toxins
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Mom-powered politics
Editor’s note: Anna wrote this post (and a few more) before she left on maternity leave. She gave birth to a healthy baby girl — Audrey — in December. All moms have a stake in public policies that affect the health and safety of their families. But as I’ve found throughout this series, pop-culture resources […]
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Chemical Soup for the Soul
Editor’s Note: Anna finished this post (and a few more) before she went on maternity leave. She gave birth to a healthy girl, Audrey, on December 13. My husband Gus and I have been lucky. I’m 36—and therefore considered an “elderly primigravida” on my charts at my doctor’s office (that’s “pregnant old-timer and first-timer” in […]
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Broken promises follow Tennessee coal ash disaster
It was one year ago today that a 60-foot-tall dam broke at a holding pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston power plant in Roane County, Tenn., dumping more than a billion gallons of toxic coal ash onto a nearby community and into the Clinch and Emory rivers. The largest industrial waste spill in U.S. […]
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Sugar and Spice and…Lead and Mercury
Sandra Steingraber is my hero. Her book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, chronicles her own pregnancy from both a scientific and personal perspective. It’s beautifully and lovingly written—yet for a pregnant woman it’s also a tough read. Trained as a biologist, Steingraber meticulously documents the toxic hazards we live with every day, and […]
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New data paints a more toxic picture of TVA coal ash spill
The disastrous coal ash spill that occurred a year ago at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston power plant in eastern Tennessee dumped a whopping 2.66 million pounds of 10 toxic pollutants into the nearby Emory and Clinch rivers — more than all the surface-water discharges from all U.S. power plants in 2007. That’s one of […]
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A quarter-century later, lessons from the world’s deadliest agrichemical disaster
Today is the 25th anniversary of the Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. The number of people affected, injured, and killed has been the subject of debate. But it seems clear that a half a million were exposed to some degree to MIC and other chemicals released and approximately […]
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Umbilical Cords Strike an Off Note
More than 200 toxic chemicals were found in the blood of umbilical cords sampled from racial and ethnic minority babies in a report coming out Wednesday. The analysis discovered for the first time in cord blood bisphenol A (or BPA), a perfluorocarbon used in non-stick and weather-proofing products, as well as certain forms of PCBs […]
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BPA Babies and Cash Registers
We’ve known for a long time that bisphenol-A (BPA) is bad for us. Study after study shows the ill-effects of this widely-used industrial chemical on our bodies–and in particular, on developing babies’ bodies. The list is pretty sobering: BPA’s been linked to breast cancer in women, brain damage in children, obesity, heart disease, diabetes… Two […]
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Water utilities lack proper filters for weed-killer
This story was written by Danielle Ivory. Results from a federal drinking water monitoring program show that many public water companies are ineffective at removing a widely used weed-killer from their water supplies. As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency has failed to notify the public about data […]
