Environmental Health Class Blog

I chose to research Asbestosis (white lung). The first case to be described in medical literature was in 1924 in England, when a textile worker died because of asbestos exposure. In the United States, Section 112 of the Clean Air Act of 1970 was the first to include asbestos as an air pollutant. The Toxic Substances Control Act has since forbidden many applications of the chemical. In 1988, the United States Environmental Protection Agency implemented regulations that required that companies report the asbestos used in their products. To this day, the Environmental Protection Agency has no general ban on the use of asbestos despite the overwhelming evidence of the harmful effects it has on human health. According to the Environmental Working Group Action Fund, over 10,000 people die each year from asbestos-caused diseases including asbestosis. 

I chose to read the Workplace Violence Prevention in Health Care program from the Cal/OSHA website. This standard went into effect in April 2017, and it requires certain health facilities to report and record a violent incident log, to implement a workplace violence prevention plan, to review this place with personnel, and to train staff appropriate to handle these situations. The summary of the program can be found here . This relates to my workplace because the program includes needle distribution sites as one of the health care facilities where this standard has gone into effect.

A chemical I looked up that we handle often in the workplace is Naloxone. This is a drug used to stop opioid overdoses. This is what I found: LD50 LC50 Mixture:LD50 (ORAL RAT) IS 1200 MG/KG(FREE BASE) Routes of Entry: Inhalation:NO Skin:NO Ingestion:NO Reports of Carcinogenicity: NTP:NO IARC:NO OSHA:NO Health Hazards Acute and Chronic: SINCE PRODUCT IS FORMULATED FOR HUMAN THERAPEUTIC USE AND CONTAINS < 1% ACTIVE INGREDIENT BY VOLUME, NORMAL HANDLING IS NOT EXPECTED TO CONSTITUTE A HAZARD. Explanation of Carcinogenicity: THIS COMPOUND CONTAINS NO INGREDIENTS AT CONCENTRATIONS OF 0.1% OR GREATER THAT ARE CARCINOGENS OR SUSPECT CARCINOGENS. Effects of Overexposure:CLINICAL EXPERIENCE WITH PRODUCT HAS FOUND THAT IN THE ABSENCE OF NARCOTICS, PRODUCT EXHIBITS ESSENTIALLY NO PHARMACOLOGIC ACTIVITY. Medical Conditions Aggravated by Exposure: NONE SPECIFIED BY MANUFACTURER. Overall this sounds like good news! There are no carcinogens at concentrations highe...

I currently volunteer at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation for the Syringe Access Services program. We do needle exchange sites at various sites throughout the city. Other than handing out sterile syringes and supplies, part of the job is to go on sweeps and pick up used syringes that users may leave on the floor. For this specific task, we use tongs to pick up the stray syringes and deposit them into a plastic container, a.k.a. a bio bucket. According to the hierarchy of controls, this is being addressed with administrative controls and personal protective equipment, the lowest levels in the hierarchy. This is because there is no way to remove the hazard, since the whole job is to remove the hazard from the public. Therefore the best way to deal with this is to train people on how to properly handle dirty needles, and giving them the necessary equipment to avoid exposure.

Lead poisoning has a way longer history than I initially thought. It's crazy to think that although child lead poisoning was first described in the United States in 1914, it was not banned as a component of house paints until 1978. That's 64 years of high exposure to most of the country's population and I find that unacceptable. As a comparison, Australia banned the use of lead in house paints in 1920, only a few years after it was identified as the cause for lead poisoning. Similarly, in the Nigeria article, the author describes a public health reaction to the high reported levels of lead in the population of a village near a gold mine. It seems that this was handled with the necessary urgency and it yielded positive results.

I think Green Chemistry is a great initiative to reduce chemical exposure and pollution. I like that it attempts at cutting the issue at the base: preventing companies from manufacturing and using the harmful chemicals in the first place, and thus not only reducing the exposure in people, but also reducing pollution at a molecular level. The twelve principles of Green Chemistry give a very comprehensive plan to reduce the creation and use of harmful and polluting chemicals. Since most manmade products are made with or composed of these harmful chemicals, I believe an initiative like this has the potential to have a great effect on the environment and on people. Let's hope its practice becomes more popular among manufacturers.

The Six Chemical Classes approach is very interesting. By putting tens of thousands of chemicals into six categories, it helps in identifying toxic chemicals that are used in products available to the public and also chemicals similar to them. In classifying the chemicals, the identification of harmful chemicals is facilitated and thus companies can eliminate them from future use. I'm glad to hear that there are companies that are already using this approach, and hope that this information is disseminated further so that its use becomes common and thus reduce exposure to harmful chemicals which are in most of our products!

I think a very important component of any policy regarding chemical regulation would be to prohibit the release and use of any chemical which hasn't been scientifically proven to be harmless to humans, animals, and the environment. A sort of guilty-until-proven-innocent type of policy. Another policy I think should be implemented is for companies producing personal care products to explicitly provide the information of all the chemicals used in their products and not hide any of them under the "fragrance" component. This way consumers will be more informed about what they are putting on their bodies.

I read Background Paper #6: Take Immediate Action to Protect Communities and Workers I completely agree with this initiative and hope that immediate action does take place. It seems like it should be common sense to not release or use any chemicals before being sure about their potential risks and harm that they may cause on the community. Unfortunately that's not the case in reality, since to this day many communities are suffering the consequences of policies not being in place to regulate the use of harmful compounds.

I chose to look the pesticides on rice, since I eat rice everyday at least twice.  Rice contains 9 pesticide residues! 4 of them are known carcinogens, 10 are suspected hormone disruptors, 2 are neurotoxins, and 3 are developmental or reproductive toxins.  Piperonyl Butoxide is found in 16.2% of the rice we eat (or I eat, for that matter). This chemical is a possible carcinogen, is a suspected hormone disruptor, and is a moderate honeybee toxin. MGK-264 is found in 8.7% of rice and is a possible carcinogen. Fortunately, the remaining chemicals are found in less than 2% of the rice out there, however, that does not eliminate the possibility that they may be present in the rice that I'm eating right now! It seems like policies limiting the use these chemicals in pesticides need to be stricter to avoid having these many chemicals in everything we eat.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a branch dedicated to radiation safety called Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH). This division has radiation safety programs that enforce requirements and encourage the safe use of radiation-emitting devices. These programs' goals are to keep professionals and the public informed about the risks of radiation exposure as well as ways to reduce such exposure and thus reduce the health risks associated with it. They do this by making sure that manufacturers make safe products, that users are educated about how to safely use devices that emit radiation, that users are educated about the risks of radiation exposure, and that regulators are able to obtain appropriate information about the use of such devices.

For this post, I chose the United States Forest Service. According to their website, they manage 154 national forests in the United States and Puerto Rico. Also, they have the biggest forestry research organization. On their website, they state their mission to be to "sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations". The United States Forest Service oversees the maintenance and safety of national forests and grasslands that provide 20% of the United States clean water supply, so their impact on environmental health is a great one, since a big chunk of the American population depends on it for clean and safe water.

The Contra Costa health department website actually has a whole section dedicated to environmental health. In it, there are links to programs dedicated to each of many different environmental health topics ranging from facility inspections to body art regulation programs. I clicked on the food section to see what information it had inside. This section contained information about the food inspection process that gets done in Contra Costa County. One interesting thing they have is this app that can be downloaded for free onto your phone or tablet and it provides the food inspection results from all the restaurants and other food establishments in the county. The link to download this app is this

Among the many vegetables and fruits that are in season in California, I saw apples, artichokes, and avocados. It makes sense that we should only eat what is in season in our environment. Biologically and physically, our bodies are not designed to travel great distances by our own means, so humans should only be able to consume what is around them at any given time. I had never heard of obesogens, but I am not surprised at the fact that there exist chemicals that influence our bodies' weight. I picked the obesogen Atrazine. This chemical is used as a pesticide in agriculture as a plant growth regulator and weed-control agent in corn, cane sugar, pineapples, macadamia nuts, among others. This means that if you've ever eaten any of these products grown in the US, you've most likely been exposed to this chemical. Atrazine is less widely used in Europe. Maybe we should look into banning or more strictly regulating chemicals like these.

Antibiotics Resistant 101 : It's a simple concept, when an antibiotic is used, a percentage of the bacteria present is killed. The surviving bacteria is obviously resistant to it. Since they are left alive, they are able to reproduce and produce more bacteria resistant to that antibiotic. Eventually, there will be less antibiotics that will be effective. These bacteria found in food, will make its way into our bodies and potentially cause great harm. Lifestock "Superbug": Already, evidence is being studied of a type of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Slowly, this "superbug" is making its way into people, as is the case in the Netherlands. The FDA should act fast in order to prevent this. Ideally, this would've been prevented earlier by regulating the use of antibiotics in agriculture and farming. Antimicrobial wipes and soaps making you sick: It's interesting to learn about a study that has evidence about this. It seems common sense that an ...

I found the bees video very interesting. I've known how bees play a role in helping us grow crops and a lot of the food we eat, but I was not aware of how big this role was. It's interesting learning about the techniques they've used to try to save them and farm them. I used to compost in the past at home, but don't do it as frequently anymore. The movie Dirt has inspired me to start doing it again, and make it a more consistent habit rather than just being eager to do so when seeing the green colored bins in public places!