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Featured stories in this issue...

As EPA Is Shredded, State Toxic Waste Programs Fail
  President Bush is eliminating EPA's scientific capacity. This has
  reduced the federal agency's ability to enforce minimum standards for
  weak state programs like the one in New Jersey aimed at controlling
  toxic waste.
Kids Living Near Landfills Get More Infections
  People living near hazardous waste sites become contaminated with
  toxic chemicals wafting on the air, which degrades their immune
  systems, which makes them more prone to infections, says the author of
  a new study.
Something Is Killing America's Urban Poor
  Something is killing America's urban poor, but this is no ordinary
  epidemic. When diseases like AIDS, measles and polio strike,
  everyone's symptoms look more or less the same, but not in this case.
  It is as if the aging process were accelerated among the urban poor.
  Even teenagers are now afflicted with numerous health problems,
  including asthma, diabetes and high blood pressure.
Feds Reject Nuclear Waste Plan the Industry Was Counting on
  The U.S. Department of the Interior has refused to endorse a
  nuclear-industry plan to store high-level radioactive waste on land
  owned by the Skull Valley Goshute tribe in Utah. This will delay, if
  not kill, the controversial project that the nuclear power industry
  has been counting on.
Correction: Hazardous Chemicals in Synthetic Turf
  A story in Rachel's News #871 incorrectly identified the brand of
  synthetic turf that was tested and found to contain hazardous
  chemicals. The brand tested was A-Turf, not FieldTurf. A revised
  version of the original story is available on-line.

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From: Rachel's Democracy & Healthy News #873, Sept. 21, 2006
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AS EPA IS SHREDDED, STATE TOXIC WASTE PROGRAMS FAIL

By Peter Montague[1]

To recap from last week: For six years, President Bush has been
systematically dismantling the scientific capabilities of U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The President has begun closing
EPA's research libraries -- which the EPA enforcement staff relies
upon for crucial information to do their jobs. The President is also
closing EPA scientific laboratories, thus diminishing the agency's
ability to judge which problems are really serious and which are less
so. As a result, this President's legacy will be accelerated
deterioration of the natural environment, yet oddly this may be a
political plus among Republicans. Many of the GOP's most faithful
supporters embrace environmental deterioration as evidence that the
End Times are upon us, when Jesus will return to Earth.

As EPA loses its scientific capabilities, the effects are being felt
at the state level, because this is where EPA used to provide backbone
for weak state agencies.

At the state level, wealthy polluters and land developers put enormous
pressure on state agencies to cut corners -- and these wealthy few
often can have their way with state government because they fund the
reelection campaigns of governors, mayors, county councils, judges,
and other local lights. Federal EPA is supposed to provide a floor,
below which even the most craven politician cannot sink. As the Bush
plan unfolds, EPA is losing its capacity to play that crucial role.

The pressure to cut corners -- to fill in wetlands, pave over farms,
declare toxic wastes "safe," and so on -- is relentless in all states,
even the wealthy ones. Take New Jersey, which is the wealthiest state
in the union, measured by annual income per person.

New Jersey is a small place with 8 million inhabitants, and it is
heavily polluted. It also has the highest cancer rate among all the
states (2002 data). The New Jersey Department of Environmental
Protection (DEP) now lists 16,000 contaminated sites throughout the
state, and roughly 200 to 300 new sites are reportedly added to the
list each month. Back in the early 1990s, wealthy developers saw a
chance to make money "redeveloping" these toxic sites, and they began
referring to them as "brownfields" -- as if to suggest that these pots
of poison are like farm fields at harvest time, with corn stalks
silhouetted against the sunset. Nothing could be further from the
truth. These sites are often dripping with the nastiest chemicals you
can imagine -- combinations of radioactive waste, black oily goo,
dioxins, PCBs, mercury, lead, chromium, TCE, PCE, perchlorate, dozens
of pesticides, benzene, jet fuel, miscellaneous chlorinated solvents
and on and on.

The Superfund toxic waste cleanup law was sponsored by Jim Florio when
he represented New Jersey in Congress, 1975-1990 -- which made Mr.
Florio the darling of environmentalists. However, late in his single
term as governor of N.J., 1990-1994, Mr. Florio began to relax the
rules for cleaning up contaminated sites, to make it easier for
developers to build on "brownfields." Mr. Florio's successor,
Republican Christie Whitman (N.J. governor, 1994-2001, and then head
of U.S. EPA), relaxed the N.J. cleanup rules even further, until these
rules are now commonly described as "pave and wave." Got a toxic site?
Pave it over with a thin layer of asphalt or a plastic tarp -- or put
a golf course over it, or a grammar school or a condo development --
and wave the problem goodbye. When she was governor, Ms. Whitman's
slogan was, "New Jersey is Open for Business."

Lax cleanup standards were intended to help developers make money.
Brownfields are cheap to buy but expensive to clean up. However, after
"cleanup" was redefined to include covering with a plastic tarp or a
parking lot, then the profit-potential of "brownfields" soared.

Democrats and environmentalists love to blame Ms. Whitman for this
creative redefinition of "cleanup." But Democrats have controlled New
Jersey with large majorities since Ms. Whitman left office 5 years ago
and the cleanup rules haven't changed -- except perhaps to become even
more permissive.

Of course relaxing the cleanup standards is never justified as a gift
to wealthy developers. It is justified as a solemn obligation to the
urban poor, who desperately need jobs and affordable housing, it is
true. So -- the story goes -- the "pave and wave" approach to toxic
sites is a benevolent act, promoting needed development in blighted
urban zones. Unfortunately, a basic law of the universe -- the law of
entropy -- guarantees that toxic chemicals left in the ground will
eventually migrate away from their original location and enter air,
water, soil, worms, birds, fish, insects, mammals -- the food web --
and eventually people. Plastic tarps and asphalt doilies will not halt
this process. And so the state of New Jersey -- and all its
inhabitants -- are now contaminated with hundreds of industrial
poisons. The New Jersey DEP has acknowledged that pollution causes
roughly 4,100 new cancers in New Jersey each year -- and it's pretty
easy to make the case that this is the tip of a large, unspoken
iceberg. There's a reason why New Jersey is the No. 1 in cancer
nationwide.

Today, former governor Jim Florio is in the business of building big-
box stores on contaminated sites, and Christie Todd Whitman runs her
own environmental consulting firm, helping wealthy developers navigate
the state's environmental laws to maximize gain. Republican or
Democrat, it matters not. The point is to make money building on toxic
sites without going to the expense of cleaning them thoroughly. With
the "pave and wave" approach, the state's 16,000 "brownfields" are no
longer a deadly liability -- they have become a vehicle for expressing
charitable concern for the urban poor and a new source of wealth for
the already-wealthy.

However, everyone now acknowledges that, from a public health
perspective, the system is completely broken.

This fact was driven home this summer by a series of revelations that
shocked even the most cynical among us:

** On August 4th, the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill revealed that
Kiddie Kollege, a day-care center in south Jersey, had been operating
for two years in a former mercury-thermometer factory in rural
Franklinville. When tested, 1/3rd of the children -- ranging in age
from 8 months to 13 years -- showed excessive mercury in their urine,
as did one adult staff member.

The toxic Kiddie Kollege had been discovered on April 11 by a DEP
employee who "had a hunch" that something might be wrong and initiated
air tests. But it was not until July 28 that DEP officials provided
facts to the day-care operator, who promptly shut down the Kollege.
"In hindsight, in April, we could have shut it down regardless of home
rule, regardless of anything," Elaine Makatura, a DEP spokesperson,
told the New York Times.

** By mid-August, two other day-care centers had been discovered
built on contaminated sites. The "Through the Years" daycare was
discovered on a site contaminated with heating oil and PCBs less than
a mile from Kiddie Kollege. And "The Ultimate Scholar" daycare in Toms
River, N.J., closed August 10 after high levels of tetrachloroethylene
-- dry cleaning fluid -- were discovered in a play area.

Soon the DEP acknowledged that 700 of the state's 4,200 daycare
centers are operating within 400 feet of toxic sites.

But then the plot thickened.

By August 16, news reporter Tim Zatzariny, Jr. of the Courier-Post in
Cherry Hill revealed that the Kiddie Kollege daycare site had been
mysteriously removed from the DEP's list of 16,000 contaminated
properties, along with 1,845 other toxic sites that disappeared from
the DEP list some time between 2002 and 2005.

Toxic sites removed from the list included 50 landfills; 100
chemical companies; a former Nike missile site; the Bader Field
Airport in Atlantic City; Camden Iron & Metal, Inc., and Penn Jersey
Rubber & Waste Company, both in Camden; Vanguard Vinyl Siding of
Gloucester City, and so on.

Reporters all over the state jumped on the story, eager to discover
who had removed the 1,846 toxic sites from the list. To this day, no
one has publicly revealed the name of the culprit, but reporters have
printed candid confessions by several top state officials.

The 1,846 sites disappeared from the list while Bradley M. Campbell
was chief of DEP, serving Democratic governor James McGreevey --
another darling of environmentalists who worked aggressively to help
him into office. But environmentalists got stabbed in the back by Mr.
McGreevey and by Mr. Campbell. Based on Mr. Campbell's performance,
Jeff Tittel, head of the New Jersey Sierra Club, told a reporter,
"The name of the game for Campbell was letting rich sponsors of
[governor] Jim McGreevey build on tainted land," said Tittel. "Taking
contaminated sites off the books makes more land available for the
developers."

Mr. Campbell reportedly "bristled" at the suggestion that his DEP gave
preferential treatment to rich builders. But he acknowledged that DEP,
under his leadership, was in complete disarray, unable to even keep a
tally of toxic sites, much less clean them up: "The DEP's professional
staff was so overwhelmed, he said, that it was impossible to even
pinpoint the number of contaminated sites and accurately chart the
agency's progress in dealing with them," the Bergen Record reported
him saying in an interview.

Other DEP employees and former employees piled on. It turned out that
DEP has only 175 "case managers" assigned to the 16,000 toxic sites,
for an average of 91 sites per case manager. One former DEP case
manager, Thomas McKee, recalled having close to 100 cases assigned to
him for supervision in the early 1990s [which were Florio years]. A
dysfunctional bureaucracy further hampered his work, he said.
"Deadlines for cleanup progress are not enforced; there is no priority
system and no real tracking and reporting system," McKee told
Alexander Lane of the Newark Star-Ledger.

As a result, toxic sites remain on the DEP's list for decades. "One
former chemical company site in South Brunswick has been identified as
contaminated since 1981 and has not been cleaned up. The same goes for
a radium company in Orange, identified by the DEP as a contaminated
site in 1984. A metal finishing company site in Bound Brook has been
contaminated since 1985 and is still an active case," Lane reported.

On August 27 Lane revealed the dirty little secret that no one had
ever talked about in print before: "One current [DEP] case manager
spoke openly about the political pressure brought to bear for the
agency to cut corners. One current case manager, Amil Singh, said
heavy caseloads account for the notoriously low morale in the site
remediation department.

"But he also said the department was plagued by a less tangible
problem: political pressure.

"It is particularly intense when a redevelopment project or real
estate transaction at a contaminated site is being held up pending a
'no further action' letter -- a certification that a cleanup is
complete -- from the department, he said.

"'There's a lot of pressure on the case managers to take certain
actions in order to appease the local governments and make property
move,' Singh said. 'I've been pressured to produce NFAs (no further
action letters) by my own [DEP] management,'" Singh said.

The current DEP chief is Lisa P. Jackson, a no-nonsense former EPA
worker. Ms. Jackson told the New York Times that her agency needs
"better tracking of contaminated sites, clearer cleanup priorities and
stronger enforcement efforts." This sounds good.

Will Democratic Governor Jon Corzine -- current darling of the state's
environmentalists who helped him gain office -- initiate the needed
reforms to permanently clean up toxic sites across the state? So far
Mr. Corzine has spent his time assuring everyone that no new daycare
centers will be built in toxic waste sites -- as if New Jersey's toxic
waste problems ended with daycare centers.

A larger question is, Can elected officials of either party protect
public health and give us environmental justice by standing up to the
monied interests who paid for their election campaigns?

Can pigs fly?

Campaign finance reform -- getting private money out of our elections
-- is still an essential priority. Without it, other reforms will be
half-baked at best.

============

[1] I would like to acknowledge one of the real heroes in this story
-- Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and its
New Jersey field director, Bill Wolfe, a former senior analyst at DEP.
As this story evolved, it was Wolfe who helped news reporters
understand the ins and outs of arcane cleanup regulations, suggesting
where they should be looking to find sleeping dogs and smoking guns.

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From: Reuters Health, Sept. 7, 2006
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INFECTION RISK IN KIDS LIVING NEAR LANDFILLS

NEW YORK -- Living near a hazardous waste site containing persistent
pollutants such as dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and
chlorinated pesticides, seems to increase the risk of hospitalization
for respiratory infections and asthma in children, a study suggests.

Dr. David O. Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the
Environment, at the State University of New York at Albany, said these
results are consistent with the hypothesis that simply living near a
waste site constitutes a risk of exposure to contaminants, presumably
by air transport, and that these chemicals can reduce immune system
function and lead to more infections.

New York State has nearly 900 identified hazardous waste sites or
highly contaminated bodies of water. Carpenter and colleagues examined
rates of hospitalization in New York for acute respiratory infections
and asthma by area of residence for children ages 0 to 9 years.

Carpenter, who reported the study this week in Germany at the annual
meeting of the European Respiratory Society, told Reuters Health: "Our
major finding is that children living near to waste sites, whether
landfills or contaminated bodies of water, are hospitalized more
frequently with acute respiratory infections," compared to children
living in "clean" areas.

"This remains true even after controlling for other known risk
factors, such as socioeconomic status, race and sex," he said.

The degree to which exposure to these contaminants suppresses immune
system function has been "underestimated," Carpenter added.

Unexpectedly, rates of hospitalization for asthma were also increased
in children living near a hazardous waste site. "Asthma is a disease
due to an overactive immune system, and we had expected that we would
see a reduced rate of hospitalization for asthma," Carpenter said.

"However, we are looking at asthmatics that are hospitalized for a
very severe attack, and on consideration we now suspect that this
occurs primarily when an asthmatic also has an infection." His team
plans additional studies to test whether this is the case.

Summing up, Carpenter said this study shows that exposure to organic
pollutants and other contaminants can harm health and just living near
to a contaminated site may cause exposure.

"While our specific study focused on air transport of the
contaminants, they are also in our food," Carpenter noted, "and the
effect of exposure should not be different whether it is via food or
air. So we really need to get these chemicals out of our environment
to the greatest degree possible."

Copyright 2006 Yahoo! Inc.

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From: New York Times Magazine, Oct. 12, 2003
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ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU SICK?

By Helen Epstein

Beverly Blagmon lives in the School Street housing projects in
southwest Yonkers, a once-vibrant manufacturing area just north of New
York City long mired in unemployment and poverty. Beverly has asthma,
diabetes, high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis, gout and an
enlarged heart, and her blood has a dangerous tendency to clot
spontaneously. She is 48, and she had her first heart attack in her
late 20's. One of her brothers died of heart failure at 50, and
another died of kidney failure at 45, as did a sister who was 35. A
young cousin recently died of cancer. In the past three years, at
least 11 young people she knows have died, most of them not from
gunshot wounds or drug overdoses, but from disease.

Monica, who asked that her last name not be used, moved to the Crown
Heights section of Brooklyn from School Street a year ago. She has
diabetes, arthritis and asthma. She is overweight, and the pain from a
back injury that occurred four years ago makes it hard for her to walk
or even bend over a stove. Her elaborately braided hair is tinged with
gray. In the past year, six of her friends have died, all of them
younger than she is. When asked simple questions about her life --
when she was born, where she grew up, when her three children were
born -- Monica answers in short phrases, wiping tears from her eyes.
She is 36.

Ebony Fasion, 22, and her friend Dominique Faulk, 17, both former
residents of School Street, have asthma. Dominique's cousin Jo-Scama
Wontong, 19, still lives in the School Street projects. Jo-Scama has
lost so many people she loved to disease and accident recently that
whenever she thinks about it, she is stricken with panic. "My heart
beats so fast, and I can't breathe, and there's just death going
through my mind the whole time."

Something is killing America's urban poor, but this is no ordinary
epidemic. When diseases like AIDS, measles and polio strike,
everyone's symptoms look more or less the same, but not in this case.
It is as if the aging process in people like Beverly and Monica were
accelerated. Even teenagers are afflicted with numerous health
problems, including asthma, diabetes and high blood pressure. Poor
urban blacks have the worst health of any ethnic group in America,
with the possible exception of Native Americans. Some poor urban
Hispanics suffer disproportionately from many health problems, too,
although the groups that arrived most recently, like Dominicans, seem
to be healthier, on average, than Puerto Ricans who have lived in the
United States for many years. It makes you wonder whether there is
something deadly in the American experience of urban poverty itself.

The neighborhoods where Beverly, Monica, Ebony, Dominique and Jo-Scama
live look like poor urban areas all across the country, with bricked-
up abandoned buildings, vacant storefronts, broken sidewalks and empty
lots with mangy grass overgrowing the ruins of old cars, machine parts
and heaps of garbage. Young men in black nylon skullcaps lurk around
the pay-phones on street corners. These neighborhoods are as
segregated from the more affluent, white sections of metropolitan New
York as any township in South Africa under apartheid. Living in such
neighborhoods as southwest Yonkers, central and East Harlem, central
Brooklyn and the South Bronx is assumed to predispose the poor to a
number of social ills, including drug abuse, truancy and the
persistent joblessness that draws young people into a long cycle of
crime and incarceration. Now it turns out these neighborhoods could be
destroying people's health as well.

There are many different types of disadvantaged neighborhoods in
America, but poor urban minority neighborhoods seem to be especially
unhealthy. Some of these neighborhoods have the highest mortality
rates in the country, but this is not, as many believe, mainly because
of drug overdoses and gunshot wounds. It is because of chronic
diseases -- mainly diseases of adulthood that are probably not caused
by viruses, bacteria or other infections and that include stroke,
diabetes, kidney disease, high blood pressure and certain types of
cancer.

The problems start at birth. The black infant death rate in
Westchester County is almost three times as high as the rate for the
county as a whole. Black youths in Harlem, central Detroit, the South
Side of Chicago and Watts have about the same probability of dying by
age 45 as whites nationwide do by age 65, and most of this premature
death is due not to violence, but to illness. A third of poor black
16-year-old girls in urban areas will not reach their 65th birthdays.
Four times as many people die of diabetes in the largely black area of
central Brooklyn as on the predominantly white Upper East Side of
Manhattan, and one in three adults in Harlem report having high blood
pressure. In 1990, two New York doctors found that so many poor
African-Americans in Harlem were dying young from heart disease,
cancer and cirrhosis of the liver that men there were less likely to
reach age 65 than men in Bangladesh.

Since the time of slavery, physicians have noted that the health of
impoverished blacks is, in general, worse than that of whites. Racist
doctors proposed that the reasons were genetic, and that blacks were
intrinsically inferior and physically weaker than whites. But there is
very little evidence that poor blacks or Hispanics are genetically
predisposed to the vast majority of the afflictions from which they
disproportionately suffer. As the living conditions of blacks have
improved over the past century, their health improved in step; when
conditions deteriorated, health deteriorated, too. This has helped
support the contention among researchers that much chronic disease
among minority groups is caused not by genes, but by something else.

That something else may come down to geography. Ana Diez-Roux, an
epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, has shown that people
who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods are more likely to have heart
attacks than people who live in middle-class neighborhoods, even
taking income differences into account. Researchers from the Rand
Corporation found that neighborhoods where many buildings are boarded
up and abandoned have higher rates of early death from cancer and
diabetes than neighborhoods with similar poverty rates and similar
proportions of uninsured people, but intact housing. Abandoned
buildings do not in themselves cause disease, of course, but they are
an indicator of neighborhood deprivation and neglect -- and this does
seem to be associated with poor health, though we don't know why.

In some ways, our public health institutions are in the same position
they were in 150 years ago. In the mid-19th century, public health
boards were established to fight the great killers of the day --
cholera and tuberculosis. The poor were more susceptible to these
diseases then, just as they are more susceptible to chronic diseases
now. And then, as now, the reasons were unknown. Some believed
diseases were acts of God and the poor got what they deserved. If they
would only drink less, go to church and stay out of brothels, they
wouldn't get sick. Others maintained that the afflictions of poverty
were environmental. A stinking mass of invisible vapor, referred to as
"miasma," hung in the air over the slums, they claimed, and sickened
those who inhaled it.

It was not until the early 1880's, when the German scientist Robert
Koch looked down his microscope at swirling cholera and tuberculosis
bacteria, that everyone finally agreed about what was going on. The
water the poor drank was full of sewage and contained deadly cholera
germs; in overcrowded tenements, the poor breathed clouds of
tuberculosis bacteria. Malnourished alcoholics tended to be more
susceptible to these diseases, but immoral behavior was not their
primary cause. Nor was miasma. The primary cause was germs.

We don't have a germ theory for chronic diseases like stroke, heart
disease, diabetes and cancer. We know something about what can
aggravate these diseases -- diet, smoking and so on -- but not enough
about why they are so much more common among people who live in
certain neighborhoods, or what makes, for example, a poor person who
smokes the same number of cigarettes a day as a rich person more
likely to get lung cancer. Or why several research studies show that
smoking, eating, drinking and exercise habits do not fully account for
why rich people are healthier than poor people. Even lack of health
care cannot entirely explain the afflictions of the poor. Many poor
people lack health insurance, and those who have it are often at the
mercy of overworked doctors and nurses who provide indifferent care,
but inadequate health care cannot explain why so many of them get so
sick in the first place.

Most poor minority neighborhoods "are less healthy," says Adam M.
Karpati, who works in the Brooklyn office of the New York City
Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. "You walk down the street and
you know it. But what is that thing that you know is going on? What's
at play there? That thing you can't name? We don't know that."

Clearly we need to examine this miasma with a different kind of
microscope. The best we have at the moment are theories that fall into
two main schools of thought. One school holds that the problem has
mainly to do with stress; the other holds actual deprivation
responsible. These two factors are often intertwined, but the emphasis
is important. "There are so many fists in the face of poor African-
Americans," says Arline Geronimus, a professor of public health at the
University of Michigan who leans toward the stress school, and she
proceeded to list them for me. They have enormous family obligations,
she explained, and while the middle class are able to purchase child
care and care for elderly relatives, the poor cannot. The experience
of racism and discrimination in everyday life is also still very real,
and very stressful. She says that blacks are faced with a society that
institutionalizes the idea "that you are a menace -- and that demeans
you," she says. Nancy Krieger, a Harvard researcher, found that
working-class African-Americans who said they accepted unfair
treatment as a fact of life had higher blood pressure than those who
challenged it.

Geronimus calls the grinding everyday stress of being poor and
marginalized in America "weathering," a condition not unlike the
effect of exposure to wind and rain on houses. Listening to Geronimus
describe "weathering," I found it hard not to wonder whether anyone
really knows what it is. Stress is subjective, a feeling, and it means
different things to different people. Philip Alcabes, associate
professor of urban public health at Hunter College, says that stress
is like the miasma that was once thought to cause cholera in 19th-
century slums. "You can't see it, you can't really measure it, but it
floats over certain people, especially the poor, and makes them sick."

If "weathering" and stress have their modern day Robert Koch, he is
probably Bruce McEwen, a neuroendocrinologist at Rockefeller
University in New York. McEwen argues that stress hormones threaten
the health of poor people, especially blacks and the Hispanic poor.
Stress hormones are produced by the adrenal glands in response to
signals from the brain. When people feel frustrated, frightened or
angry, stress hormones travel through the bloodstream and instruct
different parts of the body to prepare for an emergency. They speed up
the heart rate and narrow the arteries so that blood gets to the
tissues faster; blood sugar rises, so that energy rushes to the
muscles and other organs; and some bodily functions, like digestion
and the mechanisms that maintain the strength of the bones and other
tissues, are inhibited. But not all stress is the same. Occasional
periods of intense stress, like what you feel during a near miss in a
car, do no harm. However, McEwen's research suggests that constant
exposure to stress hormones impairs the immune system and damages the
brain and other organs.

Chronic stress also signals the body to accumulate abdominal fat
around the waistline, which is more dangerous than fat that lies under
the skin, or subcutaneous fat. Abdominal fat worsens many chronic
health problems, including diabetes and heart disease, whereas
subcutaneous fat does not. It's as if stress hormones were like lye,
powerful stuff that in small amounts is useful for cleaning the stove,
but that in large amounts will eat right through the floor.

Not everyone believes that stress is a major contributor to the health
crisis among the poor. George Davey Smith, a professor of clinical
epidemiology at the University of Bristol in England, agrees that the
poor live very stressful lives, and that racism is an everyday reality
for many people. However, in his view -- the second school of thought
on the matter -- the health crisis among the poor has more to do with
living in a deprived environment.

The experience of poverty in America has changed a great deal since
the 19th century; the poor now have safe drinking water and live in
less crowded dwellings, and many have cars and TV's. However, it's
also true that many poor people eat unhealthful food, smoke and abuse
drugs. Americans hear a great deal about the importance of making
healthy choices in their lives; warnings about cigarettes and high-fat
foods issue frequently from the surgeon general's office and fill the
pages of magazines and best-selling advice books. There are plenty of
people who feel little sympathy for overweight diabetic people, poor
or not, who eat regularly at McDonald's. But while there is
considerable controversy about the ideal lifestyle regimen, you don't
need to know much about impoverished neighborhoods to see the
absurdity of choosing to go Atkins or macrobiotic for a person like
Beverly Blagmon, who subsists on disability payments. Poor people are
more likely to have unhealthy habits because fast food and cigarettes
are abundant and cheap in their neighborhoods, and healthy
alternatives tend to be limited.

A recent survey conducted in four regions of the United States found
that there were three times as many bars in poor neighborhoods as in
rich ones, and four times as many supermarkets in white neighborhoods
as in black ones. There are fewer parks in poor neighborhoods as well,
so it is more difficult to find open spaces in which to exercise, and
many of them are dangerous. Forty-one percent of New York's public
elementary schools have no consistent physical education program. As
Mary T. Bassett, a New York City deputy health commissioner, said to
me, public health campaigns that tell people to "just say no" to
smoking, or to change their diets and start exercising, can be cruel
if they are indifferent to neighborhood circumstances.

Davey Smith also points out that many of the poor black people who are
sick today grew up in the 40's, 50's and 60's, when many black people
lived in overcrowded dwellings, and were more prone than affluent
whites to childhood infections. Some of these infections may have
long-term effects on health. Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that has
been associated with both ulcers and stomach cancer in adulthood, is
most often acquired in childhood, and this may explain why poor blacks
in particular have relatively high rates of both diseases. Adults who
were poor as children, even if they are not poor now, are also more
prone to stroke, kidney disease and hypertensive heart disease.

I wondered about these alternatives. Presumably both stress and
material disadvantage are important causes of ill health among the
poor. But which is more important? And what would be the best way to
address these problems? If stress is a major cause of ill health,
interventions to alleviate it -- counseling, antidepressants, even
yoga -- might be beneficial. A recent article in The British Medical
Journal suggested that building self-esteem actually helped a group of
Native Americans manage their obesity and diabetes better than did
conventional counseling about diet and exercise. On the other hand, if
material disadvantage is a major cause of ill health among the poor,
then extensive changes in the environment in which the poor live --
for example, cleaner buildings and more parks -- are needed.

Perhaps Beverly Blagmon, who lives in the midst of such problems,
could help resolve this matter. I asked her what she thought the
health crisis in southwest Yonkers was caused by, and she answered
without missing a beat. "Racism." We went on to talk about the lack of
jobs in the area and the dilapidated state of the housing. I also
learned that if stress is a killer, there is plenty of it on School
Street, but yoga classes and motivational seminars are not likely to
be of much help.

Beverly raised 10 children, eight orphaned nieces and nephews in
addition to her own son and daughter. The kids were desperate for
attention from the overextended Beverly. "It was hard," she said. "You
had to deal with 10 different personalities." All the kids are grown
now, and all but two have left home. Now she worries because some of
them can't find jobs. When she was young, Yonkers was full of
factories that hired many young people. But not anymore.

Then last year, disaster struck. Beverly's 21-year-old daughter was
killed in a car accident; shortly thereafter, her nephew was shot and
killed right outside her building. "I was totally out of it," she
said. "People don't know how much a death can take from you. I went
into the hospital right after my daughter's funeral. They didn't know
if I'd had a mild stroke or not."

"Life is taken stupidly" all the time around School Street, Beverly
said, but this doesn't make it easier to handle. Beverly struggles
with these losses, and said her family, friends and even officials
from the local Housing Authority have been supportive. But when
Beverly talked about life on School Street, what she said is
underscored with tension -- the constant strain of "us versus them."
She sees the police in particular as a constant source of grief. "Some
of them are very prejudiced, even now," she told me. She claimed that
a few officers harassed children and teenagers, and have even been
known to swear at kids and shove them. She recalled, as if it were
yesterday, a 1997 fight at School Street. Someone called Beverly to
come outside, which she did, along with a visiting friend. Police
officers were on the street, some of them shouting, and in the chaos
that ensued, she said, a policeman knocked down Beverly's friend, a
older woman who is legally blind. "I was freaked out," Beverly said.
"The main witnesses were drug dealers, and they couldn't say
anything." (The Yonkers police confirmed that the woman later filed a
complaint, but said an internal investigation found no wrongdoing.)
Beverly said she was infuriated when, shortly after the incident, she
saw the mayor of Yonkers praise the police in a televised speech.

People who are not poor often casually ascribe their aches, pains and
even more serious afflictions to "stress," but stress, if it is a
killer, is a far more serious problem for people like Beverly. When
middle-class people feel the police or other authorities treat them
unfairly, they often have the resources to hire a lawyer and even
effect change. But all too often poor blacks feel ignored when they
complain about discrimination and abuse.

How might painful experiences like Beverly's be imprinted on the body?
Laboratory animals suffer when stressed with electric shocks or when
kept in isolated cages away from their peers, and they sometimes do
develop symptoms that resemble human chronic diseases. But how does
mouse stress compare to Beverly's stress? Or mine? Or yours? George
Davey Smith would argue that it is entirely possible that the
afflictions of poor people like Beverly are not due to stress, at all,
but to old-fashioned deprivation: crowding, poor nutrition, lack of
exercise and exposure to dirty air, germs and vermin. For a while,
Beverly's family of 11 crowded into a two-bedroom apartment, until
they were eventually moved into a six-room place. Once, money was so
short that she begged the welfare office for food stamps. There is
nowhere around School Street for kids to run around, Beverly says,
except a concrete playground with a set of monkey bars. "Why can't
they put up some swings or build a basketball court? You see kids
using garbage cans as basketball nets around here." Until two years
ago, an incinerator in the building spewed forth horrible fumes that
may have contributed to the high rates of asthma on School Street.
"When you got ready to polish the furniture, it was black with dust,"
Beverly recalled. "Every day. Now, how much of that was getting in our
lungs? I've been in the hospital every year with acute asthma." The
incinerator has been replaced by a compactor, but as a result, life is
a constant battle against roaches and mice, whose droppings also
worsen asthma. Beverly told me that she recently caught three mice in
one day. "I put them on the maintenance people's desk," she said. The
elevators are always breaking down, which is hard on the elderly. Once
she saw human feces in the hallway.

After talking to Beverly, I could only conclude that her life was full
of many sorts of trouble, any or all of which might be harmful to
health. If only it were possible to devise an experiment that would
examine the effects of stress and deprived living conditions on the
health of the poor. For nearly 10 years, the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development has been conducting an experiment called
Moving to Opportunity that seems to be doing just that. HUD
researchers wanted to see what happens to poor urban families who move
out of neighborhoods like Harlem in New York, Roxbury in Boston or the
South Side of Chicago and settle in better neighborhoods. They wanted
to know whether moving would help children do better in school, and
escape being drawn into crime when they reached adolescence. They also
wanted to know whether their parents would climb out of poverty.

HUD did find that people's lives improved in some ways. For example,
the children who moved to better neighborhoods in Baltimore did better
on standardized tests, and adults there were more likely to get off
welfare. But HUD's most remarkable early findings had to do with
health. In Boston, poor children who moved to low-poverty
neighborhoods were less likely to experience severe asthma attacks.
Adults in New York who moved were less likely to suffer from symptoms
of depression and anxiety than those who stayed behind, and adults in
Boston were more likely to report that they felt "calm and peaceful."
The HUD researchers who devised the experiment had not set out to
study health, but their findings were so striking that they decided to
expand their study to determine whether moving out of poor
neighborhoods affected other aspects of health that they did not
measure in the first round, including blood pressure, obesity and
other factors associated with such chronic afflictions as heart
disease, cancer and stroke, like smoking. Those results aren't
available yet, but when I heard about the earlier study, I decided to
conduct a small experiment of my own.

I wanted to talk to families, like those who had participated in the
HUD program, who had recently moved out of the slums. Did the move
affect their health? And if so, why? Did people experience less
stress? Did they eat better food? Breathe better air? What might their
experiences tell me about the mysterious miasma of contemporary
poverty?

My investigation led me to Jerrold M. Levy, the general counsel of the
Enhanced Section 8 Outreach Program, or ESOP, which helps low-income
families move out of depressed, dangerous inner-city neighborhoods in
Yonkers into middle-class areas. ESOP wasn't conducting any studies of
these people, of course, but Levy was willing to put me in touch with
10 of the families he'd helped move. He had noticed that the people
who moved out of dangerous neighborhoods seemed happier. "A few weeks
after they've moved," he says of his clients, who are mostly single
mothers, "they come into my office, and it's like one of those
programs on late-night TV where they do the makeovers, you know? They
have their hair done nicely, they're wearing high heels and makeup,
it's like they're transformed. They have a new sense of self-worth and
dignity. But will you see changes in their health? I don't think so."
Depression and anxiety are major health problems that affect large
numbers of poor people, so I thought I would be satisfied just to find
people whose mental health improved. And I did find such people. But I
also found that most people who moved gained far more than high
spirits.

Of the 10 families I met, 9 had at least one member who suffered from
a serious health problem before the move that required either
medication or hospitalization. Of the 16 people in these families who
had health problems, 12 told me that they felt better in significant
ways -- either their symptoms were less severe so that they no longer
required hospitalization, or they were taking less medication. Their
health problems included severe asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure,
liver cirrhosis and eczema. Emergency-room visits for the asthmatic
kids virtually stopped, and some adults with high blood pressure or
diabetes reduced the doses of their medications. This was hardly a
rigorous scientific experiment. There was no control group, and I was
not able to check medical records. Nevertheless, I was stunned by what
people told me. These people felt better, and moving appeared to have
made all the difference. If moving out of southwest Yonkers were a
drug, I would bottle it, patent it and go on cable TV and sell it.

Juanita Moody is now 52. In the summer of 2001, she and her husband,
William, moved to a middle-class section of Yonkers from a low-income
housing complex on Nepperhan Avenue, where they lived for nearly 30
years. Juanita was crippled by polio when she was a teenager, and
during an operation to adjust her spine, she was given a blood
transfusion that contained hepatitis C. The virus lay dormant for many
years. But two and a half years ago, Juanita's doctor told her that
her liver was showing signs of damage and advised her to take
interferon, a prescription drug for viral infections. When Juanita
found out about the possible side effects, however, she refused. Today
Juanita's liver tests are almost normal, suggesting that her hepatitis
is not progressing rapidly. "The doctor said I was fantastic, in terms
of enzymes," Juanita told me. I did not speak to Juanita's doctor
myself, so I could not confirm her diagnosis, but Juanita seemed
energetic, and other doctors confirmed that it is possible for
hepatitis to slow its progression. In addition, Juanita says that
since she moved, her blood pressure has fallen from 140/90, which is
considered high, to 130/78, which is almost normal, and the dose of
blood-pressure pills she takes has been reduced by half.

Juanita, a born-again Christian, attributes her improved health to
prayer and to the new regimen she has maintained since she moved. She
has become a health-food nut. Before she moved, her daughter told me,
"everything was fried, fried, fried. Before she'd eat at McDonald's
and stuff, but not now." Now she drinks fruit and vegetable juices,
and her kitchen cabinets are full of natural remedies: vitamins C and
E, zinc, magnesium, calcium, alpha lipoic acid and milk thistle, which
she says is excellent for the liver.

Juanita says she began focusing more on her health after she moved.
When she lived on Nepperhan, there were too many other things to worry
about, including frequent robberies and killings in and around the
complex itself. The building managers put up a fence to keep drug
dealers out, "but the crackheads living inside the building gave the
dealers the keys." The elevators were often broken, which meant that
someone would have to carry Juanita and her wheelchair up and down
three flights of stairs.

Juanita's new apartment is not in a luxury building. It's on a busy
road, near two gas stations and a shopping mall, and has few
amenities. But it is safe and has nice, leafy views. On Nepperhan, "it
was stressful just to walk out of that place. You were always scared
for the kids.... You wake up stressed, go to sleep stressed, you see
all the garbage and the dealers. That is depressing. In a bad
environment like that you say, 'What's the use of doing anything?' "
Living in her new apartment building gives her a very different
feeling. "It inspires you to do all you can -- spiritually, health-
wise, any kind of way."

It is well known that junk food can make anxious people feel better.
Researchers from the University of California recently discovered one
possible reason. In response to constant stress, the brain makes a
hormone called corticotropin-releasing factor, which instructs the
adrenal glands to manufacture stress hormones, including adrenaline
and cortisol. These hormones cause a range of physiological changes
that over long periods can be harmful. When people with high levels of
cortisol eat sugary, fatty foods, fat is deposited in the abdomen. The
researchers theorize that these abdominal fat cells can temporarily
inhibit the brain from making corticotropin-releasing factor, reducing
feelings of stress and anxiety. If this theory is correct, it could
explain how the stress of poverty creates a biological urge to
overeat, thus putting poor people at greater risk of obesity and its
consequences -- diabetes, heart disease, stroke and certain types of
cancer. Perhaps this explained why Juanita found it easier to change
her diet once she moved out of the stressful atmosphere of Nepperhan
Avenue. She admitted that doctors had been telling her over the years
that she should consume less fattening food. "But they can tell you,
and you don't do it," Juanita said.

Noemi, 31, moved with her two teenage children and her 76-year-old
aunt, Raimunda, from Burnham Street in Yonkers to a better
neighborhood in northwest Yonkers only three months before I met her
in August. Noemi, who asked that her last name not be used, has had
diabetes since childhood. Shortly after she moved, her doctor reduced
her dose of insulin by three units. Noemi thinks it's because she
feels less stressed in the new neighborhood. "Stress affects your
blood sugar," she explained. "It makes your sugar go up so you need
more insulin." She drove me from her new neighborhood of neatly mowed
lawns, bushy trees and two-car garages to the place she used to live.
"Look at the neighborhood here," she said, as we drove by industrial
garages, boarded-up buildings and vacant lots. An enormous, dented,
wheezing Lincoln car screeched by. "I had to be worried all the time,
you know. Are the children gonna get hit by a car? Is something gonna
happen? We've lived in neighborhoods with a lot of drugs, a lot of
people getting killed. You'd read about it in the paper the next day
and think: Oh, God! That's only two blocks from here."

Noemi's aunt Raimunda speaks no English, although she has lived in the
United States for more than 15 years. She has high blood pressure and
heart disease. I asked Noemi to ask Raimunda how she was feeling these
days. "She says her thing with the head is gone," Noemi translated.
"Before she used to get dizzy, but not anymore. Not for the past
couple of months." When I asked Raimunda why she thought the dizzy
spells went away, she, unlike Noemi and Juanita, did not mention
stress. Instead, she said she thought the improvement had something to
do with diet. "She thinks the chicken is better here -- easier to
digest," Noemi said. "But what she doesn't know is that since we
moved, I still buy the chicken in the same place."

After meeting Noemi, Raimunda and Juanita, I began to see more clearly
what Arline Geronimus, the University of Michigan researcher, was
talking about. Perhaps the miasma that is killing the poor really is
stress after all. Then I spoke to the mothers of six children who had
severe asthma. Every one of them had significantly fewer and less
severe attacks after the families moved out of southwest Yonkers.
Reduced stress could be partly responsible -- stress can worsen asthma
-- but it seemed clear to me a cleaner environment was also
responsible. The children ranged in age from 3 to 16; they all moved
out of southwest Yonkers and settled in different parts of
Westchester. The mothers, who asked that their last names not be used,
saw astonishing changes, and hearing their stories convinced me that
the only way to deal with the staggering epidemic of asthma that
afflicts 30 percent of children in some New York City neighborhoods is
to clean up the rundown, roach-infested buildings where so many of
these children live.

Carmen and her 4-year-old son moved to a middle-class section of
Westchester in the spring of 2002. In Yonkers, her son would have
severe asthma attacks every month and would have to sit for hours
every day breathing through a nebulizer. Since they moved, she says he
has needed the nebulizer only twice. Two years ago, Monique, her 3-
year-old son and 8-year-old daughter moved from Cedar Street in
Yonkers to Peekskill. When they lived on Cedar Street, her son's
severe asthma came complete with projectile vomiting. The attacks
started just a few months after he was born, and they terrified
Monique. She blames her former landlord. "There was no hot water for
two weeks once, there were leaks in the roof, so it was damp all the
time. Sometimes there was water coming through the roof, and mice
playing in the living room," she says. "There were cockroaches
everywhere, even in the refrigerator. The landlord did nothing until I
called the health department. It was stressful having all those
roaches around. You didn't know if they were crawling all over you at
night." As soon as the family moved up to Peekskill, the boy's attacks
became less severe. Although he is still on medication, the violent
attacks and the vomiting have stopped.

Cockroaches and vermin do worsen asthma, and this might explain why
Monique's son was so sick. But there could be another reason that so
many children in poor neighborhoods have asthma, and why they get
better when they move. In the past decade, rates of childhood asthma,
as well as obesity and diabetes, have soared in the very neighborhoods
that were worst affected by the crime waves of the 70's, 80's and
90's. One possible explanation, says Daniel Kass, a research scientist
for the New York City health department, "is that asthma follows the
crime epidemic, because it goes wherever people spend a lot of time
indoors."

Poor parents, terrified that their kids will be killed on the street,
tend to keep them inside, with the windows shut and the TV on, where
they are constantly exposed to contaminants in indoor air, which some
researchers believe can be as damaging as industrial pollution. Not
only are sedentary, overweight kids more at risk for asthma, but kids
with severe asthma tend to exercise less and are thus prone to
obesity. Mothers trying to protect their kids from crime may not
realize they are putting their future health at risk. As Mindy
Fullilove, professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at
Columbia University explained, "The best parents -- the people who are
the most upright, the churchgoers, the most protective mothers -- keep
their kids inside, and they are at the intersection of the asthma and
obesity epidemics."

I thought of Trevor Jackson Jr., a 14-year-old boy with serious eczema
who moved from southwest Yonkers up to Cortland Manor in northern
Westchester two years ago. "This is a much better atmosphere," his
mother, Dawn, told me. Their new apartment is in a large house with a
wide sloping lawn surrounded by trees. "The kids can just go outside
anytime. The little one wouldn't go to sleep when we first got here."
He wanted to be outside all the time. In Cortland Manor, "kids have a
better chance to grow," Trevor's father, Trevor Sr., says. "We see
deer in the yard, woodchucks, otters, frogs. There's just life up
here."

I was beginning to see that the problems of stress and material
deprivation were inseparable parts of the contemporary miasma of
poverty. But how did these neighborhoods become so unhealthy? New York
City is one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country.
Blacks, whites and other ethnic groups interact every day, but to a
large extent they live separately. At the same time, the city has also
become more segregated by wealth, so that many black and Hispanic
neighborhoods are also the poorest.

The Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has described how,
thanks to the civil rights movement of the 60's, many middle-class
blacks have been able to find jobs and housing outside traditional
black areas, leaving behind the most impoverished, poorly educated
people. This concentration of disadvantage -- racial, social and
economic -- combined with the loss of many unskilled manufacturing
jobs, is what Wilson says contributed to the many social problems
associated with poverty today, including drug abuse, crime and single
motherhood. Mindy Fullilove says that these trends contributed to
widening health inequalities as well. As racial and economic
segregation increased, health problems became concentrated in the most
deprived areas, as if the miasma were condensing over them. Indeed, I
wondered if the miasma might not turn out to be segregation itself.

In order to understand the health crisis among America's urban poor,
Fullilove explains, you can't just consider what's going on now. "You
have to look at the history of these neighborhoods" and think about
the people who live there and what has happened to them in the past.
"The history of each neighborhood will determine its pattern of
disease. A city like New York suffers from an overlay of epidemics."

In the 70's, 80's and 90's, poor minority neighborhoods throughout the
country experienced a protean health crisis. Rates of some chronic and
infectious diseases began increasing for the first time since World
War II. Even older blacks who made it into their 60's, and who once
had as good a chance of reaching their 75th birthdays as 60-year-old
whites, began dying at higher rates.

Fullilove says that urban-renewal projects that helped create
concentrated poverty, along with redlining -- discrimination by banks
and insurance companies -- and public- service cuts in poor
neighborhoods led to catastrophic changes in the way the poor lived,
and destroyed the foundation that made poverty endurable. The migrancy
of poor people, displaced by fires, evictions and other calamities,
destroyed informal community mechanisms for caring for children and
controlling the behavior of adolescents and young adults, and this
made it harder than ever for the poor to cope. "It was like a massive
refugee situation," Fullilove says.

At the same time, as the middle class increasingly campaigned for
restrictions on cigarette and alcohol advertising, those companies
spent more of their marketing dollars in poor neighborhoods. As
Rodrick and Deborah Wallace wrote in their book "A Plague on Your
Houses," politicians looked the other way when companies posted huge,
colorful billboards -- depicting exuberant black people smoking
cigarettes and drinking beer -- outside schools and churches in
Harlem, Brooklyn and the South Bronx. Construction on central Harlem's
first full-size supermarket did not begin until 2002, but in the 90's
there were more than a hundred places where a child under 18 could buy
cigarettes, including individual "loosies," which are cheap but
illegal.

The wave of crime and drugs of the 80's and 90's has subsided
considerably, and some once-grim urban neighborhoods are even
prospering. But poverty has risen in many suburban minority enclaves,
and the health problems of the poor have not gone away.

Much has been written about how such social problems as joblessness
and drug abuse worsen health problems, but it is also possible that
the converse is true. Both Beverly and Monica have lost jobs as a
result of illness, and many sick people fall into poverty. Anne Case,
a Princeton University economist, has shown that unhealthy young
people are far less likely to succeed in school and find good jobs
later on. Thus, illness can trap poor families in cycles of disease,
death and poverty for generations.

Adam Karpati of the New York City health department says that even
though we don't know what the miasma is, there is still a great deal
we can do to improve the well-being of the poor. In the 19th century,
it was not the discovery of germs that led to the greatest advances in
public health, but a series of profound changes in the way the poor
lived -- a virtual social revolution. Then, as now, health and poverty
were inseparable from each other, and better housing, sewers, decent
wages, better working conditions and improved nutrition saved millions
of lives. Today much could be done to improve the environment and make
life less stressful for the poor. The health department is working to
reduce mold and roach infestation in public housing, as well as
encouraging doctors and community organizations to address such
problems as obesity, asthma and diabetes. These admirable programs,
however, are modest in scale, and in the current fiscal climate, their
financing is far from secure.

More ambitious changes are needed, but at present, our government is
permitting matters to get even worse. Since 2000, millions of jobs
have been lost, and nearly three million people have joined the ranks
of the poor, who now account for more than 12 percent of the U.S.
population and 24 percent of African-Americans. This means fewer
families will be able to move out of poor neighborhoods on their own.
For now, the federal Section 8 program -- which provides subsidies for
people to pay for private housing -- is the only hope most people have
of getting out of these neighborhoods, but even its future is in
doubt. Possible budget cuts could mean thousands of Section 8
recipients will lose their vouchers next year, and in the longer term,
Republicans in Congress hope to devolve the program to the states.
This will almost certainly mean the program will shrink. Last month,
moreover, HUD also suspended rental supplements that Jerrold Levy says
have made programs like ESOP possible. "This will reinforce the
ghettoization of poor people," Levy says.

Rising unemployment and budget cuts will not only harm people's
health. They will also cost Americans money. Take diabetes and asthma
as examples. Around one million people succumb to Type 2 diabetes each
year, with African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans most at
risk. The bill for treating the nation's 11 million known diabetics
comes to $92 billion for medications and doctors' visits plus $40
billion in lost productivity due to absences from work and premature
death. The yearly bill for the nation's asthma epidemic is $14
billion. As Beverly pointed out to me, shortsighted cuts, amounting to
a few hundred million dollars, from the HUD budget mean programs to
refurbish public housing, organize recreation for children and build
playgrounds have been halted. The exterminator teams that used to come
every month now come once every two months, and the roaches are
flourishing as never before.

Whatever the miasma is that afflicts America's minority poor, it is at
least partly a legacy of the segregation of America's cities. These
neighborhoods, by concentrating the poor, also concentrate the
mysterious, as yet poorly understood, factors that make them sick.
You'd almost think this new miasma was caused by some sort of
infection, because of the way it seems to strike certain neighborhoods
and certain types of people. I recently came across a research article
by Angus Deaton of Princeton University, reporting that white people
who live in cities with large black populations have higher death
rates than whites with the same income who live in cities with smaller
black populations. It made me wonder whether the deprived, polluted,
roach-infested, stressful conditions in which poor blacks live aren't
affecting all of us, to some degree. And even if we never find out
what the miasma is, this possibility should scare us into treating
this as the health emergency it is -- if nothing else will.

Helen Epstein writes frequently about public health for The New York
Review of Books. This is her first article for the magazine.

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From: Associated Press, Sept. 7, 2006
[Printer-friendly version]

FEDS REJECT NUCLEAR WASTE IN UTAH

By Paul Foy

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- The U.S. Interior Department on Thursday
rejected a bitterly contested plan to create a nuclear waste stockpile
at an American Indian reservation in Utah's west desert.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said the decision kills a proposal to store
44,000 tons of spent fuel rods on the Goshute Indians' Skull Valley
reservation, about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

Private Fuel Storage, a group of nuclear-power utilities known as PFS,
won a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in February.
Lawsuits, regulatory opposition and other hurdles have delayed the
plan for years.

"PFS is dead," Hatch said. "To me, it's a great day for Utah."

The Interior Department used its power to veto a lease tribal leaders
approved for the stockpile. The agency also refused to yield federal
land for a transfer station where fuel rods would be moved from rail
cars to tractor-trailers.

A spokeswoman for the utility consortium that won a license for the
storage site suggested it was premature to call it dead.

"We have not seen the decisions or figured out what our options may
be," PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said.

A public-health group also was cautious.

"We're a little hesitant to declare full victory on this because PFS
has a license. It's like having a license but no car, and they've been
told to stay off the road," said Vanessa Pierce, executive director
of Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah.

Private Fuel Storage billed the Goshute stockpile as temporary until
the federal government can open a national repository at Nevada's
Yucca Mountain. But some worried Utah could have become a "de facto"
home for nuclear waste if the Yucca facility, which is behind
schedule, doesn't open.

Copyright The Associated Press

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From: Rachel's Democracy & Health News #873, Sept. 21, 2006
[Printer-friendly version]

CORRECTION: HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS IN SYNTHETIC TURF

By William Crain

The article "Hazardous Chemicals in Synthetic Turf" (Rachel's News
#871, September 7, 2006) incorrectly identified the brand of synthetic
turf in the study as FieldTurf. The brand was A-Turf.

Return to Table of Contents

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