News briefs: DuPont, Teflon, EWG, Michael Dourson and EPA, alachlor, acetochlor

Walmart pushes companies to get verified by EWG... for personal care products. More about EWG verified is here. The EWG Skin Deep program rates products based on the safety of their ingredients. Many lipsticks contain lead, which causes irreversible brain damage.

Marion Nestle presents a round up of sugar industry reports. Fat isn't the biggest problem, sugar is. Read the reports and look for things like them minimizing the dangers of sugar, or focusing on the "good points". "Sugar gives you energy! But don't worry about it being an inflammatory agent."

Attorney who exposed the dangers of DuPont's Teflon wins alternative Nobel Prize called the Right Livelihood Award. Info on Teflon and studies here.

Trump's chemical safety nominee, Michael Dourson, could be bad for consumers. The EPA is already pro-poison, and frequently downplays the dangers of Roundup and other pesticides, even as farmers complain about the failure of Roundup, so this is a bad move.

Dourson was also paid by Dow and Monsanto to propose safe exposure levels for breakdown products of two widely used herbicides, alachlor and acetochlor, in an attempt to counter water standards developed by Wisconsin and Minnesota. Both chemicals are associated with higher cancer rates in male agricultural worker...

And the CDC is not much better.

The REAL story behind Trump and clean water

During Obama's reign, he extended the Clean Water Act to small streams, some of which only contain water for some months of the year. Trump's rollback of this rule would only roll back that addition: small streams that would be covered under the Clean Water Act.

The Obama rule tried to expand the definition of "navigable waters", waters where you can travel on a boat on them, to included 1 inch deep streams, and stream beds that didn't even have have water in them for parts of the year! This includes drainage ditches on the side of the road.

The claim behind the hysteria: 117 million people in the US get their drinking water from small streams. (The footnote says "Streams classified by the U.S. Geological Survey as intermittent, ephemeral or headwater streams.") Intermittent, and ephemeral, mean the stream is not even there the whole year! From the USGS PDF:

• Intermittent: "Contains water for only part of the year, but more than just after rainstorms and at snowmelt."
• Ephemeral: "Contains water only during or after a local rainstorm or heavy snowmelt."
• Headwater from here: "(1) the source and upper reaches of a stream; also the upper reaches of a reservoir. (2) the water upstream from a structure or point on a stream. (3) the small streams that come together to form a river. Also may be thought of as any and all parts of a river basin except the mainstream river and main tributaries."

The claim: 117 million people get 100% of their water from these sometimes-dry streams. The 2009 EPA map classified counties according to the percent of people in that county that use these types of streams for drinking water. In fact, the 2009 EPA study that EWG used shows somecounties use these streams for 87-100% of their drinking water.

Since "headwaters" were grouped with temporary streams in the 2009 EPA study, this makes the 72 million number suspicious.


Sources

1. EPA 2009 study about drinking water from streams. This has a similar map to the EWG map. PDF of data by county.
2. EWG article. 
3. EWG analysis.  They provide an interactive map of US states and counties.

Buy your BBB rating for cash

The Better Business Bureau is an organization that is supposed to tell consumers which businesses are honest, and which to avoid. This 2010 article says BBB will stop giving A+ ratings to paying members. But this Mar 3, 2016 article says Trump University's rating magically went from D- to A+ after Trump paid a BBB membership fee. Trump University currently has 3 active lawsuits against it.

On "Good Morning America" today, Trump said that the company's grades went up after unspecified information was shared with the BBB, but the BBB would not comment on the details of the grades of the now-defunct company. 

Guillo, a former student of Trump University and his son spent nearly $36,000 to take Trump's courses and he believes he learned little specialized expertise from the program."A lot of the information they taught seemed to come from the website zillow.com or could have been easily gathered from the IRS website," Guillo said in an affidavit about what he learned at the Trump Elite Programs retreats. "After the first seminar, I began to realize I had been taken."According to the affidavit, Guillo said that he felt that he had to complete a satisfaction questionnaire in order to get a certificate of completion for the course. 

Apparently Mr Trump couldn't care less what his university stands for, because it seems to stand for nothing except a money grab, just like Mr. Trump himself.