WIT Health and Environmental News

The International HapMap Consortium today published analyses of its second-generation map of human genetic variation, which contains three times more markers than the initial version unveiled in 2005. In two papers in the journal “Nature”, the consortium describes how the higher resolution map offers greater power to detect genetic variants involved in common diseases, explore the structure of human genetic variation and learn how environmental factors, such as infectious agents, have shaped the human genome.
Any two humans are more than 99 percent the same at the genetic level. However, it is important to understand the small fraction of genetic material that varies among people because it can help explain individual differences in susceptibility to disease, response to drugs or reaction to environmental factors. This new approach to research, called genome-wide association studies, has recently uncovered new clues to the genetic factors involved in type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, prostate cancer, multiple sclerosis and many other disorders. These results have opened up new avenues of research, taking us to places we had not imagined in our search for better ways to diagnose, treat and prevent disease.
The HapMap is available at www.hapmap.org http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/index.html and  http://snp.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH
NIH News
National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)
http://www.nhgri.nih.gov

Asbestos fibers are one of the most significant environmental hazards in the world and asbestos-related diseases are rapidly emerging in developing countries where the magnitude of human toll is significantly higher than in the U.S. and Western Europe.

Asbestos is a proven carcinogen and is associated with the development of pulmonary fibrosis, bronchogenic carcinoma, and malignant mesotheliomas of the pleura and peritoneum. Asbestos is made all the more dangerous by the recent realization that exposure does not only result from on the job exposure but also from prolonged contact with family members who are asbestos workers and with residents living near industrial sources of asbestos. In 2000, it was determined that nearly one third of the 4,500 residents of Libby, Montana, some as young as ten years old, had developed asbestos-related diseases from exposure to tremolites-contaminated vermiculites, exemplifies the human toll of environmental asbestos exposure. This highlights the significance of chronic, non-occupational asbestos exposures via their homes, schools, neighborhoods, or naturally occurring geologic sources.

To gain a better understanding of the mechanism by which asbestos induces malignancy, researchers at the Columbia University SBRP lead by Dr. Tom K. Hei performed two studies using chrysotile and crocidolite asbestos fibers. Hei, and others reported that fiber dimension, bio-persistence, composition and surface reactivity are important criteria for the carcinogenicity of the fibers, indicating that carcinogenic mechanisms of asbestos are likely to be complex and involved multiple pathways. Additionally, previous work established that asbestos is an effective gene and chromosomal mutagen and that the mutagenicity is mediated by reactive oxygen species (ROS). However, the mechanisms by which asbestos produces malignancy in vivo are unclear.

Ultimately, further research will be required to determine, how asbestos produces malignancy. This knowledge is of immense value to researchers as it will enable those who come into contact with asbestos to avoid contracting asbestos related disease.

UNEP noted that ¼ of all diseases affecting mankind resulted from environmental risks. One such risk is the Dandora waste reception site, one of Africa’s largest rubbish mountains.  The Dandora site, located in Nairobi, is seriously harming children’s health and polluting the Kenyan capital.  Located near slums in east Nairobi, the open dump receives some 2,000 metric tons of the city’s rubbish daily. Storks and other scavengers pick over the noxious heap, while scores of people including children try to make a living off the remains.

The study, commissioned by the Nairobi-based U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), found that half of 328 children tested had concentrations of lead in their blood exceeding the internationally accepted level. Exposed to pollutants from heavy metals and toxic substances in soil, water and air, almost half the children tested were also suffering respiratory diseases, including chronic bronchitis and asthma, a UNEP statement said. “Nearly half of soil samples from the area had lead levels almost 10 times higher than unpolluted samples.”  As a direct result, of the Dandora site, People residing around the area have a significantly increased risk of contracting blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis and HIV/AIDS, respiratory aliments and heavy metal poisoning.  According to the WHO the risk of contracting environmentally linked diseases is even higher for children and that 4.7 million children under five die each year from environmentally related illnesses
Source:
Ph.D. student Sarah Huang at the ACRR meeting in Los Angeles, 2007: The children of Dandora, Kenya, Africa and the world deserve better than this…”    http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL02158444.htm

The National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition, said women who avoid seafood to limit exposure to mercury deprive their babies and themselves of essential nutrients. Women should eat at least the 12 ounces a week suggested as a maximum by the government.

Child-development and nutrition specialists produced and promoted the report, with $74,000 from the seafood industry’s advocacy arm, the National Fisheries Institute.  Even still, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and some coalition members, such as the nonprofit March of Dimes Foundation, which raises money to fight birth defects, said they haven’t changed guidelines for consumption of fish by pregnant women. The March of Dimes Web site refers readers to the FDA Web site.

Warnings:

• U.S. officials have been recommending that pregnant and nursing women and young children   avoid eating any shark, swordfish, king mackerel or tilefish and consume no more than 12 ounces a week of other cooked fish and shellfish.
• Canned albacore “white'’ tuna has more mercury content than “light'’ tuna and should be limited to 6 ounces a week, according to a joint statement from the FDA and the Environmental Protection Agency.

UNEP and Google Put International Cleanup Weekend onto Millions Of Computers across the World

People across the planet will be cleaning up their area and sharing the result with millions of people on the internet thanks to a new campaign by Google and the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP). During International Cleanup Weekend on 13 and 14 October, 2007 community groups and individuals on every continent will be heading out in small groups with friends and family to clean up their local parks, beaches, streets and neighborhoods.

Under this new initiative, their activities and results will make history by being posted as photos and videos onto Google Map - giving a global platform to every local initiative. Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP’s Executive Director, said: “The power of local community action is being matched by the power of the World Wide Web. This should make a formidable partnership uniting and empowering groups from Bangalore to Bermuda and Berlin to Beijing in common cause.” “Let us hope this global Google community’s effort may go further and persist beyond the International Cleanup Weekend. It may evolve into a new forum and network for ideas sharing on a wide range of challenges from local cleanups to community-based solutions to such pressing issues as climate change”, he added.

How to Get Involved:
UNEP and Google encourage everyone to plan their own cleanup close to home, wherever they think there is the biggest need for it. To get started, go to: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/cleanup/

On average one is exposed to some 75,000 artificial chemicals every day. While these chemicals, by themselves may not cause adverse health effects.  Evidence is piling up that suggests the occurrence of a “cocktail effect” when different chemical components build up and interact in ones body.  Recently, scientists in Europe and the US have begun testing chemical combinations on populations of yeast, fish, and rats.  Results have shown that certain combinations show effects that are additive, other combinations show synergistic results (these combinations are more detrimental then the sum of their components chemicals), and still other chemicals serve to cancel each other out or reduce risk when given in combination.

In 2002 Andreas Kortenkamp, an environmental toxicologist at the School of Pharmacy, University of London tested a mix of eight xenoestrogens (compounds that disrupt the activity of the oestrogen hormone and induce development of female sexual characteristics) on yeast. These included chemicals used as plasticizers, sunscreen ingredients and others found in cooling and insulating fluids. In the mixture, each was below the level that toxicologists call the “no-observed-effect concentration” - the level that should be safe. Sure enough, the combination triggered unusual effects in the yeast. Kortenkamp and his colleagues dubbed the mixture effect “something from nothing”

While this theory has helped to explain the causes of certain diseases and deformities, it has posed a serious question for government regulatory agencies around the world. Governments generally don’t take into account the additive effects of different chemicals, with the exception of dioxins – which accumulate to dangerous levels and disrupt hormones in the body - and some pesticides. For the most part, risk assessments are done one chemical at a time.

Scallop Shells Recycled into Eco-Friendly Road De-icing Agent

The Aomori Ecological Recycle Industrial Association in Japan started manufacturing a road de-icing agent that employs large amounts of scallop shells generated as a seafood processing by-product in Aomori Prefecture. It started production in March 2007 and plans to process 6,000 tons of scallop shells annually.

http://www.japanfs.org/db/1825-e

The Flat Glass Manufacturers Association (FGMA) of Japan has been conducting an awareness campaign to promote low emissivity (dubbed “Low-E”) glass since April 2006. Low-E double grazing unit excels over regular double grazing unit in lowering heat flow through windows. Under the slogan “Protect the future of the earth with glass windows,” the FGMA is presenting this special glass as a tool for the reduction of CO2 emissions in order to halt global warming. http://www.japanfs.org/db/1824-e

The environmental burden of disease in Canada
 
Exposure to environmental hazards contributes to many chronic diseases, yet the magnitude of their contribution is not well
understood. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently estimated the environmental burden of disease globally by using a combination of comparative risk assessment data and expert judgment to develop environmentally attributable fractions (EAFs) of mortality and morbidity for 85 categories of disease.
 
Canada used the EAFs developed by the WHO, EAFs developed by other researchers, and data from Canadian public health institutions to provide an initial estimate of the environmental burden of disease in Canada for four major categories of
disease. 

Our results indicate that: 10,000-25,000 deaths; 78,000-194,000 hospitalizations; 600,000-1.5 million days spent in hospital; 1.1 million-1.8 million restricted activity days for asthma sufferers; 8000-24,000 new cases of cancer; 500-2500 low birth weight babies; and between $3.6 billion and
$9.1 billion in costs occur in Canada each year due to respiratory disease, cardiovascular illness, cancer, and congenital affliction associated withadverse environmental exposures. 
Result indicate that the burden of illness in Canada resulting from adverse environmental exposures is significant and need
to be addressed by the public health system.
Source:  Boyd, D., Genuis, S. 

Chemicals threaten wildlife in San Francisco Bay, scientists say Jane Kay, Chronicle Environment Writer
 
Scientists are closely monitoring flame retardants and commonly used pesticides in San Francisco Bay, as rising levels of toxic chemicals threaten birds, fish and marine mammals, according to an annual regional  monitoring report prepared by the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a nonprofit science group in Oakland.
 Mercury, PCBs, dioxin and invasive species remain at the top of the most-wanted list of nasty threats to the bay. Scientists have long recognized that these problems in the bay impair the quality of its fish and wildlife and affect the working
of the food chain. Over the last several years, the concentrations of bromine-containing chemical flame retardants known as PBDEs have risen in both water and soil on
the bay bottom, the report said.

State health officials have found the chemicals in the bodies of marine mammals and in bird eggs and dead embryos and are concerned that the chemicals will interfere with reproduction, a danger observed in laboratory animals. The synthetic insecticides, pyrethroids, are used in lawn products, outdoor
sprays and on crops, including one called bifenthrin, which has been shown to kill the small crustaceans eaten by fish and amphibians.  The report names pyrethroids, toxins from blue-green algae, invasive species and effects of the water projects as possible factors leading to the decline of four bay fish species - striped bass, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and
 delta smelt.
 To view the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s “Pulse of the Estuary 2007″ report, go to:
  links.sfgate.com/ZZL