breast cancer
cosmosmagazine.com
As oceans rise, so do risks of breast cancer
Atmospheric pollution contributes to cancer rates and climate change. A change of strategy is needed for both, reports Jane McArthur, from Canada's University of Windsor.
theconversation.com
Jane McArthur: As the oceans rise, so do your risks of breast cancer
Most cases of breast cancer are related to environmental causes. When we talk about climate change, we must not forget this part of the story.
Originals
Fracking chemical mix causes disturbing changes in breast tissue: Study
Low levels of oil and gas production chemicals cause abnormal mammary glands and pre-cancerous lesions in female mice
Female mice exposed to a mixture of 23 chemicals used in oil and gas fracking developed mammary lesions and enlarged tissues—suggesting the chemicals may leave breast tissues more prone to cancer, according to a new study.
The study is the first to examine the potential impact of chemicals used in unconventional oil and gas extraction—such as hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling—on mammary glands and suggests that low levels of the chemical cocktail commonly found near frack sites may spur abnormal development in women's breast tissue.
"The mammary gland is a hormone-sensitive organ that is responsive to multiple endocrine inputs during development," the authors wrote in the study published today in the Endocrinology journal.
It's the latest potential health impact linked to fracking chemicals, which have been associated with low birth weights, birth defects and reduced brain function in children.
The findings are important as more than 17 million people in the U.S live within a mile of an oil or gas well. Hydraulic fractured wells now account for about half of U.S. oil, and two-thirds of the nation's natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
In addition, health impacts were seen after exposure to levels of chemicals well within what is found near frack sites. The mixture was just a fraction of the more than 1,000 chemicals used during oil and gas fracking.
Scientists exposed female mice—while in their mothers' womb—to different levels of 23 chemicals. There were no effects on the mammary glands prior to puberty, but when the exposed mice were adults they developed lesions and a condition called hyperplasia, which causes enlarged organs or tissues.
The researchers "chose varying amounts of the [chemical] mixture in order to mimic a range of human exposures to these chemicals," said Susan Nagel, a researcher and associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and women's health at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, and study co-author.
Nagel and colleagues used four different doses — the two lowest doses were similar to what you might find in drinking water in areas near oil and gas operations, and the higher doses were comparable to wastewater puddles on work sites near fracking, said senior author Laura Vandenberg, a researcher and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst School of Public Health & Health Sciences.
They saw effects on all exposed mice. "Even at low doses we're seeing lesions in the mammary gland," Vandenberg said.
Vandenberg said this "suggests the mammary gland is getting misinformation about where in development it is." The 23 chemicals in the mixture are all known endocrine disruptors and have previously been show to either mimic or interfere with certain hormones.
Scientists have for years warned that certain fracking chemicals are hormone disruptors: In 2016, a large review of 45 studies on oil and gas chemicals concluded, "there is ample evidence for disruption of the estrogen, androgen, and progesterone receptors by oil and gas chemicals."
Nagel and colleagues had previously tested the chemicals used on the female mice on their mouse brothers—and found the mixture caused "decreased sperm counts and increased testes, body, heart, and thymus weights and increased serum testosterone in male mice, suggesting multiple organ system impacts."
Nagel said they would next analyze how these breast tissue changes may affect function, such as lactation.
The impact on mice doesn't necessarily mean the same is true for humans—the mouse mammary gland has some similarities and some differences. However, there are "important parallels" between mice and humans," Vandenberg said.
"We use mice to test drugs before we give them to people … they're similar enough that if there is a problem in mice, we're not giving it [the drug] to people," she said.
"If we used the same standard for environmental chemicals, I would say this is a problem."
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The grandfather of alt-science.
Art Robinson has seeded scientific skepticism within the GOP for decades. Now he wants to use urine to save lives.
Arthur B. Robinson, renegade chemist, failed politician, grandpa of the climate skeptics — and maybe, just maybe, our nation’s next scientist-in-chief — padded across the carpet of his homemade lab in a pair of white athletic socks. “This room, everything you see here, was built by my own sons with their own hands, including the concrete,” he said. Robinson raised and home-schooled six children in this tawny valley scratched into the hills near the town of Cave Junction, Oregon. Now his wife is dead and one of his daughters has moved away, but the rest of his kids — two veterinarians, a biochemist and a pair of nuclear engineers — remain nearby. They’ve got a lot to do: Feed the animals; maintain the lab; ward off cougars; publish their popular home-school curriculums; manage Robinson’s repeated, unsuccessful congressional campaigns; and, of course, perform high-stakes research into medicine and biochemistry.
A stuffed antelope with curly horns stares across the lab at a bank of instruments with flashing lights. “That’s a rectifier, and this machine measures the rotation of light,” said Robinson, a spritely 75-year-old in pleated khakis and a button shirt, with white hair parted neatly on his small, round head. Then he pointed at a massive cylinder, about the size of a hippopotamus and groaning like a locomotive. “And this,” he said, beaming — “this is our miracle in a box.”
Lo, the Robinson family spectrometer — a $2 million, 7-tesla magnet super-cooled by liquid helium and used for analyzing chemicals. It’s not the sort of thing one would expect to find in private hands, let alone in a DIY laboratory on a modest sheep ranch in a rural corner of the Pacific Northwest. But Robinson and his scientific colleagues — that is to say, his children — have big plans for the hulking, gray device with strands of a cobweb tethered to its back. They believe it will provide a novel way to diagnose disease and then, perhaps, to extend the human lifespan.
Here at what Robinson calls the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, the family has been assembling an archive of human urine. Eventually they hope to gather 50,000 samples, drawn from 5,000 volunteers across a five-year span. The pee is kept in cryogenic vials and stored in dozens of military-grade, minus-80 freezers on the property. Robinson and his kids have already started placing tiny urine samples, each not much bigger than a raindrop, into the family spectrometer, so they can record its chemical fingerprint — the set of peaks and valleys corresponding to its thousands of component parts. Once their catalog of prints has gotten big enough, they’ll start sifting through for hidden patterns in the data, anything that might provide a hint about our health. According to Robinson, these records could contain the telltale marks of, say, early-stage breast cancer or an approaching heart attack, or they might allow him to track the effects of treating those conditions in real time. Once the details have been worked out, he said, this cheap and noninvasive test — a tiny dab of urine fed into the hippopotamus — could spit out a dossier of diagnostic information.
Whatever you think of this endeavor, let alone its chances of success, the mere fact of its existence is remarkable. At a time when almost all biomedical research flows from either major public grants or industrial R&D;, Robinson has made the choice to strike out on his own. Instead of taking money from bureaucrats in Washington, he’s been raising millions for his big-data research from a set of ultra-wealthy donors who share his conservative values and wariness of government intrusion.
That is to say, Arthur B. Robinson is not some lonesome crank tinkering in his garage. He’s something more unusual: an extremely well-connected crank, with ample funding and an influential perch at the wild outskirts of both politics and science. If he once seemed destined for a respectable career in academia — 45 years ago, he was a young professor on the tenure track at the University of California, San Diego, working side-by-side with the legendary double-Nobelist Linus Pauling — he’s long since cut all ties to conventional research institutions and remade himself as a cowboy chemist, if not an oracle frontiersman for what might be termed America’s “alt-science” movement.
One could view his setup with idle curiosity: the science maverick on his ranch, with a seven-figure budget for his indie urinalysis. But the movement in which Robinson belongs (as a member, if not a shepherd) has nudged a few steps closer, in recent months, to the center of our national politics. Alternative theories of climate change — that is to say, those at odds with mainstream science — are now ascendant at the highest level of government, along with deep suspicion of environmental regulations. And other alt-science points of view — on vaccination, nuclear power, intelligent design — have been showing signs of purchase in the Trump administration. Even Robinson himself may soon be making tracks for Pennsylvania Avenue. Chief among his financial backers are the Mercers — hedge-fund billionaire Robert and his daughter Rebekah — who are better known these days for their avid right-wing activism and sponsorship of Steve Bannon. In March, reports emerged that Rebekah Mercer had made the case for Robinson to be the nation’s new national science adviser. “It would be an honor to do it,” he told me.
“He’s one of the founders of this whole movement,” says Joseph Bast, CEO of the Heartland Institute, which has served for 20 years as the leading think tank of the push to challenge climate science. Last year, when Robinson joined Heartland’s board of directors, Bast called him “as bold and brave a person as I have ever met.” Now Bast says that courage has been vindicated. “Time will tell,” he promised, “but it certainly seems like Robinson’s views are winning the day.”
“I’m ordinarily smart,” Robinson likes to say, as if that means he were no more clever than the average man. In fact, he has an extraordinary gift for selling average men on his ideas, and for making even subtle science seem like common sense. He’s been raising private money for his research since the 1970s, mostly on the basis of his grit-and-wit appeals to reason. Robinson is, if nothing else, a master simplifier. It’s a skill he learned from Linus Pauling: He’s the sort of guy who can flatten any topic, no matter how abstruse, into a pair of axes hand-drawn in the air. He mimes the X and Y dimensions with his fingers as he talks, explaining, for example, how samples of a person’s urine, taken over time, could yield a running readout of their health. “When you hear about a scientific subject that is said to be very, very complex, with lots of things to know, and only the expert can approach it,” he tells me, “you know they’re blowing smoke in your eyes.”
In the late-1990s, when Robinson first got into questioning the evidence for human-caused climate change, he spent six months reading through all the science he could find on atmospheric carbon dioxide. His final report, written with his son Zachary (the veterinarian) and two other scholars, cited about 150 academic papers and concluded — in a characteristic plain-spoken manner — that human activity “has not harmfully warmed the Earth.” In fact, Robinson and his colleagues went further still, claiming both in their review and an attached petition that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 would produce “a host of beneficial effects” for the planet. (His belief in the likely benefits of global warming makes Robinson somewhat unusual even among his cohort of contrarians.)
That review of climate science has been hugely influential among climate skeptics, says Bast, precisely on account of its simplicity. “It was a standard reference tool and an important publication,” he explains. “Art was one of the first to say, ‘This isn’t too hard for the layman to figure out.’ … You can go through it, even though you’re not a scientist, and say, ‘You’re right, that doesn’t make sense.’”
The same approach — simplify, clarify, persuade — has been on display for more than 20 years in Access to Energy, a libertarian newsletter that Robinson writes for 3,500 annual subscribers. (Robert Mercer is a reader.) The publication’s subject matter ranges far beyond the power grid: Robinson says it’s meant to serve as his corrective for all manner of irrational and unscientific thought; to counteract panics over pesticides and freak-outs over global warming; to teach its readers, as he puts it, “not to ‘trust and parrot’ the politically motivated statements of the press, politicians, and other self-interested parties” on scientific matters; to preach data directly to the people, so they can reach their own conclusions instead of being force-fed their ideas by science-policy elites in Washington. That is to say, Access to Energy has functioned as the house organ for Robinson’s peculiar brand of science populism — as if Breitbart had been crossed with Discover.
“Science is entirely a populist subject,” he tells me. If we don’t need some expert committee to tell us whether the atmosphere is warming, then we certainly shouldn’t let ourselves be bullied by whatever “custom and culture” happens to prevail in any other scientific circle. Custom and culture: these are dirty words for Robinson, representing the creaky machinery of public science, funded by the government through rusted peer-review committees and indifferent to nonconformists like himself. We can cast aside the custom and the culture, he says, and learn about the science for ourselves. That’s alt-science in a nutshell: It’s the freedom to draw one’s own conclusions from the facts.
Robinson has made ample use of that freedom. He currently serves as vice president of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness — an outré association of science-minded nonconformists, conspiracy theorists and dissenters (also funded by Robert Mercer). “Art is revered by those people,” says Bast, who has attended several of DDP’s annual meetings. At this year’s event, which took place in August on the theme of “Restoring Greatness in American Science and Health,” presenters spoke about the bullying of climate skeptics, the widespread use of phony global-warming models, scientific misconduct at the Environmental Protection Agency and the story of Chernobyl and other “radioactive fairytales.” Robinson himself gave a talk on the “vaccine controversy” — he believes they’re given too early in a child’s life, as a rule — and there was a banquet reception for the infamous anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield. Earlier meetings have attacked the science linking HIV and AIDS and questioned claims that we’re in the middle of a mass extinction.
Several of these radical positions were aired in a contentious interview between Robinson and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in 2010. Four years later, Maddow said Robinson “currently leads for The Rachel Maddow Show hall of fame balloting for weirdest interview on this show ever.”
“Science is entirely a populist thing,” Robinson says again. “It’s a way of using the individual human mind. That means one man can be right, and everybody else can be wrong.
“And if he’s right?” he continues. “Well, then, their ideas are going to fall.”
In a dusty and defunct building on the Oregon ranch, what used to be a mouse room now is home to a handful of flies. In the old days, Robinson would irradiate his lab animals, frying their backs with ultraviolet light until they developed squamous cell carcinoma. Then he’d check to see how their cancers might respond to changes in their diets. “We could vary the growth rate of cancer by tenfold, according to what we fed ’em,” he said, describing the results of some 40 experiments going back to his time on the faculty of the Salk Institute at UC-San Diego in La Jolla.1 “The poorer you feed ’em, the poorer the cancer grows.”
Robinson’s elfin face perks up whenever the subject turns to science, and he likes to punctuate his stories with a wheezy, blurted exclamation of delight. It wasn’t just that poor nutrition stopped the cancers’ growth, he said; according to his research, a wholesome diet seemed to make the mouse tumors more robust. “Take a gram of vitamin C per day, and it improves your health, but it’ll make your cancer grow faster, too. Heeeh!”
This alarming result — that eating well can feed the thing that kills you — all but wrecked Robinson’s career, he said: “I worked with Linus Pauling for 15 years, and then he and I got in a fight over those mice.” Pauling had been insisting that a daily mega-dose of vitamin C could prevent or cure three-quarters of all cancers; now Robinson had data that pointed in the opposite direction. “That experiment was the end of our collaboration. The 15 years were over.”
One can say the break with Pauling set the stage for much of what followed: Robinson’s decampment with his family to this secluded ranch; his turn toward radical conservatism; his reinvention of himself as a cowboy scientist; his pursuit of longer life in freezers full of urine; and now, finally, astoundingly, the prospect of his going to the White House.
It took only the slightest interrogatory nudge for Robinson to launch into a wistful account of his relationship with his former mentor, starting with the moment when they met, while Robinson was still an undergraduate at Caltech in the early 1960s.
It was right around the time that Pauling won his second Nobel Prize. The first had been for chemistry; the second, a Nobel Peace Prize, recognized Pauling’s anti-nuclear activism. In 1958, the world-famous chemist had submitted a petition, signed by 9,000 scientists (including 35 other Nobel Prize winners), to the United Nations, calling for a ban on nuclear-weapons testing.
But Pauling’s activism — and sympathy for left-wing politics — had repercussions for his career. Though he was still a member of the faculty, Pauling didn’t have access to a lab at Caltech. So instead he found a bunch of undergrads to run experiments for him while school was not in session. And in 1962, he hired Robinson — a young man from Texas with a natural gift for laboratory work — to supervise the summer research.
Back then, Robinson never read the newspaper and paid no mind to Pauling’s politics, nor in fact to politics of any kind. He’d been “raised a normal American,” he said — the only child of a homemaker and a senior engineer for Union Carbide: “My father was in love with petrochemical plants, and my mother was in love with him, and that was it.” When he got to California and started taking classes, he found himself ensorcelled by Professor Pauling’s brilliance and enthusiasm.
A few years later, their paths would cross again at UC-San Diego, where Robinson had been hired to the faculty as a biochemist. Pauling, who arrived there in 1968, was about to make a sharp left turn in his career, to pursue an alt-science theory of his own: Though his ample expertise had been in biophysics, he’d lately grown obsessed by the healing power of vitamins. One day he came into Robinson’s office with a paper that he’d written for Science magazine. Pauling already held a strong belief that large doses of vitamin C would yield enormous benefits for health; now he was proposing, in the nation’s most prestigious scientific journal, that nutritional supplements might also be a salve for mental illness.
Robinson’s idol, and one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, was asking him for help in pursuit of this unusual idea. Pauling would be the theoretician and Robinson the experimentalist. The two began by running simple tests to figure out what happens to your body when you mega-dose with vitamins. Robinson would analyze samples of his subjects’ urine so he could figure out how much of each nutrient would be excreted — and thus how much had been absorbed. What he and Pauling really wanted, though, was a global readout of well-being — a yardstick they could use to optimize their dosing. That’s when Robinson had the thought to measure all the metabolites in urine that he could and to try to use the pattern as a master-code for diagnosis, a “metabolic profile” that could serve as a holistic estimate for health.
The two would spend so much time together on this project, hashing out ideas at Pauling’s ranch in Big Sur, that Robinson — whose parents had passed away quite suddenly and tragically just a few years prior — began to think of Pauling as a second father. Eventually the two men hatched a plan to start a private institute where their out-there studies could be financed through direct appeals to donors. For Pauling, at the end of his career, the move off-campus was not so risky. For Robinson it would be a leap of faith. At just 31, he’d already been told by his department head in San Diego that he was close to getting tenure. Yet the promise of the work with Pauling, and of their search for gold in human urine, proved irresistible. So in March 1973, Robinson resigned from UCSD and kicked in $100,000 from his family inheritance to rent out a small, brick building on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. This would be the site of the duo’s new nutrition labs, at what they dubbed the Institute for Orthomolecular Medicine.
Robinson and Pauling had always been a mismatched pair: the older man, a brilliant theoretician from the Pacific Northwest, and his earnest protégé, a whiz-kid experimentalist from Houston. Pauling wore a beatnik’s black beret; Robinson favored jeans and button-shirts in situations where others might be wearing suits. Their differences went still deeper: Pauling leaned toward socialism; Robinson turned out to be a vocal libertarian. Pauling was an atheist, Robinson a faithful Christian.
The polar split extended even to each one’s fundamental sense of purpose. Pauling saw the world in pain and said it was his mission to diminish human suffering. Robinson arranged his goals around the sanctity of human life and any means that he might use to increase its quality, quantity and length. The bylaws of their institute tried to span this philosophical divide: The purpose of its research, they declared, was both to extend people’s lives and also to make those lives less miserable.
For a time, the rival forces of their personalities seemed to foster a productive tension, like the pulling of the cables on a suspension bridge. Then their partnership collapsed. Robinson claims the falling-out began with that mouse experiment — the one in which he showed that too much vitamin C could make a tumor grow instead of shrink. In contemporary press reports, Pauling called that work “amateurish.” Pauling’s wife, Ava Helen, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and Pauling was convinced that he could save her with 10-gram doses of ascorbic acid — more than 150 times the recommended daily amount. (She died of the disease in 1981, five years after her diagnosis.) Others say the rift between the men had nothing much to do with those experiments or with Ava Helen’s cancer; rather it arose from administrative disagreements. In any case, in late-summer 1978, Pauling had Robinson removed from his position as the president in Menlo Park.
The man who once felt like Pauling’s surrogate son now found himself orphaned for a second time. He responded to his firing with a $25 million lawsuit that would drag on for another half-decade, while his work on metabolic profiling — the reason he’d quit his job at UCSD and the centerpiece of his plan to save the world — came to a sudden halt. According to Robinson, a thousand cryogenic urine samples drawn from newborn infants, along with 200 magnetic tapes and 15 filing cabinets full of paper records, were summarily tossed out. “We lost everything,” he told me.
***
By the age of 36, Robinson had turned his back on academia and been evicted from the institute he’d helped create. Now he set off into the wilderness with a plan for starting over.
The more he tried to pull away from Pauling, though, the more it seemed their fates were drawn together. It was as if the falling-out had left Robinson with a driving need to be his former mentor’s mirror-opposite — a Pauling anti-particle, flung into a rival orbit. In 1980, Robinson took his family to Oregon — where Pauling had grown up — and built a lab so he could finish up their research on his own. He brought along the sign that had been out in front of his and Pauling’s place on Sand Hill Road: The same letters that once spelled out INSTITUTE OF ORTHOMOLECULAR MEDICINE were now scrambled and affixed (with a few new ones added) to the front wall of his homemade laboratory: OREGON INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND MEDICINE.
Robinson’s politics,2 like his science, also seemed to bloom in Pauling’s shadow. Pauling and Ava Helen had been terrified at the prospect of a nuclear war, and they’d spent a major portion of their later years organizing to abolish nuclear testing. Robinson and his wife (and research partner) Laurelee were also scared of nuclear devastation, but took a different tack: Starting in 1985, they became involved in “civil defense” and the disputed notion that a war with the Soviets would be survivable in shelters. From their ranch in Oregon, they started building these shelters in trailers and selling them to FEMA. They also worked on developing a nuclear-fallout diet and distributed a book on “Nuclear War Survival Skills,” which gave instructions for how to make a radiation meter from an old beer can, among many other patched-together doodads.
And where Pauling had been vocal on the health risks posed by radiation — in 1958, he participated in a famous televised debate on this topic with the theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project pioneer Edward Teller — Robinson spoke out in favor of nuclear energy. He forged his own, more cordial relationship with Teller and became an advocate for the unconventional theory of “radiation hormesis,” which holds that small doses of ionizing radiation are actually a boon for public health.3 It’s not coincidental that half of Robinson’s children have Ph.D.s in nuclear engineering: As the years went by, the Robinsons have been exactly as devoted to atomic power as the Paulings were against atomic weapons.
Then there was the Paulings’ influential 1958 petition, signed by 9,000 scientists, calling for an end to nuclear-weapons testing. (This would be the activism for which Pauling won his Nobel Peace Prize.) In 1997, Robinson organized his own petition, applying Pauling’s method to a different cause — that of climate-change skepticism. Robinson sent around his take on atmospheric science with the petition, with a cover letter from the well-known physicist, contrarian and tobacco-industry consultant Frederick Seitz. Eventually this mailing would yield 31,000 signatures, including that of Pauling’s adversary, Edward Teller, and many of the nation’s other leading skeptic scientists. Among these were a set of deregulatory pundits, the so-called “Merchants of Doubt,” who had spoken out for years on behalf of conservative think tanks and big business: Seitz, as well as Fred Singer, William Neirenberg and Robert Jastrow.
Robinson’s petition would be just as influential, in its way, as Pauling’s work on nuclear testing. Sen. James Inhofe, author of “The Greatest Hoax” and the Capitol’s leading climate-change skeptic, has described the document as “one of the first things [he] looked at” as his doubts developed, and he’s referenced it repeatedly on the floor of Congress, in claiming that the notion of “consensus” on the matter is a fraud.
“I think [the petition] was tremendously important,” another signer, the Princeton physicist and noted climate-change contrarian William Happer, told me recently. “It showed there are lots of highly credentialed scientists who really know a lot about the details of the science and don’t agree with the alarmists.” (In the past few months, Happer, like Robinson, has been short-listed for the job of science adviser to President Trump.)
Those climate skeptics are still in the minority: In a 2014 Pew Research Center survey of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 87 percent said climate change was mostly due to human activity. But Robinson’s work has been instrumental to the others.
“Art Robinson is the reason many of us are in this room,” the Heartland Institute’s Bast told a conference of climate skeptics several years ago, in reference to the 1997 review paper and petition. “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here.”
***
The Robinsons served me lunch across the gravel road from their homemade lab and urine freezers, in the home where Robinson still lives with his two unmarried sons, Noah and Matthew. There’s an embroidered sign posted on the wall beside the kitchen: “The more laws, the less justice.” The living room feels somewhat wedged between a large wood stove that heats the house and a full-size church organ, about 15 feet wide with lanky pipes that loom into the rafters where dust bunnies dangle to their metal tips from a skylight.
“This was made in 1878,” Noah told me. He bought the instrument for several thousand dollars from a beautiful stone church in Vermont after he’d come across a listing on eBay. “It’s a little out of tune, but it plays.”
Matthew gave a demonstration, briefly banging out a spell of dirge-like music that reverberated throughout the house. “It’s a nice hobby,” Robinson said when his son had finished playing. The boys have been picking up colossal and unwanted instruments from churches all across the country; by now, they’ve accumulated six or seven, toting them back to Cave Junction in pieces, then assembling them on-site. “Laurelee loved the pipe organ,” he added. “She would have loved to have had a pipe organ.”
The loss of Laurelee was the next of Robinson’s misfortunes, following his falling-out with Pauling. In the fall of 1988, not so many years after Ava Helen succumbed to cancer of the gut, Laurelee started feeling ill. One night she felt a pain inside her abdomen before she went to bed. By sunrise her pancreas, diseased and inflamed, had secreted digestive enzymes onto a nearby artery, boring through its wall. Laurelee bled to death before anyone had any idea of what was happening.
The tragedy left Robinson a hypochondriac. With every minor ache, he worried that he might die and leave his kids as he had been, without a parent. Again, it seemed to him there ought to be a simple diagnostic tool — a quick and easy way for people to obtain a global readout of their health. “My wife was sitting here with a very bad stomachache, and any profiling tool could have immediately diagnosed her, and surgery would have saved her,” he said, referring to the technology that he’d been working on with Pauling and which he’s once again pursuing on the ranch. “I brought Laurelee up here and we built this place,” he said. “I don’t know where she got that disease, but my guess is that if we’d stayed in La Jolla, she’d still be alive. It would have been a different life. So I look at all this, and I know I’m lucky — I’ve got six wonderful young people working here, and they’re all brighter than me so I’m having fun. But she’s dead and the profiling was delayed for many, many years. So if I could do it over again …”
He paused. If he could do it over again, he might have kept his job at UCSD and tried to to do some work on profiling on the side. Or else he might have figured out a way to stave off Pauling’s “self-destruction” and continued with their work in Menlo Park.
That’s not what happened, though. The split from Pauling, and the death of Laurelee, sent Robinson hurtling further out into the fringe, where he found a small but ardent caucus of contrarians: scientists, like him, who had abandoned — or been ejected from — the normie, left-leaning research community and who made common cause in puncturing prevailing views on smoking, DDT, radiation, depletion of the ozone hole and changes to the climate. When his old life fell apart, Robinson had to find a new and different one, and a new and different way of doing science.
***
After lunch — a plate of watermelon slices, with cream of mushroom soup poured over white rice — Robinson told me more about his urine project. It sounded like the end point of his long, peculiar journey as a scientist and the knotty nexus of his life’s loose ends. While much of Robinson’s philosophy and many of his scientific views are informed by his politics, the work on profiling seems to float above all that, buoyed mainly by the goal that he put forth so many years ago when he started work with Pauling: to increase the quality and quantity of human life. But then it’s also anchored in the grief and grievance that cast him out into the wilderness, almost 40 years ago.
We headed back across the gravel road, past the schoolhouse building where Robinson used to sit and do his work, after Laurelee had died, while his kids did theirs with barely any supervision. When it got too cold in there, he put UV lights above the children’s heads to keep them warm. From there we strolled by a dilapidated chicken coop and a truck-sized billboard for one of his congressional campaigns, and then back into the lab with its hippopotamus spectrometer.
Other, more mainstream biochemists have been far too conservative in their attempts to do profiling, he told me, showing off some sample data on a poster, a broad array of spectrographic peaks. Instead of looking at all the different compounds in a sample, and a dataset with thousands of dimensions, they play it safe and study just a handful. “Their papers have one foot in what we’re doing, but they also have one foot in the past,” he said. “I’m sure the field will move, until 50 years from now, it will just be this” — he gestured at his poster — “but the move will be a slow one, because of custom and culture.”
Robinson’s “custom and culture” would seem to be a product of what he sees as the present, fallen age of science, if not of society at large. He likes to talk about the time before “the bureaucracy got control of science,” back when the nation’s “wild cards,” its humble and inventive folks, could still puzzle out their theories over many years of private work. They’d toil in a basement on their own, he said, solving problems for themselves, and then they would appear one day, blinking in the light, to share their big discoveries.
“Progress in science requires freedom to do what you want,” Robinson declared.
Standing there beside him in the hills of Oregon, I was tempted by the epic sweep of this idea. If the government won’t pay to build a giant urine archive, Robinson will build one on his own. Maybe sifting through those drops of pee really will extend our lives, or maybe it won’t. Why not celebrate the fact that someone has the guts to try?
Robinson’s plan isn’t even so far-fetched, at least in principle. Other, more mainstream scientists have pursued the same idea, skimming diagnoses from body fluids using giant reams of spectrographic data. This approach has at times been perilous: In one prominent case from 2002, a team of researchers claimed to have discovered a data pattern in patients’ blood showing whether they had ovarian cancer; that finding, published in The Lancet and cited several thousand times, turned out to be an artifact of statistical noise. Yet many still see promise in this grand approach to data-driven medicine: In April, the life-sciences division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, began a major trial along the lines of Robinson’s. “Project Baseline,” which involves both Stanford and Duke universities and is likely to cost more than $100 million, will follow 10,000 people over four years to see what clues about their health might be gleaned from samples of their blood, saliva, tears and feces.
Indeed, several of the contrarian arguments that alt-science types have championed now seem pretty reasonable, and certain beliefs in Robinson’s portfolio have won out, in a sense, even among environmentalists. It’s no longer off the wall, for example, to suggest that DDT should be used in fighting malaria in Africa, or that we might benefit from greater use of nuclear power (which, after all, is carbon free).
But then, how are we to know which refutations of consensus science will end up seeming more or less correct, and which are nothing more than dangerous denialism? Which diversions from the mainstream path might lead us somewhere fruitful, and which are guaranteed dead ends? Can we really trust Art Robinson to help us make these weighty judgments, just because he’s plain-spoken and persuasive?
Or put another way: If science really is a populist phenomenon, then aren’t we at risk from science demagogues? Take Pauling, another master simplifier. In the 1950s, he convinced a lot of people that nuclear testing was a major risk to public health, based on data that Robinson now claims was “entirely incorrect.” And later on Pauling was nearly as persuasive, for a time, on his theory that vitamin C could eradicate all cancers. What if a great scientist’s skill as a communicator leads us into ruin?
“Linus was a very convincing individual,” Robinson admitted. “This is a failing of human nature that people can be driven by the most effective speaker, and that’s something we have to live with.” But if the wrong guy wins a debate or two, he said, that’s OK, because usually, the truth will come out in the end.
“Suppose I’m a charlatan, but a convincing charlatan,” he continued. “Then some people will voluntarily provide money for my work, and that’s perhaps a loss because they were fooled. But that’s not a big loss. When they earn money, it’s their privilege to spend it as they wish. … That’s a different thing than imposing something from above, something that diminishes the freedom of scientists.”
It occurred to me that the movement Robinson helped create often presents itself as free and independent — as embodying pure and populist resistance to a groupthink status quo, imposed by the elites. Yet I’ve also learned from past experience that scientific-skeptic views are often nurtured with specific ends in mind. Scientists who took tobacco money had a stake in saying cigarettes were not so bad. The Heartland Institute takes aim at mainstream climatology, while critics note its links to ExxonMobil and other companies that benefit from fighting regulation.4 All this to say: Alt-science often doubles as a beachhead for self-interest, if not a vehicle for greed.
Robinson’s ties to Heartland connect him to big business, at least indirectly, and it’s possible that the Mercers, or other wealthy donors, are in his ears on certain matters. (The Mercers did not respond to requests for comment on this story.) Still, I get the sense that he’s secured a different kind of independence. It’s hard to figure how his plans to study pee would carry water for his funders. Working only with his family, raising money as he does, Robinson seems to have walled off a space in which he can set his own alt-scientist’s agenda. On this sheep ranch in the hills, strewn with scrap metal and iron horseshoes, kitted out with electronics purchased second-hand, taxidermy animals and reconstituted pipe organs, his views do not appear to be controlled by any corporation. His way-out research is his own.
That doesn’t mean he’s free, exactly; only that his constraints come from within. His work is tied into a lifetime’s worth of trauma, and a long-held tendency to flout convention. I don’t mean to flatten out a complicated life into a pair of X-Y axes, but sometimes it does make sense to simplify: Robinson has tried to build a private fortress up in Oregon; he’s tried to break apart the shackles of consensus science; he’s tried to liberate his thinking from the so-called experts’ point of view. But in the end, he’s just as stifled and constrained as all the rest of us, wrapped up in the conflicts of his past.
Daniel Engber writes about science and culture. @danengber
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Troubled Water: Native American tribes fight for clean water and more money.
Tribes are struggling to get the attention and funding necessary to clean the water their people rely on.
By Lauren Kaljur and Macee Beheler | News21. Published Aug. 14, 2017.
CROW AGENCY, Mont. – When John Doyle first noticed signs of trouble in the Little Bighorn River, he was still a young member of the Apsaalooke Nation in southeastern Montana.
Stagnant water would pool in some areas, filling with algae. It wouldn’t even freeze in the cold of winter. Later, catfish would turn up with quarter-size white sores.
Doyle knew something had gone seriously wrong with the river – from which tribal members would drink, swim and practice religious ceremonies.
He took his observations to officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. After several months, he went to them again. And again.
Looking back, Doyle, now 68, recognizes he was naive to think the government would take quick action. The tribe’s wastewater was leaching into the river. He now understands that the tests, studies and maze of bureaucratic hurdles to address such water issues take time and money.
John Doyle works in his office and shows a sheet of incubated well water samples tested using a grant from the EPA. Bright yellow indicates the harmful bacteria E. coli. More than half of wells tested in Apsaalooke territory have exceedances in such contaminants. (Lauren Kaljur/News21)
Three decades later, Doyle managed to raise enough funds to move and replace the sewage pond and safely separate the sewage pipes from clean water lines, which had been placed side by side. The river still teems, however, with virulent strains of E. coli and nitrates.
Doyle’s experience wrestling with the complex bureaucracy necessary to address water issues is common on Native American reservations. During the past decade, tribal water systems averaged about 60 percent more water-quality violations compared with nontribal water systems, according to Environmental Protection Agency data.
A variety of forces work against tribes and their quest to provide clean, safe water to their members. Tribal members must cope with the health repercussions of extensive mining and farming activities on or near their land, whether approved by the tribe or not. The federal government carved reservations in remote and confined pockets of the U.S., making it difficult to provide reliable infrastructure. They often lack the money to improve their water systems themselves, which means they have to navigate a complicated puzzle of government agencies to shore up funding.
Crow Agency, Mont., is the administrative center of the Apsaalooke Nation, where tribal members are working for access to clean water. Nearby, mattresses and garbage lay on the bank of the Little Bighorn River, which is the source of drinking water for two Apsaalooke communities. (Lauren Kaljur/News21)
Native Americans are far more likely than any other group to live without plumbing – at up to 30 percent of households, according to the EPA. A recent report by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Natural Resources notes that tribes consistently receive the lowest funding per dollar of need out of any jurisdiction in the U.S.
Research also indicates Native Americans are more likely to experience health problems from water contamination because they use the land and water for subsistence and cultural practices.
Many Native Americans said they are frustrated at the lack of commitment to their water and health needs, and many fear resources will only become tighter now as they fight for a dwindling pool of grants.
President Donald Trump earlier this year proposed cuts to the EPA and other government agencies, which support tribal water systems.
For strained water systems, it’s like rubbing salt on wounds that have never been given the chance to heal. A 2003 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported funding for tribal programs was in a state of crisis so systemic it violated civil rights.
“Just keep in mind the EPA is already one of the most underfunded regulatory agencies,” said Chris Shuey, a research director at the Southwest Research and Information Center who studies the effect of uranium exposure on Navajo children. “It’s supposed to do a lot with very little. If you already take an agency vulnerable from a funding standpoint and take away even more of its funding, it’s going to essentially eliminate its requirement to regulate.”
Three decades after Doyle’s meetings with Bureau of Indian Affairs officials about the Little Bighorn River, he watches Apsaalooke children swimming and playing in the water.
Doyle is reminded of an Apsaalooke elder’s teaching: “Water is an essential part of our life. But it's also dangerous. It can take our life very easily.”
A small tattered flag flutters in the front yard of Ute Mountain Ute tribal member Yolanda Badback's home in White Mesa, Utah. (Maria Esquinca/News21)
Mining leaves legacy of contamination
Mining companies have extracted materials such as gold, uranium and coal on Native American lands for centuries. The contamination left behind, such as excess lead, selenium and chromium, remain long after the miners’ final paychecks.
Roughly 600,000 Native Americans live within 6 miles of an abandoned mine, according to the Center for Native American Environmental Health Equity.
Most of the uranium mines in the western United States are on federal and tribal lands, a government mining database shows. Public health researchers are especially concerned about these mines because the half-life of uranium is more than 4 billion years.
Chronic exposure is linked to cancer and kidney disease.
“You don’t have a lot of options if your water is contaminated with uranium,” said Debra MacKenzie, a researcher at the University of New Mexico. “It’s hard to take away a mountain. You can’t just move away.”
In Riverton, Wyo., on the Wind River Reservation, Arapaho children live with the legacy of contamination from a Cold War-era uranium mill. Their families live a half-mile from the former mill, now a sulfuric acid plant. (Lauren Kaljur/News21)
A recent U.S. Department of Justice Department report on environmental justice lists the legacy of Cold War-era mines in Navajo country as “one of the most severe environmental justice problems in Indian Country.”
Most communities aren’t so lucky. Settlements with mining companies are rare when it comes to remediation of contamination on Native American lands, said Paul Robinson, a research director at the Southwest Research and Information Center in New Mexico.
“Trying to avoid cleanup is a standard industrial practice,” Robinson said.
When mining companies don’t pay for cleanup, the burden falls on cash-strapped government agencies – and the people who live there.
Mark Soldier Wolf of the Arapaho Nation is the father of 10 children and a veteran of the Korean War. He said he was kicked off his land to make way for a uranium mill. (Lauren Kaljur/News21)
Standing on the front porch of his home crafted out of recycled beams, 89-year-old Mark Soldier Wolf, an elder of the Arapaho Nation, locks his gaze on the sulfuric acid plant less than a mile up the road. In 1957, the Bureau of Indian Affairs ordered him off his land to make way for a uranium mill, he said.
He relocated, but his troubles didn’t stop there. To mill weapons-grade uranium, operators crushed ore and deposited waste into unlined pits, which leached into the groundwater. Twenty-five years after the mill closed, the U.S. Department of Energy informed residents of the contamination. It took another decade before the department connected them to an alternate water supply.
Today, the department’s cleanup plan is to let the uranium flush naturally over the next 100 years, but this target will not be reached, said Steve Babits, a scientist with the Arapaho environmental office. The alternative water system, which runs through contaminated groundwater, is past due for an upgrade – and some residents aren’t even connected to it. Aside from a few fact sheets about the area posted to the energy department’s website, there’s no information going out to tribal members, Babits said.
Soldier Wolf and his family said they do not trust agencies in charge of the site. More than 50 years since officials kicked Solder Wolf off his land, he and his kids shell out 75 cents a bottle for water rather than drink from the alternative water supply – water they have to pay the tribal utility for.
“I’m still waiting impatiently,” Soldier Wolf said. “For what? I don't know anymore.”
The Lonebear family’s home is close to a former uranium mill near Riverton, Wyo. The mill closed more than 50 years ago, but the family believes the land is still contaminated with uranium. (Lauren Kaljur/News21)
Even when the traces of mine contamination aren’t visible, they can still pose a threat. “A lot of people don’t realize they are living near (old) mine sites,” said MacKenzie, the New Mexico researcher.
Tommy Rock, a scientist and member of the Navajo Nation, tested water in communities on and off the reservation with an environmental justice grant from the EPA. When results came back in 2015, what he found horrified him, he said. In Sanders, Arizona, just outside the Navajo Reservation, his tests indicated the average concentration of uranium at 1 1/2 times the EPA’s drinking water limit.
Records show the EPA and Arizona Department of Environmental Quality knew the water was contaminated as far back as 2003, and both sent violation notices to the water provider. It wasn’t until 2015 that the state notified residents of the contamination, claiming the contamination did not pose a risk to human health.
Public health experts MacKenzie and Shuey, however, would consider 10 years of uranium contamination as dangerous chronic exposure.
The White Mesa Mill in Utah is the only conventional uranium processing mill still operating in the country. It is directly atop the Navajo Aquifer in the Navajo Nation. (Maria Esquinca/News21)
Documents show the small water provider largely ignored the violations, and it later told residents they needed more money to do additional testing, Shuey said.
“In many places, people don't want to know because they don't have money to do anything about it,” said Andrea Gerlak, a University of Arizona water policy researcher.
Residents have their suspicions about what caused the contamination: The largest release of radioactive waste in the history of the United States happened near the community. However, the community has yet to go through the onerous process of proving the source of contamination. Residents are still pulling together funds to support an alternative water supply.
Even if the EPA finds something wrong with a Native American water system, it doesn’t enforce its standards to the degree it does with nontribal systems, according to a 2016 study.
Shuey said this disparity “casts doubt” on whether the EPA is serious about enforcing standards. From what he’s observed, bringing systems into compliance costs money the agency simply doesn’t have.
“If we’re not going to enforce standards, what’s the good of having standards?” he said.
The White Mesa Ute Mountain Ute live within 10 miles of America’s only fully active uranium mill, which sits above its ancient burial grounds. Chemical changes in the aquifer beneath the mill concern Scott Clow, the tribe’s environmental programs director, because below that aquifer sits the community’s drinking water source.
Many residents claim they do not drink the water, even though it falls within regulatory guidelines. Like the Navajo to the south, generations of harm from the uranium industry have bred a deep sense of distrust.
Some residents of White Mesa are concerned about the quality of the liners beneath the mill’s waste ponds. Others have misgivings about recent toxic spills from trucks en route to the mill, reported by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And still others worry about what will happen when the company closes its doors and the waste is still radioactive.
Yolanda Badback is one of the few White Mesa, Utah, residents from the Ute Mountain Ute tribe who is organizing and protesting against the White Mesa Mill. (Maria Esquinca/News21)
The mill is requesting the renewal and expansion of its operating permits. At one of the hearings in Salt Lake City, a mill representative told residents of White Mesa the company wouldn’t notify their leaders in case of an emergency or radioactive spill – although they would notify leaders in nearby Blanding, a community of mostly white residents. One resident said it’s just one more example of how both the company and the government ignore their concerns.
Yolanda Badback, a Ute Mountain Ute tribal member and resident of White Mesa, also attended the hearing. “I said, ‘But we’re only 5 miles south of you guys. At least we need a heads-up if anything happens.’ ”
Yufna Soldier Wolf Gonzalez of the Arapaho Nation in Wyoming says groundwater contamination from a former uranium mill on her land has caused generations of trauma in her family. Two immediate family members were diagnosed with breast cancer, and two had full hysterectomies. (Lauren Kaljur/News21)
Residents question health effect
After officials detected high levels of radium, uranium and thorium in the groundwater beneath his land, the Soldier Wolf family in Wind River, Wyoming, began to wonder how contaminants leached from the uranium mill may have affected their health.
Two of Soldier Wolf's immediate family members had full hysterectomies because of cancerous growths and two had breast cancer, despite no family history of this kind. They know 12 other women in the community with the same surgery, concerning for a community of roughly 100 residents.
In response to community concerns over incidents of cancer in the neighborhood, the Rocky Mountain Tribal Epidemiology Center surveyed residents. Early results found that nearly half had a blood relative who had died of cancer, which the researcher called “quite alarming.”
No one has heard back about final results, however, because the center never completed the survey. The community still doesn’t know whether or not the deaths and illness in families are connected to the uranium in their groundwater.
Mark Soldier Wolf of the Arapaho Nation is an elder and storyteller in his community. Part of the history of his people involves the Susquehanna-Western uranium mill, which forced him to give up part of his inherited land. (Lauren Kaljur/News21)
“I don’t want my great-grandkids to all have cancer or have something else wrong with them,” said Soldier Wolf’s youngest daughter, Yufna Soldier Wolf Gonzalez.
The family said they want answers, but they’re not likely to find them any time soon.
Mike Andreini is the director of the tribal epidemiology center. He said the center went years without an acting director and just a handful of employees. “There is no national tribal public health entity,” he said. “There are regional tribal epidemiology centers, but these operate on a shoestring.”
Because of funding shortages, Indian Health Services can barely keep up with the basic health needs of tribal members – many of whom do not have health insurance – let alone commission or conduct epidemiological studies. Often times, tribes rely on county and state health providers to fill the gaps in their own system, he said.
“To understand tribal public health is to understand Third World standards and practices,” Andreini said.
The community of White Mesa, Utah, has nearly 300 residents, according to U.S. Census data. About 33 percent live below the poverty line. (Maria Esquinca/News21)
Ute Mountain Ute tribal attorney Peter Ortego said White Mesa residents also have concerns about health effects from the mill, such as asthma and cancer, but he is having a hard time getting the information they need from Indian Health Services.
Shuey has more than three decades of experience studying water contamination in the Navajo Nation. He said the trouble with contamination and human health is that it’s incredibly hard to prove causality, making it easier to delay or deny a response.
“People say I’ve got this cancer or that cancer, but until there’s a formal health study, you can’t tell,” he said. Tribes often rely on grants to support these studies. Until someone takes that initiative, it’s very difficult for affected residents to argue they’ve been harmed by contamination.
“It is frustrating,” said Lorenzo Curley, a resident of Sanders and member of the Navajo Nation who found out his community had been drinking water with double the allowable limit of uranium in 2015.
“Folks say their cancer is linked to uranium, but we can’t prove it. We’ve got to develop the legal facts before we can even go to court and say, ‘OK provide some money for us so we can have a different source of water or correct the wrong.’ ”
In Crow Agency, Mont., the Apsaalooke tribe has a long tradition of raising horses. (Lauren Kaljur/News21)
Tribes face complicated funding maze
Doyle has dedicated his adult life to Apsaalooke water. He’s a scientist, member of the local wastewater authority and founding member of a volunteer steering committee dedicated to environmental health. Together, elders in the community decide how they can most improve the health of their people and find ways to make it happen.
Mari Eggers is an environmental health researcher with the University of Montana and fellow committee member. “It takes a lot to first figure out what's going on,” she said.
Once they realized that the wastewater contamination Doyle noticed was leaching into drinking water pipes, they knew they needed to address both the waste pond and the water lines – infrastructure that costs millions of dollars.
“When they first told me that first price tag for the project, I thought, ‘How are we going to pay for that?’ ” he said.
John Doyle collects sage at Pretty Eagle Point, a section of Big Horn Canyon in Montana, a sacred site and burial ground for the Apsaalooke Nation. (Claire Caulfield/News21)
Federal agencies have a duty to provide services for Native Americans as a result of treaties. This relationship means that when tribes do get funding, they often don’t control it. For example, the Navajo Nation’s $1 billion settlement to assist in cleanup of old uranium mines was awarded to the EPA, not the Navajo. “Reservations themselves should be entitled to that money directly,” Andreini said. In some cases, however, they don’t have the capacity to implement their goals.
Even knowing where to turn presents a challenge. The EPA regulates water on tribal lands, and its representatives’ offices are often in a different state. Within the Apsaalooke tribe’s designated EPA region, two dozen tribes share three or four managers.
“Regular access and dialogue between effective decision-makers – those are limited,” said Robinson, the public health researcher. “Then those agencies spend a lot of money on staff and travel and not building capacity of tribes to do work.”
While the EPA enforces national water standards on Native American lands, many other agencies oversee the implementation and maintenance of infrastructure, such as Indian Health Services, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Energy and in some cases state agencies – complicating the delivery of water services. It also makes it easier to point fingers and shirk responsibility, Andreini said.
Andreini said he often hears government officials and politicians say they don't understand how tribal governance and systems work, challenging their ability to come up with solutions.
Fawn Sharp, vice president of the National Congress of American Indians, said tribes have limited power to raise taxes, which is why they have to secure money from many sources. “The end product is what you see, programs where it may take up to 14 sources of funding to make happen,” she said.
That’s how many loans and grants it took for Doyle, a member of the Apsaalooke wastewater authority, to raise the $20 million to fix the leaking wastewater and failing pipes on the Crow Reservation.
Gerlak, the water policy scholar, said that newer models of complex financing that have come as a result of government agency cuts – such as loans, bonds and public-private partnerships – don’t always work for poor, disenfranchised communities.
Darlene Arviso has been delivering drinking water to residents in the Navajo Nation for nine years. Every morning she fills her truck with well water from the St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School. (Maria Esquinca/News21)
Tribes find alternative ways to deal with water problems
Seventy-four miles east of Sanders near the small town of Thoreau, New Mexico, Darlene Arviso, a member of the Navajo Nation, fires up a yellow diesel truck after filling its tank with thousands of gallons of fresh water from the St. Bonaventure Mission. She drives hundreds of miles every day along dirt roads filling up 5-gallon drums so Navajo families can drink safe water.
The Navajo Water Utility Authority is working its way down a long wait list to connect homes with a public water system – a list that includes Arviso’s own family. Without the nonprofit work of the mission and its partner, Digdeep, filling in the gaps, more than 150 families would risk turning to their wells for water – wells laced with uranium, mission director Chris Halter said.
Doug Brugge is a leading public health researcher at Tufts University School of Medicine. “It bothers me that it’s taken so long and so little has been done about it,” he said, considering agencies have known old uranium mines have been laying to waste on Navajo lands for decades.
Darlene Arviso delivers water to about 200 residents in the Navajo Nation who lack access to clean drinking water. “What they have is what they have,” she said. It takes her a month to deliver the water. (Maria Esquinca/News21)
“I am upset that nonprofits have to take up that responsibility,” said Janene Yazzie, a senior planner of the Little Colorado River Watershed Chapters Association. “They’re just a quick fix, short-term remedy for access to clean drinking water.”
Sometimes a short-term fix is the only option. Thanks to an EPA grant to monitor home well water, Doyle and his team can tackle a new challenge: Testing home well water. He now knows that more than half of local wells harbor at least one exceedance in E. coli, uranium and manganese – a contaminant associated with diabetes and potentially brain damage.
They’re now educating homeowners and providing water coolers for those with contaminated wells. Doyle admits it is far from a permanent solution, but it’s the best they can do to keep people safe for now.
“People don't have the resources to install the water softener, the reverse osmosis unit, the iron removal unit,” said Eggers, the researcher who tests private wells alongside Doyle. “And then all of them require monthly maintenance and monthly expense.”
“It's just beyond people's financial means.”
Darlene Arviso said the residents she delivers water to think of her as family. “Sometimes I get hot lunch, or apples, oranges, bananas or water or soda. I appreciate that. They give it to me,” she said. (Maria Esquinca/News21)
Navajo residents in Sanders, who recently found out their drinking water was contaminated with uranium for over a decade, have learned that the fight for clean water must become a community priority – with home-grown leaders dedicated to the cause.
The Apsaalooke in Montana also found its most powerful resources come from within.
“We started from nothing, just a small group of people that had the community health in mind,” Doyle said. He said they don’t have a new water plant yet, but they have safe water lines running to homes.
“You can quit and walk away from it, or you can decide that you're going to try to do as much as you can to get it done,” Doyle said.
“We're all down the stream from somebody else. What they do is going to affect us, and what we do is going to affect somebody else,” he said. “That responsibility is all of ours.”
Macee Beheler is an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellow.
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People in Oman asked not to drink from plastic bottles kept in sun.
Residents in Oman have been warned not to leave plastic water bottles out in the sun by the Muscat Municipality, which is running a campaign on the adverse health effects of chemicals from plastic bottles leaching into the water stored inside them.
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People in Oman asked not to drink from plastic bottles kept in sun
August 7, 2017 | 11:07 PM By Gautam Viswanathan / gautam@timesofoman.com
Photo -Muscat MunicipalityPeople in Oman asked not to drink from plastic bottles kept in sun
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Residents in Oman have been warned not to leave plastic water bottles out ...
People asked #nottodrink from #plasticbottles kept in sun
Muscat: Residents in Oman have been warned not to leave plastic water bottles out in the sun, as this could cause cancer.
“For your health, avoid keeping and storing drinking water under the sun,” tweeted the Muscat Municipality, which is running a campaign on the adverse health effects of chemicals from plastic bottles leaching into the water stored inside them. Dr. Sajeev Bhaskar, a general practitioner at the Al Lamki Polyclinic, highlighted the effects this could have on people.
“These bottles may have the ISO mark of approval, but just because they have that, doesn’t mean it is always safe to drink because sometimes, they are not stored properly,” he explained. “Plastics contain a highly carcinogenic compound called Bisphenol A, which is commonly used for bottled water and leaches into it water at a certain temperature.”
“Bisphenol A stimulates prostate cancer cells and causes tissue changes that resemble the early stages of breast cancer in both mice and humans,” he added. “Higher levels of Bisphenol A in humans have also been associated with ovarian dysfunction. If at all you do need to keep bottles of water in your car, please store them in glass bottles.”
Dr. Basheer, an internist and diabetologist at the Badr Al Sama’a Hospital, also agreed with the need to exercise caution when it came to storing water in the sun.
“In the long-term, plastics in water can cause cancer,” he revealed. “While long-term exposure is definitely dangerous, it is also very common to suffer from lung diseases in the short-term. It is very dangerous to keep plastic bottles in your cars and in places that have direct exposure to sunlight.”
Always cover
“It is common for those who are involved in field work to keep their bottles in the sun, but this is dangerous,” added Basheer. “If they are working outdoors, it is better to cover these bottles with a cloth, so that sunlight does not directly penetrate them. These provisions must be made by the company that is sending workers into the field, and ideally, they should be provided with a cooler to store their drinks.”
Oman’s Public Authority for Consumer Protection (PACP) also weighed in on the matter. “The World Health Organisation (WHO) suggests 1,000 ppm (parts-per-million) or less,” they tweeted, in response to queries about safe toxin levels in drinking water, adding, “In bottled drinking water, this should be between 100 and 600ppm.”
Raids carried out by PACP have led to caches of improperly stored water in the past. This July, according to the authority, “the Department of Consumer Protection in Al Dakhiliyah Governorate recently destroyed, in cooperation with the Municipality of Izki, a quantity of bottled mineral water containers, because they did not comply with the standard specifications.”
“Drinking water bottle boxes were found packed and stored in unhealthy storage conditions, and samples were taken for examination,” added the PACP spokesperson. “The results of the examination by the Food Control Laboratory of the Directorate General of Regional Municipalities and Water Resources in Al Dhakhiliyah showed that the product does not conform to the reference standard, and there was a change in taste and smell due to storage conditions.”
“The Public Authority for Consumer Protection calls upon all merchants and suppliers to abide by the provisions of the Consumer Protection Law and its executive regulations to avoid legal accountability,” he added.
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California’s biggest drought success story came with a high cost.
East Porterville was the hardest-hit community during the drought, when nearly 1,000 people were without water. Efforts to find a long-term fix have been successful but came with a big price tag and some important lessons.
EAST PORTERVILLE, CALIFORNIA – When her well went dry in 2014, Yolanda Serrato had just begun the fight of her life against breast cancer. Her world had already been turned upside down – then it went sideways.
Through chemotherapy and radiation, she often carried buckets of water from a 300-gallon tank outside so she could cook food for her family. She heated water on the stove for sponge baths. She even needed a bucket of water to use the toilet.
“I thought it was the end for me – it was exhausting,” says Serrato, 58, who has lived in an East Porterville house in California’s San Joaquin Valley for 23 years with her husband and three children, two of whom are grown. “You want to know what it’s like to live without water? Turn off your water for a week. That’s the only way you will know.”
Life is still upside down for Serrato, whose cancer has moved into her bones. But her house is now connected to nearby Porterville’s water system, not a dry well. Porterville has a water system that serves 60,000 residents with deeper community wells that survived California’s five-year drought.
More than 300 other homes in East Porterville, which has a population of 7,300, have already received the same long-term fix, some after living two years without functioning indoor plumbing. About 1,000 people – who live on 330 of the 1,800 properties in town – were without water at the height of the drought.
Indoor taps in kitchens, showers, bathrooms, washing machines and toilets just stopped working. Lawns turned brown, roses died, trees withered and dust collected everywhere. People scrambled daily to get water from relatives, friends and neighbors to get kids off to school and themselves off to work – many going to the farm fields in the vast agricultural belt of the valley.
“I shudder when I think of getting up at 3 a.m. to get a bucket of water for my husband when he’s getting ready to go to work,” Serrato says.
East Porterville took by far the hardest hit in the valley during the drought, state officials say. And the valley suffered most in the state from the drought.
Volunteers, nonprofit groups and good neighbors eased the blow here by helping people find temporary water supplies. This rural community at the edge of the Sierra Nevada foothills pulled together. Now East Porterville is the biggest post-drought success story in this 25,000-square-mile valley.
But it came at a price. The State Water Resources Control Board has responded with $35 million to connect East Porterville’s 300-plus dry homes to Porterville’s system. Another 400 homeowners who didn’t lose their wells have opted into the Porterville hookup to prevent future water problems.
At one point during the drought, the state was paying $650,000 a month just for emergency water, temporary holding tanks and deliveries. The total cost of East Porterville’s drought rescue has been estimated at nearly $40 million. Authorities had little choice once they learned the extent of the suffering in East Porterville, state officials say.
“The East Porterville project is massive,” says Dat Tran, the State Water Resources Control Board chief of Drinking Water Technical Assistance. “As far as drought impact, this is the biggest project we’ve done.”
The state favors consolidating smaller, more vulnerable towns with nearby cities, so this may not be the last time California is on the hook for tens of millions of dollars. The valley has hundreds of rural pockets with water supply and contamination problems that have been festering for many years.
“The water and wastewater infrastructure costs that we’ve neglected over the past 30 years or so are not going to be cheap to fund,” says Michelle Wilde Anderson, a professor at Stanford Law School. “The longer we delay the costs of maintenance and new projects, the more we always pay when we finally face our basic needs.”
For now, the East Porterville fix has been moving quickly, with the installation of main lines, new wells and home hookups. The goal is to bring nearly half the town’s 1,800 homes onto the system serving Porterville.
“I’ve been in government a long time, but I’ve never seen a project of this scale put together so quickly,” says Eric Coyne, Tulare County deputy administrator of economic development.
At the same time, the drought left an indelible mark on the people, more than 70 percent of whom are Hispanic. It created a horrendous ordeal, says Tomas Garcia, who has lived in East Porterville since the mid-1990s. Garcia’s well went dry in 2014.
“We never knew our well was something to worry about,” says Garcia, 54, who eventually volunteered with nonprofit groups to help his fellow residents. “In the beginning, it was very hard. You had to find water and get it to your house. I worked such long days. I have diabetes. Now, I’m hooked up to the city of Porterville, but I still save water all the time. All the time.”
He says his monthly water bill is about $54, and he does not object to paying it, especially after he looked at the cost of replacing his old well.
A well-drilling contractor estimated the cost of a 200ft well would have been $55,000, Garcia says. Garcia’s wife, Juanita, works in the fields. He works for a tire shop in Porterville. They can get by as they raise their two children, but they couldn’t afford a new well.
Residents here are poorer than 91 percent of other Californians, according to the latest CalEnviroScreen data from the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
CalEnviroScreen, which details stress in communities, shows East Porterville’s population is among the 5 percent of California residents who live with the most environmental, social and economic burdens. Factors include air pollution, poor water quality, low birth weight, issues of access to healthcare and language barriers.
The town’s drinking water source has always been shallow, private wells, some of which were dug down only 20ft by hand a century ago. The wells are not monitored by the state for contamination. In California, private well owners must hire their own contractors to test wells.
East Porterville’s geographic location is the main reason the wells are shallow. At the edge of the foothills just downhill of Success Lake, the soil below the surface is shallow because the granite base of the mountain range slopes upward. There isn’t as much room for underground water as locations farther west in the valley.
“The underground aquifer is more reliable where the sediments are deeper – as they are around Porterville,” says engineer Richard Schafer, watermaster for the Tule River Water Association, which manages water operations on nearby Success Lake. “For shallow areas, like East Porterville, there isn’t as much water, and it is recharged by the Tule. Remember, 2014 and 2015 were the driest seasons in 130 years on the Tule.”
Even though last winter was wet, there are still water supply problems in East Porterville, says Jessi Snyder of Visalia-based Self-Help Enterprises, which has worked with low-income families to build sustainable communities since 1965. The nonprofit has been a valuable resource for residents, helping them connect with the Porterville system or find financing if they need a new well.
“We’re still getting reports of new dry wells,” she says. “That’s why it’s important to have long-term solutions.”
There are a small number of properties still dry – a precise tally is difficult to estimate, officials say – but most places that lost water during the drought are now connected to Porterville’s system.
Ryan Jensen of the Community Water Center, which kept people informed and helped organize involvement in the hookup project with Porterville, says the entire process of fixing water problems here is focused on solutions.
“It’s a model that I’m hoping to see more and more,” he says. “We will have between 700 and 800 houses connected to the Porterville water system maybe by the end of the year. That’s impressive.”
Out in the community, stacks of bottled water still clutter some porches. Sometimes the garbage bins are filled with paper plates because people don’t want to waste water washing ceramic plates. It still looks like a community on the mend.
Fred Beltran, 62, a nearby Terra Bella resident who once lived in East Porterville, volunteered to work on water drives in East Porterville – getting donated water and delivering it. He had been in early retirement for a few years before the drought, but now he works for Self-Help Enterprises.
“Those water drives helped us understand what people needed,” Beltran says. “People didn’t have water to flush their toilets and take showers. We got them water tanks and connected them to the house plumbing and the hot-water heater. This was a devastating time but we pulled together.”
Yolanda Serrato, who continues to battle cancer, says she didn’t think of leaving East Porterville. She says she couldn’t have sold her house anyway after the well went dry. But she loves the quiet country life here. She says she’s staying.
Plus, the drought taught her children a few lessons about survival. The younger folks often worried how long anyone could live without running water in the house.
“I told them, ‘Yes, you can do it,’” she says. “We didn’t have indoor plumbing when I lived in Sonora, Mexico. You got a bucket of water to bathe and a cup of water to brush your teeth. But I understand why they’re afraid. You never know how precious water is until it’s gone.”
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