I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The U.S. government has “grossly” underestimated the number of cancers caused by exposure to environmental and workplace carcinogens and exposure to medical imaging radiation, a White House expert panel on cancer reported Thursday.
“The American people — even before they are born — are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures. The Panel urges you most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives,” the panel told President Obama.
“With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un(studied) or understudied and largely unregulated,” the panel wrote. “Exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread. One such ubiquitous chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), is still found in many consumer products and remains unregulated in the United States, despite the growing link between BPA and several diseases, including various cancers.”
The public is largely unaware of many common environmental carcinogens such radon and manufacturing and smoke by-products such as formaldehyde and benzene, the panel concluded.
The widespread use of high-radiation Computed Tomography (CT) scans instead of x-rays has increased Americans’ exposure to ionizing radiation and may also be significantly contributing to national cancer rates, the panel reported. A single chest CT scan can deliver more radiation than 100 chest x-rays, a recent study found.
Hundreds of thousands of military personnel and civilians in the United States were exposed to potentially carcinogenic levels of radiation during nuclear weapons testing and development, the panelists wrote, including nuclear fuel and weapons production, and uranium mining, milling, and ore transport.
Children are more vulnerable to environmental carcinogens than adults, the panelists wrote.
Climbing rates of some cancers in children are poorly understood, but the panel noted studies reporting industrial chemicals in umbilical-cord blood that suggest prenatal exposure to carcinogens from the mother’s environment.
“To a disturbing extent, babies are born ‘pre-polluted,’ ” the panel reported.
The U.S. should rewrite existing laws to better and more rapidly evaluate the safety of chemicals in consumer products, the panelists wrote, echoing calls on Congress by labor, environmental, consumer and cancer patient advocates to update the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act.
The Obama administration has already begun to do that.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stripped health risks for hundreds of chemicals of their “confidential business information” status and posted information about those chemicals online, for example.
And the EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), a program to evaluate the toxic and cancer risks of chemicals, is now back at work evaluating a backlog of chemicals after eight years of stalled efforts under the Bush administration.
Several IRIS scientists had reported in 2008 that they had been told to alter data in scientific reports about chemical risks, and the U.S. Energy and Defense departments were allowed to derail assessments of several chemicals deemed “mission critical” to the government.
IRIS has evaluated only 200 of the 80,000 chemicals that are on the market for carcinogenicity and other risks.
In January, the EPA announced that production of another flame retardant, the suspected carcinogen deca-BDE, will be curtailed by 2013.
In 2009, 1.5 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer, and 562,000 died from cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute.
