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The dark side of nitrogen; too much fertilizer is destroying the planet

Reckless overuse of synthetic fertilizers is creating an ecological catastrophe, warns a recent feature in Grist

In traditional farming, the nitrogen available in the soil imposes a strict limit on how much food can be grown. Organic methods of nitrogen supplementation include planting certain leguminous ("nitrogen fixing") crops or manually applying nitrogen in the form of manure or compost.

Yet with the so-called "Green Revolution" after World War II, agronomists widely adopted the Haber-Bosch process for transforming chemically neutral atmospheric nitrogen into the much more volatile ammonia. Ammonia soon became the base for a wide array of fertilizers, allowing farmers to produce much greater yields than had been traditionally possible. This food boom directly fueled the global population explosion of the last 70 years.

Unfortunately, due to its intrinsically volatile nature, so-called reactive nitrogen does not stay where farmers put it -- it reacts easily with the elements around it to spread into the air, water and soil. Researchers estimate that as much as 70 percent of applied nitrogen ends up outside of the crops being grown. To make matters worse, farmers typically apply far more fertilizer than they need to, as a sort of insurance to produce the largest yields possible.

Excess nitrogen can actually destroy valuable soil organisms, degrading the soil's agricultural quantity. It is responsible for the proliferation of aquatic "dead zones," where agricultural runoff has produced algal blooms that devour oxygen and choke out fish, as well as bacterial blooms that can produce human disease. Other ecological consequences of nitrogen pollution include lake acidification and general habitat degradation.

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Animals that People Consume Eat Arsenic

There are many reasons not to eat meat, but it's likely that most people don't consider avoiding the consumption of arsenic as one of them. But as it turns out, arsenic is regularly feed to chickens and sometimes also to turkeys and pigs. The poultry industry commonly uses additives with arsenic in them to induce weight gain and create the appearance of a healthy color in chicken meat. And it should be noted that if U.S. poultry producers need to create the appearance of a healthy color, then the chickens are likely not healthy to begin with - and feeding them arsenic is only going to make the situation worse.

Arsenic is a known poisonous compound. It's perhaps best known for being the murder weapon of choice among the noble classes from the Roman times to the mid-nineteenth century. At low levels, the consumption of arsenic mimics many chronic diseases, so it's likely you won't know that it's this poison affecting you. At high levels, arsenic is well known to kill.

Medical professionals are commonly under the illusion that our bodies can simply detoxify all of the poisons that most people regularly consume - and that these poisons don't cause the diseases that most of the population suffer from. But, let's be honest. Our body's ability to detoxify us, however powerful, isn't even close to able to remove all of the chemicals that most people regularly take in. Unfortunately, chickens aren't born with the ability to detoxif

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Texas nurse prosecuted for daring to report actions of bad doctor

A nurse recently found herself facing felony prosecution for making an anonymous complaint about the unsafe practices of a doctor at the hospital where she worked in the small town of Kermit, Texas.

Anne Mitchell and two fellow nurses became concerned about the conduct of Dr. Rolando G. Arafiles Jr. not long after he joined the staff of their public hospital in 2008. After repeated complaints to hospital administrators went ignored, Mitchell and another nurse drafted a letter to the state medical board, citing six particular cases of concern. In one of these, Arafiles had performed a skin graft in an emergency room without surgical privileges, and the procedure failed. In another, he sutured a rubber tip to a crushed finger, for which he was later reprimanded by the Department of State Health Services. The nurses also complained that Arafiles was e-mailing patients about an herbal remedy that he sold outside his professional capacity.

A third nurse also enclosed a letter to the medical board.

The board notified Arafiles of the anonymous complaints, and he contacted his friend and patient the country sheriff, alleging harassment. Sheriff Robert L. Roberts Jr. obtained search warrants and searched hospital computers seeking the letters' authors.

Mitchell and her co-author were arrested and charged with misuse of official information. They were promptly fired. The third nurse was not charged.

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Restaurant sushi tuna loaded with mercury

A new study on sushi has found that higher-end, restaurant-grade tuna sushi often has higher mercury levels than the cheaper tuna sushi found at local supermarkets. Researchers evaluated the DNA of various tuna species and came to the conclusion that varieties like blue fin akami and big eye tuna that typically have firmer flesh and are more visually appealing, are generally higher in mercury than other less expensive varieties.

According to the research, which appeared recently in the journal Biology Letters, the reason why higher-grade tuna often has higher mercury levels than other grades is because mercury tends to build up in muscle rather than in fat. This is why species like the blue fin toro, which is a fatty variety of tuna, typically has lower levels of mercury than bluefin akami and bigeye tuna, which are leaner varieties.

One exception was yellow fin tuna, which is lean but also low in mercury. Researchers believe that because this species is smaller than other varieties, eats less, and is generally killed at a younger age, it tends to accumulate less mercury than other varieties.

Overall, researchers observed that all species of tuna typically have high levels of mercury that, on average, exceed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) thresholds for daily consumption, as well as maximum levels in Japan. Blue fin akami was one of the worst, testing at levels of 1 part per million (ppm).

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Vitamin D promotes memory and cognitive function in seniors

A lack of vitamin D has already been linked in several studies to depression. Now it appears a deficiency of this crucial nutrient could also play a role in robbing the brain of the ability to process information correctly and clearly.

Defined as a person's ability to process thoughts, cognitive function includes memory and the ability to learn new information, as well as speaking and reading comprehension. Aging is known to affect cognitive function in many people, resulting in memory loss and difficulty thinking of the right words while speaking or writing. But what if a lack of vitamin D could be the culprit that is causing or contributing to cognitive impairment in many elders -- and not simply aging by itself? If that's the case, it offers hope that adequate vitamin D could help keep minds agile and memory sharp.

Research headed by epidemiologist Katherine Tucker with the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, and published in Journals of Gerontology raises that possibility. Metabolic pathways for vitamin D have been found in the hippocampus and cerebellum -- areas of the brain involved in planning, processing, and forming new memories. So it appears a lack of vitamin D could disrupt these cognitive processes.

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Pharmacists give themselves cancer from dispensing toxic chemotherapy chemicals

One of the side effects of chemotherapy is, ironically, cancer. The cancer doctors don't say much about it, but it's printed right on the chemo drug warning labels (in small print, of course). If you go into a cancer treatment clinic with one type of cancer, and you allow yourself to be injected with chemotherapy chemicals, you will often develop a second type of cancer as a result. Your oncologist will often claim to have successfully treated your first cancer even while you develop a second or third cancer directly caused by the chemo used to treat the original cancer.

There's nothing like cancer-causing chemotherapy to boost repeat business, huh?

During all this, the pharmacists are peddling these toxic chemotherapy chemicals to their customers as if they were medicine (which they aren't). While preparing these toxic chemical prescriptions, it turns out that pharmacists are exposing themselves to cancer-causing chemotherapy agents in the process. And because of that, pharmacists are giving themselves cancer... and they're dying from it.

Why pharmacists are dying of cancer

People who live in glass houses should never throw stones, they say. And you might similarly say that pharmacists who deal in poison shouldn't be surprised to one day discover they are killing themselves with it.

Chemotherapy drugs are extremely toxic to the human body, and they are readily absorbed through the skin. The very idea that they are even used in modern medicine is almost laughable if it weren't so downright disturbing and sad that hundreds of thousands of people are killed each year around the world by chemotherapy drugs.

Now you can add pharmacists to that statistic. For decades, they simply looked the other way, pretending they were playing a valuable role in our system of "modern" medicine, not admitting they were actually doling out chemicals that killed people. Now, the sobering truth has struck them hard: They are in the business of death, and it is killing them off, one by one.

The Seattle Times now reports the story of Sue Crump, a veteran pharmacist of two decades who spent much of her time dispensing chemotherapy drugs. Sue died last September of pancreatic cancer, and one of her dying wishes was that the truth would be told about how her on-the-job exposure to chemotherapy chemicals contributed to her own cancer.

Secondhand chemo

The Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA), it turns out, does not regulate workplace exposure to toxic, cancer-causing chemotherapy chemicals. At first glance, that seems surprising, since OSHA regulates workplace exposure to far less harmful chemicals. Why not chemo?

The answer is because the toxicity of chemotherapy has long been ignored by virtually everyone in medicine and the federal government. It has always been assumed harmless or even "safe" just because it's used as a kind of far-fetched "medicine" to treat cancer. This, despite the fact that chemotherapy is a derivative of the mustard gas used against enemy soldiers in World War I. Truthfully, chemotherapy has more in common with chemicals weapons than any legitimate medicine.

So today, while workers are protected from secondhand smoke in offices across the country, pharmacists are still being exposed every single day to toxic, cancer-causing chemicals that OSHA seems to just ignore. The agency has only issued one citation in the last decade to a hospital for inadequate safety handling of toxic chemotherapy drugs.

As the Seattle Times reports, "A just-completed study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) -- 10 years in the making and the largest to date -- confirms that chemo continues to contaminate the work spaces where it's used and in some cases is still being found in the urine of those who handle it..."

That same article goes on to report more pharmacists, veterinarians and nurses who are dead or dying from chemotherapy exposure:

• Bruce Harrison of St. Louis (cancer in his 50's, now dead)
• Karen Lewis of Baltimore (cancer in her 50's, still living)
• Brett Cordes of Scottsdale, Arizona (cancer at age 35, still living)
• Sally Giles of Vancouver, B.C. (cancer in her 40's, now dead)

The great contradiction in cancer treatments

As the Seattle Times reports:

"Danish epidemiologists used cancer-registry data from the 1940s through the late 1980s to first report a significantly increased risk of leukemia among oncology nurses and, later, physicians. Last year, another Danish study of more than 92,000 nurses found an elevated risk for breast, thyroid, nervous-system and brain cancers."

The story goes on to report how new safety rules are being put in place across the industry to protect pharmacists, veterinarians, nurses and doctors from toxic chemotherapy chemicals. But even the Seattle Times, which deserves credit for running this story, misses the bigger point:

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