Environmental Health

"Most people try to avoid ticks. But not Tom Mather. The University of Rhode Island researcher goes out of his way to find them."

"For drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the 17-page article in the New England Journal of Medicine represented a coup. The 2006 report described a trial that compared three diabetes drugs and concluded that Avandia, the company’s new drug, performed best. ... What only careful readers of the article would have gleaned is the extent of the financial connections between the drugmaker and the research."

"HINKLEY -- Underwater home mortgages plague the High Desert at an approximate rate of 60 percent, according to real estate website Zillow.com. But in Hinkley, residents say the entire town is dealing with mortgages above their current assessed values."

"ST. LOUIS -- A doctoral dissertation that renewed public interest in the military-sponsored chemical spraying of impoverished areas of St. Louis in the 1950s and ’60s has spawned a lawsuit."

"WINDSOR, Ontario -- For more than three decades, workers, most of them women, have complained of dreadful conditions in many of this city’s plastic automotive parts factories: Pungent fumes and dust that caused nosebleeds, headaches, nausea and dizziness. Blobs of smelly, smoldering plastic dumped directly onto the floor. 'It was like hell,' says one woman who still works in the industry."

"The first time Bill Ferullo saw the white plumes drifting from a natural gas fracking site, he got out of his car to take pictures. 'I didn't know what it was,' he recalled. 'But two minutes later my chest was burning. It burned all night.'"

"Seville, with a population of about 300, is one of dozens of predominantly Latino unincorporated communities in the Central Valley plagued for decades by contaminated drinking water."

"After months of uncertainty over the future of the program, the Agricultural Marketing Service's Microbiological Data Program, which tests produce for disease-causing pathogens like E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, and Listeria, has officially gone into shutdown mode, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official confirmed Tuesday."

"A Homeland Security Department undersecretary has told Janet Napolitano she has doubts about a new version of the nation's troubled system for detecting a biological attack."