Five out of seven species of great apes — the closest living relatives to humans — have been listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as “critically endangered,” according to a new study by an international team of researchers.
“The great apes — bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans — are critically threatened by human activities. We have destroyed their habitats, hunted them and transmitted fatal diseases to them,” the authors of the study wrote. “They are endangered, and time is running out.”
According to Andrew Marshall and John Mitani, field researchers from University of Michigan, traditional conservation methods have been useful, but they are no longer sufficient. The research team suggested new conservation paths to help guarantee the existence of these majestic primates.
The study, “Future coexistence with great apes will require major changes to policy and practice,” was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
“Despite considerable effort and investment in conservation, ape populations are continuing to decline, many of them very dramatically. Five of the seven recognized taxa are now critically endangered. Rather than focusing on the current plight of apes, which is well known, we wanted to be forward looking and propose things we could do that might improve the situation,” Marshall said in a press release from University of Michigan.
Pointing to the mass extinction of species caused by humans, Mitani said there was “a moral imperative” to save the apes, as they are “essentially our kin.”
“If we can’t save these animals, then there’s really very little hope for the rest of biodiversity. I just can’t imagine a world without these animals,” Mitani said in the press release.
Marshall said that even the best efforts at keeping all existing conservation areas protected won’t be adequate.
“For orangutans, which is the group that I know best, even if we were to protect every single orangutan in every protected area in perpetuity, that is not enough to ensure their long-term persistence, which means that the future of conservation must also address issues outside protected areas,” Marshall said. “That’s one of the things that we want to draw people’s attention to: There are lots and lots of apes that live outside national parks and they are more threatened than those that live inside national parks and other protected areas. But they also deserve our care and protection.”
Mitani added that more work is needed in areas where humans live alongside apes.
“The reason for this is the world has gotten a lot smaller. In my lifetime, the human population has tripled. Humans are everywhere, doing things and edging apes out as a consequence,” Mitani said.
“It’s easy for conservationists to demonize ‘local people’ as the major threats to apes. That’s problematic for all kinds of reasons,” Marshall said. “[M]any of the threats, even those that are immediately posed by local communities, are often due to broader market pressures, and many of us participate in those markets and indirectly lead to many of these pressures. Many of the folks that are killing orangutans, destroying their habitat, are doing so to earn money necessary to pay school fees for their kids, buy medicines for their sick relatives, and things like that.”
Marshall explained that it was unrealistic and unfair to ask people in these circumstances to make major sacrifices without any direct benefits to them.
Mitani said establishing reliable sources of capital was essential to help save and protect great apes, rather than making their destruction profitable.
“To address this issue, we recruited another colleague, Genevieve Campbell, a primatologist with the conservation nonprofit Re:wild, who has worked with banks and industries to try to find ways to mitigate or minimize the destructive activities they have on ape habitat,” Mitani said. “What Genevieve would like to do, and what both Andy and I support, is to develop a long-term, permanent funding stream. One way to do this is to establish a great ape trust fund that would provide support for great ape conservation in perpetuity.”
The landscape scorched, houses gone. Texas’ Smokehouse Creek fire has spread to more than one million acres, the largest in the state’s history. It is bigger than the 2006 East Amarillo Complex fire and the second-largest in United States history.
An abrupt shift in the direction of the wind on Wednesday caused the fire to erupt from 500,000 to 850,000 acres, reported CNN. As of Thursday morning, officials said the blaze — originally fueled by hot, dry air and strong winds — was only three percent contained.
“Wind was coming straight out of the north and made just this massive wall of fire moving across the landscape,” said Adam Turner, spokesperson for the Texas A&M Forest Service, on Wednesday, as CNN reported.
An 83-year-old woman, Joyce Blankenship, was killed in Hutchinson County, Texas.
“The house was gone,” Nathan Blankenship, her grandson, said, as reported by CNN.
By Wednesday afternoon, at least 31,590 acres had also been burned in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Forestry Service said.
Thursday brought cooler air with some precipitation, but warm, dry conditions are predicted to return on Friday and continue through the weekend.
“They’ve got a short window to try to get a handle on it before the winds ramp up again,” said Edward Andrade, the National Weather Service’s lead forecaster in Amarillo, as The New York Times reported.
Residents were ordered to evacuate in some parts of the Panhandle, including Gilissa and Richard Murray, who have lived in the small town of Canadian — northeast of Amarillo — for 50 years, reported Reuters.
“The house is gone and all the cars are melted,” said Murray, 72, after returning to their home on Wednesday morning, as Reuters reported. “There’s nothing left.”
Ranchers struggled to try and extinguish the flames themselves as the fire took the lives of thousands of cattle and consumed grasslands used for grazing, according to CNN and The New York Times.
Almost the entire 30,000-acre stretch of land owned by rancher Jeff Chisum was destroyed.
“It’s hard to watch,” Chisum said, as reported by The New York Times. “We’re in love with the animals and the country, and whenever something like this comes through and destroys it all, it’s hard to swallow.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a disaster on Tuesday, and firefighters from other parts of the state were deployed to help fight the blazes.
The fire originally started in the Canadian River Valley, a rugged region of cliffs and sharp hills that are difficult to navigate.
The Smokehouse Creek fire is just one of five wildfires burning across the Texas Panhandle. The others include the Windy Deuce Fire, which has razed 142,000 acres and was 30 percent contained on Thursday morning, according to CNN.
The Grape Vine Creek Fire was 60 percent contained after burning 30,000 acres; the Magenta Fire, which has destroyed 2,500 acres, was 65 percent contained; and the 687 Reamer Fire was 10 percent contained after having torched more than 2,000 acres.
A Panhandle Disaster Relief Fund was started with $1 million donated by Amarillo National Bank for wildfire victims, the financial institution said.
The U.S. Forest Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency were assisting in Texas, with federal authorities keeping in close contact with officials “on the front lines of these fires,” Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, said at a Wednesday news briefing, as Reuters reported.
Multiple countries in the EU are already hitting their sustainability goals set for 2030, according to a new study.
Researchers analyzed EU countries’ progress on certain goals laid out by the “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” resolution adopted in 2015 by the UN. The resolution set 17 Sustainable Development Goals, including clean water, clean energy, responsible consumption and production, and climate action.
The study, which was published in the journal PLOS ONE, reviewed progress toward Sustainable Development Goal No. 7, which is to “Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all,” according to the UN website.
The study authors outlined seven indicators they used to analyze progress toward the overall SDG 7 goal from 2010 to 2021: 1) primary energy consumption; 2) final energy consumption; 3) final energy consumption in households per capita; 4) energy productivity; 5) share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption; 6) dependency on energy imports; and 7) share of population unable to keep their homes adequately warm.
The first three indicators listed — primary energy consumption, final energy consumption, final energy consumption in households per capita — are the same set by the European Commission, the study authors wrote.
As it turns out, many countries have made great strides in developing cleaner sources of energy. According to the study, Malta had the greatest improvement of progress toward SDG 7 during the time period analyzed, although it still had a way to go to meet the overall goal. There were also significant improvements made in Cyprus, Latvia, Belgium, Ireland and Poland. Bulgaria remained farthest from the goal, The Guardian reported. The study authors found that Sweden was closest to meeting SDG 7 entirely, followed by Denmark, Estonia, then Austria.
The research showed that Sweden, Finland and Latvia surpassed the 40% target for indicator No. 5, the share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption.
“Such results were achieved by relying on hydropower and solid biofuels, which are regarded as more environmentally friendly compared to conventional energy sources,” the authors wrote.
Further, Sweden and Estonia met the target for indicator No. 6, and Spain, Malta and Portugal met the No. 3 indicator target in 2021.
The authors found that only Greece had met the first two indicators by 2021, and the authors explained that higher energy consumption following the COVID-19 pandemic kept many EU countries from meeting indicators No. 1 and No. 2 early.
“It is worth emphasizing that during the pandemic, some improvement could be observed for certain indicators. Counter-pandemic measures helped to enhance energy efficiency, which is one of the key pillars in achieving SDG 7,” the study concluded. “The restrictions on public life and lower economic activity reduced energy consumption from 2019 to 2020 by more than 8%. The reduction in final energy consumption also resulted in greater energy supply and increased the share of renewables in gross final energy consumption.”
However, the authors noted that the pandemic led to short-term trends, including an increase in household energy consumption, and it will be important to keep monitoring and analyzing changes toward the indicators in order to meet SDG 7 by 2030.
Doing laundry accounts for about 8 percent of a home’s annual electricity use, a figure that does not include the energy needed to heat the water swirling through the washing machine. Beyond that financial cost, the appliances contribute mightily to the nation’s carbon footprint. On Thursday, the Biden administration announced new washer and dryer efficiency standards that could ease those burdens.
The updated standards — first reported by Grist — will result in top-loading clothes washers that are 11 percent more energy efficient than similar current machines while using 28 percent less water. Dryers will see up to a 40 percent reduction in energy use, depending on the model. The requirements are in line with current Energy Star efficiency benchmarks, and will apply to equipment produced after March 1, 2028.
“These rules represent an opportunity for more efficient appliances that provide the same level of performance but have reduced operating expenses,” a Department of Energy official told Grist, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The government estimates that the measures will shave $2.2 billion a year from Americans’ utility bills and, over 30 years, eliminate 71 million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 9 million homes.
The updates are drawn from a deal manufacturers struck with environmental and consumer advocacy organizations last fall that outlined efficiency standards and implementation timelines for six appliance categories. The government has already adopted the group’s recommendations for stoves and refrigerators and freezers. New criteria for other refrigeration products (such as wine coolers), as well dishwashers, are expected in the coming months. If a consumer were to swap the least efficient model available today to the most common models available under the new efficiency standards, they would save around $120 per year, according to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a nonprofit that helped negotiate the new standards.
“We are pleased that the [Department of Energy] accepted this joint recommendation that saves some energy,” Jill Notini, vice president of the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, or AHAM, said in an email. “[It] also allows manufacturers to provide consumers with the products and features they love and rely upon.”
The updates come amid a conservative backlash. Fox News has dubbed the changes a “war on appliances,” that would leave clothes “dirtier and stinkier.” But Joanna Mauer, deputy director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a nonprofit involved in negotiating the new standards, points out that Energy Star models tend to score higher than more conventional appliances in Consumer Reports testing.
“These new standards will help ensure that dryers aren’t over-drying clothes,” she said. “Over-drying clothes doesn’t just waste energy, but can also shrink or otherwise damage them.”
AHAM was among the organizations that pushed back on the government’s initial appliance proposals, which were released in 2022 and 2023, and succeeded in weakening several of them through the joint recommendations. The most notable change involved gas stoves — a debate that proved particularly contentious. The standards for some washer models were also slightly lower than those the Biden administration first put forward. But, Mauer said, they still “achieve the bulk of the potential consumer savings.”
This is the first time that washer and dryer standards have been updated in more than a decade; a step Mauer said is long overdue. By law, the government is supposed to review appliance standards every six years, a procedure that AHAM has criticized as “resulting in a never-ending regulatory churn regardless of who is in the White House.” But the Trump administration stalled the process, pushing revisions well past their deadlines. In 2022, the Department of Energy reached a legal settlement with environment, consumer and housing nonprofits that laid out the current schedule.
While he would have welcomed quicker change, Joe Vukovich, an attorney for the National Resources Defense Council who participated in joint recommendation negotiations, said the end result proves that progress is possible.
“It’s not a sector where manufacturers are just uniformly hostile to regulation,” he said. “Stakeholders can come together and get something that we view as a win-win.”
The bruises on Alexandria Pittman’s body wouldn’t go away. Nor would the aches that plagued her at her new job at a distribution center in Lithia Springs, a small town 17 miles west of Atlanta, sorting and repackaging boxes containing medical devices. She was convinced the symptoms were connected to the job.
Pittman had applied to the position at the warehouse, run by the medical supply company ConMed, after learning about the opening from her fiancé, Derek Mitchell, who delivered products there. Every day she’d come home and complain to him about the mysterious aches and marks. At first, Mitchell tried to reassure her, guessing that the bruises were probably from bumping up against something. “I really didn’t think nothing of it,” he recalled.
Then, in the spring of 2019, came a surprising revelation. ConMed managers announced that the seemingly innocuous products in the boxes they were packaging had been sterilized with ethylene oxide, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers a carcinogen and is linked to lung and breast cancers as well as diseases of the nervous system. Suddenly, Pittman began connecting the dots between her symptoms and those of her colleagues. It would later emerge that at least 50 warehouse workers experienced a slew of health effects tied to ethylene oxide exposure, including seizures, vomiting, and trouble breathing. Ambulances were routinely called to the facility after workers collapsed, convulsed from seizures, or broke out in hives. Several — including Pittman — developed cancer.
Since ConMed came clean about the workers’ exposure to ethylene oxide, Pittman has suffered four strokes and had brain surgery. She’s currently undergoing chemotherapy for myeloma, according to multiple claims she has filed with the Georgia State Board of Workers’ Compensation for help paying her medical bills. After the second stroke, Mitchell was unable to care for her, and she moved in with her mother where she now lives. Mitchell and Pittman had planned to marry, but the $5,000 ring Mitchell purchased now sits collecting dust.
“It just corrupted everything that she ever wanted to do in life,” said Mitchell. “She can’t talk, and she’s being fed through a tube.”
The ethylene oxide that Pittman and dozens of her coworkers were exposed to wasn’t supposed to have made it to the warehouse at all. At a sterilization plant 12 miles down the road, the chemical had been used to fumigate products before they were sent to the warehouse, a standard procedure for making sure that medical equipment is antiseptic and safe to use in hospitals across the country. More than 50 percent of all U.S. medical supplies are sterilized by ethylene oxide, due to the chemical’s unique ability to penetrate porous surfaces without causing damage.
Ethylene Oxide Facts
What is ethylene oxide? Ethylene oxide is a colorless and odorless toxic gas used to sterilize medical products, fumigate spices, and manufacture other industrial chemicals. According to the Food and Drug Administration, approximately half of all sterile medical devices in the U.S. are disinfected with ethylene oxide.
What are the sources of ethylene oxide exposure? Industrial sources of ethylene oxide emissions fall into three main categories: chemical manufacturing, medical sterilization, and food fumigation.
What are the health effects of being exposed to ethylene oxide? Ethylene oxide, which the EPA has labeled a carcinogen, is harmful at concentrations above 0.1 parts per trillion if exposed over a lifetime. Numerous studies have linked it to lung and breast cancers as well as diseases of the nervous system and damage to the lungs. Acute exposure to the chemical can cause loss of consciousness or lead to a seizure or coma.
How is the EPA regulating ethylene oxide? The EPA is in the process of finalizing regulations for ethylene oxide emissions from the sterilization industry. The new rule requires companies to install equipment that minimizes the amount of the chemical released into the air. However, it does not address emissions from other parts of the medical device supply chain, such as warehouses and trucks.
But over the past few years — beginning with findings by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, in 2019 and Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division, or EPD, in 2020 — regulators have learned that some amount of ethylene oxide travels out of sterilization facilities on the treated products. In the hours and weeks following application, the chemical evaporates, or off-gasses, turning the buildings where these products are stored into potentially significant sources of toxic air pollution — particularly for workers like Pittman who handled the boxes directly.
The dangers came as a surprise to warehouse workers and regulators alike. Georgia EPD officials had originally only set out to monitor ethylene oxide levels around the industrial sterilization facilities fumigating medical equipment. The EPA had just published modeling that suggested high levels of cancer risk around the country’s medical sterilization facilities, and Georgia regulators wanted to assess the plants in their jurisdiction. (The modeling incorporated the results of a 2016 study that found ethylene oxide to be 30 times more toxic to adults and 60 times more toxic to children than previously known.)
After finding elevated levels of ethylene oxide outside of a Becton Dickinson sterilization plant in Covington, a city southeast of Atlanta, officials asked a state judge to temporarily shut the operation down while further testing took place. As part of a consent decree reached in October 2019, the company would not only have to install new technology at its sterilization plants to reduce its emissions, but also test the air coming from its warehouse to ensure that emissions were below the legal limit there as well. The results of this testing showed that the warehouse was emitting nearly 5,600 pounds of ethylene oxide per year — about nine times as much as the sterilization facility when it was still operational, and higher than almost a third of all sterilizer plants in the country. (Georgia requires an industrial facility emitting more than 4,000 pounds of a hazardous air pollutant per year to obtain a permit from the state allowing it to do so.)
Officials found elevated levels of ethylene oxide in this Becton Dickinson medical sterilization facility in Covington, Georgia, seen here in 2020. John Bazemore / AP Photo
“We basically cited the facility for failure to have an air permit, and we required them to control their air emissions,” recalled Jim Boylan, head of the air protection branch at the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, in an interview. “That’s how it all started.”
When he realized that Becton Dickinson couldn’t be the only company storing medical products recently sterilized with ethylene oxide, Boylan assigned several engineers in the EPD’s inspection program to search for similar operations. They had their work cut out for them — because the risk of exposure at these warehouses is such a new concern, there is no comprehensive public or government data on the identity, location, or number of these facilities in Georgia or any other state, let alone any kind of risk assessments. Inspectors scoured the internet and made in-person visits to warehouses to identify potential sources of emissions. Their research revealed that in some cases, warehouse operators were aware that the medical devices they stored were releasing a carcinogen that could be poisoning their workers.
All told, interagency emails obtained by Grist through a Freedom of Information Act request show that inspectors initially identified seven warehouses in Georgia storing products that had been sterilized with ethylene oxide; four emitted enough of the chemical to require air permits and the installation of emission-reduction equipment. Those facilities are on track to receive their permits in the coming months. While these measures may protect residents who live near the warehouses, they don’t guarantee the protection of the workers who may be experiencing exposure day in and day out. The responsibility of safeguarding workers falls to OSHA, which has not investigated ethylene oxide levels at three of the four warehouses that Georgia regulators have identified as requiring permits.
Court documents include photos of a ConMed warehouse allegedly containing rows of packages of medical devices sterilized with ethylene oxide. PeachCourt
According to court documents, cardboard and wood absorb ethylene oxide. The more dense the material, the slower it is to evaporate. PeachCourt
Frances Alonzo, a spokesperson for the federal Department of Labor, said that OSHA evaluates employers “on a case-by-case basis based on OSHA standards, employer records, interviews, observations on a walk-through, measurements, and air sampling.” (In a follow-up email, Alonzo told Grist that OSHA’s ethylene oxide standards were established in 1984 and that the agency does not have plans to update it.) The agency focuses its resources on workplaces where employees are in imminent danger and conducts follow-up investigations to ensure any previously identified violations have been addressed.
In the ConMed case, after an initial investigation in 2019 identified a slew of violations, OSHA conducted two follow-up investigations. Those inspections revealed “no violations of OSHA standards or serious hazards,” Alonzo said. In 2020, Pittman and dozens of her coworkers filed a lawsuit against ConMed and the sterilization company that shipped products to the warehouse, but the claims were later dismissed by the judge.
Despite all the work still to be done by regulators, Georgia is relatively far ahead of the curve on addressing ethylene oxide emissions from warehouses. Most other states have yet to examine whether warehouses in their jurisdiction are storing sterilized products — and if emissions from the facilities put workers and nearby residents at risk. A review of public records submitted to the EPA and state regulators revealed that there are dozens of such warehouses across the country, suggesting there are thousands of workers like Pittman, unknowingly and routinely exposed to ethylene oxide. These nondescript facilities are hiding in plain sight in places as disparate as Quincy, Massachusetts; Richmond, Virginia; and Tempe, Arizona.
Warehouses that store products sterilized with ethylene oxide pose “a deep threat to communities, and unfortunately, because we don’t really know or have as much information as we should about where those warehouses are, it’s an unknown source of major ethylene oxide emissions,” said Marvin Brown, an attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice.
Grist contacted the environmental agencies of 10 states that are home to multiple medical supply sterilization facilities. Most agencies said that they did not regulate warehouses that stored products sterilized with ethylene oxide and pointed to federal regulations that require them to oversee sterilization and manufacturing facilities — but not warehouses or distribution centers. Apart from Georgia, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, a regulator that serves a portion of Southern California, is a lone outlier. The agency is currently in the process of finalizing a rule requiring warehouses that store ethylene oxide products to conduct air quality monitoring.
The federal government, for its part, hasn’t yet addressed major loopholes that exempt warehouses from emissions rules. Because ethylene oxide is toxic in such small amounts, officials have had trouble regulating emissions from the sterilization facilities themselves, in many cases permitting emissions that they later discover generate levels of cancer risk that exceed federal public health standards.
While the EPA introduced regulations to reduce ethylene oxide emissions from sterilization facilities last year, its rules only apply to warehouses when they are located on the same property as sterilization facilities. But not only do many companies store their products at warehouses tens or even hundreds of miles away, they also often contract third-party logistics providers to do the job for them. That means products may be warehoused at facilities owned by subsidiaries or entirely separate logistics firms. Some companies have reported using FedEx facilities to store sterilized products. To make matters more complicated, sterilizers have largely been unwilling to disclose the locations of their storage facilities, citing those details as “confidential business information” not subject to public disclosure, according to records submitted to the EPA.
Environmental Protection Agency administrator Michael Regan speaks at a news conference in May 2022. The EPA warned residents in 13 states and Puerto Rico about health risks from ethylene oxide emissions. Patrick Semansky / AP Photo
Environmental advocates and public health experts interviewed for this story worried that these informational gaps as well as the findings in Georgia could indicate a substantial and invisible public health threat affecting communities across the country — and one that the EPA should take greater effort to regulate.
“Four years after the stunning discovery of warehouse emissions in Georgia, the EPA has failed to propose standards to address this source of uncontrolled emissions,” read a comment letter submitted to the EPA last year and signed by 16 environmental, public health, and labor groups, including Earthjustice and the Union of Concerned Scientists. It is also concerning, they wrote, that most sterilization companies fail to publicly disclose the locations of these warehouses.
“If [warehouses] are significant sources of ethylene oxide, we believe they should be covered by the [EPA’s sterilizer] rule,” Darya Minovi, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Grist. “I don’t think that the EPA provided a strong enough rationale for why that wouldn’t be considered.”
The agency is expected to finalize its sterilizer rule in early March. Environmental attorneys said the EPA’s reasoning for overlooking warehouses may come down to legalese. The agency issues regulations based on categories of pollution sources defined in amendments to the Clean Air Act in the 1990s. Since off-site storage facilities weren’t clearly defined in the law decades ago, whether the EPA can regulate them with a rule targeting sterilization facilities is an open question. A spokesperson for the EPA did not comment on why the agency isn’t including warehouses in its current sterilizer rule but said that it has already determined the levels of ethylene oxide that would be harmful to workers and plans to address emissions in a separate pesticide rule before the end of the year.
Ira Montgomery takes 26 pills a day. There’s one to calm the spasms that ripple through his muscles, another to lower his blood pressure, and yet another to make sure his body doesn’t reject a liver that doctors transplanted after diagnosing him with cancer.
The 51-year-old traces his problems to the years he spent working at the ConMed warehouse. The facility sprawls out over an area the size of five football fields and has rows of shelves that store wooden pallets, each containing medical devices sterilized at a facility owned by Sterigenics about 30 minutes away in Smyrna, Georgia. The products are stored anywhere from a few weeks to several months before they are shipped off to hospitals for use in life-saving procedures.
Ira Montgomery lies in the hospital after surgery. He was diagnosed with cancer and needed a liver transplant. Courtesy of Ira Montgomery
Ira Montgomery shows a scar from his liver transplant. He believes his health problems are linked to his time working at the ConMed warehouse. Courtesy of Ira Montgomery
In records submitted to the EPA, Sterigenics responded “No” to a question about whether products sterilized at its facilities are shipped to a warehouse, since ConMed contracts with Sterigenics to sterilize products. Given this, the presence of ethylene oxide emissions at the ConMed warehouse only became public knowledge due to Georgia regulators’ efforts. The 7-acre warehousing facility in Lithia Springs had neither state permits nor any protective gear for workers between 2008 and 2019, when Montgomery worked there.
Until an inspection by OSHA in 2019, the 3,500 workers at the warehouse were unaware that the products had been sterilized with a dangerous chemical. Dozens of Montgomery’s and Pittman’s coworkers mysteriously developed rashes, had trouble breathing, and fainted; many had seizures. When Nick Jackson began experiencing seizures in 2007 and eventually died in 2013, ConMed managers told his wife the fluorescent lights at the warehouse were to blame. They later informed his doctors that there were no occupational hazards at his workplace.
Similarly, when Essence Alexander opened a box containing products sterilized with ethylene oxide, her right arm broke out in hives and her body began to itch. Warehouse managers called an ambulance, but when paramedics arrived they were not informed that products at the warehouse were emitting a toxic chemical that could have triggered the reaction. In another case, when a worker broke out in hives all over her body, a manager told paramedics the worker had “an allergic reaction to a cookie,” according to legal filings.
Pallets and boxes are seen are stacked outside the Sterigenics facility in Smyrna, Georgia. Atlanta News First
Michael Yeh was working as a medical toxicology fellow at Emory University’s School of Medicine in 2021 when a dozen ConMed workers visited the center. As he got to know these patients better, Yeh began to notice certain patterns in their symptoms. Many felt fine on the weekends, but as soon as the work week rolled around, they developed headaches in the afternoon. Once they got home, the pain would subside. There were other common complaints as well: an irksome cough, itchy eyes, and inflamed nasal passages. These workers weren’t looking for a cure for their conditions, Yeh recalled, but an opportunity to understand how their exposure to ethylene oxide may have affected their health.
“There is no antidote to inhaling ethylene oxide,” Yeh said in an interview. “But they wanted us to hear their story and to document in a medical record what they were experiencing so that there’s documentation of what happened to them.”
ConMed warehouse managers attributed these health effects to a range of unrelated issues, according to a lawsuit filed by about 50 workers in 2020. In filings with the court, the company has argued that the workers did not provide sufficient evidence about their individual exposures and subsequent ailments. Since Pittman, Montgomery, and the other plaintiffs submitted multiple claims to the Georgia Workers’ Compensation Board, ConMed has also claimed that the workers have foregone other avenues to air their grievances. The workers are attempting an “end run around the Workers’ Compensation Act … based on a smattering of vague factual allegations interspersed among a series of legal conclusions,” the company claimed in filings.
In total, the lawsuit counts approximately 50 instances of ambulances being called to the warehouse between 2007 and 2019. A Grist review of 911 call records shows that since 2016, ambulances were dispatched to the ConMed warehouse to treat employees on at least 22 occasions. Multiple workers reported similar health effects: seizures, losing consciousness, vomiting, and trouble breathing. All of these symptoms are triggered by high-dose exposure to ethylene oxide. According to medical management guidelines developed by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which develops profiles for hazardous substances, ethylene oxide is a central nervous system depressant, and acute exposure to it “can result in diverse neurologic manifestations including seizures, loss of consciousness, and coma.” Exposure to lower concentrations can cause nausea and vomiting, while exposure via skin may cause “inflammation with redness of the skin, blisters, and crusted ulcerations.”
Ambulances were called to this ConMed warehouse approximately 50 times between 2007 and 2019. Courtesy of Atlanta News First. Atlantic News First obtained 911 audio for one of those calls, which has been de-identified and edited for length.
Due in part to these risks, OSHA has set acceptable ethylene oxide exposure limits for workers. The federal agency requires companies to inform workers if they are exposed to more than 0.5 parts per million, or ppm, of ethylene oxide and take measures to reduce exposure when levels are above 1 ppm.
OSHA’s efforts to investigate ConMed’s storage center in Lithia Springs in 2019 point to the warehouse owners’ anxieties over the possibility of being regulated. Grist reviewed OSHA complaint records about the facility and found that federal inspectors’ efforts to sample the indoor air were repeatedly rebuffed.
“The employer was not forthcoming in providing the requested documentation,” the complaint read, adding that two subpoenas had been issued to the company to request information about working conditions, but that the company lawyer rejected both. The initial complaint alleged that airborne ethylene oxide inside the warehouse was causing workers to experience “headaches, burning eyes, itching eyes, cough, and chest pains.” It took five months for regulators to get access to the facility and take air samples and another two months to publish the results.
Those results ultimately indicated that ethylene oxide was present in the air at ConMed, but not at levels that breach federal standards. In handwritten notes attached to the complaint file, an OSHA inspector noted that managers instructed workers not to open packages during the inspection, raising the possibility that managers altered operating procedures on that day. “They didn’t know I can see them,” the inspector wrote.
“Did they change their practices when they knew the inspectors were coming?” Yeh wondered, noting that it would be easy for the company to make adjustments if it knew the inspection date in advance.
The investigation also found that warehouse managers had removed an indoor air quality monitor because it routinely recorded levels between 3 and 5 ppm and beeped loudly. The levels of ethylene oxide were so high, the workers claimed, that the cardboard packages wrapped in plastic shrink-wrap became wet. (Ethylene oxide converts into ethylene cholohydrin and ethylene glycol when it interacts with plastic, and the lawsuit claims that the wet boxes were evidence of the high levels of ethylene oxide that the products were off-gassing.)
OSHA fined ConMed $7,800 for failing to inform workers of their high exposure to ethylene oxide and required the company to install equipment that reduced levels of the chemical. ConMed complied by opening bay doors for better ventilation and installing a stationary air quality monitor, but the monitor continued to detect high ethylene oxide levels.
The workers’ lawsuit claims that the products were off-gassing dangerous levels of ethylene oxide in part because Sterigenics, the sterilization company that shipped products to the ConMed warehouse, was using a sterilization method that requires overapplication of the chemical. Ethylene oxide is an effective disinfectant because even at low levels it can eliminate microbes effectively, but different volumes of the chemical may be required to properly disinfect different products. (The amount of ethylene oxide required to sterilize a product is based on regulations by the Food and Drug Administration.)
Because companies often sterilize different types of products all in one fell swoop, they end up gassing them with more ethylene oxide than is required. The lawsuit claims that Sterigenics used this process — called “overkill” in industry parlance — to sterilize more products quickly. The sterilized products are supposed to be held for several hours to days to allow the ethylene oxide to off-gas before they are sent to warehouses for storage, but the lawsuit claims that Sterigenics rushed this process to increase profits. As a result, the products that were trucked to the warehouse had higher levels of ethylene oxide than anyone would have had reason to suspect at the time.
“The method of sterilization has been to over sterilize,” said Brown, the Earthjustice attorney.
“The result for communities is that they are exposed to higher amounts of ethylene oxide, because more ethylene oxide is being used than necessary.”
Sterigenics did not respond to specific questions about its sterilization methods. In an emailed statement, Kristin Gibbs, a spokesperson for the company, noted that Sterigenics sterilized products provided by ConMed on a contract basis “as required by FDA regulations and standards.”
“The facility in Lithia Springs belongs to ConMed — not Sterigenics — and as such, the facility, the employees working in that facility, and those employees’ working conditions are under the control of and are the responsibility of ConMed,” she added.
In 2019, after OSHA investigated and the EPA identified the Sterigenics facility as a major source of ethylene oxide emissions, workers at the ConMed warehouse began trying to take precautions. Pittman asked her fiancé to buy her a mask, but when she wore it at work, the lawsuit alleges that managers told her not to because she was “scaring” others. Several workers were fired after they began raising concerns about the levels of ethylene oxide at the facility.
Since the EPA hasn’t proposed specific regulations for warehouses, Boylan, the Georgia EPD air chief, said states “should work closely with their warehouses to gather site-specific information on ethylene oxide emissions and try to calculate the risk associated with those emissions.”
“Georgia has done kind of above and beyond, because we thought there were possible risks to nearby communities, and we thought the risks were too great,” said Boylan.
In January, the workers elected to drop ConMed from the lawsuit in part because some of their claims were dismissed in 2022 by the judge presiding over the case. Since the workers had filed claims with the Georgia Workers’ Compensation Board, they were barred from seeking redress through the courts. The judge also dismissed certain claims against Sterigenics, but the company remains a party to the lawsuit. “Sterigenics is vigorously defending the limited surviving claims against it,” said Gibbs, the Sterigenics spokesperson.
Since the lawsuit was filed in 2020, four workers who signed up as plaintiffs have died. Mitchell, Pittman’s fiancé, said that working at the ConMed facility completely changed the trajectory of her life. She was a friendly person, always smiling, but the health complications have dimmed the light in her eyes.
“She was proud of her job and how she had moved up,” said Mitchell. “She always talked about how sad it was and how it hurt her. She was just trying to earn a living and do her job.”
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the federal agency that monitors diseases and establishes guidelines to protect human health — published a paper last month that shows cases of Lyme disease jumped nearly 70 percent nationwide in 2022. But what looked like an alarming spike in disease was actually the result of smarter disease surveillance that better reflects what’s happening on the ground.
The CDC revised its Lyme reporting requirements in 2022, making it easier for states with high infection rates to report those cases. The report, the first published analysis of the new data collection guidelines, demonstrates the crucial role efficient surveillance plays in better understanding the scope of infectious disease in the U.S. — and what more must be done to safeguard public health as climate change fosters the proliferation of ticks.
“Disease surveillance that is interpretable and is standardized is integral to being able to understand how disease frequency is changing, and if it’s changing,” said Kiersten Kugeler, a CDC epidemiologist and lead author of the paper. She noted that climate change will complicate the already difficult task of monitoring and controlling diseases such as Lyme. Cases in some areas will continue rising while declining in others as parts of the U.S. become more amenable, or hostile, to ticks. “It’s not going to be straightforward,” Kugeler said. “It’s going to be incredibly important to have good surveillance to be able to understand how climate is affecting risk of disease.”
Blacklegged ticks are known vectors for the zoonotic spirochetal bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi, which is the pathogen responsible for causing Lyme disease. Photo by CDC/ James Gathany; William L. Nicholson, Ph.D.
Studies have documented significant shifts in Lyme trends across the country. The illness is caused by the bite of a black-legged tick and causes symptoms that range from flu-like and mild to neurological and debilitating, depending on how quickly the disease is diagnosed. Cases doubled in the three decades between 1990 and 2020. Many researchers, including CDC employees, say climate change is one factor behind that precipitous rise. Environmental changes such as urban sprawl and swelling populations of white-tailed deer, among other drivers, also play a role.
Warmer winter temperatures have coaxed black-legged ticks into regions that have historically been too harsh for the blood-sucking arachnids. Meanwhile, milder spring and fall seasons have given the pests more time to breed. Lyme is a portent of climate-driven diseases to come. But, as it has spread into new areas and infected more people, the CDC has struggled to capture the full impact.
In 2022, the agency redoubled its disease surveillance efforts, with a special emphasis on vector-borne disease. As part of that push, the CDC loosened its Lyme disease reporting requirements in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and upper-Midwest, where cases are high. Public health departments in those areas no longer have to track down the clinical details of each positive Lyme test, such as a patient’s symptoms and when they began, and doctors can skip the labor-intensive process of recording and reporting them. Now, a positive laboratory test is sufficient. Eliminating these steps takes the onus off doctors and local public health authorities and puts it on state health departments, which are typically better equipped to handle it.
“We have a lot of behind-the-scenes data management that’s new with this Lyme disease surveillance system,” Rebecca Osborn, a vector-borne disease epidemiologist at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. But overall, she said, “it has gotten quite a bit less burdensome.”
The new system runs the risk of including information on people who no longer show symptoms but are still testing positive for the bacteria, which can linger in the blood for years after the infection has gone. But those cases likely comprise a small fraction of the overall data, the CDC said. In areas where Lyme remains rare, providers must continue reporting clinical information for each case.
These relatively modest changes to the case definition requirements unearthed 62,551 cases of Lyme nationwide. That’s 1.7 times the annual average reported from 2017 to 2019.
Chuck Lubelczyk, a vector-borne ecologist with Maine Medical Center, collects ticks at a site in Cape Elizabeth.
John Ewing / Portland Press Herald/Getty Images
Still, most cases of Lyme disease in the U.S. go unreported. Studies based on health insurance records estimate that roughly 500,000 cases are diagnosed every year. Those reported by states to the CDC in 2022 comprise less than one-fifth of that. Elizabeth Schiffman, an epidemiologist with the Vector Borne Diseases Unit at the Minnesota Department of Health, said figuring out how to capture every case is nearly impossible and perhaps besides the point.
“No system is ever perfect,” she said, “we’re always going to miss something, we’re always going to count something that probably shouldn’t be counted.” If the CDC could use the data it collects every year under its new system to measure the overall impact of Lyme, Schiffman said, then the number of cases it already knows about may be enough.
“If what we are able to capture is able to give us an idea of where things are happening, how things are changing, and inform good public health actions, then it could be argued that we don’t need to count every case.”
The data deficit and lack of standardization among states becomes more of a problem when researchers try to tease out the impacts of climate change on the disease. The CDC argues that in regions where Lyme incidence is still relatively rare, the updated surveillance system doesn’t make sense. Doctors and local health departments in those areas still need to collect clinical information on every potential Lyme patient, because each case is a revealing datapoint rather than a statistic in a larger trend. But the burdensome requirements in low-incidence areas muddy efforts to detect the role of climate change in how black-legged ticks may be migrating, said Richard Ostfeld, a senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who researches tick-borne illnesses.
A tick bite on the forearm of a man in Toronto. Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images
The prevalence of Lyme disease typically falls along geographic lines. Counties in the upper Midwest and Northeast report tens of thousands of cases each year, while those in the Southeast and South report hundreds. Although the CDC’s revised reporting guidelines more accurately revealed the extent of Lyme disease in areas with a high prevalence, the implementation of the system over time may obscure growth of the disease elsewhere. The new guidelines “would tend to bias your estimate of geographic trends toward more growth in incidence in northern parts of the country as opposed to southern parts of the country where you’re still being very conservative,” Ostfeld said. “It complicates matters for those trying to understand the role of climate change.”
North Carolina, for example, a state long classified as low-incidence, was among five states with the highest number of Lyme disease-related insurance claims in 2016, according to one analysis. But the disease reporting there, said Noah Johnston, director of the Lyme awareness group Project Lyme, still isn’t where it needs to be. “There’s an expectation that tick populations in North Carolina are not as high as they are in the Northeast,” he said.
The benefits and drawbacks of the CDC’s updated surveillance highlight the difficulties of tracking and controlling infectious diseases under climatic conditions that are rapidly shifting the distribution of disease carriers. Incremental adjustments to the status quo might not be enough to keep up with the growing scale of disease risk. “We’re likely going to see more and more cases of these diseases and more and more diseases that are going to affect not just our population in the U.S., but globally,” said Osborn. “Public health in general needs to become a little more proactive in our responses. We’re still working on that as a field.”
Nano- and microplastics (NMPs) have become so pervasive in air, water and soil that they have made their way into the bodies and blood of humans and animals.
While many methods have been attempted to remove the tiny plastic particles, a new study has found that a simple solution for reducing their presence in drinking water may be to boil it, as when you make a cup of coffee or tea.
In fact, filtering and boiling tap water containing calcium carbonate could help remove almost 90 percent of the plastics, a press release from the American Chemical Society (ACS) said.
“Tap water nano/microplastics (NMPs) escaping from centralized water treatment systems are of increasing global concern, because they pose potential health risk to humans via water consumption. Drinking boiled water, an ancient tradition in some Asian countries, is supposedly beneficial for human health, as boiling can remove some chemicals and most biological substances,” the study said. “Boiling hard water… can remove at least 80% of polystyrene, polyethylene, and polypropylene NMPs size between 0.1 and 150 μm.”
The side effects of NMPs on humans are still being investigated, but recent studies indicate that their ingestion could impact the gut microbiome, the press release said. While some advanced water filtration systems are able to capture the plastic bits, less expensive strategies are necessary in order to help reduce their passive consumption on a larger scale.
In order to find out if boiling water could help effectively remove NMPs from soft and hard tap water, the research team collected hard water samples and “spiked them” with various amounts of NMPs. They boiled the water for five minutes, then allowed it to cool. When naturally mineral-rich hard water is boiled, it forms a chalky calcium carbonate substance known as limescale. The researchers then measured the remaining plastic content floating in the water.
The results indicated that crystalline structures — or “incrustants” — formed as the temperature of the water increased and encapsulated the NMPs.
Eddy Zeng, one of the authors of the study, said the incrustants would build up over time as limescale usually does, and could then be scrubbed clean to remove the plastics. Zeng explained that any remaining incrustants could be removed by straining them through a coffee filter or other simple filter.
The experiments found that harder water produced a more pronounced encapsulation effect. For example, boiling a water sample with 300 milligrams of calcium carbonate in each liter removed as much as 90 percent of the free-floating NMPs. Roughly 25 percent were removed by boiling soft water containing less than 60 milligrams of calcium carbonate per liter.
The researchers said the results indicated that boiling water could be an easy and effective way of reducing NMP ingestion.
“This simple boiling-water strategy can ‘decontaminate’ NMPs from household tap water and has the potential for harmlessly alleviating human intake of NMPs through water consumption,” the authors wrote in the study.
The most recent phase of Superfund cleanup is part of a total of $3.5 billion allocated for the work, a press release from the EPA said. More than $2 billion has already been deployed for cleanup activities at 150-plus sites on the Superfund National Priorities List.
“After three rounds of investments, EPA is delivering on President Biden’s full promise to invest in cleaning up America’s most contaminated Superfund sites,” said Janet McCabe, deputy EPA administrator, in the press release. “This final round of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding has made it possible for EPA to initiate clean ups at every single Superfund site where construction work is ready to begin.”
The massive undertaking is part of the Biden administration’s Investing in America agenda and funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The final wave will include 25 new cleanup projects and the continuation of 85 that are already underway.
The Superfund program — originally created with passage of the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) by Congress in 1980 — assists with the repurposing of land like warehouses and parks that have been polluted by heavy industry so that it can be used for new economic development, reported Reuters.
“The law gave EPA the authority and funds to hold polluters accountable for cleaning up the most contaminated sites across the country. When no viable responsible party is found or cannot afford the cleanup, EPA steps in to address risks to human health and the environment using funds appropriated by Congress, like the funding provided by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” the press release said.
According to McCabe, more than a quarter of Black and Hispanic people in the U.S. live within three miles from a Superfund site, three quarters of which are located in historically underserved communities.
“Every American deserves clean air to breathe and access to clean land and water, no matter their zip code,” said Delaware Senator Tom Carper in the press release.
Across the country, thousands of sites have been contaminated by the neglectful dumping, improper management or open abandonment of hazardous waste. The sites can be polluted by toxic chemicals from processing plants, manufacturing facilities, mining and landfills, and can put the health and well-being of urban and rural communities at risk.
“This funding will help improve people’s lives, especially those who have long been on the front lines of pollution,” McCabe told reporters, as Reuters reported.
The projects are part of the president’s Justice40 Initiative, which has a goal of 40 percent of certain federal investments going to disadvantaged communities that have been overburdened by pollution and marginalized by underinvestment.
Frank Pallone, U.S. Representative from New Jersey, told reporters that the funding will complement another $23 billion for Superfund to come from “polluters pay” taxes reinstated by the Inflation Reduction Act, reported Reuters.
“Reinstating that Superfund tax is really only about basic fairness that corporate polluters, not taxpayers, should have to pay to clean up the messes that they created,” Pallone said.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding will help with the cleanup of sites from New Jersey — which has the most Superfund sites of any state — to Oregon.
“Superfund sites threaten public and environmental health across the country, but with today’s announcement, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is continuing to deliver on the promise we made to clean up backlogged sites and give our communities the peace of mind they deserve,” Pallone said in the press release. “For dozens of communities, today’s funding is a welcome assurance that help is on the way.”
