Environmental Health

"A new survey shows arsenic levels in public water are disproportionately high in certain U.S. communities, despite national regulatory standards designed to protect people from the harmful chemical."

"Javier Francisco Parra, 47, was shot on December 3, 2020 in the municipality of La Macarena, in Colombia’s south near the department of Meta." "Between January 1 and December 6, 2020, a jaw-dropping 284 environmental leaders and defenders have been assassinated in Colombia."

"Get poisoned or get on board. That’s the choice soybean farmers such as Will Glazik face. The past few summers, farmers near Glazik’s central Illinois farm have sprayed so much of the weedkiller dicamba at the same time that it has polluted the air for hours and sometimes days."

"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will finalize on Wednesday its overhaul of how it measures the costs and benefits of proposed new curbs on pollution, a move that is likely to sap the agency’s power to impose tough future regulations, according to a source familiar with the process."

"Loyalists to President Trump have blocked transition meetings at some government agencies and are sitting in on discussions at other agencies between career civil servants and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s transition teams, sometimes chilling conversations, several federal officials said."

"Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services is the first state attorney general to create an environmental justice bureau."

"Elevated levels of a PFAS compound were associated with more severe forms of Covid-19, according to a Danish study now undergoing peer review. The research, which involved 323 patients infected with the coronavirus, found that those who had elevated levels of a chemical called PFBA were more than twice as likely to have a severe form of the disease."

"State police brandishing firearms Monday raided the Tallahassee home of Rebekah Jones, the former Department of Health data scientist who built the state's much-praised COVID-19 dashboard before being fired over what she said was refusing to "manipulate data.""

"The U.S. air pollution monitoring network has fallen into disrepair after years of budget cuts and neglect, leaving tens of millions of Americans vulnerable to undetected bad air quality from events like wildfires to industrial pollution, the investigative arm of Congress said on Monday."

"The Trump administration on Monday declined to tighten controls on industrial soot emissions, disregarding an emerging scientific link between dirty air and Covid-19 death rates."