On April 19, 2013, GAP released "Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups?" The report details the devastating long-term effects on human health and the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem stemming from BP and the federal government's widespread use of the dispersant Corexit, in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

GAP teamed up with the nonprofit Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN) to launch this effort in August 2011 after repeatedly hearing from Gulf residents and cleanup workers that official statements from representatives of BP and the federal government were false and misleading in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Over the next 20 months, GAP collected data and evidence from over two dozen employee and citizen whistleblowers who experienced the cleanup's effects firsthand, and GAP studied data from extensive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Taken together, the documents and the witnesses' testimony belie repeated corporate and government rhetoric that Corexit is not dangerous. Worse than this, evidence suggests that the cleanup effort has been more destructive to human health and the environment than the spill itself.

Conclusions from the report strongly suggest that the dispersant Corexit was widely applied in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion because it caused the false impression that the oil disappeared. In reality, the oil/Corexit mixture became less visible, yet much more toxic than the oil alone. Nonetheless, indications are that both BP and the government were pleased with what Corexit accomplished.

The report is available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three. You can download an Executive Summary of the report here.
Additional report exhibits are on file with GAP.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and physicians continue to document that some patients experience fuzzy thinking and memory loss while taking statins, a class of global top-selling cholesterol-lowering drugs.

A University of Arizona research team has made a novel discovery in brain cells being treated with statin drugs: unusual swellings within neurons, which the team has termed the "beads-on-a-string" effect.

The team is not entirely sure why the beads form, said UA neuroscientist Linda L. Restifo, who leads the investigation. However, the team believes that further investigation of the beads will help inform why some people experience cognitive declines while taking statins.

"What we think we've found is a laboratory demonstration of a problem in the neuron that is a more severe version for what is happening in some peoples' brains when they take statins," said Restifo, a UA professor of neuroscience, neurology and cellular and molecular medicine, and principal investigator on the project.

Restifo and her team's co-authored study and findings recently were published in Disease Models & Mechanisms, a peer-reviewed journal. Robert Kraft, a former research associate in the department of neuroscience, is lead author on the article.

Restifo and Kraft cite clinical reports noting that statin users often are told by physicians that cognitive disturbances experienced while taking statins were likely due to aging or other effects. However, the UA team's research offers additional evidence that the cause for such declines in cognition is likely due to a negative response to statins.

The team also has found that removing statins results in a disappearance of the beads-on-a-string, and also a restoration of normal growth. With research continuing, the UA team intends to investigate how genetics may be involved in the bead formation and, thus, could cause hypersensitivity to the drugs in people. Team members believe that genetic differences could involve neurons directly, or the statin interaction with the blood-brain barrier.

"Women aren't dolphins" is a phrase often bandied about by those who question the idea of water births. Of course, they forget that we're not mountain goats or birds, but that doesn't stop us from rock climbing or hang gliding.

As more scientific evidence emerges about the benefits of water immersion in labour and birth, hospitals and birth centres are increasingly adding large baths to their delivery rooms. The New South Wales Department of Health has even given a directive that "all maternity services offer access to water immersion in labour (target 100 per cent by 2015)", in an attempt to stem the rising caesarean section rate.

Professor Colin Pritchard's latest research published in journal Public Health has found that the sharp rise of dementia and other neurological deaths in people under 74 cannot be put down to the fact that we are living longer. The rise is because a higher proportion of old people are being affected by such conditions -- and what is really alarming, it is starting earlier and affecting people under 55 years.

Of the 10 biggest Western countries the USA had the worst increase in all neurological deaths, men up 66% and women 92% between 1979-2010. The UK was 4th highest, men up 32% and women 48%. In terms of numbers of deaths, in the UK, it was 4,500 and now 6,500, in the USA it was 14,500 now more than 28,500 deaths.

Professor Pritchard of Bournemouth University says: "These statistics are about real people and families, and we need to recognise that there is an 'epidemic' that clearly is influenced by environmental and societal changes."

Tessa Gutteridge, Director YoungDementia UK says that our society needs to learn that dementia is increasingly affecting people from an earlier age: "The lives of an increasing number of families struggling with working-age dementia are made so much more challenging by services which fail to keep pace with their needs and a society which believes dementia to be an illness of old age."

Bournemouth University researchers, Professor Colin Pritchard and Dr Andrew Mayers, along with the University of Southampton's Professor David Baldwin show that there are rises in total neurological deaths, including the dementias, which are starting earlier, impacting upon patients, their families and health and social care services, exemplified by an 85% increase in UK Motor Neurone Disease deaths.

Scientists hail medical breakthrough by which half a million UK sufferers could avoid major surgery and take antibiotics instead

Up to 40% of patients with chronic back pain could be cured with a course of antibiotics rather than surgery, in a medical breakthrough that one spinal surgeon says is worthy of a Nobel prize.

Surgeons in the UK and elsewhere are reviewing how they treat patients with chronic back pain after scientists discovered that many of the worst cases were due to bacterial infections.

The shock finding means that scores of patients with unrelenting lower back pain will no longer face major operations but can instead be cured with courses of antibiotics costing around £114.

One of the UK's most eminent spinal surgeons said the discovery was the greatest he had witnessed in his professional life, and that its impact on medicine was worthy of a Nobel prize.

"This is vast. We are talking about probably half of all spinal surgery for back pain being replaced by taking antibiotics," said Peter Hamlyn, a consultant neurological and spinal surgeon at University College London hospital.

Hamlyn recently operated on rugby player Tom Croft, who was called up for the British and Irish Lions summer tour last month after missing most of the season with a broken neck.

Specialists who deal with back pain have long known that infections are sometimes to blame, but these cases were thought to be exceptional. That thinking has been overturned by scientists at the University of Southern Denmark who found that 20% to 40% of chronic lower back pain was caused by bacterial infections.

In Britain today, around 4 million people can expect to suffer from chronic lower back pain at some point in their lives. The latest work suggests that more than half a million of them would benefit from antibiotics.

Attorneys at Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a lawsuit on behalf of CFS, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) and seven other U.S. food safety, agriculture, public health and environmental groups to compel the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to respond to the groups' three year-old petition which calls for immediate withdrawal of FDA's approval of arsenic-containing compounds as feed additives for food animals. Filed the same day Consumer Reports released an alarming study on antibiotic resistance in turkey, the lawsuit highlights yet another gaping hole in FDA oversight of animal feed additives.

Arsenic is commonly added to poultry feed for the FDA-approved purposes of inducing faster weight gain on less feed, and creating the perceived appearance of a healthy color in meat from chickens, turkeys and hogs. Yet new studies increasingly link these practices to serious human health problems. The lawsuit filed last week seeks to force the FDA to fulfill its mandate to better protect the public from arsenic. The 2009 petition presented abundant science to FDA that organic arsenic compounds - like those added to animal feed - are directly toxic to animals and humans, but also that they convert to cancer-causing, inorganic arsenic inside of chickens, in manure-treated soil and in humans. Additional testing since submission of the 2009 petition demonstrates even greater cause for public concern and therefore greater urgency meriting FDA's prompt attention.

Chinese health officials announced on Monday that four more people have died from the H7N9 bird flu virus. The virus has now killed 31 and infected 131 mostly along China's eastern coast.

Three of the deaths occurred in the eastern coastal provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang and one death occurred further inland at Anhui.
No details have emerged concerning the new victims.

In addition to recent deaths, the Chinese government is reporting two new confirmed H7N9 cases in the southeastern coastal province Fujian, located across the straits from Taiwan where the virus has infected one person who is said to be recovering.

An apple a day used to keep the doctor away, at least according to folk wisdom. But not any more - unless it's organically grown. Apples top the list of foods contaminated with pesticides, says the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an environmental health research and advocacy organization, in its annual report called "The Dirty Dozen™."

The listing of foods that may have toxic levels of pesticides is part of the group's Shopper's Guide to Pesticide in Produce, which draws its data from tests conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Even after washing, more than two thirds of the tens of thousands of food samples tested by the agencies showed pesticide residues. The most contaminated fruits were apples, strawberries, grapes, peaches and imported nectarines. Among vegetables, the most contaminated were celery, spinach, sweet bell peppers, cucumbers, potatoes, cherry tomatoes and hot peppers.

The contamination levels varied significantly between different foods. Potatoes had a higher total weight of pesticides than any other food crop. A single grape tested for 15 different pesticides. So did sweet bell peppers.

ExxonMobil's pipeline spilled thousands of barrels tar sands crude, Arkansas Attorney General warns of nauseating conditions in area - , staff writer

Five weeks after ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline ruptured and spewed thousands of barrels of tar sands oil in Mayflower, Arkansas, residents are stuck "on their own" as they suffer from health problems following noxious black cloak that enveloped their neighborhood.

"Both the subdivision and the cove look more like construction sites than neighborhoods," Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said at a press conference on Tuesday of the cove area of Lake Conway. "There's heavy equipment everywhere, much of it contaminated with oil as it goes down roads and through people's yards."

The number of babies dying in their first day of life remains significantly higher in the United States than 33 other leading industrialized nations combined, an annual report compiled by Save the Children reveals.

The London-based charity's "State of the World's Mothers" compiled a list of birth-day death rates for 176 countries, as well as information on maternal health, education and women's income and political status.

While only one percent of the world's more than one-million first-day deaths occur in the developed world, the US far outpaces its industrialized peers in newborn deaths.

The report determines that an estimated 11,300 babies die each year in the United States on the day they are born, "50 percent more first-day deaths than all other industrialized combined."

"When first-day deaths in the United State are compared to those in the 27 countries making up the European Union, the findings show that European Union countries, taken together, have 1 million more births each year (4.3 million vs. 5.3 million, respectively) but only about half as many first-day deaths as the United States (11,300 in the US vs. 5,800 in EU member countries)," the report claims.