <a href="" target="_blank">regularly</a> <a href="" target="_blank">prosecuted</a> and imprisoned for abortion and even for miscarriages and stillbirths.</p> <p>Bans and restrictions haven't stopped abortions from happening. <a href="" target="_blank">According</a> to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2008 women in the region got 4.4 million abortions, but 95 percent of those abortions were unsafe. Ninety-seven percent of women of childbearing age live in countries where the abortion law is highly restrictive.</p> <p>"A woman who procures herself an abortion is running a very high risk," says Barroso. "There will be a lot of women in very difficult situations because in addition to all the fears you already have in a pregnancy, there's this additional one. And if she wants to interrupt the pregnancy, she'll run the risk to her life because she'll have to have an unsafe abortion because they are so limited in availability. It is tragic."</p> <p>All these issues are compounded for women in rural and poor parts of the region, who not only have significantly less access to family planning and reproductive health care, but are also at much higher risk of exposure to the Zika virus because of poorer hygiene and tropical climates.</p> <p>"The poorest women live in the mountains, places in tropical areas where there are more mosquitos and they're more isolated from health facilities, says Avila-Guillen. "This virus will probably affect them disproportionately."</p> <p>The upshot of all this? Advocates on the ground are using the momentum created by the Zika virus to attempt to push through laws that allow women to get abortions due to fetal anomalies, but they are not optimistic. There is precedent: In 2012 Brazil loosened abortion restrictions to include anencephaly, after those cases rose dramatically.</p> <p>"The virus is an opportunity because it's showing the consequences of restrictive abortion laws," says Avila-Guillen. "Women of reproductive age should have the ability to decide whether or not to be pregnant, and the government needs to give them those options."</p></body></html> Politics Health Reproductive Rights Sex and Gender Fri, 29 Jan 2016 11:00:12 +0000 Nina Liss-Schultz 294856 at Long Before Helping Flint, Michigan Officials Were Shipping Clean Water to Their Own Workers <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>According to newly discovered emails, Michigan officials were trucking clean water to a state building in Flint in January 2015, long before they acknowledged to residents that the city had a contamination problem.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><a href="" target="_blank"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/walters-shows-ambrose-water-225.png"></a> <div class="caption"><a href="" target="_blank"><strong>Read about the mom who helped expose Flint's toxic water nightmare. </strong></a></div> </div> <p>One of the emails, which were obtained by the group <a href="" target="_blank">Progress Michigan</a>, was sent from the state Department of Technology, Management, and Budget. It reads, "While the City of Flint states that corrective actions are not necessary, DTMB is in the process of providing a water cooler on each occupied floor, positioned near the water fountain, so you can choose which water to drink. The coolers will arrive today and will be provided as long as the public water does not meet treatment requirements."</p> <p>The email was sent just days after the city sent out an advisory about high levels of trihalomethanes in its water but maintained that, for healthy individuals, the water was safe to drink. Residents had been reporting smelly, tainted water and adverse health conditions related to it since shortly after Flint switched water sources in April 2014.</p> <p>Until October 2015, the administration of Gov. Rick Snyder maintained that it was unaware of high levels of lead in Flint's water. Progress Michigan's Lonnie Scott says the emails "blow a hole in the governor's timeline for when they knew or started to have concerns about Flint water. They were helping state employees while telling everyone else that there was nothing to worry about."</p> <p>An administration representative was not immediately available for comment.</p> <div class="DV-container" id="DV-viewer-2699772-Flint-facility-notification">&nbsp;</div> <script src="//"></script><script> DV.load("", { width: 630, height: 450, sidebar: false, text: false, container: "#DV-viewer-2699772-Flint-facility-notification" }); </script><noscript> <a href="">Flint facility notification (PDF)</a> <br><a href="">Flint facility notification (Text)</a> </noscript></body></html> Environment Econundrums Health Thu, 28 Jan 2016 22:35:55 +0000 Julia Lurie 295126 at Is El Niño to Blame for the "Explosive" Zika Virus Outbreak? <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>The outbreak of Zika virus in Latin America is <a href="" target="_blank">"spreading explosively,"</a> the director of the World Health Organization warned at an emergency meeting in Geneva on Thursday. Last week, the epidemic took a surreal turn when health officials in El Salvador advised women there not to get pregnant for the next two years. Similar, though less extreme, warnings have been issued by Brazil, Colombia, and several other countries. The virus has infected more than 1 million people during the current epidemic, and health officials say it may be linked to a spike in microcephaly, a rare condition in which infants are born with unusually small heads.</p> <p>Behind the outbreak is a complex combination of environmental and economic factors. Here's what you need to know:</p> <p><strong>What is Zika?</strong> Zika was <a href="" target="_blank">first identified</a> in monkeys in Uganda's Zika Forest in 1947. In the years since, the disease has slowly migrated eastward around the globe, following oceanic trade routes with the help of infected sailors and mosquitoes trapped in the holds of ships. The first serious outbreak occurred in <a href="" target="_blank">2007 in Micronesia</a>, where up to 60 people were infected, followed by cases in French Polynesia and on other Pacific islands. The current outbreak, which started late last year in Brazil, is the most serious yet and the first one in the Americas.</p> <p>Zika is carried by <em>Aedes aegypti</em>, the same species of mosquito that carries dengue fever, yellow fever, and <a href="" target="_blank">chikungunya</a>. Compared with those other viruses, the symptoms of Zika are very mild, most often resembling a bad cold or the flu. Deaths from the virus <a href="" target="_blank">are rare</a>. People can contract the virus if they are bitten by a mosquito that has previously drawn blood from another infected person; apart from mother-to-fetus transfer, there's no evidence yet of person-to-person transfer. There is no vaccine or treatment.</p> <p><strong>Why is Zika a concern for pregnant women? </strong>In pregnant women, the virus could be the cause of a rapid uptick in cases of microcephaly, which causes incomplete brain development. In Brazil, cases of microcephaly rose 30-fold between 2014 and 2015, from <a href="" target="_blank">147</a> to <a href="" target="_blank">nearly 4,000</a> cases, just as the Zika outbreak was taking place. That apparent correlation led to the precautionary pregnancy advisories, but scientists have yet to definitively confirm their suspicion that Zika is directly to blame for microcephaly.</p> <p>Microcephaly isn't unheard-of; in the United States, it occurs in roughly 2 to 12 babies per 10,000 births, <a href="" target="_blank">according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a>. But Heidi Brown, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, said the troubling thing in Latin America is the rapid rate of increase in cases.</p> <p>"It's really quite baffling that we're seeing this microcephaly where we haven't seen it before," Brown said. "If [a pregnant woman] gets Zika, is she likely to have a birth with microcephaly? That seems to be yes, but there could be other factors. Trying to get to that&mdash;that it's causal&mdash;is a really daunting task. We're still very early on this."</p> <p>That message was echoed by Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, in a <a href="" target="_blank">blog post Tuesday</a>. Collins noted that US health officials, like their counterparts in Brazil, have confirmed the presence of Zika in tissue samples from some infants born with microcephaly. But he wrote that "it is now critically important to confirm, through careful epidemiological and animal studies, whether or not a causal link exists between Zika virus infections in pregnant women and microcephaly in their newborn babies."</p> <p><strong>What's the cause of the outbreak?</strong> According to Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, the outbreak was triggered by <a href="" target="_blank">"a perfect storm"</a> of biological, economic, and climatic events. <em>Aedes aegypti</em>,<em> </em>the mosquito that can carry Zika, has been growing in population in Latin America since first being introduced to Brazil via trans-Pacific shipping routes in the late 1980s. Brazil is also now in the middle of a severe economic downturn, while the government is in disarray as President Dilma&nbsp;Rousseff faces calls for impeachment for her involvement in a corruption scandal involving Petrobras, the state oil company. That has left the country with a weakened public health system that is struggling to effectively eradicate dangerous mosquitoes. This week, Brazil's health minister admitted he was <a href="" target="_blank">"badly losing the battle"</a> against mosquito-borne illnesses.</p> <p>But the most important factor, Garrett said, is a mosquito population boom triggered by above-average rainfall, a product of this year's <a href="" target="_blank">exceptionally strong El Ni&ntilde;o</a> in the Pacific. Over the last month, flooding in Brazil, Paraguay, and elsewhere has been the <a href="" target="_blank">worst in half a century</a>, forcing 150,000 people to evacuate their homes. Those conditions are perfect for mosquito breeding.</p> <p>"One of the hallmarks of these mosquitoes is they like very clean water," Garrett said. "So rainfall is perfect for them. If it creates puddles, or accumulates in tires or any sort of containers, that will be a breeding site."</p> <p>Combine that with steamy summer temperatures and lots of bare skin, and it's easy for a mosquito-borne disease to spread quickly. Along with the Zika outbreak, Garret said, dengue is also surging.</p> <p><strong>What about climate change? </strong>For environmentalist Bill McKibben, government warnings against getting pregnant were a shocking preview of the climate change dystopia just around the corner.</p> <p>"Think about that. Women should avoid the most essential and beautiful of human tasks. It is unthinkable," he wrote in an <a href="" target="_blank">op-ed for the<em> Guardian</em></a> on Monday. "Obviously we need to face up to the fact that pushing the limits of the planet's ecology has become dangerous in novel ways."</p> <p>McKibben blames the Zika outbreak on "mosquitoes whose range inexorably expands as the climate warms." But while it's certainly true that global warming <a href="" target="_blank">could lead to increases</a> in the spread of disease-carrying mosquitoes, in the case of Zika, the mosquitoes in question have been well established in the affected region for nearly two decades.</p> <p>More important than changes in mosquito distribution is the change in rainfall caused by El Ni&ntilde;o. While this El Ni&ntilde;o wasn't caused by climate change per se, it is happening in a context of overall higher ocean and atmospheric temperatures&mdash;<a href="" target="_blank">2015 was the world's hottest year on record</a>&mdash;that may have <a href="" target="_blank">helped make it stronger</a> than usual. And there is a growing body of research finding that climate change could <a href="" target="_blank">dramatically increase the frequency of severe El Ni&ntilde;os</a>, meaning that regardless of how mosquito ranges spread, places that already have mosquito problems now could see them get worse.</p> <p>Moreover, Brown said, increasing global temperatures mean longer breeding seasons for mosquitoes, giving them more time to infect humans. Mosquitoes also mature more quickly in higher temperatures, meaning they can reproduce sooner. And they metabolize faster, meaning they can pass a virus onto a new host more quickly after acquiring it.</p> <p>"It's a question of probability: What's the probability that I'll be bitten," Brown said. "The more [mosquitoes] that are out there, those probabilities start shifting."</p> <p>With all that in mind, Brown said, it's hard to draw any sweeping conclusions about the cause of this year's outbreak or make predictions about the future with only one year of data.&nbsp;</p> <p>"It's not just climate or vector control or human travel, but all of these things together," she said. "Maybe we just got unlucky."</p> <p>The upshot is that it's too soon to point a finger at climate change for this year's outbreak. And the ways in which climate change affects future cases of mosquito-borne diseases will be much more complex than simply where mosquitoes live.</p> <p><strong>Should Americans be worried?</strong> So far, there are no cases in which US mosquitoes have transmitted Zika to people in the country. But there have been <a href="" target="_blank">at least six</a> recent cases&mdash;in Arkansas, New York, <a href="" target="_blank">Virginia</a>, <a href="" target="_blank">Hawaii</a>, and <a href="" target="_blank">California</a>&mdash;where residents who recently returned from traveling have tested positive. The CDC has posted travel advisories for more than a dozen countries with cases of Zika.</p> <p>But the National Institutes of Health blog post warned that when temperatures warm up in the spring, the virus could spread to mosquitoes across the Southeast and Midwest, putting some <a href="" target="_blank">200 million Americans</a> at risk.</p> <p>"It will definitely make its way to the United States," Garrett said.</p> <p>Paradoxically, "the El Ni&ntilde;o that is bolstering mosquitoes under the equator is probably protecting the [US] South now," she said. "But come spring, we could see very serious mosquito problems."</p> <p><em>This post has been updated.</em></p></body></html> Environment Animals Climate Change Climate Desk Health International Top Stories Thu, 28 Jan 2016 11:00:13 +0000 Tim McDonnell 294881 at Meet 5 Everyday Heroes of Flint’s Water Crisis <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p>Long before Flint's water crisis made national headlines, there were plenty of people raising hell about the tainted water or working to lessen its burden in this impoverished, majority-black city of nearly 100,000 people.&nbsp;</p> <div class="sidebar-small-right"><strong>Also read:<br> 1. <a href="" target="_blank">Meet the mom who helped expose Flint's toxic water nightmare</a><br> 2. <a href="" target="_blank">A toxic timeline of Flint's water fiasco</a></strong></div> <p>The saga began in April 2014, when the city's water source was switched from Detroit's water system (whose source is Lake Huron) to the Flint River. For more than a year, government officials assured residents their water was safe, despite evidence<a href="" target="_blank"> to the contrary.</a> After more than a year, state leaders finally <a href="" target="_blank">conceded</a> that the city had a serious public health crisis, and in October 2015 Gov. Rick Snyder <a href="" target="_blank">announced</a> that Flint would go back to using Detroit's water.</p> <p>Now, as Flint residents <a href="" target="_blank">fret</a> about potential <a href="" target="_blank">long-term effects</a> of lead&mdash;especially on the <a href="" target="_blank">thousands of young children</a> exposed&mdash;accusations are flying over who knew what, and when. But let's not forget the heroes of Flint, those who donated time and money and muscle to assist others&mdash;not to mention the residents, researchers, and even one<a href="" target="_blank"> "rogue" EPA employee</a> who helped bring the crisis to the world's attention. Here are five notables.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/walters%20shows%20ambrose%20water%20315_1.jpg"><div class="caption">William Archie/Detroit Free Press/ZUMA</div> </div> <p><strong>The mom: </strong>In the summer of 2014, LeeAnne Walters, a stay-at-home mother of four, <a href="" target="_blank">saw</a> firsthand the effects of the state's decision to switch water sources, as her toddlers developed weird rashes and family members' hair fell out. Over the next few months, she joined a cavalcade of Flint residents complaining to city leaders of foul-smelling brown tap water and health effects ranging from hair loss to vision and memory problems. Lots of people protested, but Walters also raised hell with the Environmental Protection Agency, leading health researchers to investigate further. "Without her, we would be nowhere," says Mona Hanna-Attisha, a local doctor (see below). To read more about Walters' personal battle, click <a href="" target="_blank">here</a>.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/Pastor-Bobby-Jackson-Flint.jpg"><div class="caption">Jake May/The Flint</div> </div> <p><strong>The pastor:</strong> Though he was hardly the only church leader offering aid in the middle of Flint's man-made disaster, Pastor Bobby Jackson has been distributing clean water to locals since September 2014. Jackson, <a href="" target="_blank">who runs</a> an independent homeless shelter called Mission of Hope, stores donated bottled water at five sites in his Flint hometown, and his volunteers estimate they distribute to at least 200 families daily. "We're looking at maybe a couple of years before we drink [tap] water again," Jackson <a href="" target="_blank">told </a><a href="" target="_blank"><em>ThinkProgress</em></a>. "We want to make sure that we can do the best we can until help arrives."</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/Miguel-Del-Toral.jpg"><div class="caption">Screenshot: <a href="">ABC News</a></div> </div> <p><strong>The EPA guy:</strong> In February 2015, Miguel Del Toral, a manager for the EPA's Midwest water division, received a call from LeeAnne Walters (see above). Scouring city documents, Walters noticed the city wasn't treating its water with standard corrosion control chemicals used to prevent old pipes from leaching lead into the water. Del Toral confirmed her suspicions and relayed his concerns to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. The next month, he visited Walters' house to collect samples. In a June memo later leaked to the American Civil Liberties Union, Del Toral <a href="" target="_blank">warned</a> his bosses that the Flint River water had not been properly treated, and he called the lack of corrosion controls "a major concern." (EPA division chief Susan Hedman, who dismissed Del Toral's report as premature, would later resign.) But it wasn't until after much bureaucratic wrangling that the state <a href="" target="_blank">admitted </a>it had made a mistake. "I never imagined that this would happen in the first place," Del Toral <a href="" target="_blank">told</a> ABC News.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/Marc-Edwards-Flint-YouTube.jpg"><div class="caption">HashtagFlint/<a href="">YouTube</a></div> </div> <p><strong>The prof:</strong> Last spring, Marc Edwards, a professor of environmental engineering at Virginia Tech University and a former MacArthur Foundation genius grant recipient, also got a call from Walters, courtesy of the EPA's Del Toral. More than a decade earlier, Edwards <a href="" target="_blank">had helped uncover</a> lead in Washington, DC, drinking water and corroded pipes in its sewer system. But after testing Walters' water, Edwards was "<a href="" target="_blank">shocked</a>" to discover lead levels more than twice what the EPA qualified as hazardous waste. Accompanied by a team of student researchers, Edwards <a href="" target="_blank">traveled</a> to Flint and conducted more tests, shelling out $150,000 of his own money. His results, <a href="" target="_blank">released</a> in September, were key: He determined that Flint's tap water was 19 times more corrosive than Detroit's&mdash;Flint's original source&mdash;and estimated that one in six Flint households had lead exposure levels higher than the threshold required for the EPA to take official action.</p> <div class="inline inline-right" style="display: table; width: 1%"><img alt="" class="image" src="/files/mona-hanna-attisha2.jpg"><div class="caption">Ryan Garza/Detroit Free Press/ZUMA</div> </div> <p><strong>The doctor:</strong> Last August, after hearing rumors of lead contamination in the water, Mona Hanna-Attisha, head of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, began<a href="" target="_blank"> looking</a> at the blood lead levels of children in Flint before and after the city switched its supply from Detroit's water system to the Flint River. As a control, she looked at children who lived elsewhere in Genesee County. It turned out the rate of elevated lead concentrations in the blood of Flint kids under five years old had doubled&mdash;and in some areas, tripled&mdash;since the switchover. When Hanna-Attisha released her findings, state officials dismissed the results as "unfortunate," and that was tough to take&mdash;"How can you not second-guess yourself?" she told the <a href="" target="_blank"><em>New York Times</em></a>. But within a month, the state changed its tune. Gov. Snyder has since <a href="" target="_blank">praised her</a> efforts.</p></body></html> Politics Health Science Wed, 27 Jan 2016 11:00:19 +0000 Edwin Rios 294811 at What Flint's Dirty Water and Detroit's Angry Teachers Have in Common <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body><p><em><strong>Update (2/2/2016): </strong>Darnell Earley announced plans to <a href="" target="_blank">step down</a> as emergency manager of Detroit Public Schools, saying the "initiatives implemented over the past year were completed ahead of my 18-month schedule." Gov. Rick Snyder plans to appoint a transition leader by the end of the month. </em></p> <p>Michigan is having a rough year, to put it mildly. Flint is reeling from the news that its water supply was contaminated with lead for 17 months. In Detroit, teacher "sick-outs" have been shutting down schools; 88 of the city's 104 schools were closed on January 21. These two seemingly unrelated episodes are joined by a common policy: Both Detroit's school system and Flint's water system have been<strong> </strong>under the control of emergency managers, unelected officials who are empowered to make sweeping decisions and override local policies in the name of balancing budgets.</p> <p><strong>What's an emergency manager?</strong> Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was elected in 2010 on a platform of fiscal austerity. Snyder, the former head of Gateway computers and a darling of the <a href="" target="_blank">American Legislative Exchange Council</a> and the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, promised to run the state like a company, complete with "outcomes" and "deliverables." In 2011, he introduced a signature piece of legislation, Public Act 4, which expanded the state's authority to take over financially troubled cities and school districts. Similar laws exist in about 20 states, but Michigan's is the most expansive: Emergency managers picked by the governor have the power to renegotiate or cancel city contracts, unilaterally draft policy, privatize public services, sell off city property, and even fire elected officials.</p> <p>Since 2011, <a href=",4679,7-121-1751_51556_64472-201116--,00.html" target="_blank">17 municipalities</a> or school districts in Michigan have been assigned emergency managers. The majority of them are in poor, predominantly African-American communities that have been hit hard by depressed economies and shrinking populations. Some EMs have worked with communities to generate local buy-in, but their outsider status, lack of accountability, and <a href="" target="_blank">propensity for</a> <a href="" target="_blank">cutting public services</a> to save money have generated harsh criticism. As Michael Steinberg, the legal director for the Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said a&nbsp;<a href="" target="_blank">recent statement,</a> "Flint is Exhibit A for what happens when a state suspends democracy and installs unaccountable bean counters to run a city."</p> <p><strong>So what does this have to do with Flint?</strong> Flint was one of the the first cities to be assigned an emergency manager, in 2011; it would have four EMs in as many years. In 2013, its city council voted to build a pipeline to Lake Huron that would free the city of its dependence on Detroit's water system by 2017. Ed Kurtz, the then-emergency manager, signed off on the plan, and the question became where Flint would source its water in the intervening years. According to a recent <a href="" target="_blank"><em>Daily Beast</em></a> investigation, Kurtz rejected the idea of using Flint River water based on conversations with Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality. Longtime Flint residents were also skeptical of the idea: General Motors, which calls Flint home, had used the river as a dumping ground for years.</p> <p>Yet in 2014, under emergency manager Darnell Earley, the city switched water sources to the Flint River. It remains unclear what led authorities to believe that Flint River water was safe to drink; Earley maintains the decision was supported in a vote by the city council, though there is no record of such a vote. Howard Croft, the former director of public works for Flint, told the <a href="" target="_blank">ACLU</a> that the decision was financial, had been reviewed by state authorities, and went "all the way to the governor's office."</p> <p>In March of 2015, after months of residents reporting unusual health symptoms and foul-smelling, tainted water coming from their taps, the Flint City Council voted to "do all things necessary" to switch back to Detroit's water system. Then-acting emergency manager Jerry Ambrose <a href="" target="_blank">nixed the vote</a>, calling it "incomprehensible."</p> <p><strong>And what about Detroit?</strong> For the past few weeks, Detroit teachers have been protesting with coordinated sick days that have caused dozens of temporary school closures. The sick-outs, the teachers say, are in response to disgraceful school conditions, from black mold and dead rodents in classrooms to class sizes of more than 40 students.</p> <p>The Detroit Public School system has been under the authority of an emergency manager since 2009, when the beleaguered system of roughly 100,000 students was mired in debt. Today, after six years under four emergency managers, the number of students has shrunk by about 50 percent while the system's debt has ballooned to <a href="" target="_blank">$515 million</a>. It risks going bankrupt by <a href="" target="_blank">April</a>. Over the past five years, every public school employee has taken a 10 percent wage cut.</p> <p>"Emergency management is not working," Ivy Bailey, the president of Detroit Federation of Teachers, told <em>CNN</em>. "If the goal was to destroy DPS, emergency management has done an excellent job."</p> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"> <p dir="ltr" lang="en">Appalling conditions. Support <a href="">@teachdetroit</a> in their fight for good education for all <a href="">#supportDPSteachers</a> <a href=""></a></p> &mdash; Jelmer Evers (@jelmerevers) <a href="">January 17, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="//" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"> <p dir="ltr" lang="en">Crumbling <a href="">#DPS</a> schools are a direct result of damage that can be done by unelected emergency managers. <a href="">#MISOTS16</a></p> &mdash; MI Senate Democrats (@MISenDems) <a href="">January 20, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="//" charset="utf-8"></script><p>Governor Snyder's latest pick for DPS emergency manager was Darnell Earley, the same official who oversaw Flint's transition to corrosive river water. On January 21, the day 88 schools were shut down, the school system filed a restraining order against the protesting teachers meant to stop them from calling in sick. The motion was denied. On January 23, Earley posted <a href="" target="_blank">new rules</a> requiring teachers to submit a written report to him if they learn about their fellow employees organizing a strike. "Failure to immediately comply with this order may be grounds for discipline up to and including termination," the rules read. Earley's office did not respond to requests for comment.</p> <p><strong>What's next for Michigan's emergency managers?</strong></p> <p>There are currently no Michigan cities with emergency managers, though three school districts still them. But they remain unpopular with many Michiganders. Democratic legislators say they will introduce a bill to <a href="" target="_blank">repeal the EM law</a>. Voters already overturned the EM law in a November 2012 referendum, but a month later, the Republican-led state legislature passed a nearly identical law attached to an appropriations bill that is immune to voter referendum.</p> <p>"Appointing an emergency manager is the last thing I ever want to do," wrote Snyder in a <a href=",4668,7-277-57577_60279-283632--,00.html" target="_blank">2012 blog post </a>entitled "Why Michigan Needs Its Emergency Manager Law," written just before the voter referendum. "But if worse comes to worse, the state has a responsibility to protect the health, welfare and safety of its citizens. We can't stand by and watch schools fail, water shut off, or police protection disappear."</p></body></html> Politics Education Health Regulatory Affairs Thu, 28 Jan 2016 19:10:32 +0000 Julia Lurie 294911 at