How to Clean Up Our Water

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Everyday household activities are a major contributor to polluted runoff, which is among the most serious sources of water contamination. When it rains, fertilizer from lawns, oil from driveways, paint and solvent residues from walls and decks and even waste from pet Fido are all washed into storm sewers or nearby lakes, rivers and streams -- the same lakes, rivers and streams we rely on for drinking, bathing, swimming and fishing. Here are some ways you can help reduce polluted runoff.

In Your Home:
1. Correctly dispose of hazardous household products. Keep paints, used oil, cleaning solvents, polishes, pool chemicals, insecticides, and other hazardous household chemicals out of drains, sinks, and toilets. Many of these products contain harmful substances -- such as sodium hypochlorite, petroleum distillates, phenol and cresol, ammonia and formaldehyde -- that can end up in nearby water bodies. Contact your local sanitation, public works, or environmental health department to find out about hazardous waste collection days and sites. If a local program isn't available, request one.

2. Use nontoxic household products whenever possible. Discarding toxic products correctly is important, but not buying them in the first place is better. Ask local stores to carry nontoxic products if they don't already. For examples of safe substitutes for toxic household products, check EPA's EnviroSense website.

3. Recycle and dispose of all trash properly. Never flush non-degradable products -- such as disposable diapers or plastic tampon applicators -- down the toilet. They can damage the sewage treatment process and end up littering beaches and waters.

4. Conserve water. Use the most efficient plumbing fixtures. A whopping 73 percent of the water you use in your home is either flushed down the toilet or washed down the shower drain. Toilet dams or bricks placed in your toilet tank can save four gallons of water per flush, or up to 13,000 gallons a year for the average family of four. Low-flow toilets and showerheads also yield major water savings. Repair drips promptly; a dripping faucet can waste 20 gallons a day, a leaking toilet 200 gallons. Sweep driveways and sidewalks instead of hosing them down.

In Your Yard:
5. Use natural fertilizers. Apply natural fertilizer such as compost, manure, bone meal or peat whenever possible. Ask your local hardware and garden supply stores to stock these natural fertilizers. You can also buy a composting setup at a garden supply or hardware store, or by mail. Composting decreases the need for fertilizer and helps soil retain moisture. If you don't know how to compost, visit The Compost Resource Page or the EPA's composting pages.

6. Avoid over-watering lawns and gardens. Use slow-watering techniques on lawns and gardens. Over-watering lawns can increase the leaching of fertilizers into groundwater. Trickle or "drip" irrigation systems and soaker hoses are 20 percent more efficient than sprinklers.

7. Decrease impervious surfaces around your home. Having fewer hard surfaces of concrete and asphalt will improve drainage around your home and in your yard. Do your landscaping with vegetation, gravel or other porous materials instead of cement; install wood decking instead of concrete, and interlocking bricks and paver stones for walkways. Redirect rain gutters and downspouts to soil, grass or gravel areas. Planting vegetation at lower elevations than nearby hard surfaces allows runoff to seep into soil.

8. Maintain septic systems properly. Have the septic tank cleaned out every three to five years. Effluent from failed or poorly maintained septic systems can contaminate groundwater. Monitoring and cleaning your system regularly also saves money by prolonging the life of the system.

Maintaining Your Car:
9. Recycle used motor oil. Avoid pouring waste oil into gutters or down storm drains, and resist the temptation to dump wastes onto the ground. A single quart of motor oil that seeps into groundwater can pollute 250,000 gallons of drinking water. If you don't have a place to recycle used motor oil in your community, ask your local sanitation or public works department to create one. When you buy motor oil, ask if the store or service station has a program to buy back waste oil and dispose of it properly. Keep up with car maintenance to reduce leaking of oil, coolant, antifreeze and other hazardous fluids.

10. Be "green" when washing your car. Hand-wash your car on the lawn with a bucket of soapy water, rags and a hose. Just turning off the hose between rinsings can save up to 150 gallons. Or, if you don't want to do it yourself, choose a car wash that recycles its water.

In Your Community:
11. Help identify, report and stop polluters. Join a local clean water or environmental group that monitors industries and sewage treatment plants that are discharging wastes. Local groups can be effective working together with state environmental agencies, EPA and national groups like NRDC to ensure that industries comply with regulations.

12. Be an activist. Contact your public officials and attend hearings to encourage them to support laws and programs to protect our water. Ask officials to control polluted runoff, increase protection for wetlands and other aquatic ecosystems, reduce the flow of toxics into our waterways, and strengthen enforcement. Volunteer for a beach or stream clean up, tree planting, water quality sampling, or stream pollution monitoring project sponsored by a local environmental group or watershed council. Visit NRDC's Earth Action Center to get government contact information and learn about urgent issues you can get in involved in.
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A regular dip could benefit fibromyalgia sufferers

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Fibromyalgia is a common, painful syndrome, with no known cause and no accepted cure. Symptoms usually involve chronic and severe pain and tenderness in muscles, ligaments and tendons. Pain in the neck and shoulders is common but sufferers also report problems with sleep, anxiety and depression. More than 90 percent of sufferers are female. Physicians usually prescribe painkillers together with exercise and relaxation techniques, but they may also prescribe a low-dose antidepressant.

Now, Narcís Gusi of the Faculty of Sports Sciences, at the University of Extremadura, in Cáceres, Spain and Pablo Tomas-Carus of the Department of Sport and Health at the University of Évora, Portugal have carried out a randomized controlled trial with a group of 33 female fibromyalgia patients to find an alternative approach. Seventeen of the patients took part in supervised training exercises in warm water for an hour three times a week over a period of 8 months while the remaining sixteen did no aquatic training.

Gusi and Tomas-Carus found that this long-term aquatic exercise program was effective in reducing symptoms and improving the health-related quality of life of the participants. In an earlier study, the researchers had shown that even a short-term exercise regime could reduce symptoms but pain would return once the patients stopped the exercise course.

"The addition of an aquatic exercise programme to the usual care for fibromyalgia in women, is cost-effective in terms of both health care costs and societal costs," the researchers conclude, "appropriate aquatic exercise is a good health investment." The researchers are yet to compare aquatic training with more accessible and cheaper forms of exercise, such as low-impact aerobics, walking, and tai-chi.
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Go Organic

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Canadian researchers report that dieters with the most organochlorines (pollutants from pesticides, which are stored in fat cells) experience a greater than normal dip in metabolism as they lose weight, perhaps because the toxins interfere with the energy-burning process. Other research hints that pesticides can trigger weight gain. Always choose organic when buying peaches, apples, bell peppers, celery, nectarines, strawberries, cherries, lettuce, imported grapes, and pears; they tend to have the highest levels of pesticides.

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Assail the Seven Seas

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Nearly all of world's oceans tainted by human activity, says study.

Human activity has tainted all but 3.7 percent of the world's oceans, and 41 percent of the world's waters have been heavily impacted, says a new study in Science. A graphic map illustrates in all-too-clear terms that the briny deep has taken a terrible toll from 17 human threats, including climate change, overfishing, fertilizer runoff, coastal development, and shipping pollution.

Only a few small areas near both poles remain relatively pristine -- though, according to one coauthor, "they are not untouched."

In addition, a separate study in Science found that low-oxygen dead zones off the U.S. West Coast were unprecedented before they began showing up regularly in 2002, that in 2006 some areas lacked oxygen altogether, that dead zones will likely persist and possibly get worse, and that climate change is likely to blame.

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Smoking during pregnancy hurts poor most

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Emma Tominey, a research assistant at the Center for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, said the effects are almost negligible if women stop smoking by the fifth month of pregnancy, The Times of London reported Thursday.

Tominey's report, based on data from the U.K. National Child Development Study, said women from the poorest backgrounds suffer from the highest rate of problems because smoking is often combined with unhealthy activities such as poor diet and consumption of alcohol, the newspaper said. The analysis suggested that middle class women suffer almost no damaging effects, even if they smoke throughout the entire pregnancy.

"Not only is it the low-socioeconomic-status mothers who choose to smoke, but they are also the mothers bearing the greatest burden from the smoking,'" Tominey said. "Therefore, any potential solution must offer help to these mothers, to target those with the worst habits and poorest records of child health."
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Does Your Food Travel More than You Do?

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When we shop at the grocery store today, we don't bat an eye at the sight of strawberries in the winter or perfect tomatoes from Holland. In the space of a generation, we've become accustomed to eating food that's never grown roots in local soil. In fact, most produce grown in the United States travels an average of 1,500 miles before it gets sold.

Trucking, shipping and flying in food from around the country and the globe takes a toll on the environment and on public health. Take grapes, for example. Every year, nearly 270 million pounds of grapes arrive in California, most of them shipped from Chile to the Port of Los Angeles. Their 5,900 mile journey in cargo ships and trucks releases 7,000 tons of global warming pollution each year, and enough air pollution to cause dozens of asthma attacks and hundreds of missed school days in California.

The way we eat has an enormous impact on the health of the planet. By choosing to eat lower on the food chain, and focusing on local and organic produce, we can curb global warming and air pollution, avoid toxic pesticides, support local farmers and enjoy fresh, tasty food.
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Chronic Pain Harms the Brain

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In a new study, investigators at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine have identified a clue that may explain how suffering long-term pain could trigger these other pain-related symptoms.

Researchers found that in a healthy brain all the regions exist in a state of equilibrium. When one region is active, the others quiet down. But in people with chronic pain, a front region of the cortex mostly associated with emotion "never shuts up," said Dante Chialvo, lead author and associate research professor of physiology at the Feinberg School. "The areas that are affected fail to deactivate when they should."

They are stuck on full throttle, wearing out neurons and altering their connections to each other.

This is the first demonstration of brain disturbances in chronic pain patients not directly related to the sensation of pain. The study will be published Feb. 6 in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Chialvo and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of people with chronic low back pain and a group of pain-free volunteers while both groups were tracking a moving bar on a computer screen. The study showed the pain sufferers performed the task well but "at the expense of using their brain differently than the pain-free group," Chialvo said.

When certain parts of the cortex were activated in the pain-free group, some others were deactivated, maintaining a cooperative equilibrium between the regions. This equilibrium also is known as the resting state network of the brain. In the chronic pain group, however, one of the nodes of this network did not quiet down as it did in the pain-free subjects.

This constant firing of neurons in these regions of the brain could cause permanent damage, Chialvo said. "We know when neurons fire too much they may change their connections with other neurons and or even die because they can't sustain high activity for so long," he explained.

'If you are a chronic pain patient, you have pain 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every minute of your life," Chialvo said. "That permanent perception of pain in your brain makes these areas in your brain continuously active. This continuous dysfunction in the equilibrium of the brain can change the wiring forever and could hurt the brain."

Chialvo hypothesized the subsequent changes in wiring "may make it harder for you to make a decision or be in a good mood to get up in the morning. It could be that pain produces depression and the other reported abnormalities because it disturbs the balance of the brain as a whole."

He said his findings show it is essential to study new approaches to treat patients not just to control their pain but also to evaluate and prevent the dysfunction that may be generated in the brain by the chronic pain.
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Groups Challenge EPA Regulation that Allows Pesticide Testing on Humans

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NEW YORK (January 16, 2008) – The second circuit federal appellate court on Thursday will hear a challenge to an EPA rule that allows people to be used as guinea pigs in tests of toxic pesticides. The lawsuit, NRDC V. EPA was brought before the court by a coalition of environmental, farmworker and health groups in 2006. The groups contend that the agency's human testing rule violates a law passed by Congress in 2005 mandating strict ethical and scientific protections for pesticide testing on humans.

“Testing poisons on people is unethical and against the law,” said Shelley Davis, deputy director of Farmworker Justice, a national advocacy and education center for migrant and seasonal farmworkers, based in Washington, D.C. “The EPA should stop accepting these industry funded tests.”

Previous human testing by industry produced serious ethical and scientific problems including one instance in which a company told participants they were eating vitamins, not toxic pesticides. In other instances citied in the lawsuit, researchers ignored the adverse health effects reported by the participants.

“The only people who get what they want out of these immoral tests are the chemical companies,” said Aaron Colangelo, a Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) senior attorney representing the petitioners. “Their testing methods are questionable at best, the only purpose they serve is to weaken pesticide safety standards, and ultimately the people who grow and harvest our food suffer the consequences. This practice must end.”

In 2005, Congress passed a law strictly forbidding the use of pregnant women and minors in pesticide tests. A loophole in the new EPA rule will allow testing of pregnant women, infants and children. Low-income people and students are the most likely to participate in these dangerous experiments, for which they usually receive a few hundred dollars. However, participants injured in the studies are not guaranteed medical care outside of the testing period.

The groups contend the EPA rule violates international ethical standards enumerated in the 1947 Nuremburg Code by permitting the EPA to set safety standards based on tests conducted with only a handful of healthy people. In most tests, participants are not representative of the U.S. population, the test period is scientifically problematic, and group size is not large enough to detect potential harmful health effects.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of the NRDC, the Pesticide Action Network of North America, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, Physicians for Social Responsibility, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, Pineros y Campesinos del Noreste, and the Migrant Clinicians Network. Attorneys for the petitioners are NRDC, Farmworker Justice and Earthjustice.
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Study Warns of Chemicals in Baby Items

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The chemicals, called phthalates, are found in many ordinary products including cosmetics, toys, vinyl flooring and medical supplies. They are used to stabilize fragrances and make plastics flexible.

In the study, they were found in elevated levels in the urine of babies who'd been recently shampooed, powdered or lotioned with baby products.

Phthalates (pronounced thowl-ates) are under attack by some environmental advocacy groups, but experts are uncertain what dangers, if any, they might pose. The federal government doesn't limit their use, although California and some countries have restricted their use.

Animal studies have suggested that phthalates can cause reproductive birth defects and some activists believe they may cause reproductive problems in boys and early puberty in girls.

Rigorous scientific evidence in human studies is lacking. The current study offers no direct evidence that products the infants used contained phthalates, and no evidence that the chemicals in the babies' urine caused any harm. Still, the results worried environmental groups that support restrictions on these chemicals.

"There is an obvious need for laws that force the beauty industry to clean up its act," said Stacy Malkan of Health Care Without Harm.

The study's lead author, Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana, a University of Washington pediatrician, said, "The bottom line is that these chemicals likely do exist in products that we're commonly using on our children and they potentially could cause health effects."

Babies don't usually need special lotions and powders, and water alone or shampoo in very small amounts is generally enough to clean infant hair, Sathyanarayana said. Concerned parents can seek products labeled "phthalate-free," or check labels for common phthalates, including DEP and DEHP.

But the chemicals often don't appear on product labels. That's because retail products aren't required to list individual ingredients of fragrances, which are a common phthalate source.

The Food and Drug Administration "has no compelling evidence that phthalates pose a safety risk when used in cosmetics," spokeswoman Stephanie Kwisnek said. "Should new data emerge, we will inform the public as well as the industry."

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the health effects in humans are uncertain. "

Although several studies in people have explored possible associations with developmental and reproductive outcomes (semen quality, genital development in boys, shortened pregnancy, and premature breast development in young girls), more research is needed," a 2005 CDC report said.

The new study, which appears in February's issue of the journal Pediatrics, involved 163 babies. Most were white, ages 2 to 28 months and living in California, Minnesota and Missouri.

The researchers measured levels of several phthalates in urine from diapers. They also asked the mothers about use in the previous 24 hours of baby products including lotions, powders, diaper creams and baby wipes.

All urine samples had detectable levels of at least one phthalate, and most had levels of several more. The highest levels were linked with shampoos, lotions and powders, and were most prevalent in babies younger than 8 months.

John Bailey, chief scientist at the Personal Care Products Council, questioned the methods and said the phthalates could have come from diapers, lab materials or other sources.

"Unfortunately, the researchers of this study did not test baby care products for the presence of phthalates or control for other possible routes of exposure," Bailey said.
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Folic acid cuts risk of premature birth

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The report, presented Thursday at the annual Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine meeting, said taking folate supplements for at least one year before becoming pregnant reduced premature delivery by 50 percent to 70 percent.

Babies who are born very premature are at the greatest risk of complications such as cerebral palsy, mental retardation, chronic lung disease and blindness.

The findings were based on observational analysis of folate supplementation by 38,033 participants in an earlier trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

"Thanks to the depth and breadth of the NIH study, which included an early pregnancy ultrasound of each participant, we had highly accurate evidence of the gestational ages of the preterm deliveries," Dr. Radek Bukowski of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston said in a release.

Folate supplements were linked to a 70 percent decrease in very early preterm deliveries between 20 to 28 weeks in gestational age, and up to a 50 percent reduction in early preterm deliveries of 28 to 32 weeks.
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