BY LAURIE VALERIANO AND SARAH DOLL, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS — 05/28/20 03:30 PM EDT

Infectious disease experts, scientists, and doctors have warned about the potential for a pandemic for years. Microsoft founder Bill Gates did a TED Talk on it and U.S. intelligence agencies knew it was a real threat. There was even a major USAID program, recently de-funded, called Predict, designed to head off pandemics.

And now, these scientific warnings have come true.

The once invisible threat of a virus spreading throughout our country is painfully visible today. Given a choice, wouldn’t we all choose to prevent the spread of this horrible virus in the first place?

It’s too late to stop COVID-19 from entering our lives. But there is another invisible threat to our health and well-being we can address.

Similar to those who cautioned us about a disease like COVID-19, leading public health experts, scientists, and doctors today warn us that exposure to toxic chemicals is contributing to rates of chronic illnesses.

Many of these chemicals are found in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the products in our homes. And many of these illnesses worsen the impacts of COVID-19.

Experts have been calling attention to these invisible threats for decades. Meanwhile, companies are still putting harmful chemicals into the products they make.

More than 20 years ago, Dr. Pete Myers and Dr. Theo Colburn co-authored Our Stolen Future, explaining the science behind how synthetic chemicals interfere with hormonal action in people. Interfering with your hormones can cause a long list of health problems, including impairing your resistance to disease.

Dr. Linda Birnbaum, over her decades-long career, including as director of the National Institutes for Environmental Health, has been at the forefront of building the overwhelming scientific case revealing the toxic chemical crisis and its harmful impacts on public health. Recently, she pointed out that endocrine-disrupting chemicals “increase the diseases that cause the underlying conditions that result in susceptibility to COVID-19.”

Your family, friends, and neighbors are more vulnerable to the novel coronavirus if their defenses have been compromised by chronic illnesses like cancer, diabetes, or asthma. And scientific experts have found these and other health problems are all linked to exposure to toxic chemicals.

For example, chemicals called PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are linked to many chronic illnesses as well as suppression of the immune system. And yet they are still commonly used for stain resistance and water repellency in millions of consumer products, such as carpets, food packaging, and furniture. A Harvard study found millions of people in the U.S. are drinking unsafe levels of PFAS in their water.

Our existing federal regulatory systems are failing us by allowing hazardous chemicals to contaminate people and the planet. Current laws allow the most dangerous chemicals to be used in everyday consumer products—from cosmetics and clothing to electronics and home furnishings.

If we’ve learned anything from our current crisis, it’s that we must heed the advice of health and medical experts. We must aggressively invest in prevention, safer alternatives, and our public health infrastructure. We need to build healthier and more resilient communities as a key step dramatically reducing people’s exposure to harmful chemicals must be a public health priority.

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© Malaysiakini (English)

CORONAVIRUS | Malaysian researchers are studying if traces of the Covid-19 virus found in the sewerage system may be used to detect infections in communities, particularly those who do not show any symptoms (asymptomatic cases).

Virologist Associate Prof Dr Nazlina Ibrahim told Bernamathe most vital aspect of the study would be to check the viral content of the sewage in any particular area in order to identify communities with Covid-19 positive cases but have yet to be screened.

“Sewage samples from the sewerage system in potential high-risk areas can be taken to monitor the presence of Covid-19 virus. The findings will help the Ministry of Health to identify infected locations and carry out health screenings for the residents there,” said Nazlina, who is a senior lecturer at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s Faculty of Science and Technology.

On March 28, Environment and Water Minister Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man had said that his ministry would conduct a comprehensive study to find out if the Covid-19 virus – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 or Sars-CoV-2 – can live and reproduce in the public sewerage system.

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Secret Environment Agency report finds sewage sludge destined for English fields contaminated with microplastics, weedkiller, and “persistent organic pollutants”

by Crispin Dowler and Zach Boren

A secret report obtained by Unearthed has revealed serious weaknesses in the Environment Agency’s controls on an industry that spreads millions of tonnes of sewage sludge on farmland each year.

Investigators commissioned by the agency found sewage waste destined for English crops contaminated with dangerous “persistent organic pollutants” like dioxins, fuerans, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at “levels that may present a risk to human health”.

They reported evidence that these sludges, which are routinely spread as fertiliser on hundreds of farms, were widely contaminated with microplastics that could ultimately leave soil “unsuitable for agriculture”.

They found various cases of sludge treated with lime in an attempt to kill harmful bugs, but which still tested positive for salmonella or “high concentrations of e-coli”. These bacteria can cause serious or even fatal infections.

And they warned that the task of regulating this “landspreading” industry was “becoming more difficult”, because the Environment Agency (EA) staff responsible were being hit with “increased time pressures and reduced budgets”.

The report – which proposed a suite of reforms to landspreading regulation – was handed to the agency in late 2017. But neither the environmental regulator nor the government has so far made changes in response, and the findings have remained secret until now.

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Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Products: From Wastewater Treatment into Agro-Food Systems
Qiuguo Fu, Tomer Malchi, Laura J. Carter, Hui Li, Jay Gan, and Benny Chefetz
Environmental Science & Technology 2019 53 (24), 14083-14090
DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.9b06206

ABSTRACT

Irrigation with treated wastewater (TWW) and application of biosolids introduce numerous pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) into agro-food systems. While the use of TWW and biosolids has many societal benefits, introduction of PPCPs in production agriculture poses potential food safety and human health risks. A comprehensive risk assessment and management scheme of PPCPs in agro-food systems is limited by multiple factors, not least the sheer number of investigated compounds and their diverse structures. Here we follow the fate of PPCPs in the water-soil-produce continuum by considering processes and variables that influence PPCP transfer and accumulation. By analyzing the steps in the soil-plant-human diet nexus, we propose a tiered framework as a path forward to prioritize PPCPs that could have a high potential for plant accumulation and thus pose greatest risk. This article examines research progress to date and current research challenges, highlighting the potential value of leveraging existing knowledge from decades of research on other chemicals such as pesticides. A process-driven scheme is outlined to derive a short list that may be used to refocus our future research efforts on PPCPs and other analogous emerging contaminants in agro-food systems.

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Spreading biosolids—which include human and industrial waste—on farmland helps cut down on synthetic fertilizer. But it may also pollute water supplies and expose people to harmful chemicals.

By Tom Perkins
FARMING, Food Safety, HEALTH
Posted on: January 30, 2020

Each day, about 20 million gallons of sewage flows into the city of Tacoma’s wastewater treatment plants.

The water is separated, treated, and discharged into the Puget Sound, which leaves behind sludge—a mix of human excrement, industrial waste, and everything else that ends up in Tacoma’s sewers. The plants further treat the product to reduce pathogens, bacteria, heavy metals, and odors, and convert it into a fertilizer called biosolids, which is high in phosphorus, nitrogen, and other nutrients that help plants grow.

Tacoma produces about 5,000 dry tons of biosolids annually and sells it in bags under the brand name TAGRO to about 9,000 customers at local hardware stores, as well as to urban gardeners and farmers in the Tacoma region.

“The focus here has been on recycling and the production of beneficial products—clean water, energy, and soil amendment fertilizer … including biosolids,” said Dan Thompson, division manager of business operations for TAGRO.
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Over 50 percent of the approximately 130 million wet tons of sludge produced nationally each year is treated and applied to cropland, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notes is less than 1 percent of U.S. farmland. As a fertilizer, it’s popular with some farmers because most wastewater treatment plants give it away for free or sell it at prices that are below than the cost of synthetic fertilizers.

The use of biosolids in agriculture is increasingly coming under fire as a potential health and environmental threat, however. While some see it as an effective way to close the loop on recycling waste, some scientists, health professionals, and advocates say using biosolids in agriculture is poisoning the nation’s farmland and compounding a number of health risks. Advocates argue that without stronger, comprehensive regulations that cover what types of waste can be used in biosolids—and what waste industries are allowed to send into public sewer systems—the nation is taking unknown risks with its food and water supplies, not to mention the health of farmers and people living in farm communities.

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"We are fighting for the lives and safety of our families and workers. Our lives are more valuable than the bottom line of a few chemical barons."
by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams staff writer

A chemical plant of TPC Group is shrouded by smoke as the fire continues in Port Neches, Texas on Nov. 27, 2019. (Photo: Steven Song/Xinhua via Getty Images)

A coalition of more than a dozen environmental groups on Thursday sued the Trump administration for rolling back chemical disaster prevention regulations, a move they say has endangered millions of lives.

"By killing these critical protections, millions of people living near chemical facilities in the United States are put in harm's way," said the coalition represented by environmental advocacy organization Earthjustice. "We are fighting for the lives and safety of our families and workers. Our lives are more valuable than the bottom line of a few chemical barons."

The rollback of the Obama-era Chemical Disaster Rule was finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last month despite urgent warnings that the decision would put the health and safety of people who live near chemical plants at risk. The EPA's new rule, which the environmental coalition said is illegal, took effect Thursday morning.

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