Environmental Health

"With the coronavirus already stretching supplies and budgets, local leaders worry that a flood could overwhelm them."

"The United Nations’ biodiversity chief has called for a global ban on wildlife markets – such as the one in Wuhan, China, believed to be the starting point of the coronavirus outbreak – to prevent future pandemics."

"In Louisiana, one of the states most devastated by the coronavirus, about 70 percent of the people who have died are African-American, officials announced on Monday, though only a third of the state’s population is black."

"EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler is rejecting a call by top House Democrats to formally scrap an opinion from the agency's top lawyer that limits the authority of an in-house watchdog."

"The Environmental Protection Agency warned Friday that disinfectants and sanitizers falsely claiming to protect against the coronavirus are flooding the market and threatened legal action against retailers that sell unregistered products."

"As Americans shelter in place across much of the country, washing their hands and making sure to stay six feet away from others, the farmworkers carpool on grocery runs. At day's end, most retreat to cramped, crowded quarters, sleeping several to a room."

"They hastily piled all the dumbbells and treadmills in the back of a gym to make room for 23 extra hospital beds. The beds aren’t needed yet, but on a reservation where residents suffer high rates of diseases that exist throughout Indian Country, the Lummi Tribal Health Clinic is taking every precaution to prepare for the deadly coronavirus."

"The U.S. government’s efforts to clean up Cold War-era waste from nuclear research and bomb making at federal sites around the country has lumbered along for decades, often at a pace that watchdogs and other critics say threatens public health and the environment."

"A week after EPA issued a controversial enforcement policy, the agency declined to reveal how many companies sought waivers of noncompliance due to the novel coronavirus pandemic."

"After the first alarms sounded in early January that an outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China might ignite a global pandemic, the Trump administration squandered nearly two months that could have been used to bolster the federal stockpile of critically needed medical supplies and equipment."