The EPA says public drinking water
must be under 0.0005 PPM of PCB's
The EPA classifies DIRT at higher
than 50 PPM as a TOXIC WASTE SITE
BEACHED WHALES NOW TEST AT
OVER 1000 PPM OF PCBS !!!
-----------------------
Clearly this PCB industrial waste was
PIPE-LINED into Once Clean Oceans: EcoDelMar.org/why
The orca found dead on the Olympic Peninsula earlier this year carried a level of contaminants that was among the highest -- if not the highest -- ever measured in killer whales, laboratory tests show.
The 22-foot-long female orca was so full of polychlorinated biphenyls that when scientists first attempted to test her fat, the result was too high for the machines to read it.
"She basically knocked our instruments off," Gina Ylitalo, a researcher for the National Marine Fisheries Service, told fellow scientists at a recent seminar. "We had no idea we'd see these levels."
The PCB level found in the orca is dozens of times higher than concentrations known to affect the growth, reproduction and immune system of another marine mammal, the harbor seal.
Although the toxic chemical's effect on orcas isn't as well-known, researchers believe orcas are affected in much the same way.
The super-high reading on the Dungeness Spit whale surprised even scientists who have tracked orcas for years and were well aware of their PCB burdens. It also adds new urgency to old questions about pollution of the oceans.
Dozens of beachgoers in Hollywood worked feverishly from keeping what
appeared to be a pair of beached whales -- a mother and her calf -- from stranding themselves on shore.
Their efforts could not rescue the beached mother whale who died Monday
afternoon. That means its calf will have to be euthanized because it cannot survive without its mother, said Blaire Mase of NOAA.
A NOAA Fisheries official told CBS station WFOR-TV's Gary Nelson the two whales appear to be a mother and her calf.
The whales were first spotted just before 1 p.m. when the larger one, approximately ten to twelve feet in length, tried to beach itself near Garfield Street, about five blocks north of Hollywood Boulevard.
Would be rescuers half steered, half carried, it back toward the open the sea but it turned around immediately and swam back to the shore. Half a dozen men then surrounded it and steered it into waist deep water as they tried to keep it from going back to the shoreline. At one point it swam a short ways out to sea and then began swimming in circles. It kept circling for several minutes before heading out to sea. It returned about half and hour later and again tried to beach
itself.
Chopper4 spotted a second smaller whale, only about 5 feet in length, about a quarter mile south of the first one. It too tried to beach itself several times was turned back into the open sea by beach goers.
Vanessa Lane, a spokeswoman for the Marine Animal Rescue Society, warned against pushing the sea mammals back into the water.
"Please don't push them back at sea. Just get the area clear around them. People are on the way out there. Do not push them back at sea. If it's safe to keep the blowhole area clear," she said. "There is always a risk when you're near a wild animal."
Lane said once the vet arrives, there will be several options: "At this point they need to assess the animals and first responders will keep the area clear and keep the animals wet and keep debris away from their blowhole and stabilize the animal until the vet can get on scene. They will decide if they can rehabilitate and re-release it or euthanize it."
Marine Animal Rescue Society and NOAA Fisheries were called to check out the animals.
Scientists finally understand why dolphins and whales become terminally
ill, with suppressed immune systems and cancers caused by industrial
toxins of mass distribution, they beach themselves and die at our feet,
victims of the money saved by dumping industrial toxins
into the only living Oceans in the entire universe.
Between 2006 and 2007, industry admitted and reported PCB dumping
increased by 40 percent, due to dumping of toxins manufactured before
the substances were banned in
1979. Mercury releases, mostly due to mining, increased by 38 percent.
Dioxin, the most poisonous of all, dumping increased by 11 percent.
The “Toxics Release Inventory” classifies all releases together,
including legal and illegal dumping, disposal in mine reclamation ponds
(which leach into groundwater) and disposal in toxic dump sites.
General Electric has temporarily suspended dredging for contaminants in the upper Hudson River after water samples showed that chemicals from the cleanup had traveled several miles downstream.
The Environmental Protection Agency
ordered the dredging, normally carried out six days a week, to be
stopped on Friday, but it could resume as soon as Tuesday afternoon,
said Kristen Skopeck, a spokeswoman for the agency.
Water tests conducted about five miles south of Fort Edward in
Washington County, where most of the dredging is under way, showed that
levels of the chemicals known as PCBs exceeded water quality standards.
The E.P.A. said it was reviewing efforts by General Electric, which
is overseeing the cleanup, to keep PCB levels down elsewhere in the
river. That may involve steps like limiting the number of dredges
operating at the same time and using silt curtains, made of mesh
fabric, to keep the sediment disturbed by the dredging in the same
area, Ms. Skopeck said.
The dredging operation, which began in May along a six-mile segment south of Fort Edward,
is the first phase of a cleanup expected to last through 2015. (The
current phase is expected to continue well into the fall.)
Two General Electric factories discharged PCBs for three decades
beginning in the 1940s before PCBs were banned in 1977 as a health
threat to people and wildlife. That led to the federal designation of
nearly 200 miles of the river, from Hudson Falls, N.Y., to the southern
tip of Manhattan. The total kilo tonnage dumped by industry for decades since the 1930's into Oceans worldwide has yet to be determined and the full extent of global damage to marine life and life on Earth will continue to expand as the PCBs are absorbed into non bio degradable plastic throughout the oceans of Earth.
Special Report: Youth at Risk Industrial profits prevail
By Vicki Monks
The young are harmed far more by toxic pollutants than adults, suggests new research on wildlife and humans...
Not only are the young exposed to toxic
chemicals in the womb, mothers also unload toxics in
their milk. In milk from species ranging from beluga whales to dairy
cows, scientists have
measured concentrations of chemicals including dioxins, PCBs and
various pesticides. On a daily basis, the
infant is getting 50 times the exposure an adult gets every day, but
for the infant... this is during the most
critical developmental
stage of the only brain they will ever have to be used for their entire
life... who will pay for the massive amounts of therapy that will be
required... and will it ever fix the loss of brain cells in childhood.
Chemicals found in the Florida dolphins´ blubber include some of the most deadly and long-lived
contaminants of the industrial age. Dioxins, a group of chlorine-based chemicals, are unwanted
by-products of papermaking, incineration of chlorinated plastics and other industrial processes.
Although PCBs were banned in this country in the late 1970s, they are still commonly found in
electrical systems, where they were used for insulation. Leaks from the equipment into soil and
water can move readily into food. The toxics are so persistent and
widely distributed that people and other animals continue to be exposed worldwide.
"What we are seeing now is the impact of damage that was done over the last few
decades," says biologist Randall Wells of the Chicago Zoological Society, which runs the
program that has studied the Sarasota dolphins for 26 years.
Now scientists are finding that these and other, still-manufactured toxic chemicals can interfere
with immune systems. In 1987 alone, more than 700 bottlenose dolphins, HALF of the migrant Atlantic
population, washed up on beaches from New Jersey to Florida, and scientific necropsies determined they
were killed by infectious disease. Their bodies contained extremely high levels of PCBs, DDT and other known
immune-suppressing industrial chemicals, and those chemicals clearly explain the dolphins´ susceptibility to
disease. "These chemicals are damaging immunity in adult dolphins, and they are doing
even more harm to juveniles," says immunologist Garet Lahvis of the University of
Maryland School of Medicine. That´s partly because mammalian immune systems aren´t fully
functional until months or years after birth, so the industrial chemicals always kill off the youngest first.
Several extremely disturbing links between industrial pollutants and
severely suppressed human immunity are currently under investigation,
but underfunded.
A study published in the journal Pediatric
Research found a
correlation between PCB/dioxin exposures and suppressed levels of
disease-fighting white blood
cells. Doctors who examined the children concluded that while the
immune-system changes "will persist for a lifetime and cause severe
health difficulties"--including autoimmune diseases that provoke the
body to attack itself.
"We are finding
the same pollutants in our birds--PCBs and organochlorines" that have been measured in
seals, dolphins, humans and other species with similar T-cell immune problems.
In our birds, many new born chicks with suppressed immune systems die before they are able to leave the nesting
grounds. This is becoming an industrial by-product nightmare on Earth.
LOWERED INTELLIGENCE: Not only are kids´ metabolisms faster than those of
adults, babies don´t excrete contaminants or store them away in fat in the same ways that adults
do. That
means babies get continuous exposures at a time when all of their organs, including their brains,
are developing.
A Michigan study published in The New England Journal of Medicine last September
found persistent intellectual deficits in children exposed before birth to much lower doses of PCBs
than the Yu-Cheng children. In 1981, two Wayne State University psychologists, Sandra and
Joseph Jacobson, measured PCB levels in mothers and newborn infants.
Since consumption of fatty fish from contaminated water is a major source of PCBs, the
Jacobsons selected mostly mothers who had eaten Lake Michigan salmon or lake trout regularly
during the years before their children were born. The researchers found that infants with the
highest exposures grew more slowly than other babies, and at four years old, the high-exposure
group had poorer short-term memory. By the time the group reached 11 years old, the 30 most
highly exposed children had average IQs six points lower than the least exposed group. And of
the high-exposure kids, 23 percent were two years behind in reading and learning skills.
Childhood cancers are on the rise, nearly doubling
among teenagers in the United States. Some health officials
are becoming concerned that these conditions may be somehow linked to
toxic chemicals... but they are a
long way from exposing any proof... see: efficient early retirement
planners and new executive directors dot com (For more information on
endocrine disruptors, see "The
Alarming Language of Pollution," National Wildlife)
According to a study from the University of Minnesota published in the NIEHS journal
Environmental Health Perspectives, in western Minnesota--where wheat, sugar beet and
potato farmers rely on insecticides, herbicides and other pesticides to protect their crops--children
of farm families had significantly higher rates of birth defects than the state´s general population.
The highest rates were among children conceived in the spring... when the toxin spraying is most intense...
Pollutants found in deep-sea octopods and squids
by Shelly Dawicki (NEFSC)
New evidence that chemical contaminants are finding their way into the deep-sea food web has been found in deep-sea squids and octopods, including the strange-looking “vampire squid". These species are food for deep-diving toothed whales and other predators.
In a study to be published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, Michael Vecchione of NOAA Fisheries’ National Systematics Laboratory and colleagues Michael Unger, Ellen Harvey and George Vadas at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science of The College of William and Mary report finding a variety of chemical contaminants in nine species of cephalopods, a class of organisms that includes octopods, squids, cuttlefishes and nautiluses.
“It was surprising to find measurable and sometimes high amounts of toxic pollutants in such a deep and remote environment,” Vecchione said. Among the chemicals detected were tributyltin (TBT), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), brominated diphenyl ethers (BDEs), and dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT). They are known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) because they don't degrade and persist in the environment for a very long time.
Cephalopods are important to the diet of cetaceans, a class of marine mammals which includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. Cephalopods are the primary food for 28 species of odontocetes, the sub-order of cetaceans that have teeth and include beaked, sperm, killer and beluga whales and narwhals as well as dolphins and porpoises.
Recent studies have reported the accumulation of POPs in the blubber and tissues of whales and other predatory marine mammals as well as in some deep-sea fish. Other investigators had speculated that the pollutants in marine mammals had resulted from feeding on contaminated squids. However, almost no information existed prior to this study about POPs in deep-sea cephalopods. Vecchione and colleagues wanted to see if whales had a unique capacity to accumulate pollutants or if they were simply one of the top predators in a contaminated deep-sea food web.
The researchers collected nine species of cephalopods from depths between 1,000 and 2,000 meters (about 3,300 to 6,600 feet)
