Imagine your village’s water supply was about to be contaminated by nuclear waste from a nearby dump and the federal government simply offered to put a fence around it. If you were the Hopi Nation, you’d sue.

In the 1950s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs created an unlined, unrestricted dump a few miles from a uranium mill on Navajo and Hopi land. Everything from uranium tailings to medical waste has been dumped there over the decades. The dump was closed – covered over with sand and dirt – in 1997 and the Hopi and Navajo people have been fighting for a cleanup ever since.

Studies have confirmed that groundwater near the dump contains levels of uranium, arsenic, chromium and more that far exceed what is considered safe. What’s the “safe” level of uranium, anyway? And after years of watching government agencies hem and haw over the issues (yes, even offering to simply build a fence around the dump), the Hopi Nation is fed up. They plan to take serious legal action.

And they’re not just suing as a matter of principle, but because a uranium-contaminated water plume is headed directly for the Hopi water supply. Drinking water is a precious commodity, especially in the Arizonan high desert, and it was governmental mismanagement that led to the problem in the first place.

It’s hard to believe that anyone could sue the government itself and succeed, but with President Obama’s more sensitive leadership, maybe this major law suit (which includes the Department of Energy, Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency) will make the United States government pay better attention to the real and ongoing saga of Native American affairs.

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Move over, melamine; your infamy as a contaminant in Chinese infant formula is being pushed aside by one that’s made in the USA. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has found some samples of American brands of infant formula (although they won’t divulge which) are contaminated with perchlorates – which come from rocket fuel.

How, one has to wonder, are perchlorates getting into the formula many people are feeding to their newborn babies? Improper disposal on military bases, rocket test sites and chemical plants can allow perchlorates, which affect the thyroid, to leach into drinking water. That means these chemicals may be harming you, too. So far, the EPA hasn’t set a “safe” limit for perchlorates in drinking water, but I hope this issue will force the agency to take a closer look and regulate.

Image: Alessandro Perilli

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Last year, it was widely reported that drinking water in many major metropolitan areas was contaminated with trace amounts of drugs. All types of drugs – everything from over-the-counter pain medications to antidepressants to prescription medication for high blood pressure and heart disease.

The drugs we ingest pass right through our bodies and are expelled in our urine. These drugs aren’t removed in the water treatment process and the water is released into our rivers and lakes, which serve as our water supply.

The chatter eventually died down with assurances that the amounts were so small they couldn’t possibly impact human health. But how do we know that for certain? The truth is, we don’t know enough about the effects of prolonged exposure and possible interactions between all the different drugs we ingest in our drinking water.

Drugs given to animals enter our water supply in the same way. Not only does this practice contaminate the water with steroids, hormones, and antibiotics, but because antibiotics are overused (given to healthy animals to prevent disease and increase growth) there is a high likelihood of deadly, drug-resistant infections that can be passed onto humans.

Of particular concern is a staph infection called MSRA which is killing more than 18,000 Americans a year and, as was recently reported, is showing up on hog farms.

Another recent story outlines how river fish in urban areas are contaminated with trace amounts of drugs, simply from living in the rivers through which our treated sewage flows. River fish in Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Orlando were all tested and compared to fish from a river in New Mexico into which no treated sewage flows.

The fish were tested for 24 different pharmaceuticals and 12 chemicals found in personal care products. Trace concentrations of seven drugs were found in fish at all five of the urban river sites. None were found in the fish from New Mexico.

These issues are part and parcel of the same problem. The drugs we take, dump down the sink or toilet or give to animals end up in the water supply because there is no “away”. When we throw things away or flush our toilets, our stuff has to go somewhere.

Last month, Congress introduced a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. It aims to prohibit farmers from feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals. This is great and long overdue, but it won’t entirely solve our drug problem.

We must also shift our thinking. Planners, policy makers, corporations and individuals all need to remember that we are connected to one another and all things are part of the web of nature. Everything we do has some effect downstream. We must all begin to think less linearly and more holistically about our actions.

In the meantime, you can start by finding out more about the antibiotics issue here.

Image: publik15

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Serious hikers and those who travel are quite familiar with the many varieties of portable water testers. But who would have imagined that here in the United States we would ever feel the need or desire to test our pet food or baby formula?

With an estimated 50,000 Chinese children sickened and several deaths after drinking melamine contaminated formula, and the reported deaths 8,500 dogs and cats in the United States from contaminated pet food produced in China, the folks at Purdue University were inspired to invent a new analysis method that can detect the kidney-damaging chemical in a matter of seconds.

“This situation created an immediate need for an analytical method that is highly sensitive, fast, accurate, and easy to use,” said R. Graham Cooks, Purdue’s Henry B. Hass distinguished professor of chemistry on the Purdue website. Hass led the team that developed the analysis method, which included Guangming Huang, a postdoctoral research associate, and Zheng Ouyang, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering. A paper detailing their work was published online in the journal Chemical Communications and will appear in the next issue of the journal.

Cooks said that even without direct contamination, trace amounts of melamine sometimes make their way into consumable products because melamine is used in manufacturing and is found in many packaging materials. At trace levels, said Cooks, the chemical is not known to be a health threat and has been deemed safe by the FDA. Our analysis, he added, provides a way to determine whether the amounts present exceed safe levels.

The Office of Naval Research Research Tools Program funded this research.

Image: Maldivian dude

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Our national innocence regarding the safety of our food supply is fast eroding. From salmonella in tomatoes and peanut butter, to E. coli in spinach, how can we trust that the food we eat is safe and the government we pay taxes to is paying attention?

Two recent examples: Last fall, Mother Jones broke the story that canned tuna contains dangerous levels of mercury and that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew this when it left canned tuna off the seafood advisories it released in 2001. This week, two studies are out showing that nearly one-third of popular food and drink products listing High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) as the first or second ingredient contain mercury.

So much for that standby childhood lunch of a tuna sandwich and a soda – children are especially susceptible to mercury poisoning.

In the case of mercury contamination of HFCS, Grist reports that the FDA has known about it since 2005 and that the information was finally revealed when a researcher left the agency and published her work in one of the studies just released.

The Corn Refiners Association, conveniently located in Washington D.C. near Capitol Hill, released a statement about one of the studies saying, “This study appears to be based on outdated information of dubious significance.” And while it’s true that not all HFCS is produced using the chemical processes that cause mercury contamination, much of it still is.

In addition to its prior knowledge of the mercury contamination in HFCS, the FDA has done its part in helping HFCS become the ubiquitous ingredient it is. In 1983, the FDA formally listed high fructose corn syrup as safe for use in food. That decision was reaffirmed in 1996 and in 2008, when the agency classified HFCS as a “natural” product.

Despite the FDA’s friendly stance, HFCS had a publicity problem long before the sweetener was found to be contaminated with mercury. Nutritionists have linked the pervasive ingredient to obesity and other health problems.

To counter bad publicity, The Corn Refiners Association launched an approximately $30 million public relations and advertising campaign last summer to convince consumers that HFCS was safe and as natural as sugar. Full page newspaper ads and television commercials ran in the nation’s most prominent media outlets. The blogosphere, including Ecosalon, was not convinced.

In the case of canned tuna, the FDA released an updated advisory in 2003 listing chunk light canned tuna as a “low mercury” seafood. Though the agency didn’t require this information to appear in stores or on tuna cans, the mild warning caused a minor drop in sales. The industry responded by launching a major $25 million campaign touting tuna’s Omega-3 fatty acid content and other health benefits.

Faced with the knowledge that our government agencies are more interested in protecting industry profits than protecting our health, what are we to do?

Trust your instincts. If a cheap, highly subsidized and highly processed ingredient suddenly shows up in a lot of different foods, be suspicious.

If the government drafts an advisory warning the public about contamination of a commodity product (like tuna) but pointedly avoids warning the public about branded versions of that commodity (canned tuna) be suspicious. Tangled red tape is a warning sign.

Be wary of major advertising campaigns by industry groups. You can bet if X industry trade group is spending millions of dollars trying to convince you that a particular product or ingredient is good for you, it probably isn’t.

Speak up.
Tell the new administration in Washington that you want the government to put your health before the health of agribusiness balance sheets.

Image: tsuacctnt

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Security was exceptionally tight surrounding the sentencing in the tainted milk scandal in China. Police roadblocks were set up and grieving parents of the young victims were not allowed into the courtroom to hear the verdicts. Three people were sentenced to death (including a middleman who peddled the poison to milk stations) and several others were ordered behind bars, including the head of the dairy that knowingly produced the melamine-contaminated formula.

Tian Wenhua, who pleaded guilty, received a life sentence plus a $3.6M fine. Why did the court spare the life of the Sanlu dairy executive? We only know that the parents of the victims expressed outrage that the punishment did not fit the crime.

One mother, whose baby died from the milk, fell to the ground crying, arguing Wenhua should be shot to pay for the death of her child. Who among us can’t feel that mother’s pain? Keeping her out of the courtroom was just another way to control a population that exists in another kind of prison, one rife with human rights abuses in which women and young people (babies and protesting college students) are too often the victims.

At least, this time, the government admitted it is partly to blame for adulterated milk deaths. In an interview in Science Magazine, Premier Wen Jiabao was quoted as saying leaders were especially lax in “supervision and management.” He added that he would handle the incident sincerely and seriously “and draw deep lessons from it.”

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