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Despite a 1991 lawsuit settlement in which the State of California promised to ensure blood testing and treatment for lower-income children threatened by lead poisoning, since 1992 the state has failed to identify or provide care for an estimated 200,000 lead-poisoned children ages 1 to 5. About 212,000 one-to-five-year-olds in California had harmful blood lead levels between 1992 and 1998, but

The government tried to put the best possible face on the two announcements it issued about organic farming in March, 2000. First, USDA released a long-awaited proposal to define uniform, national standards for organically grown food to replace a patchwork of several dozen state and private definitions and labels. And then the department reported that the area of U.S. farmland devoted to organic

The first analysis of Freedom to Farm payments in Iowa shows that the program provided the vast majority of recipients with financially meaningless amounts of aid, often just a few hundred dollars per farm, just as a major economic crisis was tightening its grip on the farm belt. At the same time, a handful of Iowa's largest farming operations came away with hundreds of thousands of dollars in

Section 18 of the Federal Insecticide Fungicide and Rodenticide Act allows the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to grant "emergency" and "crisis" exemptions from pesticide health and safety standards for farmers facing sudden and potentially catastrophic pest infestations. By definition, granting these exemptions is a hurried procedure, accompanied by less than a full scientific study of

In the five years before electricity deregulation, California utilities cut funding in half for programs that save energy, save customers money, and help save the environment. According to an analysis of federal data by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), the wasted energy would supply a year's worth of power to more than 600,000 homes, and would have cost California consumers almost $450

Two years after a federal investigation found California's clean air enforcement programs inadequate to stop big polluters, an Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis shows that many of the state's largest industrial facilities continue to break the law and pay fines too small to deter repeat offenses.

Two years of independent scientific monitoring by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) detected an array of toxic pesticides drifting into the air Californians breathe -- the tip of a 100-million-pound iceberg of hazardous chemicals emitted statewide each year as a result of pesticide use.

For decades, U.S. and foreign pesticide manufacturers have been feeding their products to rats, rabbits, mice, and guinea pigs in thousands of controlled laboratory studies, all designed to satisfy government regulatory requirements for chemicals that kill weeds, insects, rodents and other pests. Studies on lab animals are still routinely conducted for pesticides today. But in recent years, in a

EWG's analysis of campaign gifts and air pollution data concludes that too many politicians in the House of Representatives side with their contributors and against their constituents on air pollution, even in U.S. metropolitan areas where air pollution prematurely ends thousands of lives each year.

On March 20, 1996, eight days after Gov. Pete Wilson signed a bill overturning the state ban on methyl bromide, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) published an internal report showing that when the poison gas is used to fumigate homes, unsafe levels of hazardous vapors can drift through empty pipes into neighboring houses.

Since March 1996, when the California Legislature moved to overturn the state ban on methyl bromide, the issue of unsafe levels of the pesticide drifting from agricultural fields into nearby communities has grown from a local concern to a statewide controversy. In concert with community groups from across the state, Environmental Working Group has released a series of reports detailing the results

During the past two years, anti-environmental corporations vigorously attempted to convince the U.S. Senate to undo environmental health and safety standards. EWG searched public disclosure records to determine whether generous contributions from PACs associated with an anti-environmental agenda were an effective tool to help them persuade senators to support such an agenda.

On August 3,1996, President Clinton signed the Food Quality Protection Act,fundamen tally improving the way that pesticides are regulated in food. The bill passed the House of Representatives on July 23, 1996, by a vote of 417 - 0. It cleared the Senate on July 24, 1996, by unanimous consent.

Nitrate in drinking water at levels greater than the Federal standard of 10 parts per million (ppm) can cause methemoglobinemia, a potentially fatal condition in infants commonly known as blue-baby syndrome. According to Dr. Burton Kross, of the University of Iowa's Center For International Rural and Environmental Health, nitrate poisoning via drinking water contamination "certainly contributes to

The "Freedom to Farm" legislation, approved by a partisan vote of the House Agriculture Committee, will be taken up by the House of Representatives soon after it reconvenes on Tuesday, February 27. The Senate has already passed a version of the bill. In its current form, the "Freedom to Farm" bill will be one of the most generous Federal farm subsidy programs ever considered in the U.S. House of

Since 1985, agricultural lawmakers have defended payment of more than $108 billion in federal subsidies to farmers by arguing that the payments help to protect the environment. In order to receive subsidies, farmers must abide by soil and wetlands protections. This "deal" between farmers and taxpayers would be broken by the "Conservation Consolidation and Regulatory Reform Act" (H.R. 2542). As

Cyanazine is sold by DuPont Chemical as Bladex, and has been in use since 1971. It is the fourth most widely used synthetic chemical pesticide in U.S. agriculture. An estimated 30-35 million pounds were applied in 1993 (Aspeline 1994), primarily on corn fields to control grasses and broad leaf weeds. Based on information reported by the EPA, the USDA, and others, the use of cyanazine appears to be