The United Nations International Disarmament Documents Collections are publications, documents, and reports is one of the most complete collections on international treaties, acts, and global assessment research reports ever assembled.
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Excerpt: Seattle, Washington, is an area perhaps best known for high-tech names like Microsoft, Immunex, and Amazon.com. However, much of Washington is rural. The state is a leading producer of tree fruit, berry, and flower crops, which require extensive hand labor?picking and pruning? for cultivation and harvest. To meet this demand, Washingtons population of seasonal and full-time farm workers now numbers about 90,000, according to a report titled Agricultural Work For...
Excerpt: It is nearly impossible to totally avoid contact with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins, ubiquitous pollutants that are produced by the electrical, plastics, pesticide, paper, and other industries. These fat-soluble toxicants accumulate in the food chain, especially in meat, fish, and dairy products. Mothers pass PCBs and dioxins to their children through the umbilical cord and breast milk.
Excerpt: Environmental medicine is at a crossroad. We increasingly observe the profound impact of molecular biology on defining the combined influence of environmental factors and genetic susceptibility in diseases, but there is a decreasing number of physicians and scientists who pursue these leads and translate them in the clinical setting. Economic realities often experienced by academic physicians are disincentives for them to pursue clinical research. Our response t...
Excerpt: In her paper, van Birgelen (1) argued that hexachlorobenzene (HCB) should be classified as a dioxin-like compound, with a toxic equivalency factor (TEF) value of 0.0001. By doing this, HCB could add 10?60% to the total toxic equivalents (TEQs) in human milk samples in most countries. To include a compound in the TEF concept, the following criteria are used: a) the compound must show a structural relationship to polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins or polychlorinate...
Excerpt: An ecosystem is traditionally defined as a community of organisms functioning as an ecological unit in nature. Ecologists often study sites as far away from human influence as possible to get closer to nature. Likewise, when urban educators teach ecology, they often take their students outside the cities to study natures ecosystems. However, leaving the city limits may no longer be necessary as both ecologists and urban educators begin to look at cities as a par...
Excerpt: The use of chlorination to purify water supplies is considered one of the most important public health advances of the twentieth century. Following the 1908 Introduction: of widespread water chlorination, once-common diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever were practically eliminated. However, the chlorination cureall proved to have a caveat: disinfection byproducts (DBPs), which result from the reaction between the chlorine added during chlorinat...
Excerpt: At the dawning of a new millennium, at least onefifth of all people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water, according to a 1999 United Nations (UN) comprehensive assessment of world water resources, and more than one-half of all people lack access to adequate sanitation. These problems will almost certainly get much worse as the earths population grows from todays 6 billion to an expected 7.3?8.3 billion people by 2025, according to the UN Population Division.
Excerpt: If anything surpasses the sensory experience of a lagoon full of hog waste, its a breached lagoon with its contents floating downstream. Eastern North Carolina suffered episodes of this type of damage in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd, the ?500-year event? that tore through the state and devastated its livestock industry last September. Whether state livestock regulations will be revised to accommodate future flood conditions?particularly regarding facility si...
Excerpt: Half a century of rapid growth has transformed Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from a walled city of 30,000 people into one of the largest and busiest metropolitan areas in the Middle East. Stretching for 50 miles along the Red Sea, it is a major port for Saudi oil and for Muslim pilgrims journeying to Makkah and Madinah. As such, the city boasts a thriving economy, and its population has swelled to over 1.5 million.
Excerpt: Previous studies have shown that children?s blood lead concentrations tend to increase during hot summer months. In this issue, Lih-Ming Yiin and colleagues from the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at Rutgers University and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, New Jersey, explore whether some of this elevation can be explained by seasonal increases in the amount of lead in residential house dust [EHP 108:177?182]. Yiin a...
Excerpt: The NIEHS has emerged with a significant leadership role in the health disparities arena and has undertaken a number of activities to help eliminate health disparities influenced by the social and physical milieux.
Excerpt: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) held the first meeting on environmental ethics sponsored by the Scientific Advisory Panel and Board on 10?11 December 1998 in Arlington, Virginia (1). The report from the meeting will more completely inform scientists and the community of current issues. This editorial should serve as an initial brief of this meeting [which was held on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the Unite...
Excerpt: The September 1998 issue of EHP contained two articles about the neurotoxicity of carbon disulfide. The ?NIEHS News? article (1) reported on a collaborative study that involved scientists from the NIEHS (Research Triangle Park, NC), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Research Triangle Park, NC), the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC), Duke University (Durham, NC), and Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN). In this study, the neurotoxicity of c...
Excerpt: Increasing evidence suggests that environmental chemicals that interact with the endocrine system harm the health of humans and animals. More recent studies suggest further that these chemicals act synergistically, meaning that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects. While few scientists doubt that endocrine disruptors can cause significant harm to humans and wildlife, there is a great deal of controversy over whether synergism...
Excerpt: Toxicity testing is absolutely necessary for assessing the safety of substances in food, air, and water, in the workplace and at home. Although there are several tried-and-true toxicity assays, the search is always on for methods that can even better predict toxic effects. As scientific understanding of the effects of environmental toxicants grows, new tests are needed to evaluate previously unexamined end points and to take advantage of advances in biotechnolog...
Excerpt: Since the 1970s, studies have documented that during the warm months Soxygen levels in the Mississippi plume region of the Gulf of Mexico fall from healthy concentrations to 2-3 milligrams per liter. The result is hypoxia a low-oxygen condition that can be streesul or fatal to marine life.
Excerpt: When someone cultivates pathogenic bacteria, fungi, viruses, or certain chemical compounds specifically to kill people or transmit disease, thats biological warfare. A lesserknown form of biological warfare targets major food crops instead of people, and carries the potential to wreak environmental health havoc. After health care, agriculture has been the largest market to benefit from genomic research and biotechnology. But while the ability to diagnose plant d...
Excerpt: Ma n u r e, and what to do with it, has been much on the mind of James Schepers, a soil scientist and agronomist at the U.S. Department of Agricultures (USDA) Agricultural Research Service in Lincoln, Nebraska. ?The problem is where to put it,? he says. ?Its not something thats given a lot of thought and so it often ends up poorly spread on fields or in large piles that leach into the groundwater.?
Excerpt: North Carolinas swine industry is among the largest in the nation, second only to that of Iowa. By far, most of the hogs produced in North Carolina are raised in large industrial facilities with thousands of animals each. These operations have prompted concerns about noxious odors and potentially hazardous air emissions. Steve Wing, an associate professor of epidemiology in the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Suzan...
Excerpt: Millions of Americans have jobs that bring them into regular contact with hazardous materials, including dangerous by-products generated by the nations industries and toxic waste removed from Superfund sites and other highly polluted areas. When hazardous materials are transported off site for treatment, storage, or disposal, members of the general public may also be put at risk.