Green Health and Wellness

The companies that BP has hired to oversee the disposal of oil-soaked debris on the Gulf Coast say that everything is going smoothly. According to those companies, cleanup workers are gathering used booms, contaminated sand, tar balls, oily garbage, and all other spill-related toxic material, packing them away in sealed containers, and shipping them to landfills.

Many of the fishermen who signed up to work for BP cleaning up the oil signed contracts that forbid them from talking to the press. Perhaps for that reason, reports of illnesses have been somewhat slow to emerge. Last week, the wives of some of the fishermen spoke out publicly about the symptoms their husbands were experiencing. This week, some fishermen are starting to come forward. In this WDSU TV interview, one of the fishermen reports feeling drugged, disoriented, tingling, fatigued, and also reporting shortness of breath and cough. These are symptoms that are consistent with what one might expect from exposure to hydrocarbons in oil.

Florida residents may soon come face to face with what may become one of the worst oil spills in history.

Yahoo News reported today that the crude oil gushing out of British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon well may soon be swept up in currents that will take it through the Florida Keys and up Florida's Atlantic Coast. In about 10 days, sunbathers and beach bums in Palm Beach will think twice before donning bikinis.

I continue today with Part 2 of my Q&A about oil spill health concerns with a look at different groups of people who are at a particular risk to health impacts associated with the oil spill.

In my next post, I’ll address health tips for people working on the clean-up. And you can find answers to basic background questions in my first post here.

I continue today with Part 2 of my Q&A about oil spill health concerns with a look at different groups of people who are at a particular risk to health impacts associated with the oil spill.

In my next post, I’ll address health tips for people working on the clean-up. And you can find answers to basic background questions in my first post here.

As we’re waiting for the full scale of environmental, economic and wildlife impacts from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to unfold, there’s a lot of speculation and unanswered questions going around about what this means for the health of people living and working in the region.

To help answer these questions, I’ve put together a three-part Q&A on what this means for human health.

Virginia Tech and WVU researchers have found a connection between the ecological health of Appalachian streams and cancer deaths in the region. (Hat tip to Ken Ward, Jr. at the Charleston Gazette.)

Published in the journal EcoHealth this month, the first-of-its kind study analyzed relationships between a measure of stream health based on the presence and distribution of small freshwater creatures, cancer mortality rates, and factors such as poverty and smoking.

Overview

Corn was once a simple food, chewed off the cob. Now, with corn reinvented and transformed, it takes a chemist to recognize all its offspring. Among these is high-fructose corn syrup (a gooey sweetener used in soft drinks, meats, cheeses, and dozens more foods) that appeases confectionery cravings. But recent studies have raised concerns about the syrup by drawing links to obesity and other health effects.

Come on, FDA.

Like I mentioned in my recent blog on soaps, we are really concerned about the use of triclosan and triclocarban in “antibacterial” soaps. We had been trying to get some answers from FDA for a year now, to no avail. Lots of stonewalling.

Just got an email from my husband - he’s heading home early from work because he’s got a cold. Which means that I’ve got to be vigilant to avoid catching his cold, so I’m going to be washing my hands all the time.

But what I’m not going to do is buy tubs of “antibacterial” soap.