Environment News Service (ENS) news

The pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc. has agreed to pay a $975,000 civil penalty to resolve alleged violations of the Clean Air Act at its former manufacturing plant in Groton, Connecticut. The company stopped making pharmaceuticals at the plant in January.

The settlement is the first of its type in federal court under Clean Air Act regulations controlling the emissions of hazardous air pollutants from pharmaceutical manufacturing, the U.S. Justice Department and Environmental Pro

What could be more benign than body powder, right? Some of Chicago`s most highly placed doctors would say, wrong. They are part of a coaltion of public health experts, medical doctors and consumers organizations that is petitioning the federal goverment for warning labels on cosmetic talcum powder products used by many women as part of their personal care regime - a warning that frequent use is linked to ovarian cancer.

The petition addresses Secretary of Health and Human Services

Tracking wildlife disease outbreaks around the world is now possible with another online map that shows where threats to the health of wild animals, domestic animals, and people are occurring.

The Global Wildlife Disease News Map, developed jointly by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the U.S. Geological Survey, USGS, was introduced publicly this week. 

Updated daily, the map displays pushpins marking stories of wildlife diseases such as West Nile virus, avian influe

A coalition of farmworker advocates and environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Friday, seeking to force a halt to the use of four organophosphate pesticides. Some of these pesticides have been detected in California`s rural schoolyards and homes, Sequoia National Park, and Monterey Bay. The four organophosphates at issue in the case are methidathion, oxydemeton-methyl, methamidophos, and ethoprop. They are used primarily in California on a wide vari

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, North Carolina, December 31, 2007 (ENS) - New research on farm women has shown that contact with some commonly used pesticides may increase their risk of allergic asthma.

`Farm women are an understudied occupational group,` said Jane Hoppin, Sc.D., of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and lead author of the study. `More than half the women in our study applied pesticides, but there is very little known about the risks.`

The study was pu