Latest News Clips 2017.09.04

                      

1.      A Sea of Health and Environmental Hazards in Houston’s Floodwaters

The New York Times   AUG. 31, 2017

 

Navigating floodwaters brought by Harvey on Tuesday in Houston. CreditDavid J. Phillip/Associated Press

Officials in Houston are just beginning to grapple with the health and environmental risks that lurk in the waters dumped by Hurricane Harvey, a stew of toxic chemicals, sewage, debris and waste that still floods much of the city.

Flooded sewers are stoking fears of cholera, typhoid and other infectious diseases. Runoff from the city’s sprawling petroleum and chemicals complex contains any

number of hazardous compounds. Lead, arsenic and other toxic and carcinogenic elements may be leaching from some two dozen Superfund sites in the Houston area.

Porfirio Villarreal, a spokesman for the Houston Health Department, said the hazards of the water enveloping the city were self-evident.

“There’s no need to test it,” he said. “It’s contaminated. There’s millions of contaminants.”

He said health officials were urging people to stay out of the water if they could, although it is already too late for tens of thousands.

“We’re telling people to avoid the floodwater as much as possible. Don’t let your children play in it. And if you do touch it, wash it off,” Mr. Villarreal said. “Remember, this is going to go on for weeks.”

Flooding always brings the danger of contamination and disease, though epidemics from floods in the United States have been rare. This inundation, which put nearly 30 percent of the nation’s fourth-largest city underwater, will pose enormous problems, both immediately and when the waters finally recede.

Dr. David Persse, Houston’s director of Emergency Medical Services, said officials were monitoring the drinking water system and the sewer system, both of which he said were intact so far. But hundreds of thousands of people across the 38 Texas counties affected by Hurricane Harvey use private wells, according to an estimate by Louisiana State University researchers, and those people must fend for themselves.

“Well water is at risk for being contaminated,” Dr. Persse said, “and the well owner is really the one who is responsible. In the City of Houston, we have folks that use well water but we strongly recommend against it — and this will sound awful — we don’t take responsibility for it.”

Harris County, home to Houston, hosts more than two dozen current and former toxic waste sites designated under the federal Superfund program. The sites contain what the Environmental Protection Agency calls legacy contamination: lead, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls, benzene and other toxic and carcinogenic compounds from industrial activities many years ago.

Kathy Blueford-Daniels grew up just a block away from one of those sites, a wood-treating facility that used cancer-causing creosote and other toxins. As a young girl, she would try to avoid the plant and the pungent, oil-like goo that lined the ditches around it.

Now 60, Ms. Blueford-Daniels still lives on the same block, in Houston’s Fifth Ward. So when Harvey’s rains started to pour into her neighborhood, she immediately began to wonder what the rising waters would carry off the old industrial property.

“I wasn’t so fearful of the storm. But I’m scared of that site,” she said. “I thought: This is going to be a travesty. The contamination could be going anywhere.”

An E.P.A. spokesman, David Gray, said in a statement that the agency would inspect two flooded Superfund sites in Corpus Christi, but he did not specify which ones or say whether additional sites elsewhere in Texas would be checked.

Houston also lies at the center of the nation’s oil and chemical industry, its bustling shipping channel home to almost 500 industrial sites. Damaged refineries and other oil facilities have already released more than two million pounds of hazardous substances into the air this week, including nitrogen oxide as well as benzene and other volatile organic compounds, according to a tally by the Environmental Defense Fund of company filings to Texas state environmental regulators.

2.      Trump and Abe vow to increase pressure after North Korea fires missile over Japan

Leaders agreed to call for an emergency meeting of the UN security council to discuss the launch

The Guardian   in Tokyo  29 August 2017

 

Donald Trump and Shinzo Abe have vowed to increase pressure on North Korea after the regime launched a missile over Japan on Tuesday morning.

The Japanese prime minister denounced the launch as an “unprecedented and grave threat” to the country’s security. In a 40-minute phone call with the US president they agreed to call for an emergency meeting of the UN security council to discuss the situation.

Officials in South Korea said the missile may have flown further than any other tested by North Korea. The test, one of the most provocative ever from the reclusive state, sent a clear message to Washington just weeks after Kim Jong-un threatened to target the US Pacific territory of Guam with similar intermediate-range missiles.

It also demonstrated the regime’s willingness to raise the diplomatic stakes by sending a missile directly over Japanese territory. Pyongyang has tested more powerful intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) this year, but Tuesday’s launch followed a much flatter trajectory than those tests.

Trump said the US was “100% with Japan” and repeated his strong commitment to the defence of Japan, Abe said shortly after the call.

“The outrageous act of firing a missile over our country is an unprecedented, serious and grave threat and greatly damages regional peace and security,” Abe told reporters in Tokyo, adding that his government had protested to Pyongyang via the Japanese embassy in Beijing.

The missile was the third fired by North Korea to have passed over Japanese territory. The first was in 1998 and the second in 2009, although Pyongyang claims they were satellites.

Abe said Japan would “strongly call for increased pressure on North Korea in cooperation with the international community” via the security council.

The missile, thought to be a new intermediate-range Hwasong-12, flew over Hokkaido and landed in the Pacific about 733 miles (1,180km) east of the northern Japanese island, South Korean and Japanese officials said.

The Hwasong-12 is the same type of missile North Korea recently threatened to launch towards Guam.

China called for restraint and warned that the situation on the Korean peninsular had reached “a tipping point approaching a crisis”.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily press briefing in Beijing: “Think hard about it, who do you think should take the blame, if China is urging all parties to calm down while one party holds constant military exercises … and the other is constantly launching missiles?”

Japan’s J-Alert warning system advised people across a large area of northern Japan to seek shelter. Japan’s self-defence forces did not attempt to shoot down the missile and there were no reports of damage from falling debris.

The public broadcaster NHK said the missile had been launched from a site near the North Korean capital, Pyongyang and passed over a sparsely populated area of Hokkaido just after 6am local time (10pm Monday British summer time). It broke into three parts and landed in the sea.

Seoul’s joint chiefs of staff (JCS) said the missile travelled about 2,700km and reached a maximum height of 550km.

The JCS said it was analysing the launch with the US and that South Korea’s military had strengthened its monitoring and preparation in case of further actions from North Korea.

Abe said his government was trying to establish the details of the launch and was doing everything possible to ensure the safety of the Japanese people.

Tuesday’s launch may have been a show of defiance towards military drills involving US and South Korean troops as well as a smaller number of personnel from other countries.

The drills have coincided with a dramatic rise in tensions on the Korean peninsula after North Korea’s test launch of two ICBMs and its threat to target seas off the coast of the Guam.

Seoul and Washington say their drills are an opportunity for the allies to improve their defensive capabilities but Pyongyang routinely denounces them as a dress rehearsal for war against North Korea.

3.      Does Cooking Boost Nutrients in Tomatoes and Spinach?

The New York Times        SEPT. 1, 2017

  

CreditTony Cenicola/The New York Times

Q. Is it true tomatoes and spinach release more of their nutrients when they’ve been cooked?

A. It’s true for some nutrients, but not for others.

Water-soluble vitamins like vitamin C and the B vitamins, which include folate, leach out of vegetables if you boil them, but some will be retained in the stock, so “use it if you’re making soup,” said Helen Rasmussen, a senior research dietitian at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. Vitamin levels are reduced the longer you expose them to heat; “they’re just not stable,” she said.

Levels of other nutrients, however, may increase. One study found that while cooking decreased the amount of vitamin C in tomatoes, the cooking process increased levels of antioxidants that could be absorbed by the body, including levels of lycopene, the carotenoid plant pigment that helps protect the body from free radical damage. “You might be able to get more lycopene out because the heat starts to break down the cell matrix and that actually allows some of the tied-up carotenoids to be released from the cell walls,” Dr. Rasmussen said.

Raw spinach provides a lot of fiber, but cooked spinach may provide more beta carotene: One study found that three times as much beta carotene — an antioxidant that’s a form of vitamin A — was absorbed from cooked spinach compared with raw spinach.

 “There are pluses and minuses with both ways of preparing food,” Dr. Rasmussen said. Since spinach loses so much volume when it’s cooked, a cup of cooked spinach contains a lot more of the leafy vegetable, which may more than make up for the loss of water-soluble vitamins.

Generally speaking, boiling has the harshest effect on heat-sensitive nutrients. Stir-frying or sautéing retains more nutrients than boiling, but if you want to retain the nutrients, steaming and microwaving vegetables may be the optimal cooking methods.