Not Just Drug Addicts:  Earlier this month in South Jersey...

A Superior Court Judge today set the trial date for a Main Line dentist accused of dumping medical waste from his practice into Townsend's Inlet that wound up fouling Avalon beaches in August 2008.

Thomas McFarland Jr., of Wynnnewood, Pa., is charged with the third degree crimes of water pollution and the unlawful disposal of medical waste in connection with the alleged dumping of a bag containing 260 used needles and 180 cotton swabs from his Boston Whaler boat. If convicted, McFarland could face up to ten years in state prison.

Yuck...but fortunately, the scale of such incidents in the U.S. tends to be minuscule as compared to those in a number of other nations.  For instance in October, the Johannesburg Sunday Times got a tip which led to an investigation by the Green Scorpions, South Africa's environmental management inspectors.  End result was the largest in a series of discoveries of illegal medical waste dumps.

The finding of various illegal medical dump sites in the Welkom area was horrifying, Free State premier Ace Magashule said.

...

Magashule said the illegal dumping site at Maximus Bricks was about 3320 square metres wide and two metres deep.

That's 0.82 acres covered with over six-and-a-half feet of medical waste weighing somewhere between 200 and 300 tons.  There are records and photos of the waste being brought in regularly from other states and offloaded by brickyard workers...who were paid extra but didn't wear protective equipment.  Think of the vermin and bloodborne pathogens.  Were all the body parts actually from hospitals?  Et cetera.

From the most recent link...

The crisis in the R560-million-a-year [$76 million] industry dates back several years. With just six operating incinerators in the country and about 42000 tons of medical waste generated each year, an estimated 800 tons is illegally dumped annually.

That dumping estimate would be much higher if there weren't so many incinerators being illegally operated in the country, sometimes by hospitals.  But back to Magashule, who's obviously in damage control mode.

The province planned to do an audit on government and hospital incinerators to make sure they have the capacity to treat medical waste on site.

"Government will also look at the possibility of establishing a centralised--public or private owned--regional waste treatment plant."

It wouldn't be a bad idea to investigate the hospitals as well.  There's many an instance of hospitals (and myriad others) getting deals on disposal contracts which are too good to be true.  There are certainly complaints in South Africa that some of the legal incinerators are too expensive.

At least South Africa has a system and some enforcement...that's better than a number of nations can claim.

Domestic:  The average American produces 4.6 pounds of garbage per day, which is a bit over half a trillion pounds a year.  Our medical waste numbers are but a fraction of that.   

2006 numbers indicated that we had 1.5 billion pounds of [medical waste] produced commercially in the United States. That's five pounds for every person in the U.S. That equated to 3.5 billion dollars to haul that waste away commercially.

$2.33 a pound...that can occasionally fuel some conflicting motivations.  It's much harder to get a handle on the size of the home market.  No doubt many folks simply put their medical waste in the garbage.  Here's just a start at the number.

"In 2006, we had 8 million Americans that took over 3 billion shots for treating diabetes and other ailments at home," explains Cox. "The World Health Organization and the Diabetes Foundation says that by the year 2016, that number will grow by 165% to 21 million Americans taking over 8 billion shots at home and if you go beyond U.S. borders that number is 50 to 60 billion shots."

And obviously with needles, one of the disposal goals is to minimize injury via good sharps management.  An overview of medical waste...

The waste generated is classified into two categories, namely General Waste and Regulated Medical Waste or Clinical Waste. Regulated Medical Waste includes waste that is harmful or has the potential to be harmful to human beings and requires separate disposal. Disposal includes burning/incinerating or treatment before being sent to landfills, depending on the regulations prevalent in respective states. Some states in the US require compulsory incineration of certain types of medical waste such as amputated human parts or parts from autopsy, and laboratory cultures among others.

Hospitals work to keep their disposal bills down in many ways, including reminding employees not to dispose of general medical waste with the various types of special waste.

Playing Spore:  In two-plus decades, Stericycle has gone from a concept to the biggest player in the medical waste disposal market here in the U.S.  

Stericycle was conceived by Dr. James Sharp, a physician who returned to school to earn a Masters of Business Administration. While studying startups and writing business plans, he developed the idea of a waste medical disposal company to complete a class exercise in 1986. The problem of medical waste became major news during the summer of 1987 when on several occasions used syringes, blood bags, gauze dressings, and other items washed up on a 50-mile stretch of New Jersey beaches, which had to be closed for reasons of public safety, resulting in the loss of $1 billion in tourism for the state.

Back in those days, the big solid waste companies like Waste Management and the former Browning-Ferris (BFI) were bundling services with hospitals to try and gain a competitive advantage over smaller disposal firms, and then gobble them up.  Stericycle began in 1989 as a specialist and carved a niche with its recycling technology.  It then proceeded to grow by gobbling up smaller firms for the footprint, technology, or simply to eliminate competition.  From an article in July...

Since its inception, the company has pursued aggressive growth by undercutting competitors, securing long-term contracts and, in 1993, adopting an acquisition strategy. Stericycle has completed 157 acquisitions, including 114 in the U.S. and 43 internationally.

It now has somewhere around a quarter of the domestic market and 7 percent of the total global market.  There was one major acquisition, in 1999.

The fourth-largest solid waste management services company, Allied Waste Industries Inc., agreed to acquire Browning-Ferris Industries Inc., the No. 2 player in the market that also served as the market leader in medical waste treatment and disposal services.

But Allied, which adopted BFI's more recognizable branding, wanted nothing to do with the health care industry.

Enter Stericycle Inc., a growing player in the health care market with its ETD technology, that acquired the BFI division and ultimately crowned itself king of medical waste management. It's a title Stericycle still holds as it continues to acquire other companies

It wasn't as simple as Allied wanting to depart the industry.  With the purchase of BFI, Allied needed to cut its debt and knew Stericycle was interested.

By the way, Electro-thermal deactivation (ETD) uses low-frequency radiation to destroy pathogens without melting plastic.  That reduces emissions and waste volume.

Pricing Power:  Most utilities, public or private, are treated as monopolies.  Communities don't have multiple entities running pipelines through neighborhoods offering competing water, sewage, or natural gas service.  Phone service was the same way until long distance--despite coming over the same land-lines--could be bought from various providers.  Cell phones have obviously added a major wild card to that subject.  And though electricity is a commodity, an increasing number of power companies give people the opportunity to pay more for renewable energy...we trust them not to sell it more than once.

Waste disposal has usually been treated as a utility, either as a municipal service or via multi-year contracts for certain geographic areas.  However, wastes which merit special storage and disposal--like radioactive, hazardous, and medical--can throw wild cards into the situation.  As usual, competition erodes pricing power, and high prices drive folks to look for competition.

When it comes to limiting alternatives, note that BFI and Stericycle had a working relationship before the sale noted above.  From the "AAI Antitrust Toolkit for State Intervention in the Medical Waste Disposal Industry" here.

The State of Utah sued Stericycle and BFI in the United States District Court for the District of Utah for entering into “illegal agreements to allocate customers, divide market territories, agree and conspire not to compete, and attempt to monopolize the markets for collection and disposal of medical waste” in the inter-mountain states of Utah, Colorado, and Arizona.

Consent decrees were entered against each company within days of the filing of the complaint. Both negotiated judgments sought to facilitate future competition in the industry, but with BFI having exited the medical waste disposal business in 1999 with no plans to reenter, this was something of a challenge. Therefore, as part of the sanction against it, the Attorney General arranged for BFI to fund an independent autoclave facility and to donate $100,000.00 to the promotion of competition in the medical waste disposal industry.

Stericycle paid $580,000, made "certain operational changes in Utah to enhance competition," and denied any guilt, claiming it wanted to avoid the expense of vindicating its position.  The State of Utah used some of that settlement money to pay for the preparation of the Antitrust Toolkit.

Earlier this month...

...Stericycle says it has agreed to a Department of Justice demand to sell off some of its medical waste collection businesses in four states to settle an antitrust lawsuit and finalize its $182.5 million acquisition of MedServe Inc.

The Department of Justice's has been actively investigating what some medical waste industry insiders have called "bullying designed to keep smaller competitors out of the marketplace" and the DOJ's Antitrust Division said in a media release that a proposed acquisition by Stericycle "as originally proposed, would substantially lessen competition in infectious waste collection and treatment services to hospitals and other critical health care facilities in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma, resulting in higher prices and reduced service."

Here's why Nebraska was concerned.

Stericycle and MedServe are the only two firms currently able to compete for the customers that generate large quantities of infectious waste in Nebraska.

"If we had allowed this merger to continue, Nebraska medical providers would have seen rising costs for these services," Bruning said. "These costs would then have been passed along to Nebraskans already struggling with high medical bills."

It's nearly always a red flag when businesses, politicians, unions, etc. attempt to squelch competition.

It's time for the annual reminder that it's satellite internet or nothing here at the house.  With the dish on the roof, blogging somewhat dependent upon the weather.  While it's usually snow that causes the problems, ice was the culprit this time.  Speaking of that...

Freezing rain turned Southern Oregon into a skating rink, with a rash of accidents late Friday morning, and another steady stream Friday night and this morning.

More than 20 weather-related crashes were reported in Josephine and Jackson counties between midnight and dawn, according to the Oregon State Police, and including Friday's mayhem the number was closer to 50.

I drove very cautiously to a couple of doctor's appointments yesterday.  With the cooling overnight, I'd have never made it down my driveway this morning.

"It's so icy we can't even get our trucks to a lot of them," Randy Harris, of Fairgrounds Towing and Shell, said this morning. "We spent last night recovering an ambulance that slid into a ditch in the Williams area. It took us four hours to get out there and back.

...

Interstate 5 was closed in both directions between Grants Pass and Rogue River for about three hours following crashes at around midnight involving commercial trucks. By 3 a.m., workers had one lane open in each direction, according to the Oregon Department of Transportation.

Things are better now in much of the valley floor.  But high enough up here in the hills NW of town, there wasn't much melting today.  We could use some decent rain to go with the overcast...November was about 3" light, and this month--usually our wettest--is off to a really dry start.

I'm glad that this cold snap--the hardest here since 1998--is finally coming to an end.  Besides the fact that it's tough on some of my plants that are--or were--borderline hardy, I've had the added pleasure of losing power in the wee hours of two of the last three mornings and not getting it back until the afternoon.

On December 6-10, I had lows of 22, 16, 13, 12, and 12.  It's worth noting though that this is the time of year when nearby Grants Pass set its all-time record low.  On December 8-11 of 1972, the lows in Grants Pass were 4, -1, -1, and 0.  On those same days in Medford, the lows were -6, -6, -6, and -3...with -6 indeed being the all-time record.

On the other side of the mountains, winters are certainly colder in KIamath Falls.  However, the all-time record there isn't that much lower...-17 on December 9, 1972.  Meanwhile up in Bend, the all-time record low of -26 was set twice, January 31, 1950 and February 9, 1933.  In that same cold snap in 1972, Bend "only" got as low as -24.  The all-time record low in the state was in Seneca--about 25 miles south of John Day--on February 10, 1933...-54.  Yikes.

By the by, in Grants Pass there are still seven record lows on the books from December of 1990, the coldest of them being 3 on the 22d.  Plus, January 1 & 2 of 1991 also set record lows.  That was a cold winter...for here.

Time for the faux outrage of the day.

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.

The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment"--but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark--has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.

The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act.

Good grief...how many years now have various industrialized nations been pushing for everyone--and especially major polluters like China--to have emissions goals in future protocols?  My favorite quote was in the Financial Times.

Andy Atkins of Friends of the Earth said: "The Danes holding secret backroom meetings with a few select countries is also deeply disappointing - the world expects the host country to be neutral. Instead, we have Denmark colluding with other rich nations to stitch up the talks."

Progress is never made in the open sessions at climate talks.  These are classic international negotiations, full of backroom meetings, secret alliances, backstabbing, on and on.  And obviously, nations hosting negotiations are under no obligation to be neutral.  None of this is news to Atkins...he's a long-time social justice activist who's been championing treating climate change as a poverty issue.  For him--and most developing nations, it's about the money, not climate change. 

Switching articles again...

National aid budgets dedicated to reducing global poverty would be raided to establish a "climate fund" to help developing countries to adapt to climate change, under a British plan tabled yesterday in Copenhagen.

Money earmarked for education or health would be diverted into projects such as solar panels and wind farms.

The proposal has angered developing countries, which are demanding that all the money in the climate fund be additional to the 0.7 per cent of income that industrialised countries have pledged to give as overseas aid.

Poor nations had hoped that the British plan, devised with Norway, Australia and Mexico, would establish the principle that the climate fund be entirely new money.

Goodness, another plan developed in private by a select handful of nations...how deeply disappointing.  And by the way, few industrialized nations actually give that 0.7 percent of income.  The U.S. doesn't come close (previous blog here).

Returning to the original article...

A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:

• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;

• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called "the most vulnerable";

• Weaken the UN's role in handling climate finance;

• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.

Gee, and let's fail to acknowledge that the unease was even deeper before the obvious compromising there's been on the harder-line going-in positions of several industrialized nations.  Regarding that climate finance reference, what the Danish text actually does is specify that the climate fund will be managed by the World Bank rather than the UN.  That should reduce the amount of money lost to corruption, help make developing nations more accountable for their debt, etc.  Yep, those are goals worth fighting.

I wonder how much President Obama knew about the development of the Danish text.

ClimateGate has clearly exposed some scientific fraud, the extent of which is still being determined.  But, let's ignore the fraud and concentrate on how it was discovered.   

UN officials have likened the theft of e-mails from university climate researchers to the Watergate scandal, after claiming computer hackers were probably paid by people intent on undermining the Copenhagen summit.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the theft from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was not the work of amateur climate sceptics, but was a sophisticated and well-funded attempt to destroy public confidence in the science of man-made climate change. He said the fact that the e-mails were first uploaded to a sceptic website from a computer in Russia was an indication that the culprit was paid.

I'd like to think that van Ypersele--who has a PhD in physics--is upset that this fraud has cast a pall upon honest scientists and quality research.  But in attacking the messengers and offering a conspiracy theory, it's obvious that what matters to him more is politics rather than science.

The following was a vastly more reasoned response to the issue...by someone whose educational background is in social work.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that the stolen e-mails looked "very bad" and were fuelling scepticism, but said the media scrutiny was not unwelcome. Mr de Boer said: "I think it's very good that what is happening is being scrutinised in the media because this process has to be based on solid science. If quality and integrity is being questioned, that has to be examined."

But make no mistake, the science isn't that important to him either.

The UN climate chief has encouraged negotiators to complete work in the first week so a historic pact could be agreed to fight climate change.

...

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of UN Framework Convention on climate change, said, "First of all we need, in terms of the short-term finance, a list of pledges from individual industrialized countries specifying what each individual country will contribute. So not a collective promise where you don't know who will be paying what at the end of the day but individual announcements of contributions from individual countries. Secondly, we will have to ensure that we establish a clear and effective tracking mechanism that allows us to be absolutely sure that individual industrialized countries are meeting their financial commitments."

First comes the money for developing nations...essentially an industrialized nation tax that his organization would get to administer.

Sorry for the quiet...have been and still am under the weather.  Nonetheless, here's a quick post on a topic I visit periodically--fallout from the sexual activity of supposedly celibate Catholic officials in Alaska.  The diocese in Fairbanks declared bankruptcy last year, and early this year its headquarters--the Oregon Province (in Portland)--did the same (previous blog here).  Quoting an article from that post, which the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner evidently no longer has on-line...

"Between 1948-2001, the Fairbanks diocese had the highest rate of perpetrators in the priesthood of any diocese in America," Wall said.

"This is why we have alleged for years that the Society of Jesus and the CBNA (Catholic Bishop of Northern Alaska) through the (Jesuit) father general purposely sent perpetrators to Alaska because the Native people would not complain."

This brings us back to the bankruptcy issue...

More than 500 people have filed claims accusing Jesuits of sexually abusing children across the Northwest.

The claims vary in severity and span decades and geography, from Native Alaskan village children to students at Gonzaga Prep.

People were required to file their allegations by Nov. 30, a deadline imposed by the federal judge overseeing the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus. That organization includes Jesuits in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

The Jesuits already have settled 200 additional sex-abuse claims.

The Catholic Church obviously has very deep pockets.  However, it's proven tremendously adept at dividing and legally walling off its myriad pieces.  The siege continues.

"The judge gave us a toe in the door," [Attorney James Stang] said. "We’ll see what happens and if we can develop a viable theory" that Gonzaga and other properties are owned by the province and thus part of the financial estate available to pay claims.

Gonzaga University is fighting every attempt to link its fortunes to the province. Separately incorporated and registered 125 years ago, the private college with 7,200 students will not volunteer money or other resources to settle the bankruptcy, said Mike Casey, Gonzaga's corporation counsel.

"We are not willing to either participate in this bankruptcy nor help resolve it," he said.

Alleged victims and their attorneys are employing what Casey called the "big tent theory," which uses the threat of future big-dollar payouts against organizations with any hint of liability to instead coerce smaller payments now.

Wouldn't it be interesting to know how much potential liability various insurers have for the what the pedophile priests and the like have done.  I'm sure in some cases that it's the insurers more than the church that are fighting the settlements.

On a separate legal front, the Oregon Province is engaged in a dispute with insurers regarding the scope of policies.

They have hired James R. Murray, who was widely credited with wringing $20 million from insurance companies to help settle the Spokane Diocese bankruptcy.

It was that money, together with $10 million from parishioners, the sale of diocese assets, bank loans and promissory notes collateralized by parish property, that finally brought the diocese bankruptcy to a close in 2007.

No, not completely to a close.  From the Bishop's Q&A page at the Catholic Diocese of Spokane website.

Q. I thought the bankruptcy was over?

A.  As part of the Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Plan that became effective May 31, 2007, provisions were made for the processing of clergy abuse claims which were not filed on or before the claim bar date of March 10, 2006, set by the Bankruptcy Court. Those provisions were established for claimants who had not recognized by the bar date that he or she had been injured as a minor by clergy abuse which they had never forgotten or had repressed the memory of such abuse. These claims are called Future Claims.

In order to provide a way to handle those types of claims, a $1 million Trust Fund was established by the Diocese as part of the Bankruptcy settlement. This $1 million was reserved out of the $48 million settlement amount. This Trust Fund is secured by the Diocese and most of the parishes in Spokane County and is administered by the court-appointed Plan Trustee. A Claims Reviewer was appointed by the court to adjudicate any such claims.

...

If, however, the $1 million Trust Fund ultimately is not sufficient to pay allowed Future Claims, then the Plan provides that the Diocese must replenish the Fund, maintaining at least a $200,000 minimum balance in the Fund, until May 31, 2016. Under the Plan, this obligation is secured by the properties of all the Catholic parishes in Spokane County, with the exception of St. Mary’s Presentation Parish in Deer Park. If the fund becomes depleted and the diocese reaches a point where it can no longer replenish the fund, then the parish properties might well be at risk.

To this point, there have been 21 such claims, 7 of which were recently allowed to progress.

Sept-Îles is a town of about 25,000 on the north shore of the St. Lawrence Seaway.  It's so far northeast of the major population centers in Quebec that it's actually south of Labrador (the blue area on the map below).  In that remote and frosty location is Canada's third busiest port by tonnage.

Back in the '50s, the region boomed with the opening of a couple major iron ore mines to the north.  They were connected by rail to what was then a sleepy, deep water fishing port of about 2,000 people.  From this link...

The most ambitious of the projects, [the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway] was opened in 1954 by the Iron Ore Company of Canada (IOC) for the transport of iron ore from Schefferville, Labrador to the port of Sept Îles, a distance of 359 miles (573km). In 1958, a 36 mile (58km) branch was added from Emeril Junction (also called Ross Bay Junction) to the iron ore deposits of the Wabush area around Labrador City; the distance from Labrador City to Sept Îles is 257 miles (414km).

By 1982 the Schefferville deposit was worked out. The IOC workforce was transferred to Labrador City, and iron ore traffic ceased on the line from Emeril Junction to Schefferville.

 

Between that and the decline in iron ore prices, Sept-Îles took an economic hit early '80s.  But, the area isn't that far from the continent's second largest hydroelectric plant, Churchill Falls in Labrador.  The cheap and plentiful power eventually attracted an aluminum smelter to the port area--Aluminerie Alouette--the fifth largest in the world.

Today, the Aluminerie Alouette consortium is made up of the following five shareholders: Rio Tinto Alcan (Canada, 40%), Austria Metall (Austria, 20%), Hydro Aluminium (Norway, 20%), SGF (Quebec, 13.33%) and Marubeni (Japan, 6.67%).

Nonetheless, the economy in Sept-Îles still isn't what it was.  That's what has stirred up the following.

The Quebec government is resisting calls for a moratorium on the development of uranium deposits in the province despite threats by doctors in Sept-Îles to quit over plans to open a mine near the town.

Premier Jean Charest's government tabled a new mining act earlier this week that failed to order a moratorium on uranium exploration as provinces such as B.C. and Nova Scotia have done.

Physicians in the North Shore community spent the last year fighting mining company Terra Ventures Inc.'s exploration activities. The doctors, municipal officials, community organizations and residents are worried about potential radioactive contamination of the town's water supply.

The company recently received government permits to build an access road to a uranium deposit 13 kilometres from the town, near Lake Kachiwiss which flows into the municipal water supply. In the absence of a moratorium, 20 family doctors and specialists say the projected mining activities will eventually become a public-health threat.

Those 20 doctors, one-third of the total employed in the city's lone hospital, have threatened to quit if the uranium exploration isn't stopped.  They've said they'll leave the region, if not the province.  By law, they have to give two months notice, which they haven't done yet.  Wonder how many of them own homes there.  Anyway, from the most recent link...

The doctors are concerned about radon and other so-called "decay products" of uranium, which can contaminate air and water around a mine and cause lung cancer in humans. The letter adds that even residents of Montreal, Quebec City and Sherbrooke should be concerned about exposure to radiation because of widespread uranium mining across Quebec.

The asbestos mining in Thetford Mines, Quebec (recent blog here) presents an ever greater health risk, and Quebec fights hard to keep it going.  One of those cold, hard, ugly facts is that unemployment isn't exactly good for many people's health either.

By the by, Terra Ventures of Vancouver BC is a penny stock on the TSX Venture Exchange.  It's a highly speculative little firm which has no production, but does has a few irons in the fire in hopes of striking it rich. 

Despite the exams being free...

Deng Xingzhou, director of the Beijing municipal commission of population and family planning, said the most important reason for the increasing rate of birth defects is that couples do not have pre-marital physical examinations.

"The examination can find latency diseases before pregnancy and prevent birth defects," he said.

However, less than 30 percent of couples have such tests in Beijing, Deng said.

The local health bureau website said the increase in birth defects jumped from a steady 1 percent between 1997 and 2003, when the government stopped requiring couples to take the exam, to 1.4 percent in 2004.

Over the next four years it continued to rise to 1.7 percent, but then dropped off slightly to 1.6 percent this year.

The BBC article at this link notes that 1.7 percent is "significantly higher" than the global average.  Guess it all depends upon who's counting what.  According to the March of Dimes, China's rate of 51.2 per 1,000 live births (5.12 percent) is below the global average of about 6 percent.  The U.S. rate is 47.8 per thousand, which only ranks us 20th in the world...the best is France at 39.7.  At the other end of the scale, Saudi Arabia (81.3 per) is trailed only by the Sudan at 82.0 per 1,000.

Meanwhile, the CDC says that one in 33 babies [roughly 3 percent] born in the U.S. are affected by birth defects.  Heart defects are easily the most common, making up more than a quarter of all birth defects.  Over 20 percent of infant deaths here are from birth defects. Returning to the article...

"Pollution in the city and pregnancies in older women can lead to birth defects," said Zhou Zhongshu, director of pediatrics at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital.

She said air pollution causes the incidence rate of birth defects in the city to be higher than in the countryside

Unmentioned was how many girls in China are aborted because their "defect" was being the wrong sex.  When 119 boys are born for every 100 girls, you can sure tell what type of screening matters to many Chinese parents.  

Canada remains the second leading exporter of chrysotile asbestos, the type that's linked to mesothelioma--a vicious type of lung cancer (previous blog here).  The nation has long fought against international rules limiting or banning the trade of chrysotile because of the political influence of its asbestos miners, especially in Quebec.  They're part of the Quebec Steelworkers Union, which gives them more clout than their numbers would indicate.  Add the chronically high unemployment in the province and the constant angst over a secessionist movement, and it's standard operating procedure for many Canadian politicians to pander to the miners.

Yet, Canada uses little asbestos domestically because of health concerns.  And, chrysotile mining has long been on the decline.  At some point...

For eight months, the Quebec government has been holding on to a report that explores the link between asbestos-related cancer and Canada's only community that still mines the substance.

The study is believed to be the first Canadian research to look at asbestos-related cancer in a specific region, examining the risk of disease in and around Thetford Mines, Que. Quebec's public health institute delivered the completed report to regional officials and the provincial Health Department in March.

But the study, and its potentially alarming conclusions, still hasn't been made public. Officials say that will finally happen this month.

Gee, what happens to the health care budget if lots more people suddenly seek treatment for possible asbestos-related issues?

Dozens of Canadian health experts signed a letter Wednesday to federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, demanding that she tighten the country's asbestos exposure limits for workers, which they say are 10 times higher than any Western country.

Since it takes 25 to 40 years after exposure for many asbestos-related diseases to surface, experts predict the death toll will continue rising for years as Canada experiences the lingering effects of its asbestos boom.

...

For decades, the children of Thetford Mines used to scale the local tailings piles, many of which are as tall as a house.

In winter, locals would toboggan down the dirt mounds with their kids, who affectionately referred to them as "The Asbestos Dumps."

Chrysotile only presents a danger if one inhales fine particles.  So, are those tailings constantly wet and/or covered with vegetation?  And even if they are, kids could bring home mud on their clothes and shoes which could dry and be stirred up when, for instance, mom was preparing to put the clothes in the washer.  Asbestos has certainly killed the family members of workers at the mines in Libby MT. 

Sources figure that the report will be published by the middle of the month.

By that time, the provincial legislature will have stopped for its winter holidays and Premier Jean Charest will be in Europe for the climate-change summit in Copenhagen and a side trip Russia.

It figures.

In our post 9/11 world, passengers are now subject to more extensive searches before they get on commercial aircraft.  The same isn't true for some cargo...yet.  

The Transportation Security Administration is phasing in a 2007 law requiring freight to be screened before going in the belly of a passenger plane with suitcases. U.S. passenger planes carry 12 million pounds a day of freight ranging fish to computers.

...

The law worries producers because the TSA will not be doing the screening. Although TSA workers have been scanning luggage since 2002, the agency is putting the responsibility for cargo on private companies, which it will certify and oversee.

Airlines and cargo handlers are buying screening equipment to perform bomb scans in their warehouses. But Sammon said those companies can't handle all the freight in a timely way.

The agency is urging manufacturers and distributors to join a new program that lets them satisfy the screening requirement if they impose strict security rules, such as employee background checks.

The concerns over outsourcing are an albatross.  The producers are worried about the costs of tightening their own security or suffering delays while awaiting screening.  Thus, it's time for some alarmism.

Fruit, vegetable and seafood wholesalers are worried that their perishables will spoil at airports next year because of a new security law requiring crates of goods to be checked for bombs before going on passenger airplanes.

Boxes of fresh food could sit in airport warehouses for hours, losing freshness and potentially facing unsanitary conditions while cargo handlers stack them up and test for bombs, said Chris Connell of Commodity Forwarders, which transports perishables.

"You could have people putting their hands in strawberry cases looking for explosives," Connell said.

...

Alaska's fishing industry, which produces nearly 60% of domestic seafood, is bracing for bottlenecks, said Jan Koslosky of Ocean Beauty Seafoods, which has seven fish-processing plants in Alaska. "There's absolutely no way all this cargo can be screened at the airport," Koslosky said.

But, there is the solution that the government is pushing.

Alaska seafood processors are slowly signing up for the program.

When the handwriting's on the wall, you may as well read it.