pollution (Page 22)

In neighborhoods near industrial areas, dangerous levels of lead have been found in residents’ backyards. The amount of lead varies widely from yard to yard, and even within each yard, making some of them dangerous to play or grow vegetables in, since lead can cause learning disabilities. How to soak it up??Plant spinach (just don’t eat any of it).

Soil scientist Samantha Langley-Turnbaugh planted spinach gardens in several contaminated yards in Bayside, Oregon, to see if the plants could help clean up contaminated soil. She says, “People were planting backyard gardens and hadn’t even thought about the fact that there were heavy metals in the soil that could be taken up into the plants.”
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Instead of giving power plants in each state the same pollution guidelines, the government’s new Clear Skies Initiative will let them “buy and sell” emissions. This means that older plants can put off installing expensive new equipment by purchasing emissions allowances from newer, less polluting plants. Older cities already have the most air pollution, partly due to their older power plants, and this means they will remain more dangerous places to live. And now researchers have discovered that long-term exposure to the particulates in air pollution causes heart disease, as well as respiratory problems.
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If you develop a disease, the amount of pollution in the air you breathe may determine how sick you get. Men who live in polluted areas are more likely to develop lung cancer, and SARS patients affected by air pollution are more likely to die. This is important news in the wake of the new Clean Air regulations, which mean that some areas of the U.S. will end up with more pollution than others.
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A cocktail of dangerous chemicals has been found in the blood of every person tested in a study in the U.K., and everyone in the U.S. probably has them too. The 77 chemicals found include PCBs, which can affect gender, and a common fire retardant.

Shaoni Bhattacharya quotes toxicologist Matthew Wilkinson as saying, “Every single person we monitored had a range of these chemicals.” Some of these chemicals persist in the blood for a very long time, as shown by the fact that 99% of the people in the study tested positive for DDT, which has been banned for decades in the U.K. Animal tests show these chemicals can be harmful at high levels, but no one knows the effects of carrying low levels of these chemicals around in your blood for a long time.
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