• Coal Fired Power Plants Handed New Emissions Limits
  
• Breast Scanner Uses Nuclear Medicine to See Cancers Early
  
• SARS Vaccine Found Effective in Monkeys
  
• Charitable Bingo Wins Despite Smoke-Free Laws
  
• Natural Mercury Sources May Be Contaminating Ocean Fish
  
• Damaging Sediment Defined
  
• Fetzer Vineyards Toasts Its Environmental Award
  
• Peregrine Falcon Recovery Monitoring Plan Finalized
  

Coal Fired Power Plants Handed New Emissions Limits

The new rules plus EPA proposals last week to reduce mercury emissions from coal fired power plants, "are the largest single investment in any clean air program in history," said EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt.

The administration has not given up on getting its "clear skies" program through Congress, but will not wait for legislators, Leavitt said. "While we continue to believe that the Clear Skies Act is the best approach to reducing power plant emissions, and we are committed to working with our congressional sponsors to move this landmark legislation through Congress, we must move forward with these steps now."

But the nonprofit Clean Air Trust was not impressed. "This is really just political damage control by the Bush administration and an attempt to divert public attention from its efforts to weaken clean air protections," said the organization's Executive Director Frank O'Donnell.

"It is really just the discredited clear skies plan wrapped up with a new bow - an early Christmas present for big polluters," O'Donnell said.

Leavitt says the EPA will propose two alternative control plans for SO2 and NOx, one of which will be a market based cap-and-trade approach that has demonstrated its ability to cut emissions faster and at less cost than regulations.

The proposed rules would reduce power plant emissions in two phases. Sulfur dioxide emissions would drop by 70 percent from current levels - 40 percent by 2010, and another 30 percent after 2015, a total cut of nearly 70 percent from today's levels.

By 2015, NOx emissions would be cut by about 50 percent from today's levels in the 30 states covered under the rules. The rules focus on states that significantly contribute to ozone and fine particle pollution in the Eastern United States, which have filed several lawsuits to block Bush administration attempts to weaken clean air laws.

Cumulatively, the rules announced by the EPA today will eliminate 34 million tons of SO2 and NOx emissions between now and 2015 beyond the reductions achieved under current programs, Leavitt said. Emissions will be permanently capped and cannot increase.

But O'Donnell said the EPA rules will continue to allow industry to pollute too much for too long.

"More than two years ago, EPA told electric power company officials that smog and soot could be cleaned up both faster and better under the Clean Air Act than the plan described in today's press release," O'Donnell said. "This proposal would permit 50 percent more sulfur dioxide pollution, and for a longer time, than EPA previously said."

Emitted by coal fired power plants, SO2 and NOx are transported on the wind, causing environmental and health problems hundreds of miles away, and putting people with heart or lung disease and asthma at risk. NOx emissions also contribute to the formation of smog, which poses risks for people with lung diseases and children and adults who are active outdoors.

The EPA calls mercury "a highly toxic substance that can impair cognitive and motor skills and can impair reproductive, immune and endocrine systems in unborn children."

EPA will formally propose the Interstate Air Quality Rule later this month and then take public comment. A final rule is planned for 2005. The mercury rules will be proposed by December 15.

Breast Scanner Uses Nuclear Medicine to See Cancers Early

The new camera developed by researchers at Duke University Medical Center has undergone extensive testing in artificial breasts and testing in women is set to begin this spring.

Such early detection should enable doctors to more successfully treat breast cancer before it has formed a tumor or spread to lymph nodes, said Martin Tornai, Ph.D., associate professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at Duke and developer of the device.

The camera uses nuclear medicine to pick up chemical changes to breast cells that signal the cells are becoming malignant, said Tornai.

The camera should be useful for detecting tumors in large or dense breasts, which are difficult to image using traditional mammography because X-rays often cannot penetrate them. "This technology could potentially be applied to screening women who are at high risk for breast cancer, particularly younger women who have denser breast tissue that X-ray mammography can't easily penetrate," he said.

And the geometry of the new device allows for imaging small breasts and the nearby chest wall. It can image the axillary lymph nodes to look for evidence of metastasis - which traditional mammography cannot do.

In addition, Tornai said the device could be useful to monitor the course of chemotherapy or radiation therapy in breast cancer patients because it could detect changes to the cancer cells.

"During and after chemotherapy, if you take an X-ray mammogram of the same cancerous tissue, it looks identical to its pre-treatment size," says Tornai. "But if you take a nuclear medicine image, the dead tissue doesn't take up the tracer, so you can see if the therapy is having an effect very early on, much sooner than waiting for tumor shrinkage."

The new device works without any breast compression, and women may not be required to remove their bras.

The key to the new scanner is that it detects changes in the behavior of cancer cells rather than structural changes, such as tumor masses, which take much longer to develop, said Tornai.

"Once you start seeing structural changes using mammography, that indicates the molecular process has been going on for awhile," he said. "If we can detect subtle changes in cells before a tumor has developed, we have a better chance of treating the abnormal cells in their earliest stages of malignancy."

To use the device, a cancer-specific radioactive tracer is injected into the patient's bloodstream. The tracer, called sestamibi, is preferentially absorbed by cancer cells because they have large numbers of mitochondria, the cells' powerhouses. Cancer cells have more mitochondria than normal cells because they are more metabolically active and require more energy to grow and spread.

Next, the camera obtains an image by picking up gamma rays - high energy photons or units of light - that are emitted by the radioactive atom attached to sestamibi. The gamma rays easily penetrate the tissue and can be detected non-invasively by a gamma ray camera.

"Nuclear imaging tracers like sestamibi show up in both pre-malignant and malignant breast cells as a little light bulb in the middle of a dim space," said Tornai. "You really want a tracer to home in on small bits of cancer that may otherwise be too small for other scanners to detect."

Gamma ray tracers such as sestamibi have a short half-life and are broken down quickly by the liver and excreted. Tornai says the amount of radiation exposure from a single diagnostic procedure is about the same as a year's exposure from the natural background radiation found in the environment.

Tornai is awaiting patent approval on the new device, including the combination device that overlays X-ray and nuclear medicine images.

SARS Vaccine Found Effective in Monkeys

A genetically engineered vaccine was found to be effective in triggering an immune reaction in six rhesus macaques, a species of monkey. The research was conducted by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the Graduate School of Public Health in collaboration with colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Six weeks after vaccination, T-cells and antibodies against SARS were detected in all six of the immunized monkeys, but not in the two control animals. The intensity of the response varied, but was generally largest after the booster vaccination, researchers found.

"It is our hope that this research will lead to a protective vaccine against SARS," said project leader Andrea Gambotto, M.D., a specialist in infectious diseases with the Molecular Medicine Institute at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

The experimental vaccine uses an altered adenovirus, a common cold virus, to deliver three genetically modified SARS proteins to the animals' immune system, said Dr. Gambotto.

"From a scientific perspective, several points are important." he said. "We obtained the recombinant vaccine by engineering a common cold virus to express the SARS coronavirus antigens. This is a successful strategy that we are exploring for other infectious diseases such as HIV."

"After injection, the vaccine acts as a Trojan Horse, first by infecting cells in the body, and then stimulating an immune reaction to the delivered SARS antigens, ultimately conferring protection against the disease," Gambotto explained.

"Also, the induced immune reaction appears to be broad. Both antibody and cell-mediated immune responses, equally important for protection from viral infections, were detected in the test animals," he said.

SARS is a new viral respiratory illness which has its origins in Guangdong Province, China. The earliest known cases were identified in mid-November 2002. In early March 2003, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a global alert about SARS. Over the next few months, the illness spread to more than two dozen countries in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia.

By late July, no new cases were being reported and the illness was considered contained. According to WHO, 8,098 people worldwide became sick with SARS during this outbreak; of these, 774 died.

SARS emerged as a threatening and deadly infectious disease last year in China. For Wentao Gao, M.D., Ph.D., research instructor in the department of surgery and co-author of the study, his participation in this research was especially meaningful because SARS claimed several lives in his hometown of Changchun, Jilin.

"I am proud of what I have contributed in the development of a SARS vaccine, given that the adenoviral-based vaccine is economical and suitable for a large population. I hope we will soon be able to translate this vaccine into clinical trials to test its toxicity and efficacy," said Dr. Gao.

The researchers will now test the vaccine in ferrets, which have been shown by a group of Dutch researchers to develop SARS symptoms after SARS-coronavirus infection, unlike the monkeys in the current vaccine study.

Human trials could begin within a year, Dr. Gambotto said, but it will take at least four years before a vaccine could be available to the general public.

The study was funded by a grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute's Program of Excellence in Gene Therapy. The University of Pittsburgh is one of five centers nationwide that participate in this program.

Charitable Bingo Wins Despite Smoke-Free Laws

Researchers collected information on profits from state licensed bingo and other charitable gaming from 220 towns and cities in Massachusetts that permitted such games from 1985 to 2001. The Massachusetts State Lottery Commission, which supervises these games, provided the raw data.

The analysis by Stanton Glantz, PhD, a UCSF professor of medicine and director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and his team, showed that while bingo profits were falling over the entire period studied, this trend was well established before passage of smoke-free laws in the early 1990s, and was unaffected by these laws. The result held regardless of the size of the community.

The research, supported by the National Cancer Institute, is reported in the December 2003 issue of the journal "Tobacco Control."

"The tobacco industry has long claimed that smoke-free laws hurt restaurants and bars, but as these claims have been discredited, the industry has increasingly emphasized claims that smoke-free policies would hurt gaming," Glantz said. "The data shows that policy makers can enact smoke-free policies without concern that they will affect charitable gaming."

The American Public Health Association Alcohol and Tobacco section November 17 selected Glantz to receive its 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award for his more than 20 years of tobacco control research and advocacy work to reduce tobacco use.

Glanz is the author of three books and more than 150 scientific papers, including the first major review that identified second hand smoke as a cause of heart disease, and the landmark July 19, 1995 issue of "Journal of the American Medical Association" that showed the tobacco industry knew 30 years earlier that nicotine was addictive and smoking caused cancer.

In 1983, Glantz helped the successful defense of the San Francisco Workplace Smoking Ordinance against a tobacco industry attempt to repeal it by referendum. This represented the first electoral defeat of the tobacco industry and is now viewed as a major turning point in the battle for controlling where cigarettes can be smoked.

Natural Mercury Sources May Be Contaminating Ocean Fish

François Morel, PhD, a professor of geochemistry at Princeton and an author of the study, says this means the high levels of mercury found in tuna and other ocean fish may not be coming from pollution, but from natural sources. He suggests these could be hydrothermal vents and deep ocean sediments, but cannot pinpoint specific sources.

Mercury enters the environment naturally and through industrial pollution, mostly from coal fired power plants. Scientists have estimated that the amount of mercury in the atmosphere today is about two to three times what it was 150 years ago.

"People have assumed that the high mercury in fish must be from pollution," says Morel. "We have about tripled the mercury in the atmosphere, and therefore it should be tripled in the ocean, right? But maybe mercury that occurs in fish is a natural thing, and it may have been there all along."

Mercury concentrations in the air are of little concern, but when mercury enters water, microorganisms transform it to a highly toxic form, methylmercury, that builds up in fish.

Scientists are not yet able to measure methylmercury in ocean surface waters, so Morel and his coworkers measured methylmercury levels in yellowfin tuna caught off the coast of Hawaii in 1998 and compared the numbers to a similar study from the same area in 1971. They found no change in methylmercury levels.

Morel says this means high levels of methylmercury in these fish are not due to increased pollution, but to a natural source.

Nearly all fish contain trace amounts of mercury, but longer-lived predators - tuna, swordfish and sharks - have higher levels. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration warns pregnant women against eating large amounts of fish to avoid harming an unborn child's developing nervous system.

His research should also extend to other deep sea predatory fish, like swordfish and sharks, Morel says, but he is more cautious about applying the findings to coastal fish that might absorb mercury pollution there.

Lake fish are also a different situation, Morel says, since scientists have established a strong link between pollution and mercury levels in lakes.

The report will appear in the December 15 edition of "Environmental Science & Technology," a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society.

Damaging Sediment Defined

Carlos Alonso says his team's research may help states set and meet standards for the total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) of sediment their waterways can contain before being considered polluted.

The Clean Water Act requires states to identify polluted water bodies and develop plans for meeting TMDL requirements. TMDLs specify the amount of a pollutant a water body can receive and still meet quality standards set for its designated use by states, territories and tribes. Compliance is monitored by each state in concurrence with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Of all pollutants requiring TMDLs, none is as prevalent, or as potentially damaging, as sediment, which causes about $16 billion annually in damage to North American waterways, Alonso says.

A 90 day analysis of sediment impaired James Creek in northwestern Mississippi was requested by state officials in 2002 to develop the federally mandated water quality targets there.

Alonso and his team from the U.S. Agriculture Department's National Sedimentation Laboratory in Oxford, Mississippi tackled the assignment using computer modeling as well as geologic studies to determine how soil erosion and sediment loading change over time within a watershed.

The method proved so useful that the team is already applying it to projects in Alabama, California, Kansas, Michigan and elsewhere in Mississippi.

Fetzer Vineyards Toasts Its Environmental Award

California EPA Secretary Terry Tamminen and California Resources Agency Secretary Mike Chrisman, with representatives from several state agencies and actor Bridges, presented the awards in seven categories to California companies.

Governor Schwarzenegger joined the award winners during a reception at the California EPA headquarters.

Fetzer was a winner in the Sustainable Practices category, cited for a wide range of programs including recycling, integrated waste management, carbon emissions mitigation, energy conservation, organic farming and earth friendly packaging.

In October 2002, Fetzer pledged to grow and purchase only organic grapes for the production of its wines. Today, Fetzer farms over 2,000 vineyard acres organically, making it the largest grower of certified organically grown grapes in California and one of the largest in the world. The winery has been farming organically since the mid-1980s and shares best practices with its growers to make it easier to transition to organic farming.

As defined by Fetzer, operating a sustainable business requires that all decisions be "environmentally sound, socially responsible and economically viable."

The winery has reduced waste to landfill by over 94 percent, reduced energy demand by 28 percent and increase sales by over 15 percent annually since 1979.

Fetzer President Paul Dolan has a new book out on the company's sustainable practices. "True To Our Roots: Fermenting A Business Revolution," was published this fall by Bloomberg Press.

The Governor's awards, established in 1993, are California's most prestigious environmental honor, this year recognizing 24 individuals, organizations and businesses that demonstrate leadership in building public-private partnerships while conserving the state's environment.

Peregrine Falcon Recovery Monitoring Plan Finalized

Peregrines were removed from the list in 1999, and the monitoring plan is intended to ensure that the falcons continue to thrive without the protection of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The ESA requires that the Fish and Wildlife Service monitor recovered, delisted species for a minimum of five years. Should monitoring reveal that American peregrine falcon is likely to become endangered, the species could be listed again under the act.

“This is the first nationwide monitoring plan for a recovered, delisted species,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Steve Williams. “We’ve relied on our state and private partners for monitoring data and we’ll continue to work closely with them to put this formal plan to work.”

The plan designates six geographical survey regions in 40 states where American peregrine falcons breed. It calls for nests to be monitored five times at three year intervals. Monitoring began this year and will end in 2015.

The plan calls for counting the number of American peregrine falcons returning to nesting sites, determining whether they nest successfully, and counting the number of young produced.

The peregrine falcon was nearly extirpated in most of North America after World War II from the accumulation of organochlorine pesticides such as DDT in bird’s tissues, which resulted eggshell thinning and breakage during incubation.

The pesticide DDT was banned in Canada in 1970 and in the United States in 1972. As a result of the ban, eggshell thinning subsided. When peregrines were reintroduced across the nation, their populations rebounded to the point where they no longer required Endangered Species Act protection.

Although pesticides such as DDT are still used in Latin American countries where peregrines migrate in winter, their use is gradually being curtailed through international efforts.

In 1970, the Service listed the peregrine falcon as endangered under the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969, the precursor of today's Endangered Species Act.

By 1975, there were only 324 nesting pairs of peregrines in North America. Today, there are more than 2,000 nesting pairs in the United States, more than 400 pairs in Canada, and an estimated 170 pairs in Mexico.

Peregrine falcon recovery has involved nearly every state, dozens of conservation groups, falconers, and a highly successful captive-breeding program that released more than 6,000 birds into the wild.

The Service released a draft monitoring plan for the peregrine falcon in 2001, which was accompanied by public comment periods in July 2001 and September 2001. It received additional review by states and cooperators in December 2002 and January 2003.

The final monitoring plan is available online at: http://endangered.fws.gov/recovery/peregrine.

The American peregrine falcon continues to be protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which prohibits the taking, killing, possession, transportation and importation of migratory birds, their eggs, parts and nests except when specifically authorized by the Department of the Interior.