New research on loss of species indicates that extinctions are occurring now at a rate 100 to 1000 times as fast as "natural background" rates of extinction. (Stuart Pimm, "Seeds of Our Own Destruction", New Scientist, April 8,
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Somewhere between 2.6 and 3.8 million US men and women served in Vietnam during the years 1965 through 1971, the years when chemical herbicides were being used to denude the jungle and destroy enemy crops. Alongside the
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Can reliance on the marketplace by itself control pollution? Here we examine a case study — the dry cleaning industry. There is nothing dry about dry cleaning. All materials processed by dry cleaners are soaked in toxic
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The worldwide scientific community has reached consensus that global warming is inevitable if humans continue to dump "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere at anything like present rates. Greenhouse gases include carbon
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The Birth Defects Monitoring Program (BDMP) is a US government effort to monitor birth defects using data collected when newborn infants are discharged from hospital. The BDMP was initiated by the federal Centers for Disease
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The immune system is a complex set of specialised cells and organs that defends the body against attack. When it functions properly, the immune system fights off diseases caused by bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites and cancer
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Environmental racism is the selective exposure of racial subgroups to dangerous toxins. It happens all the time. The clearest example is lead. For at least 40 years, the children of blacks and Hispanics in the USA have
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The New York Times recently described a dark trend. In the US, and overseas, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the people in the middle are becoming less and less secure about their future. And
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The US National Cancer Advisory Board (NCAB), an official body of the National Cancer Institute, in September issued a stinging indictment of the nation's cancer programs. Furthermore, for the first time in memory the
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An internal memorandum by an official of the US Environmental Protection Agency has accused EPA of conducting a "fraudulent" criminal investigation of Monsanto, the St Louis chemical corporation. The 30-page
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For three years, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been reassessing the toxicity of dioxin and other dioxin-like chemicals, including dibenzofurans and some PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). PCBs are
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There are now more breast cancers diagnosed in the US each year (181,000) than any other cancer, and all but 1000 of these occur in the female half of the population. There are a few other cancers that occur almost as often