Sarah Zhang is a senior online fellow at Mother Jones. Before moving to San Francisco, she wrote for Discover Magazine in New York and did research on fruit flies in Israel.
The most ubiquitous danger at firing ranges has a lot to do with bullets but nothing to do with getting shot.
It's all in the lead. A recent report from the National Academy of Sciences found that OSHA lead exposure standards are too lax to protect military firing range employees. Repeated exposure to the toxic metal causes a raft of health problems including brain damage, high blood pressure, and anemia.
Lead is found in bullets as well as the explosive that ignites gunpowder. When a bullet is fired, it gets so hot that that lead actually vaporizes. Firing range employees breathe in the lead fumes, as well as ingest lead dust that settles on their body and clothes. OSHA sets the permissible level of atmospheric lead at 50 micrograms/meter2, but the report found that level frequently exceeded at military firing ranges, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.
The new report also finds OSHA's blood lead level recommendation of 40 µg/dL or lower to be too high. That limit hasn't changed since 1978, but subsequent research has found health problems at blood lead levels as low as 5 µg/dL. Lead is so damaging because it mimics calcium, an ion with essential roles everywhere in the body from bones to nerve cells. (It's especially dangerous for children with developing brains, which is why you hear so much about lead paint.) The report devotes more than 70 pages to detailing lead's many toxic effects in nearly every organ in the body, including the brain, blood, kidneys, heart, and reproductive organs.
How can firing range workers reduce their exposure? The most direct solution is switching to lead-free ammunition or at least jacketed bullets, which have a lead core covered with a coating made of copper or nylon. Lead has been traditionally favored because of its density, but the military has since developed lead-free ammunition that reportedly works just as well.
The neurotoxic element may be lurking in your pipes, window frames—even garden plants. What to look out for, especially if you have kids crawling around.
Especially if you live in a city, it's worth getting professional testing—home testing kits have been found to return up to 50 percent false negatives. If significant levels are found, here's where they might come from.
1. Water Water pipes and solder in older homes often contain lead; even new fixtures can be up to 8 percent lead. (A federal law lowering the limit to 0.25 percent takes effect in 2014.) The oft-recommended fix of running the tap for several minutes is wasteful and not always effective; better to install a NSF-approved filter at the tap.
2. Countertops and Floors Dust from paint and soil can accumulate on surfaces. Wipe them down even more often than usual if you have kids of everything-goes-into-the-mouth age.
3. Windows Friction from opening and closing old windows wears down paint and creates lead dust. The safest bet is replacing them. The EPA certifies lead-safe contractors, and some states offer subsidies.
4. Paint Sanding, scraping, and even chemically stripping old paint releases lead; it's better to seal the stuff in with a fresh coat. If you must scrape, wet the paint to keep down dust, or bring in abatement professionals.
5. Soil The most thorough fix is a "dig and haul," in which six inches of contaminated soil is trucked out and replaced with clean dirt. Covering the soil with a carpetlike geotextile and layering clean dirt on top costs a lot less; short of that, mulch or plant grass over contaminated soil to keep lead particles from being blown back into the air.
6. Urban Farming If your soil is lead contaminated (some ag extension programs do free or low-cost tests), be careful what you grow. Eggs from New York City chickens were found to have lead levels up to twice the feds' daily limit for kids under six. Among vegetables, roots like carrots take up the most lead, fruits like tomatoes and squash the least. (Tree fruits are pretty much safe.) One fix: Grow lead-absorbing plants like spinach and mustard, then throw them out; this may lower soil lead levels as much as 200 ppm in three months.
7. Airplane Fuel About 75 percent of private planes still fly with leaded aviation gas; a 2011 study found that children living closer to airports had higher levels of lead in their blood. There are lead-free alternatives, but the industry has been slow to adopt them, and regulators haven't pushed.
As news broke of the Newtown school shooting, horror and grief transcended party lines. But for some conservatives, the shooting—and the ensuing calls for reassessing gun policies—also presented a political challenge. Some notable tweets:
.@hyperboledetect Gun Control is not aimed at criminals. It is aimed at the law-abiding only. The liberal dream is us disarmed & docile.
Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate, told Fox News the shooting happened because "we removed God from our schools. (h/t ThinkProgress)
HUCKABEE: Ultimately, you can take away every gun in America and somebody will use a gun. When somebody has an intent to do incredible damage, they’re going to find a way to do it… People will want to pass new laws, but unless you change people’s hearts, they’re our transition to the pastor side. This is a heard issue, it’s not something, laws don’t change this kind of thing.
CAVUTO: How could God let this happen?
HUCKABEE: Well, you know, it’s an interesting thing. When we ask why there is violence in our schools, but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools have become a place for carnage because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, responsibility, accountability? That we’re not just going to have to be accountable to the police, if they catch us. But one day, we will stand in judgment before God. If we don’t believe that, we don’t fear that.
Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association took a similar tack on his radio show today, claiming that God has abandoned our schools because prayer is no longer allowed.
Fischer tweeted this too:
We've spent 50 years kicking God out of our public schools, then wonder why he's not around when we need him.
Blogger Mike Vanderboegh offered an elliptic Biblical reference on his blog, quoting a Wikipedia article about the ancient Ammonite god who demanded child sacrifices.
Conservative radio personality Steve Deace took to his Facebook page to complain about politicizing the tragedy while also blaming public schools.
Deace wasn't the only one who lashed out against people who speaking against gun laws. Michelle Malkin's aggregator account, Twitchy, offered this:
Disgusting: Lefty celebs crawl out to politicize Newtown, Conn., tragedy bit.ly/Y28ojw
And even as we speak, the Drive-By Media and the Democrats are attempting to politicize the issue to advance their own agenda. In this case, probably an assault on the Second Amendment again. I guarantee you that they are overturning everything they can in their quest to be able to blame this on Republicans. This, to them, is an opportunity.
Conservative news site Townhall reacts to New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's call for gun control legislation by saying this:
I'm going to have some class and avoid this political fight today, but it's important to show what Bloomberg is saying and now pushing for in the wake of tragedy.
NewsBusters, which is devoted to responding to liberal media bias, hasn't addressed the shooting at all on its homepage. This screenshot was taken at 3:45 PM PST.
And the NRA? It has been silent since this tweet, just before news of the Newtown shooting broke.
Mechanically tenderized beef, like hamburgers, must be a cooked to a higher temperature to kill off bacteria lurking inside.
Why is a rare steak and its barely warm center safe to eat? Bacteria like E. coli live only on the meat's surface, so they're easily dispatched with a sizzle in the frying pan —that is, unless your steak has been poked with dozens of tiny little blades or needles that pushed bacteria deep into the meat.
The process is called mechanical tenderization, and more than 90 percent of beef producers do it. The blades cut through muscle fibers and connective tissue to make the beef less tough. (Dry aging a steak does the same thing through a chemical process, but it takes a lot longer.)
In the past decade or so, mechanically tenderized steaks have been responsible for at least eight recalls and sickened 100 people. A year-long investigation by the Kansas City Star reveals just how pervasive and unregulated this process is.
The feds' meat inspection program, called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points or HACCP, has been referred to as "Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray."
Food safety advocates want mechnically tenderized meat labeled so restaurants and home cooks know to cook their beef to higher temperatures. It's the same logic behind the health department recommendation that ground beef be cooked hotter (160 F) than intact cuts (145 F). Even that, however, may not be enough. A study published in the Journal of Food Protection last year found surviving bacteria that hang out in "cold spots" on mechnically tenderized steaks cooked to an internal temperature of 160 F.
Lack of labeling is just one example of the greater problem of lax oversight at meat plants. As the Star reports, the federal government's meat inspection program, called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points or HACCP, has been sarcastically referred to as "Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray" or "Hardly Anyone Comprehends Current Policy." Meat producers, rather than the government, are responsible for implementing HACCP.
When federal investigators did inspect meat plants, they found plenty of the source for E. coli on beef: poop. Inspection reports obtained by the Star through FOIA requests included hundreds of references to feces. Choice quotes include "massive fecal contamination" and "a piece of trimmed fat approximately 14 inches long with feces the length of it."
The Star crunched the numbers and found that bigger meat plants had higher rates of positive E. coli tests. Big meat factories, which mix beef from many different sources, also spread contamination wider and make tracing the source of outbreaks more difficult. That's of little help to people who became sick or even died from eating mechnically tenderized beef.
A new flock of drones is taking flight in America's skies, and they are here to help. Really. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a.k.a. drones, are ready to take over jobs that are too dangerous or simply too boring for human pilots. What's holding them back, until 2015 at least, are FAA regulations that bar the commercial use of robot aircraft.
Government agencies and state universities are already using drones in ways that do not include secretly tracking and killing people. Eventually we may have FedEx drones or even personal taco delivery vehicles. But in the meantime, here are eight cool things drones can already do:
Farming: The Japanese have used robo-crop-dusters for decades, but those FAA regulations have kept ag limited to government sponsored projects. That could change when the FAA allows the commercial use of drones in 2015. Farmers and ag programs are gearing up for drones that can monitor the growth of crops as well as the drones like the crop dusters used in Japan. And with the shortage of skilled ag pilots, drones could very well swoop in.
Chasing storms: Since 2007, NASA has owned a pair of Global Hawks, the same UAVs used by the military to spy on foreign countries. Fitted with instruments to monitor clouds, winds, and temperature, the Global Hawks can hang out where few human pilots want to—in the middle of a hurricane. In September, a Global Hawk spent nearly two weeks monitoring the life cycle of the bizarrely long-lived Hurricane/Tropical Storm Nadine. NASA scientists hope to use the drones to glean insights into how hurricanes form, especially now that climate change has made superstorms a more pressing problem. (Check out NASA's website for an interactive view of the Global Hawk—with bonus action music!)
Photo of Tropical Storm Frank taken from a Global HawkNASA/NOAA
Catching poachers: When you're trying to track poachers across thousands of acres, it helps to have eyes in the sky. The World Wildlife Fund has tested a fleet of small, hand-launched, camera-equipped drones in Nepal. And the WWF just won a $5 million Google grant to implement a drone-based poacher surveillance system in Asia and Africa.
Going into the danger zone: In the first weeks after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, when radiation levels near the plant were too dangerous for humans, in flew an 18-pound robot called the Honeywell T-Hawk. The T-Hawk sent back videos of stunning devastation. Drones are no stranger to danger. BP has tested quadrotor drones in its oil fields, inspecting rigs while outmaneuvering gas flares that occasionally burst into fireballs.
Protecting human rights: On the flip side, some activists have suggested drones can be used to monitor human rights violations. The cofounders of the Genocide Intervention Network have argued that drones should be used by human rights organizations to document violence in Syria, where the government has tried to silence journalists with targeted killings.
Journalism: Old-school newsgathering was based on shoe-leather reporting; are drones the future of journalism? Matt Waite of the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln thinks so. The lab has used footage shot by drones to report on the Midwestern drought, and a drone has documented protests in Poland. But drone journalism remains legally dicey, at least until the federal ban on commercial drones is lifted in 2015. The FAA investigated The Dailyin 2011for flying a drone over natural disasters in Alabama and North Dakota. But journalists can still dream about having the ability to grab scoops from above.
@mmoyr Sometimes I wish you worked for Mother Jones.
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