Environmental Health

"A vocal and growing number of residents in northeast Fresno are convinced water from the city’s Surface Water Treatment Facility is primarily responsible for corrosion in their pipes, causing discolored water – and in several dozen instances, lead contamination – to flow from their household faucets."

"Federal government scientists on Friday released the final update of their study of Crude MCHM, without answering several important questions about the potential health effects of the January 2014 chemical spill that contaminated the drinking water supply for hundreds of thousands of residents in Charleston and surrounding communities of the Kanawha Valley."

"Outside Susan Holmes' house in southeastern Oklahoma, visitors are welcomed by an entryway lined with oxygen bottles and a machine that collects and concentrates oxygen from the air."

"As many as 50 pregnant women in Puerto Rico are becoming infected with Zika every day, top U.S. health officials said Wednesday as they urged the U.S. territory to strongly consider aerial spraying to prevent further spread of the mosquito-borne virus."

"DuPont Co. was found liable for a man’s testicular cancer in the second lawsuit to go to trial in 3,500 lawsuits over a toxic Teflon chemical found in Ohio and West Virginia waters, for which spinoff Chemours Co. had agreed to bear the cost."

"Last week [Canada's] federal government moved to list microbeads as a toxic substance under the Environmental Protection Act, thus giving the government power to ban the use of the microplastics (plastics smaller than five millimetres in size) in items such as body washes, cleansers and toothpastes."

"The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved expanding a wastewater permit for a South Texas coal mine over vocal opposition from locals Wednesday."

"The mostly working-class, black neighborhood of Uniontown, Ala., claimed a coal ash landfill was ruining their community. They got sued for it."

"The Federal Select Agent Program, which oversees dangerous substances such as anthrax and bird flu in federal, academic and private labs, reported 199 incidents in which lab workers were potentially exposed to infectious or toxic agents in 2015, though there were no losses of select agents."