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Hold the Armadillo Burger — It Might Just Give You Leprosy

May 18, 2012 admin Leave a comment

Crossposted from Healthland:

It can sometimes seem that we spend most of our journalistic time trying to scare you. Or maybe that’s just my posts — I tend to get the environmental danger of the week. But, sorry to say, I’ve got another thing for you to be frightened of, and it’s something you might not expect: armadillos.

That’s right, armadillos — the armored placenta mammal found throughout much of the South. You probably imagined that, at worst, the threat posed by armadillos would be to your car by becoming roadkill, but that’s not all. According to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine, armadillos may actually be spreading leprosy to human beings. “There is a very strong association between the geographic location of the presence of this particular strain of M. leprae [a strain of the bacteria that causes leprosy] and the presence of armadillos in the Southern U.S.,” said Stewart Cole, the head of the Global Health Institute at EPFL in Switzerland and a lead author on the paper. “Our research provides clear DNA evidence that the unique strain found in armadillos is the same as the one in certain humans.”

A little background first: armadillos are one of the few animals, aside from human beings, that carry the leprosy-causing bacteria. The disease itself — which is characterized by disfiguring skin sores and nerve damage — is extremely rare in the U.S., with about 150 cases diagnosed annually. Most Americans who contract leprosy have worked in areas overseas where leprosy is endemic, such as parts of Brazil, the Congo and India; these cases are considered imported.

But, then, health authorities found that up to one-third of U.S. cases appeared to have been contracted in country — even in victims who didn’t seem to have had any contact with a human leprosy patient. These cases were most common in the states of Texas and Louisiana, but the range is now slowly expanding. Armadillos — almost by process of elimination — were suspected, but there was no solid evidence.

The NEJM researchers — from the Global Health Institute and Louisiana State University — drew up a study that included 33 wild armadillos known to have the disease, and 50 leprosy patients. They found a new strain of M. leprae, called 3I, in 28 armadillos and 22 patients who had never been abroad (and thus could not have contracted the disease from other people with leprosy). After sequencing the new strain and comparing it to other known strains from around the world, the researchers concluded that the leprosy patients and the infected armadillos had the same strain. The fact that eight of the patients recalled having contact with armadillos, including one who frequently hunted and cooked the animals for meat, only bolstered the researchers’ confidence.

Overall, the NEJM study shows that the chance of contracting leprosy from an armadillo is quite remote, even if you do have direct contact with one. But the researchers caution that people should be discouraged from hunting, cooking and eating armadillo meat, to prevent even the chance of spreading leprosy (though it’s important to remember that leprosy sufferers can now be treating with a range of antibacterials). Just in case, though, cut out the armadillo steak.

Natural Gas Can Save the Climate? Not Exactly

May 15, 2012 admin Leave a comment

I’m beginning to think solving this global warming thing is going to be really, really hard. We all know that the burning of carbon-intensive coal is just about the single biggest source of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why groups like the Sierra Club are fighting so hard to get America off coal—whether or not [...]

Climate Change Caused Crises Half A Millennium Ago, Too

May 14, 2012 admin Leave a comment

Al Gore’s televised, 24-hour PowerPoint extravaganza last month predictably sparked some hot debate – much of it not about the science itself, but about Gore as its mouthpiece (common themes: he’s a hero, he’s become irrelevant, he’s a hypocritical capitalist). But a key message within Gore’s Climate Reality Project was that our recent strange weather [...]

Go Green: Eat McDonald’s Fish! (but only in Europe)

May 10, 2012 admin Leave a comment

Should greens avoid eating at McDonald’s? I used to be one of those earnest environmentalists—raised on Fast Food Nation—who forswore McDonald’s entirely. But when I moved to the UK I noticed some changes at the Golden Arches. The restaurant chain introduced free range eggs. It started serving sustainably sourced coffee. So I made a decision. I would go to McDonald’s but only order eggs and coffee (seriously). My thinking was that green consumers should support ethical decisions made by large corporations. Call it the Ralph Nader lesson: there’s no point placing a silent vote. If we can make it profitable for big business to be (more) eco-friendly, they are more likely to make eco-friendly decisions. And no disrespect to the mom-and-pop coffee shop on the corner, but McDonald’s purchasing power has (for better and for worse) an unmatched influence on food sourcing across the world.

Unfortunately, eggs and coffee get boring pretty quickly–even when slathered with butter on white bread (McMuffin, anyone?). So thankfully, I now have a new dish to add: the Filet-O-Fish.

Today McDonald’s Corp announced that it will be the first company of its type to sell fish in Europe that’s been certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. Any decision McDonald’s makes has large implications: the Illinois-based company is the world’s biggest restaurant chain. It’s European operations serve 13 million customers in 7,000 restaurants across 39 European countries. That translates to around 100 million Filet-O-Fish orders a year, according to the company.

Now, like all things green, Europe is far ahead of the U.S. when it comes to ethical sourcing. But Big Food is starting to realize that unless it starts serving sustainable products it might find itself without a supply chain in the future. And that’s a global problem. Unilever, the world’s second largest consumer-goods company, recently pledged to buy only sustainable palm oil by 2015. Wal-Mart only sells wild seafood certified by the Marine Stewardship Council.

Does this mean that it’s suddenly ethical to chow down on a Big Mac, as long as you travel to Paris or Berlin to do so? Probably not (eating meat of any sort contributes to climate change, as the Enlightened citizens of the Belgian city of Ghent can attest). But if big business goes green—and it’s not a green wash—shouldn’t we support them?

Breaking the Taboo on "Toilet to Tap"

May 6, 2012 admin Leave a comment

As I wrote in this week’s Going Green column, the American South is gripped by a terrible dry spell, one lasting for months. In Texas alone, 99.93% of the country is in some state of drought. These are extreme times—and they call for extreme measures. Like drinking urine—sort of. In a sense, that’s what one [...]

Can Japan Bury Its Nuclear Disaster?

April 28, 2012 admin Leave a comment

From the beginning, the Japanese response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has been a constant improvisation. After the double blow of a quake and a tsunami knocked out power to the plant, officials have desperately tried to keep nuclear material at active reactors and spent fuel pools cool, to prevent overheating and more wide-scale radiation release. They’ve tried flooding the reactors with seawater. They’ve tried using riot control high-pressure water cannons to spray the reactors, and later fire trucks with more powerful hoses. They’ve tried using helicopters to dump water from above on spent fuel pools, which are running dangerously low. There are even efforts afoot to connect long extension cords that might power up the plant’s cooling system again.

As Ken Belson writes in the New York Times, the MacGyver-like nature of the Japanese response to the crisis is either a sign that they were dangerously unready to deal with a nuclear accident on this scale—or that they’re simply trying to do the best they can with an unimaginable situation. Either way, though, more creativity is going to be needed because the disaster seems to be getting worse by the day. On Friday Japan’s nuclear safety agency raised its assessment of the severity of the catastrophe from 4 to 5 on a 7-level international scale, suggesting that the accident may pose a danger for an area beyond the immediate plant. (Three Mile Island was also rated a 5—although there were few long-term effects from the accident—and Chernobyl tops the charts at a 7.) U.S. nuclear executives told American media that they believed there may be damage to the spent fuel pool at reactor 4, which could make it difficult to refill the pool with water. While American data-collection flights sent over the plant showed that severe radiation had not spread beyond the 19-mile zone of concern laid out by the Japanese government—which is smaller than the 50-mile range recommended by the American government—by the weekend winds could shift to carry any radiation in the direction of Tokyo. “This is a very grave and serious accident,” International Atomic Energy Agency head Yukiya Amano told reporters Friday after meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan. “It’s a race against time.”

It might be time for even more extreme measures. On Friday Japanese engineers revealed that they may try to bury the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in sand and encase it in concrete to try to contain any radiation. That would be the last resort of last resorts—one that has so far only been used in the Chernobyl meltdown. Soviet officials there eventually encased the stricken plant in cement, entombing the remaining nuclear fuel—albeit after an explosive meltdown had already occurred. It won’t be easy, though, as a Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) official told reporters in Tokyo:

It is not impossible to encase the reactors in concrete. But our priority right now is to try and cool them down first.

There’s a reason burying the plant would be a last resort, however. It won’t fully work unless Japanese officials have managed to reduce the pressures and high temperatures of the remaining fuel within the reactors. Hot as it is, any sand or cement poured on top of the plant would almost certainly melt. But a physical blanketing of the reactors might at least keep some of the radiation from reaching the atmosphere and spreading. “The preferable strategy is to get water to cover the rods,” says David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “If you have only one option left I would use sand and soil and blanket the material to try to keep the radiation from reaching the atmosphere.”

Lochbaum, for his part, isn’t too optimistic about the fate of Fukushima:

They are facing an unprecedented challenge. They are mobilizing resources, but they don’t have a lot of options. There’s a lot of material in there that could be exposed and not many barriers.

It doesn’t look like this is going to come to a good outcome.

Of course, it’s important to realize that so far, only the heroic workers at Fukushima have likely been put at any risk due to the nuclear accident—compared to the 7,000 people confirmed to have died in the quake and tsunami. TEPCO is working on reconnecting power to the planet by Saturday, which might allow officials to start pumping water back into the reactors and speed the cooling of existing nuclear fuel. But that would require something to go right—and nothing has gone right in Japan for more than a week.

On the Road with a Geiger Counter in Japan

April 28, 2012 admin Leave a comment

FUKUSHIMA — A Geiger counter isn’t something you ever want to know how to use. It’s definitely not something you want to need. Not that it’s an intimidating piece of equipment – the one I used last week in Japan was roughly the size of a mobile phone circa 1998. Our Terra MKS-05, made in the Ukraine, almost blended into the miscellany of four days on the road in rural Japan: empty coffee cups, gum, onigiri wrappers, Geiger counter. But its quiet, insistent beeping, constantly calibrating and recalibrating the levels of radioactive material in the atmosphere, was a constant reminder that the bucolic scenery out the window was immutably — if invisibly — altered.

I’ve wanted to take a road trip through Japan since I moved to Asia in 2007. But until March, I had never made it out from under the shadow of Tokyo Tower to see the fabled countryside that I envisioned as the engine driving the capital’s intense aestheticism. In the end, it was the fact that the Japanese countryside is the quite literally the engine of Tokyo that took me there. Rural prefectures host most of Japan’s nuclear power plants, receiving tax money from the utilities that run them. Many have criticized the relationship, saying the host prefectures amount to little more than economic colonies of the capital. In Iitatemura, a village nearly 25 miles away from the damaged Fukushima power plant, residents living with some of the highest levels of radiation from the disaster are incensed. “It’s Tokyo’s electricity,” a woman in a local beauty salon fumed. “Why are we suffering?”

Despite the fact that it’s far outside the official evacuation area, it was in Iitatemura where I measured the second highest levels of radiation in three days of driving around Fukushima prefecture – a little over 3 microsieverts per hour. That’s not dangerous to people like me who are just passing through, but authorities say it’s still too high for residents to be exposed to on a long-term basis. On Friday, the government ordered people to evacuate Iitatemura and four other towns outside the evacuation zone in a month’s time. Even worse- off is the town of Namie, well inside the so called “caution” zone and less than 12 miles from the power plant. There, our Geiger counter registered a brief spike to 6 microsieverts per hour — down significantly from late March, when IAEA recorded levels there of 161 microsieverts per hour, or about 1,600 times normal background radiation levels, but hardly a healthy level.

As we drove, the faint beeping of the Geiger counter became a kind of dystopic soundtrack to the early spring landscape. Acre after acre of rice fields stood empty at a time of year when farmers would normally be out planting. The springtime cherry blossoms looked forlorn and unfestive. In evacuated neighborhoods, the counter clicked and calculated as we passed an abandoned cat sitting alone in a driveway. As we were leaving the area on Wednesday — the day before it was made illegal to enter — a policeman pulled our car over and lectured my colleague and me for going in. Didn’t we bother to consider the contamination we were going to bring out and track around the region?

That argument would be more compelling if the contamination was, in fact, limited to the neat 12-mile radius circle that authorities have drawn around the devastated plant. But as the enduring high levels of radiation in Iitatemura and Fukushima City demonstrate, the leaks in the early days of the power plant crisis left a trail of radiation that spreads far into what is supposed to be the safe zone. The government’s recent moves to evacuate towns outside the radius are a tacit acknowledgment of that, and the fact that the U.S. set its own recommended no-go zone at about 50 miles (80km) back in March did not escape the attention of some Fukushima residents. “It makes me feel like the Japanese government is lying to me,” said Shoichi Manome, a sea urchin fisherman in the seaside town of Iwaki. “They are always telling us that the nuclear plant is safe. I think it got so bad that the government wasn’t thinking straight. They didn’t know what to do.”

Fukushima’s agreement to host nuclear plants has been predicated on three key ideas: that nuclear power is safe, that nuclear power is good for a country with few other energy options, and that it provides jobs and money to an aging demographic where agriculture is on the downswing. Since 1977, Fukushima prefecture has collected a tax on nuclear fuel from Tokyo Electric and Power Company (TEPCO) for the 10 reactors the company operates here. (Twelve other prefectures also collect nuclear fuel taxes.) The money has been used for radiation measurements, improving infrastructure and providing subsidies to towns close to the reactor. It’s become an important part of the local government coffers. Before the disaster, it was penciled into the initial 2011 budget at 4.47 billion yen, or about $54 million. Without energy production occurring at the plant, the fuel won’t be produced and therefore the tax will not likely be collected. “Maybe my salary will be reduced,” joked Hiromine Funabashi, an official in the Fukushima prefectural government.

The problem is that while the tax will probably stop coming, the prefecture must now spend more than ever on radiation measurements, healthcare monitoring, and cleanup. And though TEPCO has promised compensation to households forced to evacuate, that does nothing for people who worked in the area and no longer have jobs. “Everyone in the 20-km radius is out of a job,” Funabashi said, adding with a laugh, “They are very free now.” In a few short weeks, what for over thirty years of what appeared to be a kind of symbiosis between guest and host has exploded. The hosts are left with houses they can’t live in, land they can’t farm, and an ocean where fish can’t be caught.

After a few days of watching the numbers flicker on the digital screen, I had mixed feelings about leaving Fukushima. I wanted to stay and learn more about how people living there were handling the evolving situation. But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved get back to Tokyo, to check into a hotel and wash the invisible threat off my skin in a hot shower — one that is heated off a power grid that so many are paying for so dearly.

Another Nuclear Plant to Shut Down in Japan on Safety Concerns

April 24, 2012 admin Leave a comment

Chubu Electric Power Company agreed on Monday to suspend operations at the controversial Hamaoka nuclear power plant, three days after Prime Minister Naoto Kan made an unprecedented request for the company to shut down the plant, citing safety concerns. Like the beleaguered Daiichi Fukishima nuclear power plant further north, Hamaoka is located in highly seismic area along Japan’s coast. The government asked that Chubu cease operations until the plant has an emergency plan in place to deal with a tsunami of March 11′s catastrophic proportions. Hamaoka is located in the city of Omaezaki, roughly 125 miles southwest of Tokyo.

Residents and anti-nuclear activists have been worried about the potential dangers in Omaezaki long before the March 11 tsunami led to one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents in northeast Japan. In the weeks since the crisis, protests have been staged in Tokyo to shut down Hamaoka. Kan’s unusual move – in no small part aimed to counter the intense criticism his government has received over its handling of Fukushima – represents both a victory to the anti-nuclear camp and perhaps the beginning of a less aggressive nuclear policy for Japan.

The Hamaoka plant was built in the 1970s near a known fault line on a geologically unstable peninsula, making it particularly vulnerable to earthquake and tsunami damage. During a press conference on Friday, Kan said the government estimates there is an 87% chance of an 8.0 quake in the area within the next three decades. Chubu has already decommissioned two of the plants’ five reactors because they would have been too expensive to retrofit to seismic standards. Today’s decision will affect the three remaining reactors, two of which have been running since March 11, and one of which has been under repairs. Just weeks ago, Chubu was seeking to reopen the third reactor to stave off anticipated summer power shortages.

Indeed, the question of how Chubu will meet its power supply obligations after shuttering the plant remains. This weekend, after a Saturday board meeting, Chubu’s chairman flew to Qatar to secure new liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies to help restart the utility’s old thermal power plants. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the operator of Fukushima, is currently trying to do the same thing, according to Kyodo. The news agency reported Monday that Chubu chairman Toshio Mita was due to meet with Qatari Energy and Industry Minister Mohammed Saleh Al-Sada and the president of the state-run LNG company Qatargas during his visit.

Many companies and individuals are trying to conserve energy on their own to try to avoid rolling blackouts as summer sets in and air conditioner use spikes. Japan is the world’s third largest electricity consumer after the U.S. and China. It’s also the third largest consumer and net importer of oil. Since the oil crisis in the 1970s, Japan has invested heavily in nuclear power to try to eventually decrease its dependence on foreign oil. In 2008, nuclear energy accounted for 24% of the nation’s electricity consumption. Before March 11, the government was on track to raise that figure to 40% by 2017 and 50% by 2030, with a dozen new reactors scheduled to be built. (Read more about alternative energy options in Japan.)

As Kan noted in a follow up address on Sunday, nuclear power will continue to play a major role in Japan’s energy portfolio and its technical export sector. Just today, in fact, news surfaced of a potential deal between Japan and the U.S. to build a nuclear waste storage facility in Mongolia for nations who do not have their own nuclear waste storage options. (Mongolia is currently planning to build its first nuclear power plant by 2020.) However, while no Japanese leader seems to get a very long run at the helm these days, it would be political suicide for any administration to stridently stick to rapid nuclear expanision previously envisioned. The nation’s hangover from Tokyo’s response to Fukushima — which is not over, by the way — will no doubt play a part in shaping the tone, if not the content, of energy policy into a more voter-friendly mix of emphasizing renewable energey sources alongside dependence on nuclear.

Whether the market will appreciate those efforts is another question. Chubu Electric’s shares plunged on Monday, dragging down the Tokyo market as Kan’s request triggered sell offs of other utilities and investors worry that prolonged power shortages could further derail the manufacturing sector that has been crippled by the March 11 crisis.

Rain Forest for Ransom?

April 22, 2012 admin Leave a comment

In this week’s international edition of TIME—which is thankfully not behind the paywall—I have a piece on Ecuador’s innovative plan to forswear drilling for oil in the Yasuni National Park in exchange for funding from the international community. Yasuni is in the western reaches of the Amazon rain forest, and it may be the most [...]

Ranking North America’s Greenest Cities

April 20, 2012 admin Leave a comment

In part because we have a political press obsessed with Washington, we tend to gauge the success of climate and energy legislation only through the national lens. And the picture from Capitol Hill is deeply depressing. One party completely ignores the science of climate change and only wants to engage on fossil fuels, and that doesn’t exactly leave a lot of room for the other party—although the Democrats have their own divisions on climate and energy. The result—as we’ve written over and over again—is gridlock.

But U.S. cities aren’t waiting around for Congress—which is a good thing, considering 82% of Americans now live in cities, a percentage expected to hit 90% by 2050. “The best cities really have comprehensive plans for climate change and population growth across all categories,” says Eric Spiegel, CEO of Siemens USA. “U.S. cities aren’t waiting for Washington.” At the Aspen Ideas Festival today Siemens and the Economist Intelligence Unit released a ranking of the greenest cities in the U.S. and Canada. Some of the findings:

The greenest city in North America is—not surprisingly—San Francisco, in part because Frisco recycles 72% of its waste, tops in the country.
Number two is Vancouver, which has managed to slash its carbon emissions over the past decade.
New York—which benefits from its extreme density—has adopted a plant to care for 1 million trees throughout the five boroughs.

Check out the full index here. Some of the findings aren’t too surprising. The U.S. has been very successful in reducing air pollution over time—as any long-time resident of Los Angeles could tell you—but American cities are not great with public transit. A wealthier city is more likely to be a sustainable one—hence cities like New York and San Francisco, with expensive downtowns. But wealth isn’t the only factor: Canadian cities do surprisingly well even though they have a per-capita GDP that is $7,000 lower than American cities on average. The difference often boils down to leadership, with powerful mayors like New York’s Michael Bloomberg—whatever you think of him—able to keep their cities focused on sustainability for the long-term. “The mayors we talk to sound more like CEOs than politicians, because they’re focused on the bottom line,” says Siegel. “For them, sustainability means business.” Their peers in Washington could take a lesson.

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Hold the Armadillo Burger — It Might Just Give You Leprosy

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Ranking North America’s Greenest Cities

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