More immediate than the Gulf oil spill to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection are the gushers, spills, and accidents from the gas drilling boom in the state.
"Before a fillet of grouper, fresh oyster or piece of shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico lands in the grocery seafood aisle, state and federal agencies have weighed in on its safety. ... However, no one is testing seafood to tell whether it has absorbed the toxic compounds found in the nearly 1.8 million gallons of dispersants BP has poured into the water to break up the oil."
"The latest skirmish in the decades-long scientific battle over the health risks of the most toxic form of dioxin is heating up."
"It's shaping up to be an active season for West Nile virus in Santa Clara County. ... But plans for a Tuesday evening fogging have outraged many West San Jose residents, who fear the county's large-scale spraying does more harm than good."
"When a [California] bill to ban a common plastic additive in feeding products for young children passed the Assembly on July 1, it marked a milestone in state legislative efforts to regulate bisphenol A."
"Detroit's anti-lead program -- beset with alleged shakedowns and bogus treatments, missing files, incompetence and mismanagement -- was upended last year after such scorching claims were reported in state and federal investigations." But efforts to reform it have left many lead-poisoned kids untreated and permanently damaged.
"Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide’s health risks, records of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine’s safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review."
"TXI will permanently shut down its four oldest, highest-polluting cement kilns in Midlothian and will stop burning hazardous waste as fuel, the Dallas-based company said Tuesday."
When Ray Hott bought a strip of land in DeKalb, Illinois, he did not know that it had been contaminated by toxic chemicals from a gas plant a century before.
"The use of roxarsone and other arsenic-based additives in poultry and swine feed is at the center of a national controversy."
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