Pollution and Extinction
Ecology affected (Fish, Frogs, Trees, Deforestation, Rivers, Oceans and Coral reefs),
Industrial waste products released (Mercury, Cyanide, Dioxins, Cadmium, Pesticides, Atrazine (weed killer), antibotics, steroids, hormones, bacteria, sulfur dioxide, arsenic, irradiation [Cobalt 60], DDT, Ammonium perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) or C-8)
The year 1999 through 2001
Expert on fish deaths to speak.
Study finds cause of haze at Grand Canyon.
Panel backs tigher reins over arsenic in water.
Deformities in frogs may be due to parasites
Wariness Over Canned Tuna
Weird pollution turns surf Mecca into ghost town

Cyanide spill endangers river.
Agencies issue warning about mercury levels in fish
Study finds decades of amphibian decline
Report: Environment more at risk than ever
Oceanic Extinctions
Toxins tainting Europe's fish, scientists warn

Dying frogs, coral reefs cited as Signs of a sick Earth
Butter can be used to measure pollutants


• 3/1/1999 - Expert on fish deaths to speak.
      JoAnn Burkholder, a North Carolina State University botanist and an expert on single-celled organisms blamed the deaths of more than 1 billion fish along the Atlantic Coast is giving free public lectures, titled "The Impacts of the Toxic Pfiesteria Complex on Fish and Human Health."    She has discovered a toxic version of the seaborne micro-organisms a decade ago.    Experts blame pollution and say exposure can cause sores, short-term memory loss, breathing difficulties and other symptons in people.
• 3/24/1999 - Study finds cause of haze at Grand Canyon.
      Phoenix, Az. -- A coal-fired power plant 75 miles from the Grand Canyon is the largest single source of emissions that cause the hazy view at the national landmark, a federal study says.    But the biggest culprit is the emissions from cars and industrial plants in southern California that combine with dust and other material to waft over the entire Colorado River plateau, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.    The study confirms what conservation groups have long contended, that the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nev., is emitting sulfur dioxide, which combined with other materials contributes to the haze.
• 3/24/1999 - Panel backs tigher reins over arsenic in water.
      The National Academy of Scientists recommended more stringent controls on arsenic in drinking water, saying the Environmental Protection Agency's standard is far too high and may expose many people to unacceptable risks of cancer.    The EPA agreed with the findings, and officials said a new arsenic standard for drinking water would be proposed by January, with a final standard likely in 2000.
• 4/30/1999 - Deformities in frogs may be due to parasites by The Associated Press.
      Washington -- A mysterious ailment that causes frogs to grow extra, deformed legs and touched off environmental concerns may be the result of a tiny worm parasite, not ozone depletion or pesticides, new studies say.    Defects found in frogs throughout the Western United States may be caused by a trematode, a simple parasitic flatworm, with a complex life cycle that includes infecting the developing legs of tadpoles, said Stanley Sessions of Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y.    "Every single frog I have looked at with extra legs, ..., all have these cysts around the deformity."    Another scientist infected frogs with the worms and the tadpoles acquired deformed legs upon adulthood.
      Researchers worldwide have noted for years that many species of frogs are in decline, particularly in the Northern and Western United States, Central America and Australia.
• 5/17/1999 - Wariness Over Canned Tuna by Nancy Beth Jackson, The New York Times.
      Based on a sampling of mercury levels in canned tuna, a coalition of environmental and health care groups has written a report urging pregnant women to avoid the fish entirely and advised mothers of pre-schoolers to serve no more than one tuna salad sandwich a week.    The Food and Drug Administration questioned the report's findings, calling them suggestive, very preliminary and highly uncertain.    The average level of methyl mercury -- mercury as it accumulates in fish tissue -- in the tuna was 0.09 parts per million, or just under the 0.1 ppm limit the FDA set for human consumption in 1993.    Some sources claim that the science around mercury levels is murky, and the history of mercury as to what we learned about lead, should make us not take any chances.    The report also urges reductions in mercury pollution in the air to help decrease mercury levels in fish.
• 8/29/1999 - Weird pollution turns surf Mecca into ghost town by Chelsea, The Associated Press.
      Huntington Beach, Calif. -- On a typical trek to "Surf City, USA," visitors would see well-oiled bodies spread out towel-to-towel in the sand, swimmers frolicking in the water and board-toting surfers hitting the waves.    But the usual party atmosphere has been crashed by something new surfing in the water this summer -- thousands of gallons of bacteria, including extremely high levels of enterococcous -- known to cause gastrointestinal and respiratory infections.    For nearly eight weeks, health officials have closed section after section of the 8-mile beach trying to find the source of a sewage leak.    The problem has come at peak beach season, affecting tourism, financial losses to merchants, and layoffs among beach workers.    It is also threatening Bolsa Chica State Beach to the north.
  
  
• 2/13/2000 - Cyanide spill endangers river.
      Belgrade, Yugoslavia -- In what may be Europe's worst environmental disaster since Chernobyl, a cyanide spill contaminating a major river has moved into Yugoslavia and destroyed all life in the water, local officials said.    The spill originated in northwest Romania, near the border town of Oradea, where a dam at the Baia Mare gold mine overflowed on January 30 and caused cyanide to pour into streams.    From there, the polluted water flowed west into the Tisa River in neighboring Hungary and then on into Yugoslavia.
      Eighty percent of the fish in the Tisa have died since the contaminant entered the country two days ago, said Mayor Atila Juhas of the northern town Senta.    "Enormous quantities of dead fish are floating on the surface, and the spill continues to spread," Juhas said in a telephone interview.    The pollution was expected to reach the Danube River early today.
• 4/12/2000 - Agencies issue warning about mercury levels in fish by Charles Wolfe, The Associated Press.
      Frankfort, Ky. -- Mercury in fish from Kentucky waters prompted the state to issue a health warning to child bearing women and children under 6 years of age.    This only applied to freshwater fish from Kentucky caught out of the pond - not to canned tuna or deep-sea fish sold to groceries and restaurants, even though they might have higher mercury levels.
      Mercury, which destroys proteins, accumulates in tissue and does not dissipate.    The consumption notice was based on years of test results from Environmental Protection's Division of Water.    Mike Mills, a Division of Water environmental biologist, said Kentucky fish are regularly collected and tested, for years, "fairly high levels of mercury" have been noted in fish from Lake Cumberland, where Fruit of the Loom has a permit to discharge waste water from its Jamestown garment-dying plant.
• 4/17/2000 - Study finds decades of amphibian decline by The Associate Press.
      The world's frogs, toads and other amphibians are vanishing, and the decline began decades before scientists first sounded the alarm in the 1980s, according to the biggest statistical study of the topic.    Researchers reported that overall numbers of amphibians dropped 15 perscent a year from 1960 to 1966, and continued to decline about 2 percent a year through 1997.    "This should put the last nail in the coffin for anyone who doesn't think there are some population declines for amphibians," said Andrew Blaustein, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University.
• 4/17/2000 - Report: Environment more at risk than ever by The Associate Press.
      Washington -- Despite greater environmental awareness, growing demand for resources is threatening the world's environmental health more than ever, a United Nations-sponsored report said.    In the long term, it said, humans will pay the price.    The broad decline of the world's ecosystems -- the interaction of organisms with their physical environment -- must be reversed or there "could be devastating implications" for human development, said the report released by the World Resources Institute, a private environmental think tank.    The report reflects the findings of 197 scientists, which will be presented in detail at a meeting in September of the U.N. General Assembly.    It will be a key in deciding whether the United Nations will direct a broader study on the state of the world's environmental well-being.
      The study was sponsored by the U.N. Development Programme, the U.N. Environmental Programme and the World Bank.
      Among the scientists' findings:
  
  • Half of the world's wetlands have been lost over the past 100 years.
  • Dams and other diversions have fragmented 60 percent of the world's largest rivers, and 20 percent of the world's freshwater fish have disappeared or are in danger of vanishing.
  • Half of the world's forest have disappeared, and tropical deforestation continues at an alarming rate.    About 9 percent of all tree species are at risk of vanishing.
  • Fishing fleets are taking in much greater amounts of fish than the oceans can replace.    As a result, 70 percent of the world's fish stocks are being overfished.
  • Two-thirds of the world's agricultural lands have suffered from significant soil degradation over the past 50 years, and a third of the world's original forests have been converted to agriculture.
      "Governments and businesses must rethink some basic assumptions about how we measure and plan economic growth," James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, siad in a statement.
• 11/20/2000 - Oceanic Extinctions by John Balzar, The Los Angeles Times.
      For years, the best minds in the science of fisheries held a conceit: Humans could not drive oceanic fish into extinction.    Now, America's pre-eminent professional society of fishery scientists has concluded that humans can push once-common species of saltwater fish toward the brink.    In a study of North American waters, the 10,000-member American Fisheries Society listed 82 species and stocks as "at risk of extinction."    Among the West Coast varieties are lingcod, cowcod, bocaccio, giant sea bass, Pacific ocean perch, shortspine thornyhead and eight species of other rockfish.    Among common Atlantic species listed as in danger of extinction are Atlantic halibut and Atlantic cod.    This list includes fish in the Gulf of Mexico, such as the largetooth and smalltooth sawfish, and wide ranging species including white shark, dusky shark and sand tiger shark.    Five species of anadromous sturgeon also are listed.
      The government's official endangered and threatened species list includes 102 species and stocks of freshwater, estuarine and anadromous fish, such as salmon that live in both fresh and saltwater -- but no non-anadromous oceanic fish.    In the past regulators assumed when they made management decisions for commercial and recreational fishing: Somehow the ocean was too vast and fish too resilent for humans to entirely extirpate a species.    Overfishing could reduce stocks, but extinction was not a consideration.
      The report said the overall worst conditions were in four "hot spots -- Puget Sound, Wash.; the northern Gulf of California in Mexico's Sea of Cortez; parts of Florida; and the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
  
• 12/17/2000 - Toxins tainting Europe's fish, scientists warn - Region already worried about mad cow disease - by New York Times News Service.
      Paris -- Just as worried Europeans are turning their backs on beef because of the spread of mad cow disease and flocking to the fish counter, there is more bad news about dinner: Scientists have warned that they have found unacceptably high levels of toxic industrial chemicals in the region's seafood.    In a report prepared for the European Union says fish from fish farms and the region's seas are regularly contaminated by dioxins and similar toxins.    Fish oil and fish meal have the highest levels of these chemicals.    Dioxins, which are produced by industrial waste product by industrial plants and waste incineration, have been linked to hormone changes, cancer in animals and other severe disorders.    Fish from the North Sea and the Baltic around Scandinavia are more polluted areas.
  
  
• 1/14/2001 - Dying frogs, coral reefs cited as Signs of a sick Earth by The Associated Press.
      Washington -- Melting arctic ice, dying frogs and the destruction of coral reefs are signs of a growing world ecological decline, an environment research group Worldwatch Institute said in a report.    Since global warming talks collapsed last November, and failed to complete key international agreements. decades of progress could unravel.    Melting Arctic ice caused by burning fossil fuels, other environmental decline of many species of frogs, salamanders and other amphibia due to pressures that range from deforestation to ozone depletion make many global ecosystems in danger.    Amphibians are considered a "sort of barometer of Earth's health, more sensitive to environmental stress than other organisms," according to Worldwatch researchers.    Marine biologists estimate that one-quarter of the coral reefs in the world's tropical oceans were sick or dying.    President-elect Bush has made drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska a major part of his energy plan and is expected to try to ease present restrictions on logging in national forests.    Bush has ties to the oil industry and extractive industries which have been key opponents to the climate issue.
• 4/2/2001 - Butter can be used to measure pollutants by The New York Times.
      Butter has a bad reputation as a cholesteral-laden, artery choking spread.    Scientists at the University of Lancaster in England have a potential new use for butter to be used to monitor airborne pollution.    These pollutants eventually are deposited on the ground.    Cows consume them with their grass and feed, and the compounds accumulate in dairy fat.    Butter samples from 23 countries found PCB levels on the order of trillionths of a gram, per gram of butter.    That's far below levels that might harm humans, but high enough to make butter a meaningful way of comparing regions' levels of pollutants.
  
  

Last updated January 27, 2004.