Dust Storms Overseas Carry Contaminants to U.S.

[Guest guest]

Hi y'all,

 

I didn't list this as OT because I think its not Off Topic .. its pertinent

to matters discussed on this list. Folks can believe or deny the below but

even if they believe just half of it they can recognize the ramifications as

far as Organic production is concerned .. and .. as far as protecting

ourselves from disease. This is not something that governments are

unaware of .. they've known about it for years .. but they recognize their

limitations when it comes to fixing it. I believe there are probably some

ongoing efforts to counter some of this now .. but I can't support that

statement with more than supposition. Y'all keep smiling. :-)

Butch http://www.AV-AT.c om

 

 

Dust Storms Overseas Carry Contaminants to U.S.

 

Scientists Study Whether Diseases Are Also Transported

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/05/AR2008020502950_\

pf.html

 

By Doug Struck

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

 

Seventy-five years ago, aviator Charles Lindbergh turned the controls of his

pontoon plane over to his co-pilot, wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, while flying

above Iceland. He thrust a makeshift metal arm holding a sticky glass plate

from the cockpit. He wanted to see if the winds high aloft the Earth were

as clean as they seemed.

 

They were not.

 

Now, with NASA satellites and sampling by researchers around the world,

scientists know that great billowing clouds of dust waft over the oceans in

the upper atmosphere, arriving in North America from

deserts in Africa and Asia.

 

Researchers have also found that the dust clouds contain not only harmful

minerals and industrial pollutants, but also living organisms: bacteria,

fungus and viruses that may transmit diseases to humans. Some say an

alarming increase in asthma in children in the Caribbean is the consequence

of dust blown from Africa, and predict they will find similar connections in

the Southeast and Northwest United States.

 

Scientists are beginning to look at these dust clouds as possible suspects

in transcontinental movement of diseases such as influenza and SARS in

humans, or foot-and-mouth disease in livestock. Until recently,

epidemiologists had looked at people, animals and products as carriers of

the diseases.

 

" We are just beginning to accumulate the evidence of airborne dust

implications on human health, " said William A. Sprigg, a climate expert at

the University of Arizona. " Until now, it's been like the tree falling in

the forest. Nobody heard, so nobody knew it was there. "

 

The World Meteorological Organization, a science arm of the United Nations,

is alarmed enough to set up a global warning system to track the moving

clouds of dust and to alert those in the path. Sprigg is heading the

project.

 

He foresees a system soon in which forecasters can predict " down to the Zip

code " the arrival of dust clouds. That forecast could prompt schools and

nursing homes to keep their wards inside, and help public health doctors

predict a surge of respiratory complaints.

 

Analysis of soil samples has long shown that minerals picked up from barren

deserts reach distant shores, for good or bad. The Amazon rain forest in

South America, for example, gets phosphate nutrients from

dust blown in from northern Africa's Sahara Desert.

 

Industrial development has added heavy metals and toxic chemicals to that

airborne mix. Korea and Japan periodically chafe as storms of " Yellow Dust "

wash over from China, bringing a caustic mix of sand

and industrial pollutants.

 

Even natural minerals can be harmful to humans, and dust-borne particles

have been linked to annual meningitis outbreaks in Africa and silicosis lung

disease in Kazakhstan and North Africa. The Dust

Bowl storms of the 1930s in the United States brought graphic descriptions

of choking sediment getting into the lungs of people and felling livestock.

 

But the advent of satellite images gave scientists a sobering look at how

even faraway storms can reach us.

 

Traveling for a week over the Pacific from the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts

in Asia, clouds carrying hundreds of millions of tons of dust regularly

reach the northwestern United States. From the Sahara and

Sahel deserts in Africa and the East, they roll across the Atlantic to the

Caribbean and reach the southeastern United States in three to five days.

 

Authorities in Los Angeles estimate that on some days, one-quarter of the

city's smog comes from China.

 

" There is plenty of evidence from space observations of the Northern

Hemisphere that there is a persistent ring of industrial emission dust and

other pollutants in the air. You can actually see this bathtub ring around

the Northern Hemisphere, " said Stanley A. Morain, who heads the Earth Data

Analysis Center at the University of New Mexico and collaborates with

Sprigg.

 

" If something breaks out, it can move very quickly into other areas, " he

said.

 

Dust storms may be increasing as global warming and desertification expand

arid areas. The dust swirls into the atmosphere containing plant pollens,

fungal spores, dried animal feces, minerals, chemicals from fires and

industry, and pesticide residues.

 

Asthma in the Caribbean increased just as an African drought increased the

amount of dust washing over the islands. Asthma has increased in Barbados

17 times since 1973, when the African drought

began, according to a national study there, and researchers have documented

an increase in pediatric hospital admissions when the dust storms are worst.

 

 

Scientists previously had thought bacteria and viruses picked up by the dust

storms would die on long flights, when they are exposed to ultraviolet

radiation and extreme temperatures. But three-inch African locusts have

been found alive in the Caribbean after dust storms.

 

In the late 1990s, Eugene Shinn, who was studying the widespread die-off of

Caribbean coral reefs for the U.S. Geological Survey in Florida, began

wondering if smaller living organisms came with the dust. He eventually

linked live microbes brought from Africa to sea fan disease, which was

infecting the coral.

 

Shinn enlisted USGS microbiologist Dale Griffin. They and other colleagues

devised a method of collecting air samples, using a contraption built with a

vacuum pump from Home Depot drawing air

through a two-inch round sterile filter.

 

In the first test, collected during a dusty day in 2000 over the Virgin

Islands, Griffin said he thought they might find evidence of four or five

different microorganisms growing colonies on the filter. Instead, he found

30 colonies, each with billions of cells.

 

" I did not expect that many, " he said. " And we know that whatever grows on

the filter represents only about 1 percent of what's really there. People

just don't think about microorganisms moving around the

atmosphere, at least that far. "

 

Griffin said that " in Florida in the summer, when the dust storms are

pulsing across, if you walk outside and breathe, 50 percent of the particles

you breathe come from Africa, " more than 4,000 miles away. They contain

mold spores and bacteria that increase allergies and respiratory diseases.

 

Shinn, who is now retired, said that there has not been enough response to

these findings.

 

" No one in authority really wants to hear about this problem, even when it

is known that African dust sporadically exceeds EPA air standards in places

like Miami during the summer months, " Shinn said

in a letter recently. " No government agency wants to face this problem

because no one knows what to do about it.

 

" In my opinion, nothing will change regarding either African or Asian dust

until we have a catastrophe such as a large-scale avian flu, West Nile

virus, or some other deadly outbreak that cannot be explained away by the

usual suspects, " he said. " Meanwhile we will continue to employ agents to

check for fruit in baggage and dirt on tourists' shoes while hundreds of

millions of tons of soil dust carrying live microbes continue to be

transported unchecked overhead. "

 

Unchecked, perhaps, but not unwatched. The early warning system being

devised by Sprigg will track those storms, integrating the data with weather

forecasts, so that local authorities have notice of one to

three days to take precautions. Parts of the system have already been set

up in China and Europe.

 

In addition to medical precautions, police can be warned about deteriorating

driving visibility and airports can plan to reroute planes, Sprigg said. He

said he hopes the next step will be more aggressive medical research to

determine the composition and human health threats of what is in those dust

clouds.

 

" I really see some practical applications here, " he said. " We are just

getting started. "

 

© 2008 The Washington Post Company

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Dear Butch,

 

Since this list is about " oils, herbs, etc " , and the

etc is natural health in general, This is indeed ON

topic.

 

I generally agree, that it is impossible to claim that

any substance is 100% organic.

This planet is ONE. Sooner or later we'll have to

figure out some decent balance between the right of

individuals and the need to support the collective.

That's another topic.

 

But we have to keep trying. There must be some

difference between a cauliflower that has had

insecticide sprayed directly on it, and one that

merely got some drift.

 

We'll never get it exactly right. That would be

death. Life is about dynamic processes.

Go a bit too far in one direction, make a correction,

steer too far the other way, etc.

 

All we can do is be kind, enjoy the process, muddle

through as best we can and enjoy the imperfection.

 

Muddling through in the Kootenays

http://freegreenliving.com (blog)

)