food 5.foo.1.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. High concentrations of a chemical used in the production of well-known nonstick surfaces have turned up in people living near a Teflon-manufacturing plant in West Virginia. The data emerge from the first government-sponsored epidemiological study of the chemical, known both as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and C-8. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise

Since 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency has been investigating potential risks of this very persistent compound. Once in the environment, it doesn't appear to break down—ever. Trace amounts have shown up in the blood of most U.S. residents tested, although EPA has yet to identify the source. The agency has posted information on its Web site indicating that "PFOA can cause developmental and other adverse effects in laboratory animals," including cancer. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise

One source of PFOA in blood that DuPont researchers have all but ruled out is Teflon-coated cookware. In a new study, researchers found that PFOA residues were "not detected in over 40 extraction tests on nonstick cookware under test conditions simulating cooking and prolonged food or consumer contact." That same study, in the June 1 Environmental Science & Technology, did find leaching of PFOA from certain stain-guard treatments of carpeting and upholstery, suggesting that some consumer products might be notable environmental sources of the chemical.

The new study measured blood concentrations of PFOA in 326 people from four communities in southeastern Ohio, across the river from DuPont's Teflon-making Washington (W.Va.) Works facility. Average blood concentrations of PFOA in the communities ranged from 298 to 369 parts per billion (ppb). These amounts are more than 60 times those found in most people, notes study leader Edward A. Emmett, a physician and toxicologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. In general, the new study by Emmett's team found that PFOA concentrations in an individual's blood tended to be about 105 times that in the water that the person had been drinking.

Owing to the limited number of people examined for the study, the researchers made no effort to look for a possible elevation in rates of cancer or birth defects among the study volunteers, Emmett says. However, his team did look for, and failed to find, an increased incidence of liver, kidney, or thyroid disease. Finding no indication of liver disease in these people "may be somewhat comforting" because lab rats treated with PFOA develop liver toxicity before developing liver tumors.

Water wells serving all four communities are contaminated with PFOA from the Teflon plant, notes EPA. Indeed, the agency possesses data from DuPont indicating PFOA contamination for more than 2 decades in the water supplies serving several West Virginia and Ohio communities. Although two of the Ohio communities are close enough to the plant to be affected by air emissions of the chemical, if they occur, blood concentrations of PFOA were actually a bit higher in people from the more-distant communities. This observation argues strongly "that the major source of the C-8 [PFOA] in the residents' bodies is the contaminated water," Emmett says. Further strengthening that conclusion, his team found that people who regularly drank bottled, cistern, or spring water had a median blood concentration of only 55 ppb PFOA in their blood.

At an Aug. 15 town hall meeting, Emmett told residents of the four Ohio communities: "I urge parents within the study area to consider taking appropriate measures to reduce C-8 levels in their children's blood," such as by switching to bottled water for all drinking, cooking, and tooth brushing. Owing to the pollutant's capability of causing problems such as birth abnormalities in lab animals, Emmett advised "the same precaution for pregnant women and women of child-bearing age who may wish to become pregnant."

The Little Hocking (Ohio) Water Association provides tap water to an Ohio water district including most of the people who participated in Emmett's study for more than a year. This water association had asked DuPont to provide PFOA-free water to people living near the Teflon plant, notes Robert L. Griffin, general manager of the water association. The Teflon maker refused to do so, he says, until just hours before Emmett reported his team's new PFOA data to the four communities with residents in the study.

DuPont has pledged to supply coupons for free bottled water to the 4,300 Ohio households that Griffin's company serves. Griffin says DuPont has agreed to supply this water—for drinking and cooking only—until the Teflon maker builds a water-treatment facility that can filter PFOA from the local drinking water.
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DuPont has agreed to buy bottled water for some 12,000 residents whose tap water is contaminated with a pollutant from the company's Teflon-making factory.

Water worries

The Little Hocking water district and five others nearby—serving some 80,000 people—have turned up PFOA groundwater pollution linked to DuPont's Teflon operations. Little Hocking's 12,000 customers have the most-polluted tap water and are the only ones now slated to get the bottled-water coupons.

In a report to the company's customers, last year, Griffin reported that his water association had "learned... [that] DuPont, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, established a 'community exposure guideline' for C-8 of 1 ppb." EPA has also cited that internal-company guideline. Currently, no state or federal limit exists for the pollutant, Griffin notes, although West Virginia has published a recommended guideline for PFOA in water of 150 ppb. Although PFOA contamination from the Teflon-manufacturing plant affecting the other five water districts do not exceed 1 ppb, Griffin says that Little Hocking tap water "has been as high as 7.2 ppb." His company decommissioned one well because it was producing water with 18.6 ppb, and Griffin told Science News Online that a known plume of PFOA in groundwater could eventually taint the district's wells with significantly higher concentrations of the chemical.

EPA has charged DuPont with knowing about its PFOA-water-pollution problem for decades but neglecting to report it to EPA. The company has argued that it had no legal obligation to do so. Last year, EPA charged that DuPont's failure to report the PFOA pollution of water outside its plant and substantial concentrations of the Teflon chemical in workers' blood violated the Toxic Substances Control Act (SN: 7/31/04, p. 78).

This past Feb. 28, a judge approved a $107.6 million settlement of a 3-year-old class action suit against DuPont by residents near the Washington Works over the water pollution. As part of that accord, the company agreed to build "state-of-the-art water treatment systems" for the water districts—including Little Hocking.

DuPont also pledged to provide the same technology or its equivalent to residents in the affected communities who rely on private wells as their sole source of drinking water. The settlement also will fund an independent study to see whether PFOA is toxic to people and to conduct long-term health monitoring of residents that had received water from the six tainted community-water systems.

Data to date

A person's body readily absorbs PFOA but doesn't readily excrete it, says Tim Kropp, a toxicologist with the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group that has been unearthing documents on the health effects and environmental fate of nonstick chemicals. PFOA's half-life in the body is 4.4 years. What that means, Kropp says, is that even if no additional PFOA exposure occurred, the body "would take about 2 decades to get rid of about 99 percent of it."

In Emmett's study, among people living near the DuPont plant but not working there, young children and older adults tended to have the highest body burdens of the pollutant. For instance, although the median PFOA concentrations was 320 ppb in women and 346 ppb in men, the median among children under 6 was around 500 ppb, and concentrations in some 25 percent of them exceeded 800 ppb. Similarly, the median for people over 60 was 500 ppb but many had blood concentrations "in the thousands," Emmett says. That's bad news, he said at the town hall meeting in Ohio, because these are the most physically vulnerable segments of society.

Another apparent at-risk group: people who eat lots of homegrown produce. Emmett's team found that among Little Hocking water users, those who ate no homegrown fruits and vegetables had median PFOA concentrations of 295 ppb. However, those eating up to 20 servings per week of garden produce had median concentrations of 420 ppb, and the value climbed to 469 ppb for those who ate even more home-grown fruits and veggies.

Whatever the reason for this association, he notes, from a public health standpoint, it's worrisome. That's because physicians and nutritionists typically urge people—especially children and the elderly—to eat plenty of fruits and vegetables.

Concludes Emmett, West Virginia's "so-called 'safe level' of C-8 of 150 ppb in water may need revision" in light of the high concentrations of this pollutant showing up in people exposed to concentrations of only 2 to 7 ppb. With the body's accumulation of the pollutant witnessed in this study, one might expect ingestion of water tainted with 150 ppb PFOA to result in blood concentrations of around 15,000 ppb, says Emmett, "and we simply don't know those levels are safe." Indeed, he adds, his study can't confirm that even the much-lower concentrations seen in Little Hocking residents are safe.

"This study shows that workers are not the only population at risk from PFOA," says Jane Houlihan, who is vice president for research at the Environmental Working Group. "Even trace amounts in water pose risks to residential communities—especially their children and seniors."

Dupont: little concern

In a statement issued by DuPont, its Washington Works manager Bill Hopkins said: "We want to provide residents of the Little Hocking community with the same assurance we have given our own employees—that based on research of DuPont and [others], no human health effects are known to be caused by exposure to PFOA." Hopkins acknowledged in the statement that Emmett's study "raises important questions" about the long-term implications of these exposures. However, he said that DuPont is confident that such issues will be resolved by an independent science panel that was created earlier this year as part of the lawsuit that it settled with area residents.

In February, the company began its own health study of residents near the Teflon factory, probing for signs of any PFOA-triggered disease.http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise

It complements a company study of workers already under way at the Washington Works facility. The first wave of findings from the workers study, reported by the company in January, found no hint of PFOA-related liver disease or cancer. The only apparent adverse impact: a 10 percent elevation in total cholesterol (mostly due to a rise in the so-called bad, low-density lipoprotein fraction) and a rise in blood triglycerides. Both of these changes were seen only in very heavily exposed individuals, people with blood concentrations of PFOA greater than 1,000 ppb.

Finally, DuPont notes that PFOA exposure to community residents should begin falling. The company says it has cut PFOA releases from its Washington Works by 98 percent over the past 6 years and is "aggressively installing" the water-treatment facilities it promised as part of the class-action settlement earlier this year. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

pfa 4.pfa.00010002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Mechanicsburg man seeks PFA against former cop
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
BY MATT MILLER
Of Our Cumberland County Bureau

Former Harrisburg police officer Leslie Brown's ex-lover testified Tuesday that the ex-cop stalked him for months after he ended their affair last January.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US

Brown, who resigned from the police force in October, flattened tires on his vehicles and committed petty vandalism at his Mechanicsburg home, William T. Holloway told Cumberland County Judge Kevin A. Hess during a hearing on his request for a protection from abuse order.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US

Brown drove past his house hundreds of times, left threatening messages and once vomited on his back door, Holloway said.

Holloway presented surveillance photographs and testimony from two neighbors who said Brown had been on his property, even though he said he repeatedly told her to stay away.

Some photos showed Brown, 39, of Hampden Twp., in her police uniform.

Brown denied harassing Holloway. She admitted leaving him notes, sometimes asking to renew their romance, but insisted her contacts were benign.

Hess didn't believe her.

"This is bizarre behavior that would cause fear in any normal person," the judge said.

Hess granted the PFA, barring Brown from having contact with Holloway for three years.

If she violates the order, she could go to jail.

Holloway, 55, who is separated from his wife, said he sought a PFA on the advice of Harrisburg police.

Holloway said he began filing complaints with Mechanicsburg police last spring about the alleged harassment.

Harrisburg police became insistent about him securing a PFA when Brown, a 13-year veteran of the city force, resigned Oct. 23, Holloway said.

"I was told ... that I should be watching my back," he said.

Holloway said Brown left him phone or text messages -- including one that read "You better hide" -- and repeatedly called and hung up.

Under questioning by Brown's attorney, Jacob Jividen, Holloway conceded he had no proof Brown was behind some of the vandalism.

But Holloway said she kept harassing him after he sought the PFA, even though his PFA petition triggered a temporary order barring contact.

He said that within the last few days he received an unsigned note that read, "I still love you," that he believes was from Brown.

Brown, who works as a hospital medical technician, claimed that after their break-up, Holloway deliberately showed up at places she frequented.

"Did you ever make any threats to [Holloway's] life or safety?" Jividen asked.

"No," Brown said.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US

Hess, however, said he concluded that Brown is "in total denial of the situation."

MATT MILLER: 249-2006 or mmiller@patriot-news.com

©2009 Patriot-News
© 2009 PennLive.com All Rights Reserved. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

sleep 9.sle.009 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

During a 5-month stint on the space station Mir in 1997, U.S. astronaut Jerry M. Linenger and his two Russian counterparts confronted a severe fire, failures of the oxygen generator and communications systems, and a near-collision with a resupply ship. As if that weren't enough, Linenger also found himself wrestling with his own biology: After 3 months in space, his body's clock apparently lost its daily rhythm.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .

One of the worst aspects of this circadian setback was that it severely disrupted Linenger's sleep, according to a new report. The scientists suspect that something functioned differently in Linenger's brain area that regulates cycles of sleep, wakefulness, alertness, temperature, and brain chemistry.

Linenger's experience provides the longest study to date of circadian rhythms in space. In the future, astronauts taking extended space trips could be prone to comparable changes that interfere with sleep and task performance, says psychologist Timothy H. Monk of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who directed the investigation.

While orbiting Earth every 2 hours aboard Mir, Linenger recorded data on himself for three blocks of time: days 37 to 50, days 79 to 91, and days 110 to 122. During these periods, Linenger took his oral temperature and rated his sense of alertness at the same five times during each 24-hour cycle. He also went to bed and arose at regular times in the cycle and recorded the amount and quality of his sleep.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

As on Earth, Linenger's temperature declined as he fell asleep and rose toward the end of his slumber�at least for the first 91 days in space. During that time, the astronaut also reported sleeping well and staying alert while awake. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

The situation later changed, however. In the third time block, Linenger displayed no daily cycle of temperature fluctuations. His body temperature remained nearly constant whether he slept or was awake. Moreover, he often didn't feel sleepy at his regular bedtime and felt as if he was losing track of each 24-hour day. His sleep time declined, and he awoke much more often than he had earlier in the flight.

Monk and his coauthors, including Linenger, present their results in the November/December Psychosomatic Medicine.

Sleep loss and circadian disturbances also occurred among five astronauts who traveled for either 10 days or 16 days on the Space Shuttle in 1998, according to a report in the November American Journal of Physiology. Astronauts' body temperature and secretion of the stress hormone cortisol stopped showing 24-hour cycles during the space flights, reports a team led by Charles A. Czeisler of Harvard Medical School in Boston. The shortened sleep periods included a marked decline in rapid-eye-movement sleep, which is associated with dreaming.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

The crew members scored lower on attention and thinking tests in space than they had on Earth. It's unclear whether either sleep loss or circadian changes caused these declines�and Linenger's on Mir�Czeisler says.

"We may need to find ways to trick the circadian pacemaker into maintaining a 24-hour cycle when removed from Earth's time cues on long space missions," Monk says.

results 9.res.000200 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Anthropologists have long believed that there was a protracted lag between when humans started domesticating cattle for food—about 9,000 years ago—and when they managed to harness the animals to plows and collect their milk. “It’s one thing to keep an animal in a corral and quite another thing to get near enough to milk it,” says University of Bristol chemist Richard Evershed. To get a fix on when the second stage occurred, Evershed pulverized tiny pieces of 2,200 pottery fragments from sites in the Near East to see if they contained traces of dairy fats. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US




His results, published in August in Nature [subscription required], hint not only that people made the dairy leap just as soon as they began domesticating herd animals, but that these early “ranchers” were even processing milk and storing it. The study may also help geneticists solve the mystery of where and when people evolved the ability to digest the milk sugar lactose.http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US




To this day, most adults around the world can’t easily digest milk, but those who can may be the progeny of populations in the Near East and southeastern Europe, where Evershed finds the earliest evidence of stored milk. “It’s a very interesting study. Put the two maps on top of each other and you get a coherent pattern,” says geneticist Anders Götherström of Uppsala University in Sweden.

coral 44.cor.222991 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Creating protected marine areas in one part of the Caribbean won't replenish distant coral reefs in the region, according to genetic research. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com

Because free-swimming coral larvae don't appear to spread far from their points of origin, protected "coral gardens" at intervals of more than 100 kilometers would be too far apart to repopulate all depleted reefs in the region in our lifetimes, says Steve Palumbi of Stanford University.

"Coral gardens will need to be on every major island," he says.

He and Steven Vollmer of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama studied the DNA in 262 samples of staghorn coral from the Bahamas to Panama and the Yucatán peninsula to Curaçao. They judged the corals' relatedness by the degree of genetic similarity among the samples. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com





They found that related corals live in "local villages" that are separated by no more than 100 km and sometimes as little as 2 km. The genetic differences among villages indicate that larvae produced in one locale rarely become established in another, the researchers report. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com

Establishing "more conservation [areas] on smaller scales would probably do you more good than ... protecting one large location," Vollmer concludes.

Palumbi and Vollmer are now examining their data in the context of ocean-circulation patterns to understand how currents influence coral genetics. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

stern 55.ste.0001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Alan Stern is an astronomer, space scientist, and had a stint at NASA HQ as Associate Administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. While he was there he was appalled when he saw cost overruns eating away at various missions, and the collateral damage they were causing other missions. He wound up resigning when he realized he couldn’t do what he was tasked to do (including controlling costs), because he was countermanded by people higher up in the NASA pecking order.http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US

Alan wrote a scathing editorial in the New York Times today, and I must admit I find very little if anything in it that I disagree with. While I was a contractor for NASA, and all the time I have worked with NASA projects, I heard stories of missions that ran hugely over budget, and how that impacted other missions (including ones I worked with, so I saw a lot of cutbacks take their toll). http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US NASA has a finite budget, so when one mission runs over cost, that money has to come from other missions.

What NASA needs is oversight, more accountability, and people in its management structure willing to take responsibility for these overruns. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US

Ironically, what it also needs is more money. The basic fact is that getting to space is hard, takes a long time to plan out, and costs a lot of cash. Of course, in general I think this is money well spent, and I will argue that vehemently, and so will others. What NASA does is important, and the money we spend we get back multiplied many times over. But that doesn’t mean NASA should get a wheelbarrow full of million dollar bills and a wink of the eye to acquiesce spending money as it sees fit.

With more money — and of course with the money it gets now, less than 1% of the national budget — comes responsibility. NASA does great things, fantastic things… and it can be doing far, far grander work. But it will take quite a bit of self-inspection and change in the status quo to get it done. Mike Griffin, the current NASA Administrator, will almost certainly be on his way out next year. I hope the Obama Administration will find someone to step in who has the vision, the plan, and the management know-how needed to get NASA flying straight. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

game 663.gam.00023 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com/. Recent investigations of genetic variation in living populations have suggested that the

numbers of Stone Age people rose sharply sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Better clues to the timing and extent of ancient population shifts may reside among the fossil

bones of tortoises, hares, and other small game that supplemented Stone Age diets.

"Many archaeologists may not have appreciated the unique potential of small-game data for

examining when and where [ancient population] increases took place," say anthropologist Mary

C. Stiner of the University of Arizona in Tucson and her coworkers.

The proportion of small game in the human diet and the number of species of these animals

captured varied little from 200,000 to 9,000 years ago, Stiner's team reports. In contrast, a dramatic

change in the type of small game eaten toward the end of that period reflected sharp

growth of the human population, the researchers find.

For much of the Stone Age, inhabitants of coastal sites in Italy and Israel sought shellfish,

tortoises, and other easy-to-capture small game to supplement the large gazelle-like creatures

they also hunted. Between about 36,000 and 26,000 years ago, small-game preferences at these

locations shifted to much swifter prey, such as partridges and hares.

Earlier Stone Age folk probably lived in small, widely separated groups that could regularly

eat slow-footed or immobile prey without wiping them out, according to Stiner's team.

The ensuing culinary shift to speedier prey followed declines in numbers of easy-to-catch

animals due to pressure from a budding human population, in their view. The challenges of

hunting small, elusive animals encouraged the development of snares, nets, and other implements

(SN: 5/23/98, p. 331: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/5_23_98/bob1.htm).

People gained consistent access to more meat, the scientists theorize. Unlike slower prey,

birds and hares have short breeding cycles that enable them to maintain their numbers in the face

of intensive hunting. A meatier diet, in turn, improved childhood nutrition and instigated even

steeper human-population growth, Stiner's team contends in the February Current Anthropology.

The researchers analyzed animal remains excavated at five Italian rock shelters and a rock

shelter and a cave site in Israel. Radiocarbon dates range from 110,000 to 9,000 years ago for

the Italian fossil finds and from 200,000 to 11,000 years ago for the Israeli specimens.

Mathematical simulations allowed the investigators to estimate the effects of modest and intensive

hunting, over a 200-year span, on modern species of tortoises, hares, and partridges.

The evidence of a shift to swift prey in the late Stone Age supports an earlier proposal that

an expansion of food sources in western Asia at that time set the stage for population growth,

agriculture, and livestock raising. In the same issue of Current Anthropology, that theory's originator,

anthropologist Kent V. Flannery of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, remarks that

scientists need to examine slow and quick prey at other ancient human sites.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire