Hurricane Harvey picked up and spread around scores of toxic chemicals in Houston, home to 6.5 million residents and 500 industrial sites—drawing attention to chemical-related health risks new and old.Oil refineries, hazardous waste sites and abandoned Superfund sites…
More than 1 billion pounds of garbage pile up each year globally.In fast-growing African cities, improper garbage disposal spurs epidemics of malaria, yellow fever, and 2 recent outbreaks of Lassa fever in Lagos—now Africa’s largest city at 21 million people.
1 in 10 in Indonesia’s North Kayong province live on less than $1 a day, and scores pay for scarce medical care through illegal logging in the Gunung Palung National Park.Tackling the problem for over a decade, non-profit Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI) blends “healthcare,…
In an unusual move, the editorial board of a small academic journal called for disciplinary action against its publisher for prioritizing “corporate interests over independent science in the public interest.”
Across the US, African American and low-income communities near oil and natural gas refineries are at disproportionate health risks from airborne pollutants, finds a new analysis. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and the NAACP report, quantifying environmental racism in “…
Pollutants’ impact is likely multi-generational, according to epigeneticists tracking how pollutants alter gene regulation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Without changing the DNA code, epigenetic changes dictate “which genes are switched on and off…
The shockingly toxic air that has shut down Delhi is a multi-sensory experience—it can be tasted and smelled in the air, and felt in the weakness and nausea it invokes. In a city accustomed to everyday noxious air, children vomiting out of a school bus prompted the…
Epidemics and pandemics can rewrite history. The Great Plague of the medieval ages, or “The Black Death,” which killed 75-200 million and wiped away 60% of the European population, is one of history’s most catastrophic examples. The last plague pandemic occurred in the 19th…
The Trump administration has overturned a planned EPA ban on a pesticide from a class of chemicals the Nazis used to make nerve gas, Nicholas Kristof reports. Studies link the chemical, chlorpyrifos—found throughout the environment—to brain damage, cancer and Parkinson’s…
A crack team of Stanford researchers is looking to end the scourge of coal and rubber-burning brick kilns in South Asia, where their environmental impacts rival those of cars. Pollution spewed by the kilns, linked to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, kills tens of…
