Monthly Archives: October 2008

Boo!  All week long, the Eco Women will be posting about the environmental issues that scare them the most.

In 1909, cotton and sugarcane plantations dominated the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.  The same year, Standard Oil established the first refinery.  Since then, this stretch of river has become of the of America’s most toxic cesspools — full of bad odors, bad water, illness and pollution.  Over 300 major industries operate within this corridor.  This stretch of river is also home to primarily low income African Americans.  Unemployment is high and poverty abounds.  Alongside poor living conditions, these people suffer from asthma, stillbirths, miscarriages, neurological diseases and cancer.  Mike Farrell gives his personal view on his blog–

One woman, who seems to be the appointed spokesperson for the community, produces a list of family and neighbors who have died of cancer, liver and kidney disease and other less-clear causes. Among other insults, she talks of being victimized by “mustard gas,” which is later explained to me as a chemical reaction resulting from a process used by the company to clean old equipment. The gas had seeped out, into, and across their community. The residents claim the company has responsibility for the medical problems that have resulted from this and other such incidents; the company will not help.

A young woman, a graduate of the university, tells of the lingering effects of damage that was done her when a barge capsized on the river just offshore and a cloud of benzene encompassed the campus. A lovely young woman — her tale of years of debilitating illness, nausea, and possible neural damage is staggering. She’s followed by a teacher who describes her own confusion as to what to do during the event. Her students were suffering, yet they were all told to remain on campus, no cause for alarm. Nor has there been any acceptance of responsibility for the accident.

In 2002 Louisiana had the 2nd highest death rate from cancer in the U.S.  It had a population of 4,469,970 people and produced 9,416,598,055 pounds of waste in 2000.  Industries citing industrial accidents and accidental chemical releases include Conoco.  Conoco discharged 19-47 million pounds of ethylene dicholoride into a local stream.  After the flooding from Katrina and Rita, an estimated million gallons of oil saturated St. Bernard Parish from 44 spills.  An estimated 7 million gallons of oil seeped out of gas stations, offshore rigs, and coastal refineries.  Soil samples showed arsenic, heavy metals, benzene, diesel, and pesticides.  Residents and relief workers both reported flu-like symptoms, fevers, vomiting, and coughing for  months after Katrina.

You can’t read about this place, these people, this pollution without feeling some level of guilt.  We’ve all profited from the destruction of this region — enjoyed the luxury of cheap fuel and ignored its source.  The corporations in this region polluted and profited without accountability and the citizens suffered without recourse (it’s tough for people without money to have a voice, hire legal representation, or fight companies with billions in their coffers). One cannot travel through this region and ignore the scars of corporate greed — the smoke of the factories and refineries, the landscape of scaffolding and structure.  Enviro-Girl saw it firsthand in 1995, she can only imagine what the past decade of American greed has done to further devastate the region.  When she reads the following articles, it’s hard for her to believe the words “liberty and justice for all.”

The Brookings Institution

CorpWatch Progressive Future American Portfolio

Boo!  All week long, the Eco Women will be posting about the environmental issues that scare them the most.

This past spring the Associated Press ran a 5 month investigation that revealed all kinds of drugs in the drinking water used by at least 41 million Americans.  These drugs included antibiotics, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers, and hormones.

Here are some of their findings:

_Officials in Philadelphia said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city’s watersheds.

_Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.

_Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.

_A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco’s drinking water.

_The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.

_Three medications, including an antibiotic, were found in drinking water supplied to Tucson, Ariz.

This news isn’t terribly surprising considering the love affair Americans, especially aging Americans, have with pharmaceuticals.  The number of prescriptions rose to 3.7 million in the last 5 years.  Nonprescription drug purchases are 3.3 billion — a number certain to rise as certain medications become available over-the-counter like Claritin.

Most of these drugs get passed through urine into wastewater treatment systems where the drugs simply cannot break down.  Pharmaceuticals are designed to remain stable so their shelf life lasts and lasts.  Drugs don’t disappear once they’re in a body — many can’t be removed from water once they’re passed through the human body, including popular cholesterol medications.  Reverse osmosis is the only method proven to remove all contamination, but it’s expensive and impractical and leaves behind gallons of contaminated water.

The other source of drugs in our drinking water is disposal — people don’t finish a drug or find an outdated bottle of something in their medicine cabinet and flush it down the toilet — directly infusing it into the water supply.

Aquifiers near landfills and animal feed lots provide another source of contamination — steroids and antibiotics given to cattle flow straight into the water.

What’s the result of all these drugs in the water supply? The bottom feeders of the food chain are already showing the effects — male fish are being feminized because of their exposure to estrogen, earthworms, zooplankton, minnows and frogs also show abnormalities.   As we all know from pesticide use in the 60′s, trace amounts that damage the bottom of the food chain work up — remember the thin eggshells threatening the extinction of the American Bald Eagle — DDT had made its way through plants to fish to settle and concentrate in birds.  New lab studies now show small amounts of medication can affect human embryonic kidney cells, human blood cells and human breast cancer cells.  This limited research has already unveiled the danger of drugs in our water — and it’s just begun to study the effects of continuous exposure to small amounts of drugs over a long period of time.

What’s to be done?

That’s the scariest part of this story — the contamination is here and continues to increase as we age and depend more and more on pharmaceuticals to cure what ails us.  We can’t turn to bottled water as a safe source since bottlers mostly repackage tap water and don’t test for pharmaceuticals.  Home filtration systems and boiling don’t remove the drugs either.

We can:

*  Stop flushing pharmaceuticals, instead throw them away in the trash.

*  Reduce our use of pharmaceuticals.  Many (although not all) conditions can be resolved through healthy living, making some medications unnecessary.

*  Demand accountability from the EPA, FDA and public officials on this issue.

*  Request that our local water supply gets tested and those test results get published.

For the rest of this scary story from the Associated Press, click here.  Yes, Fox News ran the complete study!