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    Lynne Peeples

    Lynne Peeples

    Environment and Public Health Reporter, The Huffington Post

  • Veterans Exposed To Toxic Chemicals Accuse VA Of Foot-Dragging

    Retired Senior Master Sgt. Leslie Howe has battled two cancers -- non-Hodgkin lymphoma and prostate cancer, both of which have been linked with exposure to Agent Orange, the herbicide used by the U.S. military to destroy enemy cover and crops during the Vietnam War. Howe, 71, was never actually in Vietnam during the conflict, but in the 1980s he served aboard Air Force planes that contained trace amounts of the defoliant. "I flew in good conscience on that aircraft, not knowing the danger," said Howe, who recalled a distinct "aroma" at times while he worked in the aircraft as an air medical evacuation technician.

  • Can We Wean Our Future Food Off Antibiotics?

    Poultry probiotics may help wean chickens off regular doses of antibiotics. Each year, at least 23,000 Americans die from drug-resistant infections carried by so-called superbugs -- pathogens that were once easily treatable but that can now withstand modern medicine's full arsenal of antibiotics. The WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with a number of leading scientists, have warned that the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in both humans and animals is the driving force behind this threat to public health.

  • Industry Is Still Making Toxic Lead Paint, And Feds Seem Cool With It

    One of the world's largest paint manufacturers continues to add a toxic heavy metal to products it sells outside the U.S., mostly in poor countries, despite decades of health warnings and ongoing pleas to stop the practice -- the latest of which came from the company's own investors. Nine organizations that own shares in PPG Industries, the world's second-largest paint maker, filed a shareholder proposal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in late 2014 asking PPG to come up with a plan for the eventual phase-out of lead from all its paints. Industrial paints are the major holdout for the company, which has otherwise largely removed lead from its products.

  • Scientists Issue Warning Over Chemicals Common In Carpets, Coats, Cookware

    In 1961, a DuPont toxicologist warned colleagues that exposure to their company's increasingly popular Teflon chemicals enlarged the livers of rats and rabbits. Studies over the following decades found no safe level of exposure in animals and determined that humans, too, got sick when exposed to the chemicals -- which were also seen to build up in the body and resist breakdown in the environment. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • Toxic Smoke Forces Firefighter To Retire, But He's Not Done Protecting Others

    Firefighter Clive Savacool battled his final blaze, a grass fire in Pittsburg, California, in March 2014. "Up until that point, grass fires hadn't bothered me," said Savacool, 37, of Martinez, California, recalling how his pulmonary doctor later concluded that cumulative toxic exposures during 18 years of fire service had given him career-ending lung disease. Savacool, however, would be far from done protecting others.

  • The Easter Bunny Could Soon Bring Safer Candy With Natural Food Colors

    To be safe, many like Courtney Sucato of Phoenix, are no longer taking chances with the man-made additives, which are generally derived from petroleum and coal. Sucato now swaps out the mainstream sweets her kids collect during other people's Easter egg hunts with a stash of naturally colored candy she keeps at home. The market for natural food colors is predicted to grow nearly threefold between 2014 and 2020.

  • Stop Playing 'Whack-A-Mole' With Toxic Flame Retardants, Health Advocates Urge

    As the public has learned of health risks tied to chemicals in everyday products, many companies have responded by eliminating, one by one, the suspected cancer causers, brain damagers and hormone disruptors. "We're playing toxic whack-a-mole," said Arlene Blum, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and executive director of the nonprofit Green Science Policy Institute. "When after a great deal of research and testing, a chemical is found to be harmful, then the tendency is to replace it with as similar a chemical as possible.

  • A Menacing Mix In Antibiotic Resistance: Herbicides, Heavy Metals And Factory Farms

    The use of common herbicides, such as Roundup, Kamba and 2,4-D, according to a study published on Tuesday, may help drive antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance stemming from overuse in livestock also is the target of a bill re-introduced in Congress on Tuesday. In some cases, combinations of herbicides and antibiotics in the new study made bacteria more susceptible to antibiotics, or had no effect.

  • Surprise Finding Adds To Health Worries Over Ocean Plastic

    Scientists are looking for -- and finding -- little bits of plastic in a lot of places lately: ice cores, deep sea sediments, coral reefs, crab gills, the digestive system of mussels, even German beer. Since plastic does not biodegrade, it simply accumulates -- year after year.

  • Industry-Supported Chemical Bill Straight From 'Merchants Of Doubt' Playbook

    Tuesday's unveiling of a bipartisan bill in Congress that would reform how the nation regulates toxic chemicals sparked fervor among environmental and public health advocates. Critics also said they're suspicious of the chemical industry's role in drafting and garnering support for the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, the proposed update to a nearly 40-year-old law that just about everyone agrees is too weak and outdated. "The chemical industry has hijacked the narrative around protecting the environment and public health," said Ansje Miller of the nonprofit Center for Environmental Health, noting the environmental health community's widespread support for the Safe Chemicals Act when it was introduced in 2013 by the late Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

  • Anti-Vaccine Haven Digs In As Measles Outbreak Hands Science Crusaders An Edge

    Since arriving from Puerto Rico a year ago, Pedro Alvarez says he has learned a lot about healthy living from other people on this island -- a small, crunchy community a short ferry ride from Seattle. "Vashon is more aware. There are a bunch of really informed people here," said Alvarez, 25, who wore a Karl Marx T-shirt, round-rimmed glasses and trimmed beard as he blended fresh fruits and vegetables behind the bar at the popular Pure Organic Cafe, where he works.

  • Fracking Foes Accuse Industry Of Manipulating Science

    The oil and gas industry sponsors and spins research to shape the scientific debate over horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. "Research and statistics can be manipulated to say whatever the person using them wants to say," said Robert Galbraith, an analyst with the nonprofit Public Accountability Initiative and co-author of the report released on Wednesday. Public Accountability Initiative, which describes itself as a non-partisan advocate of corporate and government transparency, receives some financial support from groups opposed to fracking.

  • The Public Health Consequences Of Shoddy Science

    The current outbreak of measles, on pace to become the largest since the disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. more than a decade ago, was made possible in large part by a single black mark in the medical research literature -- a discredited 1998 study from Dr. Andrew Wakefield that purported to link the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. The Lancet, the journal in which Wakefield's study appeared, pulled the study after investigations by a British journalist and a medical panel uncovered cherry-picked data and an array of financial conflicts of interest, among other trappings of fraudulent science. Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist, had gone as far as to pay children at his son's birthday party to have their blood drawn for the research.

  • Superbug Fear Meets Super Bowl With Sexy Ad For Antibiotic-Free Burger

    At the end of an ad set to air during Super Bowl XLIX, a scantily-clad supermodel takes a bite out of Carl's Jr.'s new "All-Natural" hamburger. The risqué nature of the commercial has triggered some controversy, but perhaps not as impassioned as the debate that continues over the widespread use of antibiotics by livestock producers -- and the role the practice may play in rising rates of antibiotic-resistant infections in humans. "This ad tells you that Carl's Jr. sees this as enough of a mainstream issue," said Michael Hansen, senior scientist with Consumers Union, the policy and action division of Consumer Reports.

  • Household Chemicals May Explain Rising Rates Of Male Infertility

    Bisphenol A and other common estrogen-mimicking chemicals may be wreaking havoc on sperm and stymying some couples' hopes of having children, warns new research. "We're seeing more and more guys who have low and troubling sperm counts," said Pat Hunt, a molecular biologist at Washington State University and co-author of a small study published Thursday that investigates how certain industrial chemicals may affect sexual development in newborn male mice. "There's a hypothesis now that this might be due to these estrogenic exposures to the male testes -- because it's not just sperm counts that seem to be changing," she added, noting the similarly rising rates of testicular cancer, undescended testes and other abnormalities in male genitalia throughout the developed world.

  • Veterans Who Flew Agent Orange-Poisoned Planes After Vietnam Now 'A Giant Step Closer To Justice'

    Lingering amounts of the herbicide Agent Orange aboard repurposed airplanes after the Vietnam War could have sickened military veterans, according to a new federal report. In findings released Friday, an Institute of Medicine committee "emphatically" refutes a recurrent argument made by the U.S. Air Force and Department of Veteran Affairs that any carcinogenic dioxin or other components of Agent Orange contaminating its fleet of C-123 cargo planes would have been "dried residues" and therefore unlikely to pose any meaningful exposure risks to the 1,500 to 2,100 Air Force Reserve personnel who served aboard the planes between 1972 and 1982.

  • Toxic Treads: Scrap Tire Playgrounds Lighten Landfills, But Raise Cancer Fears

    Today, in part because of actions sparked by the Virginia disaster and many smaller tire fires, more than 90 percent of the nation's approximately 230 million tires scrapped each year are put to use -- burned as fuel, incorporated into asphalt roads and, increasingly, shredded into components of products such as synthetic turf sports fields and children's playgrounds. In 2007, a committee of state, academic, industry and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency representatives published action plans to "promote increased use of ground rubber made from scrap tires" in playgrounds, sports fields and colored mulch, among other products.

  • Mounting Health Concerns Over Fracking Chemicals

    April Lane's work often brings her to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she monitors pollution from natural gas production sites around the area's rich shale reserves. A paper published Friday in Reviews on Environmental Health may give credence to her personal suspicions. The paper suggests that even tiny doses of benzene, toluene and other chemicals released during the various phases of oil and natural gas production, including fracking, could pose serious health risks -- especially to developing fetuses, babies and young children.

  • The Household Threat To Children's Brains

    A lot, especially when considering the cumulative effects of this chemical cocktail on children, warns a video unveiled Thursday during an environmental health conference in Ottawa, Canada. The seven-minute project, "Little Things Matter," draws on emerging scientific evidence that even mild exposures to common contaminants can derail normal brain development -- lowering IQs and raising risks of behavioral conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. "The chemical industry argues that the effect of toxins on children is subtle and of little consequence," co-producer Bruce Lanphear, an environmental health expert at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, states in the video.

  • Researchers Find Bed Bugs Could Carry A Deadly Disease

    As bed bug infestations have continued to crop up in firehouses, schools, movie theaters and homes across the country, a team of researchers is now warning that these proliferating pests could prove to be more than just an itchy, pricey nuisance. According to a new study published on Monday, bed bugs are capable of transmitting a parasite that causes Chagas disease, an infection that in some cases can lead to cardiac or intestinal complications. "There are a lot of people with Chagas disease, and a lot of bed bugs.