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"Following the fund’s creation, the state offered amnesty programs to contaminated site owners to pay for the majority of the cleanup costs. But abandoned sites, such as Imperial Gas in Marion County, were not likely to get access to the funds because the agency tasked with handling the money made it a policy not to seek out abandoned properties."
After a five-month Boston Globe investigation into the mislabeling of fish, it was found that many upscale restaurants, grocery stores and seafood markets advertise one type of fish but sell you another.
The Globe did state the mislabeling “happens for a range of reasons, from outright fraud to a chef’s ignorance to the sometimes real difficulty of discerning one fillet from another. But industry specialists say money is commonly the motivator.”
However, the Denver Post reports that in "a 2004 internal state health department memo, it went so far as to describe the site as “unusable” for hazardous- waste disposal under state regulations.” Nevertheless, state regulators say the leak does not pose an immediate threat to residents because they no longer drink well water; despite the fact that the state cannot tell whether molybdenum or uranium is among the contaminants leaking.
At age 52, no one would think a mother and wife, with a roof over her head, would die from a drug overdose. However, after hurting her shoulder more than a decade ago, Myrtle Bailey died of a hydrocodone overdose. Unfortunately for her and many others, doctors are treating symptoms instead of actual problems. “Bailey was one of six people in Madison County to die of drug overdoses within a four-day span in June 2010. She was also one of 62 to die of a drug or alcohol overdose last year in the county, by far the county’s highest total in the past 10 years.”
Kevin Bersett and Jacqueline Lee of the Belleville News-Democrat take a deeper look, using computer-assisted reporting tools, into why the East St. Louis police are claiming heroin is to blame for the rise in deaths.
In most towns across Illinois and the U.S., the Public Health Department publicizes any health code violation so that consumers can be aware of the risk they are taking by eating at a restaurant. However, the Champaign-Urbana Public Health Department chooses not to share the roughly 1,300 inspections done in a year. Many in the restaurant business don’t find this a problem, citing that once the violation is corrected, it should not matter. Unfortunately, there are repeat offenders; “Geovanti’s Bar & Grill on Green Street failed its restaurant inspections five times from September 2008 through February of this year.”
Exposure to lead – even a little – in tap water can cause serious health problems in both children and adults. In this report by Ellen Gabler of the Chicago Tribune, she reveals that a recent federal testing of Chicago’s tap water showed that “nearly 45 percent” of homes “had lead levels spike when more water samples were taken directly” after the initial testing that is done. All homes passed that first test. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials conducted another small study of Chicago tap water earlier this year, which also revealed high levels of lead.
Gabler writes, “Those results suggest that the way water is screened for lead nationwide may inaccurately gauge how much of the toxic metal leaches into our water.”
“The city of Chicago hasn’t exceeded that limit in nearly 20 years, and neither have the majority of communities across the nation. But regulators, scientists and public health officials are worried the flawless results are the result of outdated testing methods, government agencies gaming the system or both.”
After the attacks on September 11, 2001 President George Bush told the nation that he would make certain that the food we eat would be safe from chemical terrorist threats from the ‘farm to the fork’. However, with no single agency in charge of policing our farms, factories, warehouses, or grocery stores, this multi-headed bureaucracy appears to be a huge money drain. In the past ten years, it has managed to spend nearly 3.5 billion dollars with little to show.
In the series, “A Lethal Dose,” the Star Tribune addresses alarming facts about synthetic drugs. In part II, the Star Tribune reveals how simply it is to obtain these highly dangerous chemicals. All it takes is a credit card and the Internet. The substances are often marketed as harmless bath salts, herbal incense or research chemicals. To find out just how dangerous these drugs are, the Star Tribune ordered 30 different types “from dealers in the United States and overseas” with plans to have the drugs tested.
The majority of the packages arrived “mislabeled” and “some items came with deliberately misleading instructions on how they should be used.”
“The laboratory test results disturbed several drug experts who reviewed the findings for the newspaper. The packages contained an array of psychoactive stimulants, hallucinogens and cannabinoids. Also troubling: Concentration levels varied so much that a dose of one was many times more potent than the same dose of another — even when the products carried the same name, the experts said.”
In a one-hour comprehensive special, KHOU-TV revealed how Texas and U.S. authorities often allow the public to drink water with more radioactive contamination than is allowed by federal law. “A Matter of Risk” also uncovered a report by state-scientists that nearly a quarter of a million Texans drink water that give them a 1 in 400 chance of developing cancer. In addition, Investigative Reporter Mark Greenblatt found the state’s top politicians, including Governor Rick Perry, were involved in an on-going practice to hide just how much radiation was in the state’s drinking water. The report also discusses KHOU’s own testing of one city’s tap water and the surprising results.
A concerned citizen, and Union Pacific employee called the UTA last November to voice her concerns about a sound wall that was too high for people to see oncoming trains. However, even after the second complaint, by another concerned citizen, the UTA did nothing. Now, 15-year-old Shariah Casper is dead.
Furthermore, the UTA declined to comment on the matter, citing an expected lawsuit from the slain teen’s family and claiming, in part, “that such records could include sensitive information that could harm “homeland security” if released.”
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