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Agent Orange, exposed: How U.S. chemical warfare in Vietnam unleashed a slow-moving disaster.
Some 45 million liters of the poisoned spray was Agent Orange, which contains the toxic compound dioxin. It has unleashed in Vietnam a slow-onset disaster whose devastating economic, health and ecological impacts that are still being felt today.
In the end, the military campaign was called Operation Ranch Hand, but it originally went by a more appropriately hellish appellation: Operation Hades. As part of this Vietnam War effort, from 1961 to 1971, the United States sprayed over 73 million liters of chemical agents on the country to strip away the vegetation that provided cover for Vietcong troops in “enemy territory.”
Using a variety of defoliants, the U.S. military also intentionally targeted cultivated land, destroying crops and disrupting rice production and distribution by the largely communist National Liberation Front, a party devoted to reunification of North and South Vietnam.
Some 45 million liters of the poisoned spray was Agent Orange, which contains the toxic compound dioxin. It has unleashed in Vietnam a slow-onset disaster whose devastating economic, health and ecological impacts that are still being felt today.
This is one of the greatest legacies of the country’s 20-year war, but is yet to be honestly confronted. Even Ken Burns and Lynn Novick seem to gloss over this contentious issue, both in their supposedly exhaustive “Vietnam War” documentary series and in subsequent interviews about the horrors of Vietnam.
Vietnam’s half-century of disaster
More than 10 years of U.S. chemical warfare in Vietnam exposed an estimated 2.1 to 4.8 million Vietnamese people to Agent Orange. More than 40 years on, the impact on their health has been staggering.
This dispersion of Agent Orange over a vast area of central and south Vietnam poisoned the soil, river systems, lakes and rice paddies of Vietnam, enabling toxic chemicals to enter the food chain.
Today crops are grown and livestock graze at former U.S. bases where toxic dioxin continues to pollute the soil. HOANG DINH NAM / AFP
Vietnamese people weren’t the only ones poisoned by Agent Orange. U.S. soldiers, unaware of the dangers, sometimes showered in the empty 55-gallon drums, used them to store food and repurposed them as barbecue pits.
Unlike the effects of another chemical weapon used in Vietnam – namely napalm, which caused painful death by burns or asphyxiation – Agent Orange exposure did not affect its victims immediately.
In the first generation, the impacts were mostly visible in high rates of various forms of cancer among both U.S. soldiers and Vietnam residents.
But then the children were born. It is estimated that, in total, tens of thousands of people have suffered serious birth defects – spina bifida, cerebral palsy, physical and intellectual disabilities and missing or deformed limbs. Because the effects of the chemical are passed from one generation to the next, Agent Orange is now debilitating its third and fourth generation.
Aerial spraying in central and southern Vietnam. Wikimedia
A legacy of environmental devastation
During the 10-year campaign, U.S. aircraft targeted 4.5 million acres across 30 different provinces in the area below the 17th parallel and in the Mekong Delta, destroying inland hardwood forests and coastal mangrove swamps as they sprayed.
The most heavily exposed locations – among them Dong Nai, Binh Phuoc, Thua Thien Hue and Kontum – were sprayed multiple times. Toxic hotspots also remain at several former U.S. air force bases.
And while research in those areas is limited – an extensive 2003 study was canceled in 2005 due to a reported “lack of mutual understanding” between the U.S. and the Vietnamese governments – evidence suggests that the heavily polluted soil and water in these locations have yet to recover.
The dangerous quantity of residual dioxin in the earth thwarts the normal growth of crops and trees, while continuing to poison the food chain.
Vietnam’s natural defenses were also debilitated. Nearly 50 percent of the country’s mangroves, which protect shorelines from typhoons and tsunamis, were destroyed.
On a positive note, the Vietnamese government and both local and international organizations are making strides toward restoring this critical landscape. The U.S. and Vietnam are also undertaking a joint remediation program to deal with dioxin-contaminated soil and water.
Mangrove forests before and after spraying. Wikimedia
The destruction of Vietnamese forests, however, has proven irreversible. The natural habitat of such rare species as tigers, elephants, bears and leopards were distorted, in many cases beyond repair.
In parts of central and southern Vietnam that were already exposed to environmental hazards such as frequent typhoons and flooding in low-lying areas and droughts and water scarcity in the highlands and Mekong Delta, herbicide spraying led to nutrient loss in the soil.
This, in turn, has caused erosion, compromising forests in 28 river basins. As a result, flooding has gotten worse in numerous watershed areas.
Some of these vulnerable areas also happen to be very poor and, these days, home to a large number of Agent Orange victims.
War propaganda and delayed justice
During Operation Ranch Hand, the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments spent considerable time and effort making the claim that tactical herbicides were safe for humans and the environment.
U.S. propaganda about Agent Orange was so effective, it fooled American troops into thinking it was safe, too.
It launched a public relations campaign included educational programs showing civilians happily applying herbicides to their skin and passing through defoliated areas without concern.
One prominent comic strip featured a character named Brother Nam who explained that “The only effect of defoliant is to kill trees and force leaves to whither, and normally does not cause harm to people, livestock, land, or the drinking water of our compatriots.”
Brother Nam assured readers that herbicides were safe. Wikimedia
It’s abundantly clear now that this is false. Allegedly, chemical manufacturers had informed the U.S. military that Agent Orange was toxic, but spraying went forward anyway.
Today, Agent Orange has become a contentious legal and political issue, both within Vietnam and internationally. From 2005 to 2015, more than 200,000 Vietnamese victims suffering from 17 diseases linked to cancers, diabetes and birth defects were eligible for limited compensation, via a government program.
U.S. companies, including Monsanto and Dow Chemical, have taken the position that the governments involved in the war are solely responsible for paying out damages to Agent Orange victims. In 2004, a Vietnamese group unsuccessfully attempted to sue some 30 companies, alleging that the use of chemical weapons constituted a war crime. The class action case was dismissed in 2005 by a district court in Brooklyn, New York.
Many American victims have had better luck, though, seeing successful multi-million-dollar class action settlements with manufacturers of the chemical, including Dow, in 1984 and 2012.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government recently allocated more than US$13 billion to fund expanded Agent Orange-related health services in America. No such plan is in store in Vietnam.
It is unlikely that the U.S. will admit liability for the horrors Agent Orange unleashed in Vietnam. To do so would set an unwelcome precedent: Despite official denials, the U.S. and its allies, including Israel, have been accused of using chemical weapons in conflicts in Gaza, Iraq and Syria.
As a result, nobody is officially accountable for the suffering of Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange. The Burns and Novick documentary could have finally raised this uncomfortable truth, but, alas, the directors missed their chance.
This story was co-authored by Hang Thai T.M., a research assistant at the Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology, in Hanoi.
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Devastated Puerto Rico tests fairness of response to climate disasters.
Hurricane Maria wrecked the impoverished island’s electrical grid and laid open toxic sites. How will Congress handle the crisis?
Hurricane Maria's devastation of Puerto Rico presents a test case of the United States' response to climate-related damages on a small island territory that is impoverished, vulnerable and underrepresented in Congress. The storm caused widespread damage that could leave people homeless, jobless and without clean water or electricity for months. As is so often the case, the harm hit hardest those with the fewest resources.
It's not just that Puerto Rico was already laden with chronic debt and acutely injured by an earlier storm that had passed just north of the island two weeks before. Nor is it merely that Maria, probably the most destructive hurricane in the island's history, is the kind of event that climate change experts have long warned would be among the risks facing coastal areas as the planet warms.
From the vantage point of environmental justice, this storm also represents many of the ways that those risks are unfairly distributed—and whether the United States, like the world as a whole, is prepared to come to the aid of poor and vulnerable communities that have contributed little to climate change.
The Category 4 hurricane wiped out Puerto Rico's electric grid, and it's expected to be out for months, leaving the island's 3.4 million people—about 44 percent of whom already lived below the poverty line—isolated without life's basic necessities and. As of late Thursday, Puerto Rico's governor, Ricardo Rosselló, said there had been no contact with officials in 85 percent of the island.
Among the questions will be this narrow one, which Congress and the White House will have to grapple with: If there is not enough money to pay all the costs, yet untallied, of the record hurricanes that hit Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico this summer, will the funds be equitably allocated? The two other devastated states have among the largest voting blocs in Congress, and Puerto Rico has no vote.
Puerto Rico is, in many ways, a microcosm for climate fairness issues at the global level. Puerto Ricans use one-third as much energy and emit less than half as much carbon dioxide as the rest of the United States on a per capita basis yet bear the risk of increased hurricane activity in a warming Atlantic basin.
Like its Caribbean neighbor, the U.S. Virgin Islands, which was also hit by hurricanes Maria and Irma, Puerto Rico is a part of the world that doesn't contribute significantly to climate change but is impacted significantly by it.
Since 2003, more than 4,000 natural disasters, including extreme temperatures and droughts, storms, floods and epidemics, have wreaked havoc on the Caribbean, up from fewer than 100 over a similar time period at the beginning of the 20th century. The number of the strongest storms, Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, will likely increase over the coming century, according to the latest National Climate Assessment.
"This is the new norm," Christina Chan, climate resilience practice director for the World Resources Institute and former branch chief for the U.S. State Department's climate change office, said. "How do we start building that into the bloodstream of our economic, social and development work, whether you are talking domestic or international?"
How Will Congress Respond?
The initial federal response to Maria suggests the U.S. will step up.
As news of the devastation on Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands made headlines on the mainland, President Donald Trump upped the federal response from "emergency" declarations to "disaster" declarations for the territories, and prominent Republicans, including Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop of Utah, pledged their support.
The declarations will cover millions of dollars worth of initial recovery efforts, but full recovery and rebuilding costs will be in the tens of billions and will follow on the heels of unprecedented hurricane recovery spending in Texas and Florida, states with a combined Congressional delegation of more than 60 representatives, mostly Republicans. Puerto Rico has one, non-voting "resident commissioner" in Congress, Jenniffer González.
"Texas and Florida will receive the bulk of that funding," Roger-Mark De Souza, director of population, environmental security and resilience at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, said. "It doesn't mean that there isn't additional need or greater need on these more vulnerable territories, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, so there needs to be a consideration of how we balance those allocations, to meet the needs of those who are most vulnerable."
Toxic Sites, Flooding Raise Health Risks
Low-income, minority communities in Texas and Florida also face a long road to recovery, though the situation in Puerto Rico will likely be more difficult.
Judith Enck, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator for Region 2, which includes Puerto Rico, said she's particularly worried about Cano Martin Pena, a low-income community in the capital, San Juan.
"Even when there is just a few inches of rain, they have major flooding problems, and reports are there were over 30 inches of rain in San Juan," Enck said. "On a routine basis, they had problems where there was flooding and then people's furniture would get all wet and then they would endure mold, and then they would have more incidents of asthma—it's just a vicious cycle. There is also just a huge amount of sewage in the floodwaters, so people are exposed to pathogens and bacteria and are prone to rashes and skin diseases."
Puerto Rico is home to a slew of other toxic sites, many of which lack sufficient safeguards to protect surrounding communities under the best of conditions, let alone a major hurricane.
More than half of Puerto Rico's municipal landfills are in violation of EPA's regulations, according to a 2016 report from the bipartisan Congressional Task Force on Economic Growth in Puerto Rico. The territory is also home to 23 Superfund sites that pose a risk to surrounding soil and groundwater, including much of the island of Vieques, which the U.S. military used as a bomb-test site for decades.
Perhaps of greatest concern, however, is a five-story coal ash pile near an electric power plant in Guayama, a low-income community on Puerto Rico's Caribbean coast. The ash, according to EPA testing, contains arsenic, chromium and selenium, which have been linked to serious health effects, such as higher rates of asthma, birth defects and cancer according to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). The senator recently wrote to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, urging him to take appropriate measures to protect the health of Puerto Ricans from "potentially deadly toxic exposure."
Adriana Gonzalez, Sierra Club's environmental justice organizer for Puerto Rico, said before Maria made landfall that she feared the ash will "either blow with the wind or rain will wash it off."
The potential impacts on low-income communities of color led former EPA advisor Michael Dorsey to ask more than a year ago whether Puerto Rico was the next Flint, referring to the Michigan city where low-income communities of color were exposed to high levels of lead in their drinking water. Dorsey urged the nation to do something about similar pollution concerns in Puerto Rico, before it was too late.
It's still too early to assess the full scope of the damage wrought by Maria or the amount of federal aid the territory will need or receive. One image, however, is beginning to emerge. Puerto Rico is quickly becoming a poster child for a problem that spans the globe; the disproportionate impacts of climate change risks on the poor, vulnerable and especially colonial and island nations.
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EPA removes waste at Texas toxic sites, won’t say from where.
The Environmental Protection Agency says it has recovered 517 containers of “unidentified, potentially hazardous material” from highly contaminated toxic waste sites in Texas that flooded last month during Hurricane Harvey.
By Michael Biesecker | AP September 23 at 10:44 PM
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency says it has recovered 517 containers of “unidentified, potentially hazardous material” from highly contaminated toxic waste sites in Texas that flooded last month during Hurricane Harvey.
The agency has not provided details about which Superfund sites the material came from, why the contaminants at issue have not been identified and whether there’s a threat to human health.
The one-sentence disclosure about the 517 containers was made Friday night deep within a media release from the Federal Emergency Management Agency summarizing the government’s response to the devastating storm.
At least a dozen Superfund sites in and around Houston were flooded in the days after Harvey’s record-shattering rains stopped. Associated Press journalists surveyed seven of the flooded sites by boat, vehicle and on foot. The EPA said at the time that its personnel had been unable to reach the sites, though they surveyed the locations using aerial photos.
The Associated Press reported Monday that a government hotline also received calls about three spills at the U.S. Oil Recovery Superfund site, a former petroleum waste processing plant outside Houston contaminated with a dangerous brew of cancer-causing chemicals. Records obtained by the AP showed workers at the site reported spills of unknown materials in unknown amounts.
Local pollution control officials photographed three large tanks used to store potentially hazardous waste completely underwater on Aug. 29. The EPA later said there was no evidence that nearby Vince Bayou had been impacted.
PRP Group, the company formed to clean up the U.S. Oil Recovery site, said it does not know how much material leaked from the tanks, soaking into the soil or flowing into the bayou. As part of the post-storm cleanup, workers have vacuumed up 63 truckloads of potentially contaminated storm water, totaling about 315,000 gallons.
It was not immediately clear whether those truckloads accounted for any of the 517 containers cited in the FEMA media release on Friday. The EPA has not responded to questions from AP about activities at U.S. Oil Recovery for more than a week.
About a dozen miles east, the San Jacinto River Waste Pits Superfund site is on and around a low-lying island that was the site of a paper mill in the 1960s, leaving behind dangerous levels of dioxins and other long-lasting toxins linked to birth defects and cancer. The site was completely covered with floodwaters when the AP surveyed it on Sept. 1.
To prevent contaminated soil and sediments from being washed down river, about 16 acres of the site was covered in 2011 with an “armored cap” of fabric and rock. The cap was reportedly designed to last for up to 100 years, but it has required extensive repairs on at least six occasions in recent years, with large sections becoming displaced or having been washed away.
The EPA has not responded to repeated inquiries over the past two weeks about whether its assessment has determined whether the cap was similarly damaged during Harvey.
The companies responsible for cleaning up the site, Waste Management Inc. and International Paper, have said there were “a small number of areas where the current layer of armored cap is thinner than required.”
“There was no evidence of a release from any of these areas,” the companies said, adding that sediments there were sampled last week.
The EPA has not yet released those test results to the public.
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Move over malaria: Mosquitoes carrying Zika, dengue may thrive in warmer Africa.
Hotter weather and migration to cities may make different diseases the scourge of the future in Africa, scientists say.
by Kieran Guilbert | KieranG77
DAKAR, Sept 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - From deadly droughts and destroyed crops to shrinking water sources, communities across sub-Saharan Africa are struggling to withstand the onslaught of global record-breaking temperatures.
But the dangers do not end there. Rising heat poses another threat - one that is far less known and studied but could spark disease epidemics across the continent, scientists say.
Mosquitoes are the menace, and the risk goes beyond malaria.
The Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads debilitating and potentially deadly viruses, from Zika and dengue to chikungunya, thrives in warmer climates than its malaria-carrying cousin, known as Anopheles, say researchers at Stanford University.
In sub-Saharan Africa, this means malaria rates could rise in cooler areas as they heat up, but fall in hotter places that now battle the disease. In those areas, malaria - one of the continent's biggest killers - may be rivalled by other vector-borne diseases as major health crises.
"As temperatures go past 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit), you move away from the peak transmission window for malaria, and towards that of diseases such as dengue," said Erin Mordecai, an assistant professor at Stanford.
"We have this intriguing prospect of the threat of malaria declining in Africa, while Zika, dengue and chikungunya become more of a danger," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Besides a warming planet, scientists fear growing urbanisation across Africa could also fuel the transmission of diseases carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which flourishes in cities and slums - the opposite of the country-loving Anopheles.
One in two Africans are expected to live in cities by 2030, up from 36 percent in 2010, according to World Bank data.
A soaring number may become prey to vector-borne viruses like dengue, which have struck Africa at a record pace in recent years, fuelled by urbanisation, population growth, poor sanitation and global warming, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.
"We see poorly planned development in Africa, not just with megacities but smaller settlements ... which often lack proper water and sanitation," said Marianne Comparet, director of the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases.
"Climate change, disease and the interaction between man and habitat - it is a crisis going under the radar ... a time-bomb for public health problems," she added.
NEGLECTED DISEASES
Last year was the hottest on record, for the third year in a row, with global temperature rise edging nearer a ceiling set by some 200 nations for limiting global warming, according to the European Union's climate change service.
Parts of Africa were among the regions suffering from unusual heat.
As temperatures keep rising, mosquitoes in low-latitude regions in East African countries are finding new habitats in higher altitude areas, yet malaria rates are falling in warmer regions, such as northern Senegal in the Sahel, studies show.
So as cooler parts of sub-Saharan Africa gear up for the spread of malaria, hotter areas should prepare for future epidemics like chikungunya and dengue, experts say.
While not as lethal as malaria, chikungunya lasts longer and can lead to people developing long-term joint pain. Dengue causes flu-like symptoms and can develop into a deadly hemorrhagic fever.
There is a danger that the global drive to end malaria, which absorbed $2.9 billion in international investment in 2015, has left African countries ill-prepared to deal with other vector-borne diseases, said Larry Slutsker of the international health organisation PATH.
"Diseases such as dengue and chikungunya have been neglected and under-funded," said Slutsker, the leader of PATH's malaria and neglected tropical diseases programmes. "There needs to be much better surveillance and understanding."
Malaria kills around 430,000 people a year, about 90 percent of them young African children.
Dengue, the world's fastest-spreading tropical disease, infects about 390 million annually but is often badly recorded and misdiagnosed, health experts say.
Some experts believe the global alarm triggered by Zika, which can cause birth defects such as small brain size, may see more money pumped into fighting neglected tropical diseases in sub-Saharan Africa, especially after outbreaks in Angola, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau during the last year.
Although 26 African nations - almost half of the continent - have strategies in place to fight vector-borne diseases, most of them only target malaria, according to data from the WHO.
Malaria rates have been slashed in recent decades through the use of bed nets, indoor spraying and drugs. But there are no dedicated treatments or vaccines for chikungunya and dengue.
"The most important preventive and control intervention is vector management, particularly through community engagement," said Magaran Bagayoko, a team leader for the WHO in Africa.
DISENTANGLING DATA
However, efforts to beat back mosquitoes are hampered by a lack of quality and affordable climate data that could help predict outbreaks and indicate risks, said Madeleine Thomson of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society.
"What countries really want to know is what they can do to improve their programmes, as well as the capacity of their health workers," said the scientist at the Columbia University-based institute.
But to do that, "climate information must be put into practice", Thomson added.
African nations also must improve coordination between their health ministries and meteorological agencies, said the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), a new continent-wide public health agency launched this year by the African Union.
"They are not linked, or talking to each other," said Sheila Shawa, a project officer at the Africa CDC headquarters in Ethiopia. "There needs to be better communication in order to model neglected diseases, such as chikungunya, across Africa."
Yet climate scientists and health experts warn of the difficulty of analysing the impact of rising temperature on mosquito-borne diseases without looking at other factors.
"We have a major challenge of isolating effects of rising temperatures – which are really variable – from all the other aspects like rainfall patterns, humidity, mobility and migration, as well as socioeconomic factors," said Stanford's Mordecai.
"They are all changing at the same time, making individual drivers very difficult to isolate and disentangle for analysis."
(Reporting by Kieran Guilbert, Editing by Laurie Goering and Megan Rowling; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit https://news.trust.org)
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Physicians oppose methanol refinery.
Risking the health of local residents to produce plastics for another country is bad policy.
BY MICHAEL SOMAN AND BRUCE SEPTEMBER 19, 2017 11:09 AM
Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (WPSR) represents over 800 healthcare professionals. As members of WPSR, we are deeply concerned about the methanol refinery proposed for Kalama. (“How a Chinese businessman is going toe-to-toe with Pacific Northwest environmentalists on Methanol”, Seattle Times, July 6, 2017.) This would be the largest such plant in the world, consuming more fracked natural gas than any other sector of our economy. It would emit over 1.2 million metric tons/year of greenhouse gases.
Our state and Gov. Inslee have worked to support “green” energy and the sustainability movement. This is not the way to do it. While the project may have short term benefits, closer inspection reveals that it’s “fools gold”:
The impacts from increasing use of fossil fuels are unacceptable. The consequences of climate change will become enormous in the coming decades if we don’t dramatically reduce our collective carbon footprint. We already face more wildfires, floods, drought, and other severe weather events, extreme temperatures with devastating health impacts, outdoor air quality degradation bringing respiratory and cardiovascular death, problems with water and food scarcity, threatened coastal cities, warming oceans, and the prospect of millions of “climate refugees”. We are at a tipping point on climate change, and this project would take us in the wrong direction!
Use of natural gas, methane, is not progress toward a clean energy future. American natural gas comes largely from fracking, a process fraught with risks at all stages of production. Methane leakage unleashes a climate change agent up to 86 times more potent than CO2. Leakage estimates vary from .2 percent to 10 percent, and a recent 20-year study by the US Department of Transportation documented 17 “pipeline incidents” yearly, cumulatively causing 347 deaths and over 1300 injuries. Fracking uses chemicals known to be carcinogens, neurotoxins and endocrine-disruptors, which can cause birth defects, irreversible lung problems, and premature death.
Increasingly, corporations tout their commitment to sustainable energy. This is clearly the case with Northwest Innovations Works (NWIW), the US subsidiary of a Chinese firm known as Shanghai Bi Ke Clean Energy Technology Company Ltd. Bi Ke Clean Energy is a corporation created by the government-owned Chinese Academy of Sciences. The Northwest Innovations website is replete with assertions of commitment to sustainability. The reality is different.
The idea that using natural gas will minimize use of coal in methanol production is completely unsupported. In addition, NWIW acknowledges that the process to create methanol using natural gas has never been attempted at this scale and is therefore experimental. Finally, the end product, methanol, is largely used in a plastics industry which is itself out of control (see NYT article from July 19, 2017: “The Immense, Eternal Footprint Humanity Leaves on Earth: Plastics”).
Local risks to the population include fire and explosions in an area with moderate to high risk of liquefaction in an earthquake. Methanol is highly flammable. Other risks include ground level air pollution with subsequent respiratory and cardio-vascular illness, and introduction of diesel particulates into the air risking malignancies, respiratory, cardio-vascular and neuro-developmental problems and low neonatal birth weight. Risking the health of local residents to produce plastics for another country is bad policy.
As health care stewards we are dismayed to see this project move forward with aggressive support from Gov. Inslee, ex-Gov. Locke, and other public officials. Inslee has repeatedly promoted sustainable energy as a powerful jobs creator. This project is inconsistent with his goals, with predictions of fewer than 200 full-time jobs.
So here is our plea, Gov. Inslee: Think about your commendable “green” legacy, but also the larger issue — the implications for the health of our families and our planet. Then do the right thing and join with us in opposing this project.
Michael Soman is the retired president of Group Health Physicians and member of the Climate Task Force, Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. A family physician, he resides on Bainbridge Island. Bruce Amundson is the president of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. He is a family physician who lives in Shoreline.
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Diseases of poverty identified in Alabama county burdened by poor sanitation.
Study finds “shocking” incidence of parasite infections in Lowndes County.
By Brett Walton, Circle of Blue
In the poorest sections of the American South researchers are finding hookworm, dengue fever, and other parasites and viruses that are more commonly associated with developing countries or, in the United States, with the early years of the 20th century.
The latest evidence comes from Lowndes County, Alabama, where Baylor College of Medicine researchers went on an expedition for parasitic worms. They found that two in five people who participated in a recently published health study had intestinal parasites, primarily hookworm. The parasite, once considered contained, is making a comeback in the Black Belt, a region of clay soil that stretches across nearly two dozen counties in central Alabama.
“I was shocked, quite shocked,” Rojelio Mejia, the Baylor College of Medicine researcher who guided the study, told Circle of Blue. “We thought hookworm was eradicated, or at least under control. To find such a high prevalence was concerning.”
Surprised at the results, the research team double- and triple-checked the data to verify accuracy. The peer-reviewed study was published online on September 5 in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. The diseases, the researchers said, are now less a matter of political borders and more a function of economics and sanitary conditions. In this health equation, the poor suffer.
Though the study’s numbers are startling, the high incidence of parasitic infections is more understandable due to conditions on the ground, Mejia said. The central Alabama climate — warm and humid — is favorable for worms to flourish. Because hookworm is not a sensational disease like Zika or Ebola, it attracts less attention, he said. Anemia and lethargy are common symptoms, rather than birth defects or death. Perhaps most important — and most galling — is that many people live in unsanitary surroundings.
The Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise, a local nonprofit that has conducted surveys to collect data, estimates that half of the homes in Lowndes County have failing septic systems or no sanitary sewage disposal at all. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, more than one-third of households in the county are in poverty.
Many homes in the county are too scattered for a central wastewater facility, and septic systems are often a poor fit for the dense Black Belt soils, which do not drain well enough to filter waste. There are high-tech septic systems on the market, but the cost — around $10,000 to $12,000 — could consume most of a poor household’s annual income. An unknown number of homes instead connect their toilets and sinks to “straight pipes” that send the waste into gullies, creeks, or backyard pits. In these conditions, hookworm and other parasites can thrive.
More than a century ago, in 1909, John D. Rockefeller Sr. gave $1 million to establish the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, an initiative with the goal of eradicating hookworm in the South. The commission’s work, however, lasted only five years, and hookworm continued to fester in certain areas. Infection rates in high-risk Alabama counties in the 1950s were as high as 60 percent.
Then hookworm assessments largely ceased. Health researchers stopped looking for it. Mejia said the most recent study he could find that included field research was a 1993 graduate student paper that was not published in an academic journal. The study found one to two percent of participants had hookworm in Wilcox County, a Black Belt neighbor of Lowndes.
The Wilcox study and Mejia’s study are difficult to compare. What changed is the method of investigation. Older studies assessed hookworm infections by looking at stool samples beneath a microscope. The level of magnification provided by the lens is not strong enough to detect parasites below a concentration of roughly 12 eggs per gram.
Mejia instead used DNA analysis, which is sensitive to low parasite concentrations, even below one egg per gram. Better equipment means an increase in detection, he said.
Sixty-six people, all African Americans, participated in the study, which included samples of blood, stool, and soil as well as a health questionnaire. Stool samples, taken from 55 of the participants, showed that 23 had a parasite, 19 of which were hookworm.
The number of people in the study was smaller than Mejia had hoped, largely because of the difficulty in recruiting volunteers. There is widespread mistrust within the communities of outside researchers because straight pipes are illegal. Authorities can fine residents, jail them, or even take custody of children living in such conditions.
“People are afraid,” Catherine Flowers, executive director of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise, told Circle of Blue. She assisted Mejia, who said that without Flowers the study would probably not have been possible.
Sanitation Failures Widespread in Alabama
No person has done more than Flowers to shine a light on sewage failures in rural Alabama. In November 2012, after reading his New York Times op-ed about tropical diseases spreading among the poor in the southern United States, Flowers sent an email to Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
Hotez had estimated that at least 12 million Americans, mostly in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, were living with diseases caused by worms and bacteria commonly associated with the warm, humid countries of the tropics: afflictions such as dengue fever, Chagas disease, and parasitic infections that cause seizes.
“They are the forgotten diseases of forgotten people,” Hotez wrote in the piece, published on August 18, 2012.
Flowers, though, would not let the rest of America forget. A week after sending the email, she traveled to Atlanta to meet Hotez, who was attending the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and explain the problems in Lowndes County. A year earlier she had testified before the United Nations’ independent expert on drinking water and sanitation. More recently, in June, she gave a tour to Sen. Corey Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, who was traveling in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana to learn about the links between poverty, race, health, and the environment in the South.
Failing septic systems and the use of straight pipes are not confined to Lowndes County, but the extent of the problem is largely unknown. According to Mark Elliot, a University of Alabama researcher, there have been only two rigorous, county-level studies in the United States to establish how many households have failing septic systems or straight pipe discharge. Both studies are more than a decade old.
The first, in 2000, was conducted in Madison County, North Carolina. It found 5.6 percent of homes had straight pipes. The other study, based on data from Bibb County, Alabama, in 2006, found 15 percent of homes used a straight pipe and 35 percent had failing septic systems. In Bibb County alone this discharge corresponds to more than 60,000 gallons of raw sewage per day along with billions of enteric viruses, giardia, and cryptosporidium.
A smaller survey in 2016 of 289 homes without sewer connections in Wilcox County, Alabama, found at least 60 percent with straight pipes, which Elliot called “a staggeringly high number.” Wilcox County is poorer than Bibb County, and poverty is an indicator of straight pipe use. Based on that survey, Elliot estimates that 550,000 gallons of raw sewage in the county enters the Alabama River watershed every day. That figure assumes that each person generates 100 gallons of wastewater a day through showering, toilet flushing, and washing clothes and dishes, which is probably an overestimate of the daily discharge.
Straight pipes are probably more common than thought. An Auburn University study in 2011 estimated that half of Alabama’s Black Belt is unsuitable for septic systems because of poorly drained soils.
Because of the region’s clay soils, wastewater does not readily soak into the ground. Heavy rains can then flush the sewage into creeks and rivers. Elliot tested this by sampling water from Big Prairie Creek, in Hale County, during the 2016 drought and immediately after the first big rain that fall. Water samples downstream of the town of Newbern saw a huge jump in E. coli after the rain — concentrations increased by 1,000 times compared to the drought period. In Newbern, according to best estimates, at least half of homes use a straight pipe.
Elliot does not blame the county health departments, which, he says, have no good options. The arrest, in 1999, of people in Lowndes with illegal sewage disposal provoked backlash and, besides, health departments have no handy solution to offer, he explained. “People really don’t have an option,” he told Circle of Blue.
Mejia and his colleagues hope to eliminate ignorance of the problem. With the results of the initial study now published, Mejia said that he will apply for funding for a larger investigation: a health study of several hundred, maybe even 1,000 people in the county. Then researchers can begin to map areas of greatest need.
Mejia also says there is more work to do on the connections between climate change and disease. Hookworm larvae hibernate in cold temperatures. If winters are warmer, then the window for contracting the parasite, which enters the body through the skin, opens wider.
Flowers, for her part, pins hopes on developing a low-cost wastewater treatment system that suits Black Belt soils.
“We need to deal with the places that haven’t had infrastructure that functions,” she said.
Read Circle of Blue’s award-winning series on America’s spreading septic threat.
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Trump says he cares about people in coal country. So why halt a study on their health?
We need to know the effects of mountaintop-removal coal mining.
ONE WOULD imagine that the Trump administration, which swept into power claiming to support the people who live in coal country, would prioritize federal spending on those very people’s health. Instead, the Interior Department has halted a study on how so-called mountaintop-removal coal mining affects people who live around these landscape-stripping operations.
Ostensibly, the halt is part of a broad budgetary review. If so, Interior should restart the study quickly. It is a worthwhile use of government research money, and it should proceed no matter which constituency the president had promised to support.
Mountaintop-removal mining involves literally blowing the tops off mountains in order to extract coal deposits too thin for conventional subsurface mining. The explosions kick up a lot of dust. Rubble is filled into nearby valleys and streams. Heavy metals leach into waterways. Scientists have warned that they are seeing heightened rates of lung cancer, kidney disease, birth defects and other devastating illnesses around mountaintop removal sites. There is also mounting data showing that mountaintopremoval mining seriously harms local ecosystems.
The correlations that researchers have drawn require more careful study to determine how closely they relate to mountaintop removal, as opposed to poverty or other factors, and to recommend ways of addressing the issue. West Virginia officials have asked the federal government for more solid information. That is why the Interior Department tapped the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to conduct a two-year, $1 million study of these and other questions. A team of 12 experts was to characterize the mountaintop-removal process, assess potential effects, examine the data, and recommend ways to monitor people’s health and to conduct research for new safeguards.
But the department told the National Academies that it must cease its work, due to “an agency-wide review of its grants and cooperative agreements in excess of $100,000, largely as a result of our changing budget situation.” In response, the National Academies insisted that Interior was putting the brakes on “an important study” and promised to “stand ready to resume it as soon as the Department of the Interior review is completed.”
It is not big government for states to seek federal expertise on matters relating to their citizens’ welfare. And this particular study is no waste of time. There may not be as many operating mountaintop-removal sites as before. But if the practice is going to be used at all, there must be science-based standards. Moreover, state health officials should know about any legacy of illness and pain that may await communities around mountaintop-removal sites. The National Academies was charged with examining both active and reclaimed mining sites, of which there are hundreds.
President Trump’s Interior Department can bury the science — whether in hope of keeping these disgusting operations in business a little longer, or in service of shortsighted budget cutting — but that will not solve any of the problems that would remain.
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