School drinking water contains toxins

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090925/ap_on_re_us/us_toxic_water_schools

I should probably cross reference this article with the previous one on air quality in/around schools. (You will want to double check this too).
http://flintville.multiply.com/links/item/71

Although poorly written (among others, offering no options), those of you with children should just be aware...

XOXO
Me


By GARANCE BURKE,
1 hr 32 mins ago

CUTLER, Calif. – Over the last decade, the drinking water at thousands of schools across the country has been found to contain unsafe levels of lead, pesticides and dozens of other toxins.

An Associated Press investigation found that contaminants have surfaced at public and private schools in all 50 states — in small towns and inner cities alike.

But the problem has gone largely unmonitored by the federal government, even as the number of water safety violations has multiplied.

"It's an outrage," said Marc Edwards, an engineer at Virginia Tech who has been honored for his work on water quality. "If a landlord doesn't tell a tenant about lead paint in an apartment, he can go to jail. But we have no system to make people follow the rules to keep school children safe?"

The contamination is most apparent at schools with wells, which represent 8 to 11 percent of the nation's schools. Roughly one of every five schools with its own water supply violated the Safe Drinking Water Act in the past decade, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency analyzed by the AP.

In California's farm belt, wells at some schools are so tainted with pesticides that students have taken to stuffing their backpacks with bottled water for fear of getting sick from the drinking fountain.

Experts and children's advocates complain that responsibility for drinking water is spread among too many local, state and federal agencies, and that risks are going unreported. Finding a solution, they say, would require a costly new national strategy for monitoring water in schools.

Schools with unsafe water represent only a small percentage of the nation's 132,500 schools. And the EPA says the number of violations spiked over the last decade largely because the government has gradually adopted stricter standards for contaminants such as arsenic and some disinfectants.

Many of the same toxins could also be found in water at homes, offices and businesses. But the contaminants are especially dangerous to children, who drink more water per pound than adults and are more vulnerable to the effects of many hazardous substances.

"There's a different risk for kids," said Cynthia Dougherty, head of the EPA's Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water.

Still, the EPA does not have the authority to require testing for all schools and can only provide guidance on environmental practices.

In recent years, students at a Minnesota elementary school fell ill after drinking tainted water. A young girl in Seattle got sick, too.

The AP analyzed a database showing federal drinking water violations from 1998 to 2008 in schools with their own water supplies. The findings:

• Water in about 100 school districts and 2,250 schools breached federal safety standards.

• Those schools and districts racked up more than 5,550 separate violations. In 2008, the EPA recorded 577 violations, up from 59 in 1998 — an increase that officials attribute mainly to tougher rules.

• California, which has the most schools of any state, also recorded the most violations with 612, followed by Ohio (451), Maine (417), Connecticut (318) and Indiana (289).

• Nearly half the violators in California were repeat offenders. One elementary school in Tulare County, in the farm country of the Central Valley, broke safe-water laws 20 times.

• The most frequently cited contaminant was coliform bacteria, followed by lead and copper, arsenic and nitrates.

The AP analysis has "clearly identified the tip of an iceberg," said Gina Solomon, a San Francisco physician who serves on an EPA drinking water advisory board. "This tells me there is a widespread problem that needs to be fixed because there are ongoing water quality problems in small and large utilities, as well."

Schools with wells are required to test their water and report any problems to the state, which is supposed to send all violations to the federal government.

But EPA officials acknowledge the agency's database of violations is plagued with errors and omissions. And the agency does not specifically monitor incoming state data on school water quality.

Critics say those practices prevent the government from reliably identifying the worst offenders — and carrying out enforcement.

Scientists say the testing requirements fail to detect dangerous toxins such as lead, which can wreak havoc on major organs and may retard children's learning abilities.

"There is just no excuse for this. Period," said California Sen. Barbara Boxer, Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. "We want to make sure that we fix this problem in a way that it will never happen again, and we can ensure parents that their children will be safe."

The problem goes beyond schools that use wells. Schools that draw water from public utilities showed contamination, too, especially older buildings where lead can concentrate at higher levels than in most homes.

In schools with lead-soldered pipes, the metal sometimes flakes off into drinking water. Lead levels can also build up as water sits stagnant over weekends and holidays.

Schools that get water from local utilities are not required to test for toxins because the EPA already regulates water providers. That means there is no way to ensure detection of contaminants caused by schools' own plumbing.

But voluntary tests in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Seattle and Los Angeles have found dangerous levels of lead in recent years. And experts warn the real risk to schoolchildren is going unreported.

"I really suspect the level of exposure to lead and other metals at schools is underestimated," said Michael Schock, a corrosion expert with the EPA in Cincinnati. "You just don't know what is going on in the places you don't sample."

Since 2004, the agency has been asking states to increase lead monitoring. As of 2006, a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found nearly half of all schools nationwide do not test their water for lead.

Because contaminant levels in water can vary from drinking fountain to drinking fountain, and different children drink different amounts of water, epidemiologists often have trouble measuring the potential threats to children's health.

But children have suffered health problems attributed to school water:

• In 2001, 28 children at a Worthington, Minn., elementary school experienced severe stomach aches and nausea after drinking water tainted with lead and copper, the result of a poorly installed treatment system.

• In Seattle several years ago, a 6-year-old girl suffered stomach aches and became disoriented and easily exhausted. The girl's mother asked her daughter's school to test its water, and also tested a strand of her daughter's hair. Tests showed high levels of copper and lead, which figured into state health officials' decision to phase-in rules requiring schools to test their water for both contaminants.

Many school officials say buying bottled water is less expensive than fixing old pipes. Baltimore, for instance, has spent more than $2.5 million on bottled water over the last six years.

After wrestling with unsafe levels of arsenic for almost two years, administrators in Sterling, Ohio, southeast of Cincinnati, finally bought water coolers for elementary school students last fall. Now they plan to move students to a new building.

In California, the Department of Public Health has given out more than $4 million in recent years to help districts overhaul their water systems.

But school administrators in the farmworker town of Cutler cannot fix chronic water problems at Lovell High School because funding is frozen due to the state's budget crisis.

Signs posted above the kitchen sink warn students not to drink from the tap because the water is tainted with nitrates, a potential carcinogen, and DBCP, a pesticide scientists say may cause male sterility.

As gym class ended one morning, thirsty basketball players crowded around a five-gallon cooler, the only safe place to get a drink on campus.

"The teachers always remind us to go to the classroom and get a cup of water from the cooler," said sophomore Israel Aguila. "But the bathroom sinks still work, so sometimes you kind of forget you can't drink out of them."

******

Remember this: Bottled water is NOT an option...

Domestic Violence Anyone?

How sick is this?
Is this just another reason to lie to your insurance company, (and hope it never comes to light)?

Or sadly, another reason not to report this when it happens?

Do any of you have this in your papers?

• What is the original question?
  
  • Is it "has it ever happened to you?"
  • Or "is it happening now?"

From here: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/

Michelle Obama claims that domestic violence counts as a pre-exisiting condition in some states

On Sept. 18, 2009, the first lady gave a speech about the importance of health care reform to women, and cited several reasons she thinks the current system is gender-biased.
 
This line caught our attention:
 
"Women are affected because, as we heard, in many states, insurance companies can still discriminate because of gender," she said. "And this is still shocking to me. These are the kind of facts that still wake me up at night... In some states, it is still legal to deny a woman coverage because she's been the victim of domestic violence."
 
Health reform bills under consideration by Congress would prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-exisiting conditions, an issue we've already explored; we've also examined how pregnancy can sometimes be a basis to deny coverage, and how pre-exisiting conditions already lead to health care rationing by private health insurers.

But we'd never heard domestic abuse could count as a pre-existing condition, so we decided to look into the claim. 

The issue first came to light in 1994, when a Pennsylvania woman was denied health, life and mortgage disability insurance because of domestic violence, according to the Women's Law Project. That group, along with Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, began advocating for legislation to expressly prohibit the practice. Since then, most states, including Pennsylvania, have adopted laws prohibiting the practice.

But, as Mrs. Obama said in her speech, denying coverage due to a history of domestic abuse is still legal in some states. Those states are Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming, and the District of Columbia, according to the National Women's Law Center.

The claim has become a popular talking point for groups supporting health care reform such as the Service Employees International Union. (It's been discussed so much recently that Arkansas, which had no prohibition, this year passed a law prohibiting discrimination against domestic violence victims.)
A Huffington Post story about the laws last week prompted several states and insurance companies to say that the laws have been changed or that the companies don't treat domestic violence as a pre-existing condition.

The North Carolina situation is a matter of some disagreement. Although the Women's Law Center says the practice is still allowed, state officials say they interpret the laws to mean it is not.

Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney told the Jackson Free Press that he wanted to explore whether insurance companies were taking advantage of the law:
 
"I've got to get some of my lawyers to do some research on this, but we have only six mandated (conditions that must be covered) in our state statues, and we have 25 or more optional coverages, but domestic abuse doesn't seem to be one of them... The whole situation is bad. Let's say a woman works with a company that had Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and she gets beat up in her house and Blue Cross says 'we're not covering you because getting beat up is your pre-existing condition.' That's terrible."

Meanwhile, Wyoming Department of Insurance staff attorney James Mitchell told the Huffington Post that state law does not expressly prohibit insurers from using domestic abuse as grounds to deny coverage, though he'd found no cases of the practice in his state.

Mitchell's response raises an important point: Just because it's legal in some states for insurance companies to cite domestic violence as a pre-existing condition, it doesn't mean that insurance companies are actually taking advantage of the loophole.

Back in the 1990s there was evidence that the practice was widespread. In 1994, a House Judiciary Committee panel conducted an informal survey and found that eight of the 16 largest insurers in the country used domestic violence as a factor in deciding coverage. And a year later, the Insurance Commission of Pennsylvania reported that a formal survey showed that 24 percent of accident, health, and life insurers took domestic violence into account when deciding whether to issue and renew insurance policies.

But that data is more than 10 years old, so we asked Lisa Codispoti, senior counsel for the National Women's Law Center, if insurance companies are still denying health care coverage based on domestic violence history.

Examples are hard to come by, she said, because people who get coverage through an employer don't usually face exclusions about pre-existing condititions. Only people who apply for individual coverage would, she said.

"It's such a small number of people who apply for individual insurance," she said. "And it's not like insurance companies have to tell you why you're being denied coverage."

Indeed, underwriting standards are private, said Nancy Durborow, health projects coordinator for the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, making it difficult for groups such as hers to find out how widespread the practice still is.

"This is very secretive stuff," she said.

A spokesman for the association representing insurance companies told us he's not aware of any insurers that deny women coverage based on history of domestic abuse. And the group supports a proposal by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners that would fully prohibit the practice.

"No one should be denied coverage because they are victims of domestic abuse," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans.

We find that the first lady is correct that "in some states, it is still legal to deny a woman coverage because she's been the victim of domestic violence."
Putting aside the disputed North Carolina law, there still are several other states - including Mississippi and Wyoming - that have no specific laws prohibiting the practice. It's important to note that we couldn't find this was happening on a widespread basis -- or even just a little bit.
Mrs. Obama is correct and we rate the claim True.

What's your take on this? I find it repulsive at best.

XOXO
Me

Children AND Infants Tylenol Recalled

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20090924/GPG0101/90924156/1207&located=rss
Johnson & Johnson's recalls children's Tylenol

Additionally, here is TYLENOL Link for the FULL LIST of recalled products:
http://www.tylenol.com/page.jhtml?id=tylenol/news/subpchildinfantnews.inc

NEW YORK -- Johnson & Johnson's McNeil unit said Thursday it is voluntarily recalling 57 lots of infants' and children's liquid Tylenol products because of possible bacterial contamination.

The products being recalled were made between April and June and include nearly two dozen varieties, including Children's Tylenol Suspension 4 oz. Grape, Infants' Tylenol Grape Suspension Drops 1/4 oz. and Children's Tylenol Plus Cold/Allergy 4 oz. Bubble Gum.

Johnson & Johnson said it has contacted wholesalers and retailers about the recall. An inactive ingredient didn't meet internal testing requirements, the company said, and B. cepacia bacteria were detected in a portion of raw material that went unused in the finished product.

The company said in a letter that no bacteria were found in the finished product, and that the likelihood of a serious medical event is remote. However, in consultation with the Food and Drug Administration, the company decided to recall the products.

"It was decided, as a precaution, to recall all product that utilized any of the raw material manufactured at the same time as the raw material that tested positive for the bacteria," the company said.

Consumers with questions should call McNeil's consumer call center at 1-800-962-5357.
A full list of the 21 recalled products and their lot numbers can be seen at:
http://www.tylenol.com/page.jhtml?id=tylenol/news/subpchildinfantnews.inc

Consumers can find lot numbers on the bottom of the product's box and on the sticker that surrounds the product's bottle.

For info on B. cepacia bacteria, please click the following link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkholderia_cepacia_complex

**********

Wonders WHY this does not show on the FDA recall site?

Now go check your bottles.

XOXO
Anne