Environmental & Public Health

Evan Hansen of Downstream Strategies said the bills matches up to the way West Virginia’s Senate Bill 373 started the legislative process. That bill, which was signed into law earlier this week, changed, however, as it worked its way through both houses of the legislature. “The West Virginia bill is much more comprehensive,” he said Thursday. “They overlap in terms of having new regulations on aboveground storage tanks, but the West Virginia bill includes a lot more.”

Evan Hansen, an environmental consultant who has testified about the leak before the West Virginia legislature, has tracked the cumulative effect of that objective throughout the government. “In the past ten or fifteen years, they’ve systematically weakened virtually all the major water-quality standards that apply to the coal industry,” he said. “One by one, there’s been a steady effort to undermine the implementation of environmental laws, to the point that it’s become a part of everyday normal life here.”

One of the ways our Fellows lead is by providing expert testimony before state and national legislative bodies. In March, Mike Wilson and Evan Hansen were called to testify before the U.S.

The 2014 Chancellor’s Achievement Awards for Diversity and Community have been presented in the categories of Academic Senate and Academic Federation, staff, undergraduate and graduate student, community member — and in a new category, post-doctoral scholar. ...

The EPA tightened the PM2.5 standard because health experts keep finding impacts at lower levels than previously thought. “For health effects, the big one now is premature mortality,” said Scott Fruin, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California who studies PM2.5’s health impacts. “We see reduced life expectancy and higher chances of developing cardiovascular disease in places where the standard isn’t met.”

You work hard every day on issues affecting the health of residents in your state. You release reports about the dangers of fracking and other critical environmental issues. You try to link economic development with natural resource stewardship. You tweet and blog and host webinars to get the issues out to the public. But if you live in a state like West Virginia, you’re literally swimming upstream struggling for recognition of the big issues in the face of policymakers tied to a carbon-based future.

From the beginning, lease agreements have barred residents from digging in their yards or altering the landscaping because of the arsenic, pesticides, lead, PCBs and other chemicals on a long list of known toxic materials left over in the dirt from the Navy's trash pit under portions of the housing area. But some residents said that prohibition wasn't made clear to them, and public health experts say it's ridiculous to expect children not to play in the dirt.

Santoyo: What is the most important message you try to relay to your students?

Add liver cancer—a childhood cancer on the rise in the US—to the growing list of potential health effects associated with bisphenol A (BPA) exposure that are under scrutiny by researchers. A recent study by scientists at the University of Michigan, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, is the first ever to report a dose-dependent, statistically significant relationship between perinatal (before and just after birth) exposures to environmentally relevant levels of BPA and development of cancerous liver tumors later in life.