Environmental News Network (ENN) news

For days now, a swollen Mississippi River has menacingly roamed far from its banks, devouring large swatches of picturesque river towns and some of the Midwest`s best farmlands. While countless news organizations chronicle both the courage of those fighting `Big Muddy`s` assault and the anguish of those wounded by it, another battle is about to begin. This battle will go all but unseen, for the struggle will be one of individual households against mold, mold that is both toxic and dangerous, tho

In a paper published by the leading scientific journal Nature, scientists at the Consortium for Conservation Medicine (CCM) Wildlife Trust New York, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), Columbia University (New York) and the University of Georgia have announced a major breakthrough in the understanding of what causes diseases like HIV/AIDS and SARS to emerge, and how to further predict and prevent future devastating pandemics by plotting a global map of `Emerging Disease Hotspots.`

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New evidence blames traffic-related pollution for increasing the risk of allergy and atopic diseases among children by more than fifty percent. What`s more, the closer children live to roads, the higher their risk. `[Children] living very close to a major road are likely to be exposed not only to a higher amount of traffic-derived particles and gases but also to a more freshly emitted aerosols which may be more toxic,` wrote lead author of the research, Joachim Heinrich, Ph.D., of the German Res

In human fat tissues, bisphenol A (BPA) suppresses levels of a key hormone, adiponectin, that protects people from heart attacks and Type II diabetes. These results implicate BPA as a potential cause of metabolic syndrome, one of the most serious and costly public health problems in the US.

Most Americans have levels of BPA within their serum within the range of concentrations sufficient to suppress adiponectin in these experiments. The BPA effect on adiponectin disappears at higher levels.<