Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Incense and candles release substantial quantities of pollutants that may harm health, a detailed new study of air quality in a Roman Catholic church suggests.
Even brief exposure to contaminated air during a religious service could be harmful to some people, says atmospheric scientist Stephan Weber of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Essen, Germany. A previous study in the Netherlands indicated that the pollutants in smoke from incense and candles may be more toxic than fine-particle pollution from sources such as vehicle engines. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan/
Numerous studies have examined the health effects of combustion by-products from major outdoor sources, such as automobiles and power plants. Researchers have also examined some sources of indoor pollution, including stoves. But there have been few investigations of the health consequences of candles and incense, even though they are usually lit indoors, sometimes in crowded spaces with limited ventilation. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan/
Weber conducted the new study in St. Engelbert Church in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. The church staff burns candles during each mass and incense on some holidays.
Weber installed two devices that continuously sampled air during a 13-day period that began on Christmas Eve of 2004. The equipment measured concentrations of particles up to 10 micrometers in diameter (PM10) and also those 1 µm or smaller (PM1), which endanger people's hearts, lungs, and arteries (SN: 8/2/03, p. 72: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030802/bob8.asp).
During the study, incense burners and candles were lit for services at midnight on Christmas Day, on the morning of the following day, and on New Year's Eve. During services on other days, only candles burned.
Concentrations of both types of particles almost doubled during services that used only candles. Simultaneous use of incense and candles raised the concentration of PM10 to about seven times that recorded between services, and PM1 reached about nine times its background abundance.
Particulate-matter concentrations quickly dropped after the candles were extinguished, but remained elevated for 24 hours after simultaneous use of candles and incense, Weber reports in an upcoming Environmental Science & Technology.
Even the relatively modest increase linked to candles concerns Theo de Kok of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. In past experiments, he and his collaborators found that PM10 from candles might be especially harmful because, in the body, unidentified constituents of the smoke readily generate free radicals that damage cells.
After candles had burned in a Dutch chapel for 9 hours, particles in the air there formed 10 times as many free radicals as airborne particulates collected along busy roadways do, de Kok's group reported 2 years ago.
"Even after relatively short exposure, you can expect acute health effects" in susceptible groups, such as shortness of breath in people with asthma, de Kok says. He adds that he knows of no study examining whether groups such as priests and frequent churchgoers have elevated rates of cancer or other pollution-associated health problems.
Incense isn't used exclusively for religious purposes. Some people who live in cramped quarters burn incense to mask household odors, de Kok notes. In fact, an incense-using student originally proposed the study that de Kok's group conducted. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
foul 33.fou.222 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Pharmaceuticals ranging from painkillers to synthetic estrogens can harm aquatic life when they enter waterways through human excreta, hospital and household waste, and agricultural runoff. Now, researchers have shown that there's another way for such drugs to get into the environment: A treatment plant in India that processes wastewater from pharmaceutical manufacturers discharges highly drug-contaminated water into a stream that feeds a major river.
The treated water contained astronomical amounts of antibiotics, along with high concentrations of analgesics, hypertension drugs, and antidepressants.
Production facilities "have not been considered an important source of drugs in [the] environment," says lead author Joakim Larsson of Göteborg University in Sweden. "This is not the case in India. We found levels of drugs many orders of magnitude higher than anywhere [recorded] on Earth before."
Larsson and his colleagues collected water samples from the effluent of a treatment plant that cleans the wastewater of 90 bulk-drug manufacturers in Hyderabad in southern India. The region produces most of India's pharmaceuticals, 60 percent of which are exported. The treated effluent pours into a stream that eventually joins the Godavari, India's second-largest river.
Of the 59 compounds for which researchers screened, 21 were present in concentrations greater than those typical of drugs in effluent from U.S. sewage-treatment plants, about 1 part per billion (ppb). Eleven of the drugs, including six antibiotics, had concentrations higher than 100 ppb. One of them, the common broad-spectrum antibiotic ciprofloxacin, registered at about 30,000 ppb. An antidepressant that belongs to a class of drugs known to disrupt hormone effects in fish (SN: 6/17/00, p. 388) was at a concentration of 800 ppb.
The results appear online and in an upcoming Journal of Hazardous Materials.
Beyond studies of gender effects in fish, little research exists on the possible health effects on people and other animals of pharmaceuticals in the water supply. However, Larsson points out that the amount of antibiotics that his team found was well above that known to affect a variety of organisms, including plants, bacteria, and blue-green algae (SN: 6/29/02, p. 406). "There is no doubt" that concentrations found in the study are toxic, he says.
Following common practice, the treatment plant in India mixes raw human sewage with contaminated waste to enlist the decomposing capacity of bacteria in the water cleanup. The enormous quantities of antibiotics in the wastewater might not only reduce the effectiveness of that process but also encourage the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, Larsson says. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
"We do find pharmaceuticals routinely in wastewater effluents," says Dana Kolpin, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Iowa City, Iowa. The concentrations recorded in the study are "certainly significant," he says. Sampling incoming waste and the sludge remaining after treatment, he says, would clarify what quantities of drugs are getting into the environment. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
Daniel Schlenk, an ecotoxicologist at the University of California, Riverside, notes that many of the drugs measured in the new study are water soluble and are more likely to be diluted and washed away than to accumulate in aquatic organisms. Even so, the extremely high concentrations recorded "could still be a problem," he says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
The treated water contained astronomical amounts of antibiotics, along with high concentrations of analgesics, hypertension drugs, and antidepressants.
Production facilities "have not been considered an important source of drugs in [the] environment," says lead author Joakim Larsson of Göteborg University in Sweden. "This is not the case in India. We found levels of drugs many orders of magnitude higher than anywhere [recorded] on Earth before."
Larsson and his colleagues collected water samples from the effluent of a treatment plant that cleans the wastewater of 90 bulk-drug manufacturers in Hyderabad in southern India. The region produces most of India's pharmaceuticals, 60 percent of which are exported. The treated effluent pours into a stream that eventually joins the Godavari, India's second-largest river.
Of the 59 compounds for which researchers screened, 21 were present in concentrations greater than those typical of drugs in effluent from U.S. sewage-treatment plants, about 1 part per billion (ppb). Eleven of the drugs, including six antibiotics, had concentrations higher than 100 ppb. One of them, the common broad-spectrum antibiotic ciprofloxacin, registered at about 30,000 ppb. An antidepressant that belongs to a class of drugs known to disrupt hormone effects in fish (SN: 6/17/00, p. 388) was at a concentration of 800 ppb.
The results appear online and in an upcoming Journal of Hazardous Materials.
Beyond studies of gender effects in fish, little research exists on the possible health effects on people and other animals of pharmaceuticals in the water supply. However, Larsson points out that the amount of antibiotics that his team found was well above that known to affect a variety of organisms, including plants, bacteria, and blue-green algae (SN: 6/29/02, p. 406). "There is no doubt" that concentrations found in the study are toxic, he says.
Following common practice, the treatment plant in India mixes raw human sewage with contaminated waste to enlist the decomposing capacity of bacteria in the water cleanup. The enormous quantities of antibiotics in the wastewater might not only reduce the effectiveness of that process but also encourage the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, Larsson says. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
"We do find pharmaceuticals routinely in wastewater effluents," says Dana Kolpin, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Iowa City, Iowa. The concentrations recorded in the study are "certainly significant," he says. Sampling incoming waste and the sludge remaining after treatment, he says, would clarify what quantities of drugs are getting into the environment. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
Daniel Schlenk, an ecotoxicologist at the University of California, Riverside, notes that many of the drugs measured in the new study are water soluble and are more likely to be diluted and washed away than to accumulate in aquatic organisms. Even so, the extremely high concentrations recorded "could still be a problem," he says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Monday, November 17, 2008
body
It sounds like a lost episode of The Twilight Zone. A man enters a laboratory, dons a special headset and shakes hands with a woman sitting across from him. In a matter of seconds, he feels like he’s inside the woman’s skin, reaching out and grasping his own hand. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
Strange as it sounds, neuroscientists have induced this phenomenon in a series of volunteers. People can experience the illusion that either a mannequin or another person’s body is their own body, says Valeria Petkova of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. She and Karolinska colleague Henrik Ehrsson call this reaction the “body-swap illusion.” LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
“Our subjects experienced this illusion as being exciting and strange, and often said that they wanted to come back and try it again,” says Petkova, who reported the findings November 17 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
Illusory body-swapping could provide a new tool for studying the nature of self-identity and psychiatric disorders that involve distortions of body image, she suggests. This phenomenon might also be tapped to enhance user control over virtual reality applications and to prompt a person’s sense of really being part of a virtual world.
Volunteers experienced the body-swap illusion by receiving simultaneous visual and motor input from another’s body. In one experiment, each participant stood across from a male mannequin, and in another experiment volunteers faced a female experimenter. A headset covering participants’ eyes displayed a three-dimensional view of the other’s visual perspective, transmitted from a small video camera positioned on the mannequin’s or the woman’s head. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
In the mannequin situation, an experimenter simultaneously touched the participant’s belly and the mannequin’s belly with separate probes. So the volunteer felt a poking in the abdomen but saw the poking happen as if he or she were the mannequin. In the real-person situation, participant and experimenter shook hands. Thus, while volunteers felt the sensation of hand shaking, it appeared to them that they were shaking their own hand. After 10 to 12 seconds of abdominal touch or hand-shaking, male and female participants spontaneously had the experience of looking out from the body of the male mannequin or the female experimenter. They literally felt that they were in the mannequin’s body getting poked or had embodied the female experimenter and were shaking their own hands.
“In the body-swap illusion, we can see that multisensory information powerfully affects the brain,” says neuroscientist Patrick Haggard of University College London, who was not part of the research team.
Petkova and Ehrsson first confirmed that 16 male and 16 female volunteers experienced an illusory body-swap with a mannequin. After undergoing the procedure, participants indicated on a questionnaire that they had experienced the mannequin’s body as their own. They didn’t feel that they had become plastic like a mannequin, Petkova notes. Volunteers reported having had an expectation that, if they moved, the mannequin’s body would move accordingly.
In a subsequent experiment, the researchers found that 10 volunteers experiencing a body-swap with a mannequin displayed elevated electrical responses in the skin on their fingertips — a physiological indication of heightened emotion — when a knife was passed just over the mannequin’s arm. No such response occurred when a knife was passed just over volunteers’ arms during the illusion. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
In a third experiment, 12 volunteers experiencing a body-swap with a female experimenter exhibited comparable physiological signs of emotional arousal when a knife was passed just over the experimenter’s arm, but not just over their own arms.
Gender had no affect on the illusion. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG Men had no difficulty experiencing a body-swap with a female experimenter, Petkova notes. Women readily experienced the illusion of being in a male mannequin’s body.
“This illusion is so strong that one can face one’s physical body and shake hands with oneself while still experiencing owning another person’s body,” Petkova says.
When a researcher stroked a brush along a volunteer’s own arm, the body-swap illusion vanished. In this way, each participant’s personal sense of touch became disengaged from the other individual’s visual perspective, Petkova proposes.
The new findings build on Ehrsson’s earlier research documenting a “rubber-hand illusion.” To induce that effect, a rubber hand is plausibly positioned on a table to extend from a volunteer’s outstretched arm, while the person’s actual hand is hidden. As an experimenter strokes the rubber hand with a brush, the volunteer eventually experiences the fake hand as his or her own and feels the sensation of being stroked.
Strange as it sounds, neuroscientists have induced this phenomenon in a series of volunteers. People can experience the illusion that either a mannequin or another person’s body is their own body, says Valeria Petkova of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. She and Karolinska colleague Henrik Ehrsson call this reaction the “body-swap illusion.” LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
“Our subjects experienced this illusion as being exciting and strange, and often said that they wanted to come back and try it again,” says Petkova, who reported the findings November 17 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
Illusory body-swapping could provide a new tool for studying the nature of self-identity and psychiatric disorders that involve distortions of body image, she suggests. This phenomenon might also be tapped to enhance user control over virtual reality applications and to prompt a person’s sense of really being part of a virtual world.
Volunteers experienced the body-swap illusion by receiving simultaneous visual and motor input from another’s body. In one experiment, each participant stood across from a male mannequin, and in another experiment volunteers faced a female experimenter. A headset covering participants’ eyes displayed a three-dimensional view of the other’s visual perspective, transmitted from a small video camera positioned on the mannequin’s or the woman’s head. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
In the mannequin situation, an experimenter simultaneously touched the participant’s belly and the mannequin’s belly with separate probes. So the volunteer felt a poking in the abdomen but saw the poking happen as if he or she were the mannequin. In the real-person situation, participant and experimenter shook hands. Thus, while volunteers felt the sensation of hand shaking, it appeared to them that they were shaking their own hand. After 10 to 12 seconds of abdominal touch or hand-shaking, male and female participants spontaneously had the experience of looking out from the body of the male mannequin or the female experimenter. They literally felt that they were in the mannequin’s body getting poked or had embodied the female experimenter and were shaking their own hands.
“In the body-swap illusion, we can see that multisensory information powerfully affects the brain,” says neuroscientist Patrick Haggard of University College London, who was not part of the research team.
Petkova and Ehrsson first confirmed that 16 male and 16 female volunteers experienced an illusory body-swap with a mannequin. After undergoing the procedure, participants indicated on a questionnaire that they had experienced the mannequin’s body as their own. They didn’t feel that they had become plastic like a mannequin, Petkova notes. Volunteers reported having had an expectation that, if they moved, the mannequin’s body would move accordingly.
In a subsequent experiment, the researchers found that 10 volunteers experiencing a body-swap with a mannequin displayed elevated electrical responses in the skin on their fingertips — a physiological indication of heightened emotion — when a knife was passed just over the mannequin’s arm. No such response occurred when a knife was passed just over volunteers’ arms during the illusion. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
In a third experiment, 12 volunteers experiencing a body-swap with a female experimenter exhibited comparable physiological signs of emotional arousal when a knife was passed just over the experimenter’s arm, but not just over their own arms.
Gender had no affect on the illusion. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG Men had no difficulty experiencing a body-swap with a female experimenter, Petkova notes. Women readily experienced the illusion of being in a male mannequin’s body.
“This illusion is so strong that one can face one’s physical body and shake hands with oneself while still experiencing owning another person’s body,” Petkova says.
When a researcher stroked a brush along a volunteer’s own arm, the body-swap illusion vanished. In this way, each participant’s personal sense of touch became disengaged from the other individual’s visual perspective, Petkova proposes.
The new findings build on Ehrsson’s earlier research documenting a “rubber-hand illusion.” To induce that effect, a rubber hand is plausibly positioned on a table to extend from a volunteer’s outstretched arm, while the person’s actual hand is hidden. As an experimenter strokes the rubber hand with a brush, the volunteer eventually experiences the fake hand as his or her own and feels the sensation of being stroked.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
perchlorate 993.per.2 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Perchlorate is not yet a household word in many parts of the country. But it may becomes one if Sen. Barbara Boxer has her way.
Perchlorate – an ingredient in solid rocket fuel, fireworks, flares and explosives – taints drinking-water supplies around the nation, not to mention plenty of foods. In animal tests, the pollutant perturbs thyroid-hormone signaling. If such hormonal messages are muted or garbled in the womb or shortly after birth, an animal may suffer developmental – even cognitive – retardation. So one might think that
They haven’t.
Why they haven’t remains a mystery to some of the greater minds in toxicology – and to some of our more outspoken elected leaders. Yesterday, one of those lawmakers, Boxer (D-Calif.), grilled the Environmental Protection Agency’s top water official about why perchlorate limits for water still don’t exist.
And, it turns out, she didn’t like Benjamin H. Grumbles’ answers. Not one little bit.
Boxer chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. In her opening statement she noted that of some nearly 400 sites around the country tainted with perchlorate, 106 are in her state.
Although EPA had at one point required water utilities to monitor perchlorate, it revoked the rule 17 months ago. Five months afterward, Boxer notes, EPA argued it lacked sufficient data to know whether regulations are warranted.
“Talk about speaking out of both sides of your mouth,” she said at the hearing. “This is a perfect case.” http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/
Speaking on behalf of EPA, Grumbles said the agency had been studying the science of perchlorate’s potential toxicity for more than a decade. Based on that, it had issued a preliminary remediation goal – or PRG – for perchlorate. It recommended that tainted waters be cleaned up to where they no longer contained more than 24.5 parts per billion of the pollutant. It wasn’t, however, a legally binding rule.
Some states, fed up with waiting for the feds to set legal limits, issued their own.
“We know that perchlorate can have an adverse effect – and we’re concerned about that,” Grumbles said. Moreover, he reported, data collected before EPA let the utility-monitoring program end, showed that 2 percent of some 34,000 surveyed drinking-water systems are tainted with perchlorate concentrations above 4 ppb. Where the pollution showed up, its concentrations averaged about 10 ppb, he said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported finding perchlorate residues in urine from a broad and representative cross-section of the
The problem, Grumbles responded, was that food can also be a major source. Indeed, he noted, Food and Drug Administration scientists have found traces of perchlorate lacing 74 percent of the 285 foods that they surveyed. Those data appear in a January 2008 paper (still in press at the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology). The sampled foods had been chosen to reflect the
Grumbles argued that EPA didn’t want to set water limits for perchlorate until it could figure out if water, rather than foods, contributed substantially to how much of the toxic chemical gets into people.
For what it’s worth, the Environmental Working Group is an activist group that identifies and works to reduce what it believes to be unnecessary public exposures to harmful substances, especially in food. EWG’s scientists, who reviewed the new FDA paper, concluded that the survey’s “findings are especially concerning because they show that children have high baseline exposures to perchlorate from commonly consumed foods and beverages. Additional exposures from other sources like contaminated tap water could easily result in cumulative daily exposures that exceed the EPA reference dose” – a guideline for presumably safe intake.
Grumbles vowed that EPA takes children's perchlorate exposures seriously and would decide by year end whether to set legally binding limits for perchlorate in water. He added in a conciliatory tone to Boxer, “I understand your frustration at how long the [deliberative] process is taking.”
Boxer wasn’t mollified. Instead, she asked the EPA official: “Is it possible that EPA could decide not to regulate perchlorate? Is that an option?”
“That is a distinct possibility,” he conceded.
To which Boxer pointed out, acknowledging more than a little “anger,” that EPA’s own Children’s Health Advisory Committee had told Grumbles’ boss two years ago that “the new PRG is not supported by the underlying science and can result in exposures that pose neurodevelopmental risks in early life.”
In fact, she argued, that panel “told you that what you were doing was dangerous.” How, she asked, can you now expect us to believe you don’t know if possible exposures are risky enough to warrant limiting them via regulations?
The committee chairman’s performance and impassioned rhetoric made for good drama. But Grumbles remained unruffled, despite Boxer’s admitted “hostile questioning.”
Anticipating this result, the California senator announced she was introducing a bill – the Perchlorate Monitoring and Right to Know Act – that would require that EPA reinstate not only mandatory monitoring for the pollutant in municipal water supplies but also a public reporting of those findings.
Of course, bills are a dime a dozen. Many are worth considerably less than that. Few ever pass into law, and when they do, they often bear only the slightest resemblance to what was initially proposed. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/
But bills do offer a measure of how seriously legislators consider particular issues. And perchlorate concerns have been building, not going away, as the development of new state regulations attest.
But for now, we must sit back and wait to see if EPA chooses to act on perchlorate or just contents itself with letting the states step in to create their own hodgepodge of potentially conflicting standards for the pollutant.
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