low birth weight
Polluted air is endangering newborns in New Mexico
A new study reveals that air pollution is significantly linked to low birth weight among babies born near industrial areas in New Mexico, posing serious health risks.
In short:
- The University of New Mexico study connects exposure to five industrial pollutants with low birth weight in infants.
- Areas like Albuquerque, Santa Fe and the Permian Basin –the country's most productive oilfield– have some of the worst air quality in the U.S., affecting local newborns' health.
- Minority and low-income communities face disproportionate impacts from pollution, with higher incidences of low birth weight among Black and Latino infants.
Key quote:
“The stakes are incredibly high. Low birth weight not only impacts the health of newborns but can also set children up for health issues that extend well into adulthood.”
— Giovanna Rossi, New Mexico organizer for Moms Clean Air Force.
Why this matters:
Protecting pregnant women and their babies from industrial pollution is vital as low birth weight is linked to severe health issues, from respiratory problems to heart disease, creating a critical public health crisis. Read more: Air pollution linked to millions of birth complications across the globe.
Keep reading...Show less
loe.org
Living on Earth: Beyond the Headlines
This week on Beyond the Headlines, Environmental Health News editor Peter Dykstra and Host Bobby Bascomb explore a new study that found a correlation between natural gas production and low birth weights.
grist.org
The government can’t keep up with abandoned oil wells. Can these industry insiders help?
The number of abandoned oil and gas wells is on the verge of exploding. These industry insiders want to be part of the solution.
Hot temperatures during pregnancy: Evidence for an impact on fetal growth
A large study reports associations between prenatal exposure to hot ambient temperatures and evidence of lower fetal growth among nearly 30 million births across the United States.
www.paenvironmentdigest.com
Jacquelyn Bonomo: PA legislators should stop giving tax breaks to fossil fuel industry
Pennsylvania is approaching a steep precipice, and the ramifications will be irreversible if we tumble over the edge and link our future to fracked gas, petrochemicals and plastics.
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.”
Keep reading...Show less
Smog becomes a political issue in South Korean election.
Seoul’s air now regularly ranks among the dirtiest in Asia. Politicians blame China.
By Anna Fifield and Yoonjung Seo April 27 at 9:33 PM
SEOUL — A rare springtime election will send South Koreans to the polls early next month, but here in smog-bound Seoul they may be gasping all the way.
Spring is notorious for its poor air quality here. The combination of smog and the yellow dust that descends from Mongolia’s Gobi Desert every spring has produced pollution so thick that on the worst days — and there have been many of them — Seoul has looked like a city shrouded in a toxic gray blanket.
This has made air pollution a topical issue in the snap presidential election, to be held May 9.
“I will do everything in my power to make South Korea an environmentally clean country,” Moon Jae-in, the Democratic Party candidate and clear front-runner for the presidency, said this month. “People are angry over the government’s lack of action to tackle the almost-unbreathable air.”
The 123-story Lotte World Tower and other buildings are blanketed in a gray haze caused by fine dust in the air in Seoul, South Korea. (Yonhap/EPA)
Moon and his closest rival, centrist Ahn Cheol-soo, have both pledged to work with China — blamed by the government for much of South Korea’s air problems, although environmental activists point out that most of the pollution is homegrown. They have also vowed to stop any new coal-fired power plants from being built. Hong Joon-pyo of the conservative Liberty Korea Party has also promised to work with China and increase the number of environmentally friendly cars on the roads.
Seoul is joining Beijing and Delhi near the top of the list of Asian cities with certifiably unhealthy air. The South Korean capital now regularly records unhealthy levels of PM2.5 ultra-fine dust in the air — particles that are one-thirtieth the width of a human hair and can pick up lead and arsenic from the air and then embed themselves deep in a person’s lungs once inhaled.
In the first months of this year, Seoul has been recording twice the number of ultrafine dust warnings as last year, with authorities advising people to limit outdoor activities and sensitive groups to stay inside altogether to avoid breathing in the dangerous particles.
“It’s really frustrating because air pollution is not something I can fix as a citizen,” said Seoul resident Lee Eun-jung, the mother of two girls, ages 9 and 15.
“My eldest daughter goes to a middle school where they still have outdoor P.E. classes on days when the pollution is considered dangerous. It breaks my heart to imagine her working out on a day like that,” Lee said. “My youngest daughter has asthma and has been hospitalized several times for pneumonia.”
[Air pollution affects preterm birthrates globally, study finds]
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked PM2.5 to a variety of illnesses, including cancer and heart disease, and low birth weight. A recent South Korean study suggested an association with Parkinson’s and other neurological diseases.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has predicted that 1,069 South Koreans per million will die prematurely in 2060 as a direct result of air pollution. South Korea is the only country in the “rich nations’ club” (a phrase often used to describe the OEDC) to exceed 1,000 deaths per million in the projections.
Local studies have put the economic damage caused by air pollution — largely because of lost production — at about $9 billion a year and have predicted this will double by 2060.
The tendency here has been to blame the pollution on neighboring China, where coal-fired power plants and huge factories are spewing gunk into the environment to be carried on winds over to the Korean Peninsula.
“China is the main culprit,” the environment ministry said in a report last month, saying that China causes 30 to 50 percent of the PM2.5 in South Korea on normal days, but 60 to 80 percent on the worst days. The central government has approached Beijing about working together to try to limit industrial pollution.
But the practice of pointing the finger at China overlooks the fact that the majority of South Korea’s pollution is homegrown, analysts and activists say.
[Fine-particle pollution linked to wider number of cancers, premature births ]
Even if 30 to 50 percent of the ultrafine dust comes from China, that means 50 to 70 percent comes from South Korean sources, including exhaust from old diesel vehicles, “fugitive dust” from construction sites and tires hitting the road, and the illegal burning of waste.
“The South Korean government looks like it’s trying to avoid dealing with the situation,” said Son Min-woo, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace Korea. “They aren’t doing enough to reduce the pollution here.”
Greenpeace is lobbying the government to close down coal-fired power plants to reduce pollution.
About 40 percent of South Korea’s electricity comes from more than 50 coal-fired power plants, and the country has plans to build 20 new plants by 2021 despite being a signatory to the Paris climate change deal. It will, however, shut down 10 aging plants by 2025.
Other official efforts have had little effect. The Seoul metropolitan government has been ordering cars off the roads on alternate dates depending on their tags, but these restrictions apply only to government vehicles. Seoul also is doubling the number of street sweepers to pick up “fugitive dust” from the roads.
Lee, the mother of two daughters, is doing as much as she can to protect her family, installing three air purifiers at home and spending about $50 a month on masks for her family.
But she wants the South Korean government to do more.
“I know China is responsible for a large part of the bad air, but I hear that coal-fired power plants and aging industrial sites violating regulations are serious factors, too,” she said. “The South Korean government says it is cooperating with China to tackle this issue, but I don’t know if any meaningful results will come out from that cooperation.”
Bae Jeong-hwan, an economics professor at Chonnam National University, said a decade of effort by local and central governments had amounted to little.
“The government is neglecting its duties by not taking more action while peoples’ lives are at stake,” he said, saying the central government had been tinkering around the edges rather than tackling the crux of the problem.
[You’re more likely to die from air pollution in India than China, study says]
For one, the government should bring the tax on diesel into line with that on gasoline, Bae said.
“The diesel price has been kept down to help South Korean industry, but diesel trucks can produce more than 140 times more exhaust than diesel cars,” he said. “Regulations need to be strengthened to make some difference in the air quality.”
Another, admittedly extreme option would be to impose a “smog tax” on products imported from China, Bae said. “When cooperation doesn’t work, stronger regulations or sanctions should be considered.”
In the meantime, many people here are concerned that the government is minimizing the problem by having a looser definition of dirty air than the international standard. The World Health Organization classifies 25 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter in a day as unhealthy, but the South Korean government standard is double that.
“I don’t understand this,” said Lee Mi-ok, a 38-year-old mother of a 4-year-old boy who was born prematurely with weak lungs. “Do Koreans have lungs that are twice as strong as other nationalities? Why do we have to put up with this bad air? What is the purpose of the government if it cannot protect lives and health of the people?”
Keep reading...Show less
ORIGINAL REPORTING
MOST POPULAR
CLIMATE
