Just gross

Photographs of the 'shroom infestation in the yard. Two close-ups for ID. One wider-angle to see extent of problem. Fungi gross me out. Ever since I saw a photo of an aspergillis infection on someone's leg ... eww... Of course, it was one of those high-quality, high-resolution medical photographs. I was very glad the lecture was just before lunch. I spent half an hour last week trying not to puke simply from the psychological effort of picking them. The top photograph is the yard after being left for 3 days without eradication. This is posted for the benefit of the Extension Officer I contacted for assistance. If anyone else, however, has suggestions short of a nuclear device, please let me know.

[resource] NIOSH science blog

NIOSH has a science blog here. Finally a blog that has intelligent comments. Well, compared to the drivel I find on my local newspaper after something "scientific". An interesting collection of different topics. And, the posts are long, designed to be educational and informative to the occupational health & safety professional. Some of the last posts:

• horse racing safety & health
• second hand smoke and casino dealers
• no-nose bicycle saddles
• firing range exposures

There are only one or two posts per month.

[resource] MCOHS training list

Training programs from the Midwest Center of Occupational Health & Safety. MCOHS also has a monthly seminar on campus at Mayo Hall, usually 1-125.

Build it, and they will ... dump?

The MPCA (Minnesota Pollution Control Agency) is excavating the landfill in Washington County to install a modern containment system. As the Strib dubbed it, an "history-making landfill do-over". 33 acres of garbage. $20,000,000. wow. ever notice that people write $20M or $20 million? It doesn't seem so impressive without all the zeros. That has led to one of the biggest attempts to go back and undo decades-old environmental practices that the metro area has ever seen. At the bottom of the 90-foot pit, four dozers were spreading clay that will form the base of the landfill. Compactors with huge spiked rollers were smoothing it. ... The landfill will have three layers of heavy plastic liner, separated by layers of geosynthetic material. Lewis said the new landfill will hold mainly old garbage but is designed with a higher level of protection often used to handle hazardous wastes. It will have three distinct layers to prevent any contaminated water in the landfill from reaching ground water: two feet of compacted clay at the bottom, three layers of heavy plastic above that, and two feet of sand and a collection and drainage system above the liners. an MPCA senior engineer, said no surprises have come to light so far in the nearly 300,000 cubic yards of waste removed. -- now, that in itself is a surprise The state has received some complaints about construction noise since work began in early June, he said, and one call about odor. The contractor is spraying the waste with a slurry of cement and cardboard paper to reduce odors, ... What kind of precedent is being set? Can I complain about the landfill in my part of town (hypothetically) and have the MPCA bring it up to modern standards? Does this remove any grandfather compliance clause about environmental protection? And really, what's the difference - ethically or scientifically - between cleaning up 3M (and other people's) waste and cleaning up the arsenic floating around the Philips Neighborhood over here? Oh, I know the difference. 3M has tons of money and can afford to spend $8,000,000 to help cleanup. The pesticide company which operated in Philips doesn't exist anymore. and, of course: NIMBY "I don't understand how this could have been a viable solution -- to dig this up, put in a liner, and then put it all back into the ground," said ---, who lives a half-mile east of the landfill. She and others at public meetings advised MPCA officials to truck the trash away to be burned or buried elsewhere. "I don't understand" = MPCA didn't do a good enough job communicating the risk management -- or the person quoted represents people who aren't willing to expend the energy to understand. "I don't understand" just isn't the same as "I don't agree with" or "I do understand and I still think this is a poor choice". I do sympathize with people who don't understand it, and don't have the scientific knowledge to know which questions to ask. If someone doesn't understand, and they're not an environmental toxicologist or hazardous waste controller ... how do we expect them to even be able to question our decisions? Ah, back to my criticism of modern American educational system. Although, I would likely have supported hauling it off to incinerate it. Still, this "make this someone else's problem" just aggravates me. I don't like the fact there's arsenic in the neighborhood near mine - but it's not like the MPCA or EPA is going to pull up the top soil for an entire neighborhood and bury it somewhere else. Until someone figures out how to make money at it. .

Less = more?

Fewer mosquitos!!!! Yea!!! Lower risk of bug-borne infectious diseases? uh, probably No risk? unfortunately, no. I have taken advantage of the opportunity to sit in the front yard in the evenings and simply enjoy the utterly delightful weather we've been having this Summer. It is, quite honestly, the nicest Summer weather I can recall in my adult life; it's definitely the nicest since we've moved here to the Mosquito State.

Safety assays for vaccines

FDA struggles how to verify vaccine safety with such a high-pressure rush to produce? [radio story]

Chrality & smell

D-form amino acids tend to taste sweet, whereas L-forms are usually tasteless. Spearmint leaves and caraway seeds, respectively, contain L-carvone and D-carvone - enantiomers of carvone. These smell different to most people because our olfactory receptors also contain chiral molecules that behave differently in the presence of different enantiomers. how odd - I really like spearmint, and I absolutely loathe the taste and smell of caraway seeds. This applies to chemical enantiomers, as well. Hence the stark difference between n-butanol and t-butanol. I recall seeing some chiral compounds being sold as "artificial" sweeteners. Whatever the compound was, it tasted sweet, but it was the wrong handedness to be metabolized. I wondered why that didn't take the place of aspartame (which was at the time the big new 'sweetener' in the wake of sacchrine's PR downfall).

PTFE Exposure

PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) is Teflon(TM), which people will tell you causes cancer or whatever. It might. If you ever get exposed to it. The science is absolutely clear: Teflon-coated pans are safe up to about 780F, a temperature at which anything in the pan will have caught fire. So, as a rule of thumb, you should be careful when flames start shooting out of your nonstick pan. Soon it might get hot enough to emit toxic Teflon particles. People scream about "Risk!" without comprehending what it really means, even qualitatively. Risk = exposure * hazard. therefore .... No exposure = no risk. No doubt this is one of the most difficult problems to overcome, psychologically. Even if the worker intellectually knows this ... their definition of "no exposure" is rarely the same as mine. Well, I suppose "no exposure" is the same. It's the "acceptable exposure" whichis the sticking point ... unfortunately, Teflon doesn't help with this no-stick problem. .

HSE chair Judith Hackitt said children needed to learn how to manage risk. [HSE = Health & Safety Executive - the English sort-of cognate to OSHA] Wow - what a concept! Nearly half of teachers believe the health and safety culture in schools is damaging children's learning and development, a survey suggests. When questioned by Teachers TV, teachers complained about a five-page briefing on using glue sticks and being told to wear goggles to put up posters. I am curious about whether the 'five page briefing' was actually an MSDS...

The plague all over again

BBC is reporting an outbreak of bubonic plague in Lybia. I'm in the midst of reading Camus' The Plague. I was inspired to read it by the conspiracy idiots (read: FBI) reports after the anthrax-letters in '01. The reports stated one of the suspects was extra suspicious due to his collection of books in his office. Quite a few of which are sitting on my shelf. The Plague, however, I hadn't read. Maybe it will make me suspicious (since in 2001 I had access to lots of anthrax)? The book is well written and interesting so far.

MDR Malaria?

An on-going concern about long-term disease control or eradication is the development of resistance to various control mechanisms, such as antibiotics Malaysia is reporting malarial parasites developing resistance to antibiotics.

And in those earlier cases, resistance also started in Western Cambodia, and in a similar way.

No-one is sure why this area seems to have become a nursery for anti-malaria drug resistance.

One factor could be the inappropriate use of drugs, related to a lack of medical supervision.

The public health system is weak. Government clinics often run out of drugs or may be closed when patients want access to them.

Sure, I'm biased after working for an American pharmaceutical firm and dealing with the obsessive compulsive regieme of the FDA. [after being in the hospital and staring at a bag of solution being pumped straight into my body - that will make you change your mind about how good it is for document control and quality assurance.] But really - this is beyond the pale of people here:

All pharmacies are supposed to be licensed. But the stallholder told me he didn't have a licence. He'd applied for one, he said, but the paperwork had never been processed.

Many others running pharmacies, he said, were in the same position.

I watched him and his wife make up their own packets of drugs on the glass-topped counter, shaking a variety of coloured tablets into unlabelled plastic bags.

Employment in Urals

New jobs for IH/evironmental in the Urals in Russia, decommissioning weapons of mass destruction.

Bed Bugs

The Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2009 seriously ... that's what it's called. Where do these people get the names for their bills? There are times when I think they must have hired the Schoolhouse Rock staff for writing the names I'm just a bill / yes I'm only a bill / and I'm sittin' here on Capitol Hill ... The EPA held its first-ever bedbug summit last month. Did the attendees stay in a hotel room for the conference? The biggest bedbug outbreak since World War II

holy cow ...

So, we all have our opinions about PPE. We express them to our employers / employees. Most likely repeatedly. In detail. We wonder at times (or at least I do), where all this information goes. Does an employee take this to another job? Does my colleague tell his kid to be safe? Well, I just had the most amazing thing happen. I got quoted on Minnesota Public Radio's Marketplace website. I have never had my professional opinion put forth in such a public manner. Of course, what happens? My husband then starts arguing about whether this statement is actually 100% true. Well, what if Respirator A is actually a bit more effective than Respirator B, although both are marketed as N-95? If A is more expensive than B, then my statement to MPR is invalid ... I suppose I should have argued in that case, if B is more expensive than A, then I could equally have said cheaper is better, and been equally wrong. As if anything in the world is ever 100% exactly the same 100% of the time ...

Libby, part 2

earlier in the saga, the EPA posted Q&A about the earlier suit: Q : Can Grace sue me to recover money it is required to pay EPA for cleanup of my property?

A : Yes. Grace has the right to sue you, but the court must first decide to what extent you may be held responsible. EPA provided No Action Assurances to owners of residential and business properties in Libby. These assurances indicate that EPA will not seek the cost of cleanup from you. The No Action Assurance will tell the court that EPA does not believe you should be held responsible for those costs.

So, the EPA won't screw you out of money to pay for this??? What in god's name do they think funds the EPA? My taxes. Oh, okay - so EPA won't see restitution from the residents - they get it from me! Grace being able to sue a homeowner to recoup money they need to spend to cover their illegal/unethical activities which caused the homeowner to get asbestosis(read: lung cancer)? How much more obscene can you get?

Libby, part 1

Well, a bit delayed with posting ... From February... W.R. Grace was back in the news with a new lawsuit. This is the owner of the vermiculite mine in Libby, Montana. The stupendous point of this is that the defendants in the suit are the Grace executives, not the company. This is the first time the EPA has tried this. They - unlike OSHA - are allowed to directly bring suit against individuals. Actually, I’m not sure OSHA is even allowed to sue anyone, just implement fines. I’m sure the rest of the legal community is waiting with baited breath (assuming we don’t have asbestosis, of course). The company did ban smoking at the mine in 1978 — smoking compounds the dangers of asbestos, doctors say — and also issued respirator masks to workers. But showers that the miners could have used at the end of their shifts before heading home were ruled out, because they might have overly worried people. In the largest judgment after trial (in 2003) in the history of the federal Superfund law, the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency announced that the District Court of Montana has ordered W.R. Grace & Co. to pay over $54.5 million to reimburse the federal government for the costs of investigation and cleanup of asbestos contamination in Libby, Montana. There is asbestos all over the entire town. Usually asbestos abatement brings an image of workers in Tyvek suits & respirators working behind plastic sheeting. This abatement is somehow supposed to be the entire city of Libby.

Bitrex

Good heavens, this stuff tastes gross! Last night's class on respirators ended with a call for volunteers to go through a qualitative fit-test with a filtering face-piece respirator. How do you know if it's a respirator or a dust mask? If it says NIOSH, it's a respirator. There being only 6 people in the class, it's not as though one can hide in the back of the room. No one seemed to be leaping at the opportunity, so I volunteered. I guess there's benefits of being the oldest student - I'm pretty immune to most things that embarrass my younger classmates. I've never done qualitative fit testing before, only the quantitative method. They used bitrex as the sensory stimulus. They asked if I knew what it tasted like, simply to avoid having to check. I got a whiff of it once, being in close proximity to someone getting this done. Blech. Since we weren't waiting 1 minute for each of these activities (reading, turning head, lifting chin, etc), I was getting one whopping huge amount of bitrex pumped into the Bag On Head. They're looking kind of curious - I'm not sure why. The whole point is to demonstrate that even an N95 (read: not an N100) is perfectly capable of protecting against this stuff. Then ... wham. The standard bug-eyed, open mouth, sounds of disgust and grabbing for the hood. An hour later walking through campus with some classmates, I licked my lips only to realize it was still there. I think recommending employees rinse their face should be required, whether or not they fail. I failed on the step requiring someone to bend over. I'm not toooo surprised. It wasn't fitting really well under my chin. I was actually surprised it fit as well as it did. I'm curious about what size I was wearing - despite being a woman, I have a fairly broad face. I wear a size Large for full-face respirators, and depending on the manufacturer either Medium or Large for the half-face fitted ones. Yet another reason to offer multiple sizes to employees and make them try on more than one size. Of course you have them, because you're required to (1910.134 Apdx A - first point made) - but you should make them try more than one. Curiously, a rep from 3M told me that different chemicals are used in different countries. Not a surprising statement, eh? But ... apparently there is a distinct difference in sensitivity to some of the compounds. Americans have a lower sensitivity to one of the sweet-smelling chemicals, presumably due to the high sugar content of our regular diets.

Process Man (a.k.a. Chemical Worker's Song)

Well, if you're from Newfoundland, you've likely heard of these men: Great Big Sea. I've loved their music since I saw them on some Canadian channel playing outdoors at a ski resort in shorts in the Winter while it was snowing. This is also one of my favorite of their songs. The original version on Up (and that I heard live, about 12 feet from the stage in Ann Arbor) was powerful in the way that a capella music can be. This recording has either poor audio detail, or the lead singer was having vocal problems & slurring a bit, just a bit. I mention this only in that - if you like this - the standard studio recording is even better for the clarity (as is often the case). Process Man - the ballad of a fellow stuck in the chemical manufacturing world. work & breathe among the fumes that trail across the sky... and it's go boys, go, they'll time your every breath ... 'cause every day you're in this place you're 2 days nearer death ...

[chem free] Makeup

This is the cosmetic "makeup"; not the "amount needed to equalize something (e.g. make up air); and not emotional reattachment (e.g. make up with my girl friend). So, I'm curious ... from a stealth-ad: Mineral makeup is make-up that's made of all natural, finely ground minerals from the earth, without any of the chemicals, dyes, and preservatives found in traditional makeup. It gives you a light, natural, long-lasting glow that simply can't be duplicated by other types of makeup. One of my favorite phrases is "chemical free". I've seen it on food, on coffee, and now on (of all things) make up. What do these people think is in this stuff, if not chemicals? Because the way it's written certainly implies it's chemical free. Note the prepositional phrase (in traditional makeup) is waaaaaay down the long sentence. What you read is without any chemical, dyes or blah blah blah. If these are so wonderfully healthy for you, and are great for sensitive skin - what kind of exposure control systems do they have in the manufacturing plant? I can pretty much guarantee there's an amazing amount of ventilation to cope with the really fine powder. I'd also bet dermal PPE is required to avoid getting this stuff on your skin because it's irritating. (of course, this is sold as a mixture direct-to-customer-not-hazardous product, so there's no MSDS for it). Did they mention that asbestos is a very nice, naturally occurring "chemical free" and "dye free" mineral? Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with these product. I've got a bottle of eye shadow powder that I like. But I bought it because I liked the color; I have no delusions that any of my cosmetics are actually good for me.

HF leak on highway

The picture is far more impressive than the text: managed to stop the slowly dripping liquid . Of course, I'm curious: How slow is 'slowly dripping' compared to 16 tons [just over 14,500 kg] ?