Let’s Call It National Barbecue Month

Hoof and mouth disease, a virus deadly to livestock, has been researched since 1954 in a government lab on Plum Island, NY. Since that time there have been some accidental releases of the virus, but none escaped the island. That’s why the lab in ON an island.

In 2002 the government ran a simulation of a hoof and mouth outbreak. It resulted in tens of millions of cattle killed by National Guardsmen, riots and protests and a 25-mile burial trench for the carcasses. “It was a mess,” said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who played the president.

Now the government wants to move Plum Island’s lab to the mainland and Kansas is one of the proposed sites. What does Senator Roberts have to say about that, huh? “It will mean jobs,” he says. It will mean research and development, he says.

Yeah, and if all else fails it will mean jobs digging that 25-mile barbecue pit.

The Stuff We Leave Behind

The European Space Agency has just published some pictures of the space debris surrounding Earth. Ancient civilizations have often been identified by the garbage heaps they leave behind. I guess it’s no different in space.

Scary Tales + Politicians = Rushed Legislation

Lead is bad. Everyone knows that. We should keep it out of our water and our air. Until recently lead was used in solder, which means that every electrical or electronic device contained lead. Enter the European Union and their RoHS Directive. In July of 2006 lead solder was banned from the EU. Manufacturers have been forced to find replacements, usually an all tin solder instead of the lead/tin solder formerly used.

Many engineers have raise concerns. Tin solder has a number of drawbacks – it is brittle; it has a tendency to cause shorts; it requires more heat; it doesn’t “get along” well with other types of solder on the same board. This last issue can cause problems with repairs and with electronics that are composed of parts from multiple manufacturers.

Although the RoHS only applies to the European Union, it affects us all. Manufacturers cannot supports different processes for different countries. Assembly lines have been switched over to the new soldering techniques whether they are making radios or communications satellites or medical equipment or airliners.

It’s too early to tell if this will cause problems, although anecdotal evidence suggest that it has. Studies on Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) have been hampered by manufacturers who are unwilling to let their failure rates be documented. Meanwhile, the manufacturers are blaming hot-headed environmentalists for possible failures and environmentalists claim that greedy industry welcomed the change because failures sell more product.

Cringley’s column has more to say

Great Lakes Report Suppressed

Six years in the making, a study on hazardous materials around the Great Lakes has been buried by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Despite extensive review by the EPA, International Joint Commission, state agencies from New York and Minnesota, independent academics and the ATSDR itself, the director of ATDSR has claimed the study “well below expectations.”

The study contains warning that more than nine million people may face elevated risk from dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury or other pollutants. It found low birth weights, elevated rates of infant mortality and premature births, and elevated death rates from breast cancer, colon cancer, and lung cancer.

According to Dr. Peter Orris, one of the reviewers of the report, it “…is perhaps the most extensively critiqued report, internally and externally, that I have heard of.” Christopher De Rosa [former] director of Toxicology and Environmental Medicine complained in a letter to the CDC director and the director of ATSDR that not publishing the study had “the appearance of censorship of science and distribution of factual information regarding the health status of vulnerable communities.” Mr. De Rosa has since been relieved of his job.

For a more complete story see The Center For Public Integrity