All environmental health stories

Are building environmental and health disasters result of climate change?

404132862 — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:11:15 -0500

Disagreement over the public health impact of global warming emerged in a symposium this morning at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The colloquium, titled “Sustaining Human Health in a Changing Global Environment,” addressed what hazards can be expected as a result of rapid and continuing climate change.

Harvard brings the Earth to high school

jake — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:16:26 -0400

Steam vents in Yellowstone National Park are part of the area’s unique environment, seen in a case study exploring Yellowstone and the reintroduction of wolves into the park. This case study is part of a new environmental science course for high school science teachers.

Harvard scientists and media specialists unveiled an online environmental science course Monday (Oct. 1) aimed at high school teachers and, through them, high school students — the future inheritors of the Earth’s environmental problems.

The course, called “The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science,” features a scientific “dream team” of experts from Harvard and elsewhere who describe their fields, relevant problems, and potential solutions in a series of online videos.

Harvard launches major initiative to help design international climate agreements

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 09:54:08 -0400

Harvard University announced in early July a two-year project to help identify key design elements of a future international agreement on climate change, drawing on the ideas of leading thinkers from academia, private industry, government, and advocacy organizations, both in the industrialized world and in developing countries.

Forty percent of world lacks clean water, solutions sought

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:49:16 -0400

The pictures — of children with sunken eyes and shriveled skin; oxen being herded across a river where women clean their clothes and fill their pitchers; an African villager sipping water from a shallow puddle — made the point like no words could at the May 11 Center for International Development symposium “The Impact of the Global Water Crisis on Health and Human Development” at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Still, the statistics were almost equally startling: More than a billion people worldwide lack safe water sources, and 2.6 billion — 40 percent of the world’s population — have no basic sanitation. Nearly 2 million people a year, 90 percent of them children under 5, die from dehydration and associated malnutrition and microbial diseases.

Ingenious use of indigenous tree reaps award

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:38:17 -0400

The jatropha tree is a humble — some might even say homely — plant, with large, maple-like leaves and clusters of inedible fruit that, when mature, look too brown and shriveled to be of much use to anyone. But to thousands of rural eastern and southern Africans, the jatropha is a beautiful thing. It represents hope that they’ll someday have electric lamps to light their homes, refrigerators to keep medicines and vaccines cold in local clinics, and computers and telephones in the schools and orphanages — hope for sustainable energy. And on Tuesday (May 8), the people behind that hope were honored with the 2007 Roy Family Environmental Award in a day of events at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG).

Warming may not spark tree growth

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:21:22 -0400

A bright spot in the gloomy global warming picture has been scientists’ predictions that at least some carbon dioxide will be removed from the atmosphere by a burst of growth from tropical forests.

New research from the Arnold Arboretum, however, questions that prediction, finding that trees in two forests on opposite sides of the world have been growing dramatically slower, not faster, as temperatures have risen over the past 20 years.

Kenneth Feeley, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Tropical Forest Science, a partnership between the arboretum and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, examined tree growth data from forest plots in Panama and Malaysia.

Arctic hit by global warming first

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:28:30 -0400

Scientists from the eight nations bordering the Arctic recently enlisted representatives of the region's native peoples to help assess climate change there. What they found put a human face on a debate often involving distant projections and abstract numbers.

Less snow, less sea ice, freezing rain in winter, and the appearance of mosquitoes and robins, creatures so foreign the native residents have no word for them.

The experience of the Arctic peoples is a harbinger of things to come, according to James McCarthy, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography.

"It's the canary in the mine, a glimpse of what's going to happen at lower latitudes," McCarthy said.

Current U.S. renewable energy goal too low, says head of national lab

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:34:55 -0400

The head of the U.S. government's renewable energy lab said Monday (Feb. 5) that the federal government is doing "embarrassingly few things" to foster renewable energy, leaving leadership to the states at a time of opportunity to change the nation's energy future.

Dan Arvizu, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Colorado-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said a brief opening exists to dramatically increase the energy generated from renewable sources in the coming decades, but said more resources and a national policy promoting renewable energy will be needed to make it come true.

Orangutan research yields conservation dividends

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 11:06:40 -0400

Cheryl Knott remembers the first time she heard the sound of chainsaws shattering the quiet in Indonesia's Gunung Palung National Park.

It was the late 1990s and Knott, an associate professor of anthropology who studies orangutan biology in the park's rain forest, said researchers at the Cabang Panti Research Station listened as the ominous sound grew ever nearer.

"There were illegal loggers in the National Park, thousands of loggers," Knott said. "Every morning, you could hear the sound of chainsaws, and knew they were getting closer."

Brain pollution: Common chemicals are damaging young minds

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:43:25 -0400

Learning disabilities. Cerebral palsy. Mental retardation. A "silent pandemic" of these and other neurodevelopmental disorders is under way owing to industrial chemicals in the environment that impair brain development in fetuses and young children. That's the conclusion of a data analysis by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, who point to 201 chemicals - most of them common - known to inflict lasting neurological damage in humans. Information on possible neurotoxic effects exists, however, for only a small fraction of the thousands of chemicals in use around the world.

The findings, published online in The Lancet (Nov. 8, 2006) and soon to be in print, stem from a careful review of publicly available data by lead author Philippe Grandjean, an adjunct professor in HSPH's Department of Environmental Health, and Philip Landrigan, a professor of pediatrics and chair of Community and Preventive Medicine at Mount Sinai. Their research was funded by the Danish Medical Research Council and, in the United States, by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In their report, the researchers urge countries to adopt the "precautionary" approach for chemical testing and control recently embraced by the European Union (EU). The EU has put into place strong regulations that can later be relaxed if a potential hazard proves less dangerous than anticipated, instead of requiring a high level of proof of toxicity at the outset. By contrast, U.S. requirements for the testing of chemicals for brain toxicity are minimal, the authors say.

One out of six American children has a developmental disability, usually involving the nervous system, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A growing body of evidence links industrial chemicals to neurodevelopmental disorders; treatments for such disorders are difficult and costly to families and society. Lead, for example, became the first substance identified as having toxic effects on early brain development only about 100 years ago, even though its neurotoxicity in adults had been known for centuries.

Dust from Asia invades North America

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:28:24 -0400

On the dustiest days in the western United States, 40 percent of the grime blows in from Asia. And fine particles can travel all the way around the world from Africa's Sahara Desert. These unwanted visitors show up in a new model of dust imports developed by researchers from Harvard and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The findings have important implications for air pollution and climate change.

The Asian dust invasion is heaviest in the western states in spring. It moves on into the eastern U.S., but in much lower quantities. The traveling grime is mobilized by strong winds blowing over deserts or dry lakes and streambeds. "Most of the dust is from natural sources and falls out close to its source," notes Daniel Jacob, a professor of atmospheric chemistry and environmental engineering at Harvard. "But fine dust can be transported over long distances: from Asia to North America, and from North Africa to Florida, and all the way around the world to Canada and the U.S."

The grit is a health problem. A study done by other investigators, at the Harvard School of Public Health, concludes that an increase of particulate air pollution increases the risk of early death for people with diabetes, chronic obstructive lung disease, congestive heart failure, and inflammatory ailments like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Fine mineral dust is so damaging because it can penetrate much deeper into the lungs than larger particles.

Jacob worked with graduate student T. Duncan Fairlie and research associate Rokjin Park to build a computer model for estimating the impact of dust from Asia. They tested the model's accuracy with measurements from a NASA aircraft mission over the Pacific led by Jacob in 2001. The results were compared with dust records from Japan, various Pacific Islands, and air quality observing stations in the United States.

The model simulates the highs and lows of dust flow. Following the largest flow in spring, things quiet down in summer. Then a second, less active peak blows dust around in the fall. Winter is quiet.

North African dust imports peak during summer months in Florida and along the Gulf Coast. It adds haze in the Great Smoky Mountains, the Appalachians, and other East Coast locations.

Hormones in milk can be dangerous

50443248 — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 09:58:49 -0400

Ganmaa Davaasambuu is a physician (Mongolia), a Ph.D. in environmental health (Japan), a fellow (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), and a working scientist (Harvard School of Public Health).

On Monday (Dec. 4), she drew on all those roles during a lunchtime talk to most of her fellow fellows.

Ganmaa's topic was lunch-appropriate: the suspected role of cow's milk, cheese, and other dairy products in hormone-dependent cancers. (Those include cancers of the testes, prostate, and breast.)

The link between cancer and dietary hormones - estrogen in particular - has been a source of great concern among scientists, said Ganmaa, but it has not been widely studied or discussed.

Study shows benefits of eating fish greatly outweigh risks

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:46:48 -0400

Many studies have shown the nutritional benefits of eating fish (finfish or shellfish). Fish is high in protein and omega-3 fatty acids. But concerns have been raised in recent years about chemicals found in fish from environmental pollution, including mercury, PCBs and dioxins. That has led to confusion among the public - do the risks of eating fish outweigh the benefits?

Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) tackled that question by undertaking the single most comprehensive analysis to date of fish and health. In the first review to combine the evidence for major health effects of omega-3 fatty acids, major health risks of mercury, and major health risks of PCBs and dioxins in both adults and infants/ young children, the results show that the benefits of eating a modest amount of fish per week - about 3 ounces of farmed salmon or 6 ounces of mackerel - reduced the risk of death from coronary heart disease (CHD) by 36 percent.

Notably, by combining results of randomized clinical trials, the investigators also demonstrated that intake of fish or fish oil reduces total mortality - deaths from any causes - by 17 percent.

Included with the paper, which appears in the Oct. 18, 2006, issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (http:// jama.ama-assn.org/), is the first comprehensive summary of levels of omega-3 fatty acids, mercury, PCBs and dioxins in various species of fish and other foods, including chicken, beef, pork, butter and eggs.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

French fries, other vegetable oil products help fuel recycling effort

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 11:16:00 -0400

Harvard Recycling and Waste Management fueled its truck with used vegetable oil from the Annenberg Hall kitchen this past Tuesday (Sept. 19) - marking a first for a Facilities Maintenance Operations (FMO) vehicle. According to recycling and waste management supervisor for FMO Rob Gogan, the oil performed "identical to diesel."

Up until recently, Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) collected and shipped off the used oil from Harvard's deep fryers for use in cosmetics and animal feed. Now, Harvard's recycling truck will use about half of Annenberg's waste oil to fuel trips across campus picking up bulk recyclables such as computers, clothing, and scrap metal, and donations to Harvard Habitat for Humanity.

Study shows escalating climate change impacts

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:22:51 -0400

The Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, along with co-sponsors Swiss Re and the United Nations Development Programme, has released a study showing that climate change will significantly affect the health of humans and ecosystems and these impacts will have economic consequences.

The study, "Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological and Economic Dimensions" (CCF), surveys existing and future costs associated with climate change and the growing potential for abrupt, widespread impacts. The study reports that the insurance industry will be at the center of this issue, absorbing risk and helping society and business to adapt and reduce new risks.

"We found that impacts of climate change are likely to lead to ramifications that overlap in several areas including our health, our economy and the natural systems on which we depend," said Paul Epstein, the study's lead author and associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

"A comparable event would be the aftermath of flooding, contamination and homelessness witnessed after Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in August," he said. "Analysis of the potential ripple effects stemming from an unstable climate shows the need for more sustainable practices to safeguard and insure a healthy future."

The CCF study is comprised of three primary elements: trends, case studies and scenarios, which detail and analyze current climate-change-related consequences for human health, ecological systems and the global economy. Through two potential scenarios, the CCF report examines possible impacts of climate change that may impose severe strains on the financial sector.