A team of French and Australian oceanographers have discovered the seabirds in the Southern Ocean have four times the mercury levels of aquatic birds elsewhere.
The toxic element has come from both man-made and naturally occurring sources and while the birds seem to be coping, the same cannot be said for the region’s fish.
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BANGALORE: The next time you go to buy vegetables in the market, check if they are coming from villages around Varthur Tank, Bellandur Tank, Byramangala Tank and Nagawara Tank areas, for a recent study conducted by city-based Indian Institute of Horticulture Research (IIHR) has revealed that vegetables grown in these areas contain heavy toxic metal pollutants.
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FAO chief Jacques Diouf on Wednesday warned that pressure on the world’s soil resources and land degradation were threatening global food security.
Diouf called for “a renewed international effort to assure sufficient fertile and healthy soils today and for future generations”.
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..Chinese officials in provinces with heavy industrial pollution are restricting access to lead testing or even falsifying test results, and denying children treatment, a US rights group said on Wednesday.
Human Rights Watch accused officials in four provinces — Henan, Yunnan, Shaanxi and Hunan — of trying to cover up the extent of lead poisoning among local children, including limiting their access to blood tests.
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The national product quality watchdog has found heavy metal elements in some toy products, which experts say can accumulate in children’s bodies and cause chronic poisoning if they are absorbed.
A recent spot-check by the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine showed that lead and chrome were found in toy products, China Central Television (CCTV) reported Sunday.
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China’s environmental protection ministry is cracking down on pollution caused by lead and other heavy metals following a spate of poisoning cases and reports that much of the country is contaminated with toxic materials.
The new rules were announced late Wednesday, after dozens of children living near a battery plant in southern China’s Guangdong province were reported sickened by lead poisoning.
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The atmosphere over the Dead Sea, researchers have found, is laden with oxidized mercury. Some of the highest levels of oxidized mercury ever observed outside the polar regions exist there.
The results appear in a paper published on-line November 28th in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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Popularity: 7% [?]
Looking for a good way to consume a higher daily dose of lead, arsenic, and cadmium? Try smoking Chinese cigarettes.
According to a Reuters report, a recent tobacco study conducted by researchers from the Buffalo-based Roswell Park Cancer Institute found that cigarettes produced in China contain three times the amount of heavy metals found in Canadian-manufactured brands.
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Popularity: 9% [?]
Abandoned mines in Romania leach water contaminated by heavy metals into rivers. A Hungarian chemical plant produces more than 100,000 tonnes of toxic substances a year. Soil in eastern Slovakia is contaminated with cancer-producing PCBs.
The flood of toxic sludge in Hungary is but one of the ecological horrors that lurk in Eastern Europe 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, serving as a reminder that the region is dotted with disasters waiting to happen.
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A United Nations team has finished collecting dozens of soil and water samples in a region of northern Nigeria where acute lead poisoning due to backyard gold digging has sickened hundreds of children this year, leading to excess deaths.
The five-member team from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) will spend the next two days working in its mobile laboratory to analyze the samples and present preliminary findings to local and federal government officials by Monday.
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British farming soil could run out within 60 years, leading to a catastrophic food crisis and drastically higher prices for consumers, scientists warn.
Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished and will eventually lead to the “topsoil bank” becoming empty, an Australian conference heard.
Chronic soil mismanagement and over farming causing erosion, climate change and increasing populations were to blame for the dramatic global decline in suitable farming soil, scientists said. Read More / Watch Video »
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GENEVA (AFP) – Insufficient food, climate change and pandemic flu are global crises which could unravel progress in public health, the World Health Organisation’s director general said Monday.
“These three critical events, these clear threats to international security, have the potential to undo much hard-won progress in public health,” WHO director general Margaret Chan told delegates from 193 member states at the WHO’s annual general assembly. Read More / Watch Video »
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Over 10 percent of China’s farm land is contaminated, threatening the ability of the world’s most populous nation to feed itself, the official Xinhua news agency has said. Excessive fertilizer use, dirty water and solid waste were among the main pollutants, with heavy metals alone poisoning around 12 million tonnes of grain a year, the report said, quoting the Ministry of Land and Resources.
That pollution caused 20 billion yuan (US$2.59 billion) of annual losses.
In total, around 12.3 million hectares have been damaged, and the country is also losing large amounts of arable land to development as its cities expand, posing a “severe threat” to national food security, Xinhua quoted an unnamed ministry official saying.
China had already announced that agricultural land had shrunk by 306,800 hectares in the first 10 months of last year alone, to a total 121.8 million hectares. Read More / Watch Video »
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