Environmental Responsibility News: contamination

Showing posts with label contamination. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Weedkiller Dangerous to Humans

Story first appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

Syngenta AG agreed to pay $105 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in which water utilities in the U.S. Midwest claimed that one of the Swiss company's widely used weedkillers contaminated water supplies.

The proposed settlement, subject to federal court approval in Illinois, would resolve an eight-year-old suit over atrazine, a herbicide used by many corn growers.

Nearly 2,000 water utilities are eligible for the settlement, the lead plaintiff's attorney said Friday. In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, utilities sought to be reimbursed for the cost of filtering atrazine from their systems.

300 utilities with the highest atrazine levels in their water will recover 100% of their costs, stated Kansas City Class Actions Lawyers.

Syngenta, an agricultural chemical and seed company, admitted no liability linked to atrazine as part of the settlement and said it reached the pact to end the business uncertainty and expense of protracted legal proceedings. The settlement will reduce its 2012 earnings by about 50 cents per share, the company said.

Settling this case will remove the burden of litigation from Syngenta's partners, customers, retailers, distributors and others who have been inconvenienced by the lawsuit.

The lead plaintiff's attorney, a St. Louis attorney, said the agreement will help protect many Americans' health. Water companies eligible to collect payments under the settlement serve 52 million people.

Atrazine is banned by the European Union, and critics of the herbicide cite studies indicating it can disrupt sexual reproduction in frogs, as well as some studies indicating potential human reproductive problems.

Syngenta, holding to its position that the product is safe, said Friday that the product is safe and no one ever has or ever could be exposed to enough atrazine in water to affect their health.

Atrazine is used on more than half of all acres of corn grown in the U.S., according to Syngenta.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is now reviewing the chemical, and has convened several meetings of its independent scientific advisory panel to examine atrazine over the past two years.

The EPA recently said that while there are still areas of uncertainty with atrazine, the agency's regulation is "robust" and effectively prevents exposure that could cause reproductive problems in humans.

A senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that has been critical of the EPA's regulation of atrazine, said there is increasing evidence that atrazine poses a threat to Midwestern women who become pregnant early in the crop-growing season, when the application of atrazine and other chemicals spikes.

Syngenta and farm groups said atrazine is a crucial herbicide and prohibiting the use of atrazine would cost farmers millions of dollars each year. Syngenta added that there is no substitute for atrazine, a 50-year-old product used in more than 60 countries.

The EPA's scientific advisory panel will meet again to examine atrazine in June. The agency said findings of the panel's meetings will be considered as it considers re-registering atrazine starting in 2013.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit included municipalities across the Midwest, from Greenville, Ill., to Oswego, Kan., as well as several Midwestern subsidiaries of American Water Works Co., the nation's largest non-government water company by volume.

Attorneys are notifying the communities that have detected atrazine in their water systems, and utilities will have until late August to test their water and submit claims.

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Radioactive Tuna

Story first appeared in Time Magazine.

Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan’s crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.

The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that’s still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.

Previously, smaller fish and plankton were found with elevated levels of radiation in Japanese waters after a magnitude-9 earthquake in March 2011 triggered a tsunami that badly damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors.

But scientists did not expect the nuclear fallout to linger in huge fish that sail the world because such fish can metabolize and shed radioactive substances.

One of the largest and speediest fish, Pacific bluefin tuna can grow to 10 feet and weigh more than 1,000 pounds. They spawn off the Japan coast and swim east at breakneck speed to school in waters off California and the tip of Baja California, Mexico.

Five months after the Fukushima disaster team decided to test Pacific bluefin that were caught off the coast of San Diego. To their surprise, tissue samples from all 15 tuna captured contained levels of two radioactive substances — cesium-134 and cesium-137 — that were higher than in previous catches.

To rule out the possibility that the radiation was carried by ocean currents or deposited in the sea through the atmosphere, the team also analyzed yellowfin tuna, found in the eastern Pacific, and bluefin that migrated to Southern California before the nuclear crisis. They found no trace of cesium-134 and only background levels of cesium-137 left over from nuclear weapons testing in the 1960s.

The results are unequivocal. Fukushima was the source.

Bluefin tuna absorbed radioactive cesium from swimming in contaminated waters and feeding on contaminated prey such as krill and squid, the scientists said. As the predators made the journey east, they shed some of the radiation through metabolism and as they grew larger. Even so, they weren’t able to completely flush out all the contamination from their system.

Pacific bluefin tuna are prized in Japan where a thin slice of the tender red meat prepared as sushi can fetch $24 per piece at top Tokyo restaurants. Japanese consume 80 percent of the world’s Pacific and Atlantic bluefin tuna.

The real test of how radioactivity affects tuna populations comes this summer when researchers planned to repeat the study with a larger number of samples. Bluefin tuna that journeyed last year were exposed to radiation for about a month. The upcoming travelers have been swimming in radioactive waters for a longer period. How this will affect concentrations of contamination remains to be seen.

Now that scientists know that bluefin tuna can transport radiation, they also want to track the movements of other migratory species including sea turtles, sharks and seabirds.