Environmental Health

"Donald Trump approved a federal emergency declaration Saturday related to a sewer main break north of Washington DC that threatens to put a stink on the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations in the US capital this summer."

"Peggy Shepard walked into her living room on Tuesday morning when her husband told her Jesse Jackson, the civil rights titan from South Carolina, had died. “Immediately tears started coming,” said Shepard, co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a New York City-based nonprofit."

"In a stretch of Louisiana with about 170 fossil fuel and petrochemical plants, premature death is a fact of life for people living nearby. The air is so polluted and the cancer rates so high it is known as Cancer Alley."

"Chemicals increasingly used to replace the toxic plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA) may disrupt fertility, fetal development, and reproductive health through many of the same biological mechanisms, according to a narrative review of human, animal and laboratory studies."

"President Trump issued an executive order late Wednesday aimed at spurring the domestic production of glyphosate, a widely used weedkiller that has figured in health lawsuits."

"America’s farmers and farmworkers, their families and neighbors, are being diagnosed with cancer at rates higher than the national average. A growing body of research indicates that pesticides are partly to blame."

"Two lawsuits filed Wednesday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals mark the beginning of a rocky legal road for the Environmental Protection Agency following its reversal of a 2009 rule underpinning federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions."

"The Environmental Protection Agency plans this week to loosen restrictions on coal-burning power plants, allowing them to emit more hazardous pollutants including mercury, a powerful neurotoxin that can impair babies’ brain development, internal agency documents show."