Life expectancy is falling in the US as the impact of pollutants on cancer in children, and untreatable diseases spread from industrially farrmed food into the population. As the impact of pollutants on childhood health is better understood experts warn that cancers, asthma and obesity have become normal characteristics of the population. Pollution is directly killing over 20 million people a year, wiping out the equivalent of a nation like Australia or a US state like Florida or New York, every year. The impact of industrial use of antibiotics in food production means that untreatable diseases are being transmitted into the population through the food chain.
A US-UK trade deal threatens to export the horrors of US corporate livestock production
Around 75% of the antibiotics used in the US are fed to farm animals. Our city is under siege, and we are knocking down our own defences. The EU and the UK are no paragons. The Guardian has revealed that both pork and chicken sold here are infected with resistant superbugs.
The Precautionary Principle Asks “How Much Harm Is Avoidable?” Rather Than “How Much Harm Is Acceptable?”
In 1980, breast milk in the US was so contaminated with DDT, PCBs and other industrial poisons. If it were cow’s milk, it would be banned. After two decades of failed “chemical regulation,” babies everywhere in the world are drinking industrial toxicants in breast milk. In 2005 umbilical cord blood from newborns showed that babies are now “pre-polluted” with 200 industrial compounds. In the US, children’s health is deteriorating. childhood cancers has risen 27% since 1974; childhood asthma, obesity, learning and behaviour problems doubled. Industrial poisons have spread worldwide because regulators have relied on a quantitative risk assessment to determine which chemical releases are “safe.” But “safe” amounts of 80,000 chemicals have contaminated the entire planet, so today noone is safe.
Junk Planet: Is Earth the Largest Garbage Dump in the Universe?
Approximately 19 million premature deaths occur annually as a result of the way societies use natural resources and impact the environment to support production and consumption. This will give you a reasonably comprehensive summary of the types of garbage being generated (focusing particularly on those that are less well known), the locations into which the garbage is being dumped and some indication of what is being done about it and what you can do too.
Desperate Need to Halt ‘World’s Largest Killer’ — PollutionAnalyses impacts on human health and ecosystems brought on by air, land, freshwater, marine, chemical and waste pollution. “None of us is now safe, so now all of us have to act. The health effects are stark, with air pollution alone killing some 6.5 million annually, affecting mostly poor and vulnerable people.”
Deposit schemes reduce drink containers in the ocean by 40%Some eight million metric tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean every year. There has been a push to get rid of plastic straws, and even Queen Elizabeth II has banned single use plastics from Royal Estates. How effective is a cash for containers program? While there is evidence that container deposits increase return rates and decrease litter, until now there has been no study asking whether they also reduce the sources of debris entering the oceans.
The image in this story came from Greenpeace Philippines.
http://cnnphilippines.com/news/2017/05/12/dead-whale-cavite.html