Monday night's Chevron Refinery fire as seen from the Berkeley Hills. (Daniel Parks: Flickr)

Contra Costa Health Services has posted a succinct “Frequently Asked Questions Related to the Chevron Fire on August 6, 2012.” [PDF] It’s good information — cleaning fruits, vegetables, avoiding groundwater, health impact, etc.

I republish it here, in its entirety:

Map from the National Weather Service shows the areas of 'excessive heat' alerts in California.

The rest of the nation has sweltered this summer, but California has escaped extreme heat — until now. The National Weather Service may not have high-end graphics, but its map tells the story. The San Joaquin Valley, starting south of Modesto, is colored a brownish-red and that means excessive heat warning. Temperatures are expected to exceed 100 degrees every day until Tuesday. The bright pink areas indicate a heat “watch” (click here if you don’t know the difference). This kind of heat is not just a weather story, it’s a significant health and environment story too.

High heat is hazardous to people, pets and livestock. San Joaquin County Public Health Services warns people to drink plenty of water, stay cool in an air-conditioned room and wear loose-fitting clothing. And, please, do not leave children, seniors or pets in a parked car for any period of time, even with windows cracked. The interior of the car can heat up very fast — to deadly levels — within minutes.

Those at highest risk for heat stress are children under age 4, adults with disabilities, anyone with a chronic illness and the elderly.

With high heat generally comes higher pollution which puts people with respiratory conditions at risk as well. Kevin Hall, Director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition emailed me that the worst air is likely to be in the Fresno metropolitan area and “presumably, up against and into the Sierra Nevada — but we only have the forest service monitors at 1500 and 5500 feet in eastern Tulare County.” He also pointed out that the Valley Air Board suspended issuing “Spare the Air” days three years ago, so air quality warnings will not be issued.

Indeed, when I checked the Valley Air Board’s website, it showed today’s air quality forecast as “moderate” even though numbers from the state Air Resources Board show that yesterday’s 8-hour ozone levels exceeded both state and federal standards in many areas in and around Fresno.

Finally, this kind of heat stressed humans and the state’s power grid. The California Independent System Operator has issued a Flex Alert starting tomorrow and running through Sunday. People are encouraged to reduce their energy use, especially in the afternoon. As Steven Greene told KPBS, “During the 4 to 6 p.m. period, we like to call that the ‘air conditioning rush hour.’ Many people come home and they have been out in the weather and want to cool down fairly quickly. So they go over their thermostat to do that.”

Greene says a setting of of between 70 and 80 degrees provides enough cooling and helps lessen the energy strain.

Smoke from the Chevron refinery fire blanketed Richmond and surrounding communities Monday night. (Jeremy Brooks: Flickr)

Since Monday’s fire erupted just after 6pm, more than 600 people have been treated in emergency departments at Kaiser in Richmond and Doctors Medical Center in nearby San Pablo for symptoms caused by the Chevron refinery fire.

One of them was Point Richmond resident Cheri Edwards. “The smoke was kind of like an oily smell, it was an oily smell, and I have asthma really bad. And right now I’m at the bus stop trying to go to Kaiser because I have been having respiratory problems.”

Besides breathing problems, people also reported symptoms including sore throats and watery eyes. These symptoms are consistent with exposure to “a full toxic soup of hundreds, probably thousands, of combustion products and byproducts,” Greg Karras, senior scientist with the advocacy group Communities for a Better Environment, told a Forum audience Tuesday morning.

Richmond is a low socioeconomic community with a high proportion of African American residents that suffers disproportionate rates of asthma and other illnesses. Living near major refineries adds to negative health impacts. “The cumulative impact of all of the pollution in this overburdened community where there’s been a legacy of environmental racism frankly, is also part of the puzzle,” Karras told me in an interview following Forum.

In a phone interview, Randy Sawyer director of Contra Costa Health Services Hazardous Materials Program agreed that “there’s all kinds of chemicals that can be in the fire. But the biggest concern that we had last night was the particulates in the smoke because they can lodge in your lungs.”

Particulates, also called particulate matter, are a complex mix of tiny bits of pollution and liquid droplets. In addition to lodging in a person’s lungs, they can also get into the bloodstream and cause heart problems.

The shelter-in-place order was lifted just after 11pm Monday night. People in Richmond today are getting back to normal — while pondering plenty of remaining questions. My colleagues at Forum received a question they could not address during their broadcast from a listener concerned about “toxic particulate matter that may or may not have been deposited in outdoor play structures, vegetable gardens, fruit trees, etc.”

“I don’t expect too much deposits on people’s cars, but if they see anything,” Sawyer says, “it can be washed off, and that should be fine for them. It’s mostly the material would be kind of oily.”

Sawyer explained that “shelter-in-place” is the safest thing for residents to do in crises such as this refinery fire. While there is still “some infiltration, the concentrations inside will be far less than what it is outside.” He says if everyone tries to evacuate at once, then everyone is outside “stuck right in the cloud, and that could be very dangerous.”

Finally, Sawyer recommended that people who were advised to shelter-in-place air out their homes today.

This post was updated at 4:15pm to reflect the number of people who have been to the emergency room.

Yes, a candy named "Toxic Waste" was recalled. (Image: California Department of Public Health)

By Lyssa Rome

Just like that, the number of children at risk for lead poisoning jumped five-fold yesterday as the Centers for Disease Control announced that it cut its threshold for lead poisoning diagnosis in half. The new diagnosis will occur at five micrograms per deciliter of blood. The former threshold was 10.

Health advocates have worked to alert the public to the risks of lead in paint, toys and even jewelry. But lead can also be found in – of all things tempting to children – candy. Candy with high levels of lead may not taste unusual. In fact, some kinds of lead even taste sweet.

Lead is a major environmental health risk. It affects almost every system in the body, including the brain and other organs, but the symptoms aren’t always obvious. For children, exposure to even minute quantities of lead can cause long-term developmental problems, including lower IQ, and the damage may not be reversible.

Most of those candies are imported, mainly from four countries: Mexico, Malaysia, China and India. That’s where the candies come from, but what about the lead itself?

“It is not entirely clear where the lead in many of the products is coming from,” says Patrick Kennelly, the chief of the California Department of Public Health’s Food Safety Section. “But products containing tamarind or mined sources of salt from certain regions of the world may have a higher likelihood of having elevated levels of lead.”

Candies with chili powder may also have high lead levels, according to the Food and Drug Administration. One source of lead could be contaminated dirt in the fields where the peppers are grown. If the peppers are not thoroughly washed, the lead remains. Drying and processing the spice might also introduce high concentrations of lead. Other potential sources of lead in candy include the machinery used in the manufacturing process, candy packaging, and ink on wrappers.

In the first four months of 2012, the Department of Public Health has issued advisories about Vagabundo brand lollipops from Mexico and nine different types of sesame candies from India and Pakistan.

A little over a year ago, the department recalled the Toxic Sludge brand’s Nuclear Waste Chew Bars. Some of the candies had more than twice the acceptable amount of lead in them.

Public health officials worry about even small amounts of lead because, according to Kennelly, “There is no known safe blood lead level.” High levels of lead in the blood are especially dangerous for infants, children under the age of six, and pregnant women and their fetuses.

According to the DPH, in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, nearly 2,300 California children tested positive for lead levels high enough to cause harm. With the new lead standards announced yesterday nearly 25,000 kids in California may have lead poisoning.

In 2005, the Orange County Register uncovered the problem of lead in Mexican candies in its investigative series Toxic Treats. The Register profiled Javier Bonilla of La Habra. He tested positive for lead poisoning and the source was tamarind candies that came in clay pots. His mother, Gloria Bonilla, told the Register, “If I had known, I wouldn’t have given them to him.”

Maria Perez of Sacramento, whose son’s blood levels were three times the CDC’s threshold at the time, told the Register, “If the candy has lead, they should make sure it doesn’t come here. … What else has to be done?”

After the series ran, the state legislature passed a law directing the DPH to regularly test candy for lead.

As part of its Lead in Candy program, the DPH collects a wide range of candies from store shelves and tests them for lead. To prevent candies with high lead levels from reaching consumers, the DPH works with manufacturers on voluntary recalls and distributes health alerts to the public and local health departments. Store owners who knowingly sell candy laced with lead face fines of up to $500 per violation.

As the recent recalls have shown, “the problem still exists,” says Kennelly. “But the level of lead contamination CDPH finds in candies appears to have reduced slightly over the years.”

(Mark H. Anbinder: Flickr)

It’s well established that dirty, sooty air is no good for your lungs and probably not great for your skin. But new research indicates it can damage your brain, too.

A study in the journal of the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that air pollution accelerates cognitive decline in women.

And with a new federal report showing Southern Californians are at the highest risk of death due to air pollution, this study adds to the growing body of grim evidence showing air pollution and healthy bodies don’t mix.

“We keep learning about more adverse effects (from pollution) than we thought possible,” said Jean Ospital, health effects officer with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, who was not involved with the current research.

“I’m not sure I find these results surprising,” he said, “but I’m also not sure I would have expected them if you’d asked me 10 years ago.”

The new research, conducted by a team of researchers from Chicago, Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia, looked at the effect of coarse particulate matter in the air on the cognitive health of older women.

“We, as a society, are on the verge of dealing with an unprecedented number of people having dementia,” said Jennifer Weuve, lead author of the study and a researcher at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center. “We know relatively little about how to prevent dementia, but we do know cognitive decline is related to dementia.”

Weuve pointed to research showing a link between air pollution and cardiovascular disease.

“It turns out that cardiovascular disease may play a role in cognitive decline,” said Weuve, who is a researcher at Rush’s Institute for Healthy Aging. “So if we understand how to prevent or delay these cognitive increments, maybe we can prevent or delay dementia.”

And not just at an individual level, she said.

“It’s a whole new way to think about prevention for dementia and cognitive decline,” she said.

Weuve and her team turned to one of the largest epidemiological datasets and cohorts in medical research, the Nurses’ Health Study, to begin looking for links between pollution and cognitive health.

The Nurses’ Health Study, which researchers began in 1976, is a dataset based on information collected over time from 121,700 female registered nurses between the ages of 30 and 55 living in 11 different states.

Between 1995 and 2001, Weuve and her colleagues invited participants of the Nurses’ Health Study to participate in a study of cognition. The team was able to get data from nearly 20,000 women.

To establish pollutant exposure, the team collected air pollution exposure data from the Environmental Protection Agency, which they correlated with the location of each woman’s home and place of employment. Then they called each woman six times on the phone, over six years, and tested their cognitive abilities.

They found that higher levels of long-term exposure to air pollution particles was associated with significantly faster cognitive decline.

She said more research needs to be done. For instance, is the cognitive decline they observed due to cardiovascular issues, or are pollutants having a direct effect on the brain?

She said more research also will be needed to confirm her work.

“The bottom line,” said Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, “is that in Southern California, we have some of the highest levels of particulate matter in the country, and we are working as quickly as possible at reducing those levels.”

Patricia Davis straightens a client's hair at her salon in Oakland. (Photo: Shuka Kalantari)

Oakland salon owner Patricia Davis leans over her client to get a better angle on the flat iron that’s clamped to her hair. Steam rises up from the woman’s hair and a spinning fan above spreads the steam throughout the room and out the windows. Sometimes, formaldehyde gas, a known carcinogen, is in that steam. And if that product is called “Brazilian Blowout,” then formaldehyde is definitely in there … despite the fact that it says “formaldehyde-free.”

In a recent settlement agreement with the California Attorney General, GIB, the company that makes the popular Brazilian Blowout hair straightening treatment, will drop the claim that they’re formaldehyde-free. They also have to add a caution label to their product.

“California laws protect consumers and workers and give them fair notice about the health risks associated with the products they use,” said Attorney General Harris. “This settlement requires the company to disclose any hazard so that Californians can make more informed decisions.”

But salon owner Davis says the controversy is overblown. “I think it’s much ado about nothing,” she says as she continues flat-ironing her client’s hair.

Davis has been straightening hair at First Impressions Hair Designs in downtown Oakland for over 20 years. She says most hair-straightening treatments have one thing in common: they emit smoke. So regardless of whether or not a product contains formaldehyde, or any other of the host of toxins in hair products, she says a salon owner must always get the smoke out of their salon.

“It can cause your eyes to burn and probably your skin to burn,” Davis said. “Absolutely. But only without the proper ventilation and the circulation of air within your salon.”

Davis points to two fans running in the room. She said she’s never had health problems as long as she followed the guidelines [PDF] of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) on proper ventilation. “So even if it has a [label saying] ‘caution: formaldehyde in it,’ basically I’m like, ‘And? We already have smoke in our salons.’”

Davis notes that ethnic hair salons have used hair straightening treatments with toxic chemicals for decades. She believes the reason the FDA is now receiving complaints may be because hair-straightening treatments have become popular outside of ethnic salons. “[Ethnic salons] know all about the need for ventilation,” Davis says. “My point is as white-oriented salons become more familiar with strong chemicals, they are more challenged to not overlook the ventilation issues.”

But Renee Sharpe, a scientist and the California director of the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, says all salon owners should be concerned. The EWG did a study on formaldehyde in hair products and say their reports clearly show that some salon workers were having negative health effects.

“People have really different sensitivities to chemicals. So what is fine for one person may not be fine for another person. Do you really want to have a product on the market where OSHA is saying that you have to follow all these precautions? Ultimately that means that product is toxic and shouldn’t remain on the market.”

Sharpe says while the EWG welcomes the California Attorney General’s decision, it’s only a first step. They want the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ban all formaldehyde beauty products. Sharpe says the EWG filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the FDA and got back scores of consumer complaints about hair products containing formaldehyde.

“We got back so many records of people complaining of nausea, of vomiting, of hair loss, of actually scalp burns, skin burns. There’s a huge volume of consumer experiences with this product that shows that this is dangerous.” Indeed, these are all commonly known side effects of formaldehyde exposure.

Sharpe says EWG’s research shows that there are sixteen other companies that make hair-straightening products that contain formaldehyde, but many still claim to be formaldehyde-free. But you may find the ingredient methylene glycol, which Sharpe says is formaldehyde in solution.  This was the case with Brazilian Blowout.

“People have this perception that it’s just about Brazilian Blowout when it’s really this much wider class of products,” she said. “And it’s not just California, of course. This is an issue that is nationwide.”

As part of the settlement, the makers of Brazilian Blowout must send warning letters to salon owners using their products, make changes to their website, and pay $600,000 in fines. In a statement they wrote, “We believe the settlement reached with Attorney General Harris represents a fair and equitable resolution.”

(Image: from "Designing Health Communities")

It’s called the “built environment” and if you’re a public health whiz, you know exactly what that means. If you don’t, Dr. Richard Jackson, Chair of UCLA’s Environmental Health Sciences Department believes it’s critical you do.

“By the built environment,” he explains, “we mean everything around us that was changed by human activity, homes, building, streets that we’re surrounded by.” In other words, it’s where we live our lives, work, or go to school. When the car came along, the built environment seemed to build up on its own without any thought to health impacts. “We’ve made it hard to walk,” he says. “We’ve engineered physical activity out of our daily lives.”

Jackson hosts a new documentary series, Designing Healthy Communities, that debuts tonight in Los Angeles and rolls out across the country over the next several weeks on PBS. In the series he makes the case that the built environment itself is so unhealthy, it causes people to be unhealthy. Among other things, he links this unhealthy built environment to two of the greatest health disorders of our day, obesity and diabetes.

But the built environment does not need to cause so much harm. The concept of the built environment, Jackson says, is both “relatively new and desperately old.” In the 1800s people working in urban planning overlapped with people working in public health, he says. Two of the seven founders of the American Public Health Association were urban planners. But then urban planning as a component of health seemed to fall by the wayside after the advent of the automobile which led to suburban sprawl, abandoned and impoverished inner cities, and isolation.

In Part I of his series, Jackson calls for the “retrofitting of suburbia.”

Episode 1: Retrofitting Suburbia – (preview) from MPC on Vimeo.

Designing Healthy Communities looks across the country, both at struggles and solutions. To get a sense of what’s happening specifically in California, I talked to the Prevention Institute‘s Jeremy Cantor. “California is a big state and it’s still very auto-dependent,” Cantor told me, “and there is a lot of work to be done to create healthier communities in California, to create built environments that promote health.”

While there is work to be done, there is also hope. The passage of AB 32, California’s ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has led to a level of engagement and innovation in the state, Cantor says. He pointed to policy approaches including the Health in All Policies [PDF] Task Force created by Governor Schwarzenegger to local efforts such as Safe Routes to Schools, helping parents and schools to organize ways for children to be able to walk to school.

“There’s a lot going on, excitement and dialogue about how to do this in the state,” Cantor says. “The key is going to be to figure out how to do all those things at the same time.”