_logo_phere . . .Takin’ the “BS” out’a the BlogoSphere

Last year the Va. “expert panel” on BS checked in with its final report. There has been a fair amount of media coverage and Email chatter among sludge-warriors, but mostly over the way Synagro’s Virginia Biosolids Council put the spin on the Report’s conclusions.

I have had a close look at the Report, and it ain’t too good, in my opinion. Here’s a link to a long spew (Spew #16) on it back at the Mother Site: http://www.something-stinks.com/Feb09.htm

To re-state my conclusion verbatim:

“When has so much time been so badly wasted on such a listless and meaningless endeavor as this? Even by a state government. Hardly a single valid conclusion or useful recommendation in the whole 61 pages. In short: The HJR 694 report is as helpful as pigeon poop on the pump handle. I could have produced a far more informative, accurate, and helpful report by assigning the task to a group of high school students as a joint senior research project. But the troubling aspect is the deceit.”

This Report was cooked by the sludgers and then spun by Synagro. What a tag-team.

At the bottom of my rant I link to objections to the Report that were submitted jointly by two members of the panel: Henry Staudinger and Alan Rubin. If you don’t have time to wade through my drivel, drop down to the bottom and have a look at the way Satudinger/Rubin slammed the Report. That is definitely worth your time. (I would give you a direct link, but it’s been so long since I’ve fired up WordPress I don’t remember how to add the hyperlinks.)

Tags: Research, Legislation, Spin, Virginia, Sludge by webmaster
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The most mundane, and painful, of human maladies — a tooth ache — has led me to a testable hypothesis that wind-blown sludge-dust produces asymptomatic infections in humans (and cows and pigs). It’s all laid out over at the Mother Site.

Tags: Strategies, Research, Disease by webmaster
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When I was an avid listener of National Public Radio, I often noticed that when an interview was on a subject I knew zip about, the interviewer always seemed so brilliant and asked such pointed questions. But when the interview was on a subject within my (admittedly limited) sphere of knowledge, the interviewer seemed clueless and missed every opportunity to deflect or detect spin. An NPR interview on the Johns Hopkins human experiments on Baltimore children is a good example of the later. See my Apr 14 blog post on the experiments.

The interview, dated April 24, was conducted by Farai Chideya. Here’s a link to the audio, it’s about 12 minutes long. (Thanks Maureen) Chideya starts out interviewing John Heilprin, one of the reporters who exposed this Nazi-inspired human research with a series of AP articles, which, apparently isn’t finished yet.

Then Chideya dials into the Hopkins spin machine and gets Dr. Michael Klag, dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at JHU. Klag attacks the AP article on the grounds that the BS that was put in the kids’ yards was totally safe because it was Class A, which is the good stuff – Class B is the stuff to worry about. No damage, no foul. What a load of BS.

Does Chideya go after him? Does she point out that Class A sludge has the same exact risks as Class B for being contaminated with pharmaceuticals, thallium, mercury, cadmium, dioxins, drug resistance genes, or any of thousands of additional toxic metals, synthetic organics and biologicals? Does Chideya confront Klag with what Dr. Thomas Burke, who chaired the 2002 NAS report on BS and who is also a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in the original AP article about the Class A BS that was spread in the kiddie experiments?

“There are potential pathogens and chemicals that are not in the realm of safe,” Burke told the AP. “What’s needed are more studies on what’s going on with the pathogens in sludge — are we actually removing them? The commitment to connecting the dots hasn’t been there.”

Nope, not a single pointed question. Chideya gives this Rovian spin-meister, Klag, the last word: the BS was as safe as mothers’ milk. He was, of course, talking straight to the potential jurors who are going to hear this case when Hopkins gets sued for fraud or when the researchers who conducted the experiments go on trial for child endangerment.

But now it looks like Burke, who, of course works for Klag, is being forced into line. Over at Yahoo.com LINK they have tagged the following note onto an op ed of Apr 21 titled “Of Sludge and Syphilis”:

“Update: A Kennedy Krieger Institute representative has contacted us to dispute the accuracy of the AP report cited. The materials used in the Baltimore study were Class A grade, and are sold commercially for residential use. We spoke with Thomas Burke, one of the experts cited in the original AP report, who confirmed their safety. According to Burke, his quote–and the EPA reports referenced in the article–were referring to the potential hazards of Class B sludge. No correction has yet been posted on the AP website.”

Burke’s retraction is as smelly as his boss’ spin-job. After all, in his original quote to AP Burke is asking the question of whether “we” are actually removing all of the pathogens from the sludge. Well . . . hello – Class A is the only sludge in which any attempt is made to reduce pathogens to acceptable levels. Furthermore, the whole AP interview was about Class A. There was never any confusion about what class was put down. So of course Burke was referring to Class A.

Tags: Research, Spin by webmaster
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In 2001 a justice of Maryland’s highest court implied that the US government, including the EPA, has learned a lot from the Nazis about how to turn innocent and unsuspecting citizens into experimental Guinea pigs.

Justice Cathell juxtaposed the US government’s history of human research against the Nazis’ human research. For example from 1932 until 1972, the US Public Health Service conducted the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study that withheld penicillin and other treatment options from 400 poor black sharecroppers infected with syphilis in order to study the long term effects of the disease. Not only was treatment and diagnosis information withheld from the subjects, but they were blatantly lied to in order to obtain and maintain their cooperation. Link to Wikipedia article.

For decades before, during, and after WWII, the US government approved, funded, and participated in the eugenics craze so admired by Hitler, including incarcerating and forcefully sterilizing of thousands of mentally retarded individuals. Wiki link.

In the 1940’s and 1950’s the US government knowingly and intentionally exposed US servicemen to fallout radiation from atomic bomb tests, and Navajo Indian uranium miners to radioactive mining dust. In the 1950’s and 1960’s the Army and CIA intentionally and secretly poisoned dozens of soldiers with hallucinogens, including LSD. Some committed suicide during their hallucinations. In 1963 Jewish males were unwittingly injected with live cancer cells in a study funded by the US Public Health Services and the American Cancer Society.

Mind you, these are only progroms that became public. These are the tip of the iceberg.

The case Justice Cathell was writing about was a suit brought by Baltimore families over a study funded and approved by the EPA and conducted in the Baltimore inner city projects by a worrisome dude named Mark Farfel, who headed the lead studies wing of one of Johns Hopkins research groups, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Inc. He is now head of the World Trade Center Registry for 9/11 victims. In this first study, which was conducted in the 1990’s, the families were recruited to live in inner city houses that were expected to produce lead dust. The experiment was designed to determine if different methods of reclaiming houses tainted by lead were effective. The way you do that, apparently, is turn kids into your Guinea pigs and see how much lead they accumulate when living in houses with differing lead-histories.

Johns Hopkins people were right in the middle of this mess. Not only did they design the experiments, write the grant applications, and collect the grant money, but the John Hopkins ethics committee approved of the study and advised Farfel on how to twist the grant language so the study would sound like it was of therapeutic benefit to the kids in order to avoid federal scrutiny. It was actually John Hopkin’s Kennedy Krieger Institute that was named in the lawsuit.

Justice Cathell went right through the roof on this case, writing a searing 103 page opinion and comparing Farfel’s experiments to the Nazis’ typhus experiments at Buchenwald . You can get a copy of the opinion here.

Here’s the way the Court described what Farfel and Co did:

“The same researchers had completed a prior study on abatement and partial abatement methods that indicated that lead dust remained and/or returned to abated houses over a period of time. In an article reporting on that study, the very same researchers said: ‘Exposure to lead-bearing dust is particularly hazardous for children because hand-to-mouth activity is recognized as a major route of entry of lead into the body and because absorption of lead is inversely related to particule size.’ Mark R. Farfel & J. Julian Chisolm, Health and Environmental Outcomes of Traditional and Modified Practices for Abatement of Residential Lead-Based Paint, 80 American Journal of Public Health 1240, 1243 (1990). After publishing this report, the researchers began the present research project in which children were encouraged to reside in households where the possibility of lead dust was known to the researcher to be likely, so that the lead dust content of their [i.e., the children’s] blood could be compared with the level of lead dust in the houses at periodic intervals over a two-year period.”

That opinion was written in 2001. Farfel is back in the news today. The AP is reporting [Link] that in a 2005 paper Farfel describes how he and a bunch of his Johns Hopkins buddies went back into a poor Baltimore community and sludged the yards children play in with composted BS. Farfel and a side kick co-author from the U.S. Dept of Agriculture, an agronomist named Rufus Chaney, claimed that by sludging the ground they actually did the kids who play on it a favor because the BS – we’re talking processed human feces here – binds a number of heavy metals, including lead, and so – walla!! – when the kids eat it, the metals should pass through the kids’ digestive tracts without being absorbed. Of course, that’s nothing more than a fat guess of a hypothesis. And they test the hypothesis by exposing the kids to whatever is in the BS.

Great modus operandi – expose children to toxins in the form of lead dust or BS and see what happens. We’ll call this the “John Hopkins Protocol.” Poor children work best because their folks are the least likely to figure out what’s going on, or complain, or sue. According to the AP article: “Chaney said the Baltimore neighborhoods were chosen because they were within an economically depressed area qualifying for tax incentives. He acknowledged the families were not told there have been some safety disputes and health complaints over sludge.”

Right, Rufus, you call that informed consent when you don’t tell them that there could be active pharmaceuticals, drug resistant microbes or at least microbial drug resistant DNA (see my last post), myriad organic toxins, and a whole smorgasbord of heavy metals in the BS? There is not a single word in Farfel’s abstract and summary about analyzing the BS for toxins before they exposed the children to it. Link to the abstract. [I haven’t been able to find the full article.] Nor, as the AP points out, is there any indication of any medical follow up on the children.

Another John Hopkins researcher, Thomas Burke, who was chairman of the famous 2002 National Academy of Sciences sludge review pointed out for the AP that even if sludge does bind lead in the dirt, the sludge could still release the heavy metals for absorption when it hits the acidic environment of the stomach.

More great BS research from the EPA. What we’ve come to expect, I guess. Hopefully, somebody will get their skivvies sued off on this one, too, which is also what we’ve come to expect.

Tags: Technology, Research, EPA by webmaster
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It causes about 90,000 American fatalities every year – mostly older people and kids. That is more than the yearly number of automobile fatalities. More than all of the nation’s homicides, including NYC. It’s more than the auto deaths and homicides combined. It’s 50% more than the total American loss of life in the entire 10 years of war in Vietnam. And at our present rate of casualties in Iraq, it would take a century to match just one year of this scourge.

It’s killing somebody every 6 minutes. Day in, day out, around the clock. And the worse is yet to come because the rate is increasing dramatically.

Have you guessed what I’m talking about? Nope, not predictions for bird flu. Not the nuclear winter. Not lead-laced toys from China. Not grease from McDonald’s.

Drug resistant bacteria.

Those are figures published in a recent article by Jessica Snyder Sachs in the March Discover Magazine. Link

The culprit we hear most about is methicillin-resistant Staph A, a nasty bug that is alone responsible for 18,000 deaths a year. More than AIDS. MRSA is just the tip of the iceberg.

But it is not the numbers in Sachs’ article that are most shocking, it is the science. Although I have gotten away from hard-core biological sciences, I was a student and teacher in the medical sciences for more than 20 years. Being an academic, I naturally assumed I had heard it all, but I wasn’t prepared for this. I well knew, for instance, that many types of bacteria are able to exchange their DNA in a sort of micro-sex. But I was always taught that these trysts occur just within a species. I had no idea that entirely different types of bacteria are capable of exchanging genes with each other. It’s like a chicken swapping DNA with a bull frog. Nor did I realize how long DNA persists in nature, or that bacteria are capable of scavenging genes that are just lying around, for instance genes released in BS when other bacteria are killed during treatment.

Of course, BS from city treatment works contains sewage from hospitals, where drug-resistant microbes are produced and excreted by the buckets full. Treating the sewage means that you kill a large portion, but not all, of the microbes. Those you do kill release their durg-resistance genes; those you don’t kill take those genes up. Then you spread it all on the ground where the naked DNA and/or now-modified bacteria attach to the plants growing in the BS. It gets eaten by livestock and wild animals and gets incorporated into their intestinal flora, where it reproduces like gang-busters and then spreads yeah-long distances from the fields.

According to Sachs, the drug-resistance DNA is being found everywhere. It is found in the ground water. It is turning up in streams. It is found up our kids noses and down their throats in alarming levels. I’ll bet donuts to dollars that someday soon some DNA jock will be able to track drug-resistant strains of bacteria found in ground water, rivers, or children of rural Virginia back to NYC, DC, or Newark.

We’re generating a perfect microbiological storm here.

[For the life of me, this is one deplorable situation I cannot find a way to pin on Bush, Cheney, or Rove. I know there must be a connection. I just can’t find it.]

Thank you, Moira Bell of Bedford for passing the Discover article around.

Tags: Research, Disease by webmaster
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Dr. Rob Hale is a dedicated environmental scientist working for the Va. Institute of Marine Science. Rob is one of the world’s authorities on a particular organic contaminant found in BS: polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDEs. He also sits on the new BS oversight board for the Va. Dept. of Environmental Quality. Here are a few of his recent publications. Link.>

In many ways organic contaminants are the toughest problem with BS. Metals and micro-organisms are of limited types and can be detected, and there is a pretty good scientific basis for setting acceptable levels. But organic compounds are often quite exotic, which means that often not a lot is known about them or the levels at which they are toxic. It also means that detecting and measuring them can be difficult. Just the sheer numbers of such compounds rules out any possibility of monitoring them all — at least with today’s technology. Organic contaminants are virtually all man-made, which means that huge numbers of different types can be produced, so you never have a final list of the problem compounds.

PBDEs are one good example of the problem with organics in BS. PBDEs have been around as household flame-retardants for quite a while. They are sprayed on furniture and on electronic components. They are ubiquitous products of human synthesis and society, but there is at least one report of them being produced naturally by whales, not as flame-retardants of course because whales live underwater and don’t have couches or computers, but as a by-product of presumably normal metabolism.

Since the late 1990’s the Swiss have been all over PBDE’s as toxins, and it seems that until recently most of the research on these compounds is from Swiss scientists. Switzerland banned PBDE’s in 1998 — way before the rest of the world caught on. IN fact, the rest of the world hasn’t quite caught on yet, but the number of research articles on PBDE’s is growing every year.  A few green US states have started banning them. As of Jan 1, 2008 Calif. bans all products using the compounds. Washington and Maine are not far behind, but with more limited bans. Wiki Link>

PBDE’s are found in high concentrations in BS and wastewater treatment plant effluents. Recently Rob Hale and colleagues published an article showing that as a result of trash/sewage-dumping activities, McMurdo Base in Antarctica is a point source of PBDE pollution of one of the most and last pristine areas on the planet. Link.

Rob, a marine scientist, has focused a lot of his effort on understanding and documenting the hormone-disrupting effects of PBDE’s on fish — specifically, male fish producing eggs. PBDEs are also known to have effects on the thyroid, impair brain development, decrease sperm counts. They are concentrated in human breast milk. Studies published in 2007 show feminization of bass and other species in the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, including near the outflow of the Blue Plains wastewater treatment facility on the Potomac in Washington, D.C. Link. Blue Plains is a major contributor to BS spread on Virginia rural land.

You connect the dots, especially if you’re breast feeding a baby boy.

Tags: Players, Research by webmaster
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Maureen has sent around a link to an epidemiological survey of residents living near BS-farms in Ohio. It was done by Khuder et al. and reported last year in Archives of Environmental & Occupational Health 62:5, 2007. A .pdf version is here: Link

This study is pretty poorly done and the authors acknowledge a lot of its shortcomings, but the flaws tend to understate the findings. It’s an important report and I’ll be analyzing it in more detail over at the Mother Site later this week. I raise it here as another example of how the BSers lie when they claim there is no evidence that BS is not safe.

Almost hidden in Khuder’s data (Table 3) is an observation I found shocking. Of 437 exposed people (living within 1 mile of a BS field) who responded to the survey, 5 reported multiple sclerosis. None of 176 unexposed responders reported MS.

The incidence of MS in the exposed group is 14x higher than the normal US population.

This situation is reminiscent of a situation in the late 1980’s when Bob Waters, a former SF 49ers quarterback came down with another neurological disease, ALS - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease. Waters found out that two of his teammates from the 49ers 1964 season also had ALS. The prevalence of ALS in the population is far, far less than MS (50 per 100,000 v. 1171 per 100,000), and the odds of three members of a group of about 70 people having ALS are “astronomically small.” The only suspicious factor anyone could find was that 49ers practice field had been sludged with Milorganite.

Of course Milorganite is produced by Milwaukee. So on Feb. 18, 1987 Milwaukee’s mayor, Henry Maier, obviously fearing a lawsuit, authorized an investigation of Waters’ claims. The investigation team was led by Henry Goldberg, medical director of the Milwaukee Industrial Clinics. THE NEXT DAY Goldberg held a press conference to announce their conclusions that Miloganite was not the problem.

You can draw your own conclusions. Mine is that someone needs to step in here and carry out proper, long-term studies to see if neurological diseases and other diseases/disorders are being caused, spread, or exacerbated by BS. And if anybody fakes any data or intentionally mis-characterizes data and thereby contributes in any way to another person contracting a disease from BS, then the person faking the data ought to do some hard time in lock-up.

– GG

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