Keith Starvrum stands on the banks of Willapa Bay, where the low tide has revealed long lines of mudflats speckled with empty oyster shells. The sun is making a rare appearance in southwestern Washington State, but the perfect spring weather fails to cheer up the lumbering Starvrum, whose loud outbursts and biting sarcasm keep his employees’ eyes rolling. He served overseas as a special ops soldier in his youth and he has some interesting things to say about the recent uprisings in Arab countries and the CIA’s dirty habit of quietly ‘rearranging’ governments amid apparent political turmoil. But he has a lot more to say about oysters.

Starvrum points to a lone oysterman gathering the day’s catch from neighboring mudflats and shakes his head. Starvrum used to harvest oysters from the thick mud exposed by the low tide, but he has not brought in a catch in three years. He refuses to participate in the lucrative business, a traditional mainstay of the local economy, because the pesticides sprayed on adjacent mudflats drifted onto his oyster beds.

‘That’s why we don’t sell our oysters, ’cause we know what they’re in,’ Starvrum says. ‘But when we do, they will be 100 times better.’ Other […]

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Media Matters analyzed television news guests who discussed the Environmental Protection Agency’s role in regulating greenhouse gas emissions from December 2009 through April 2011. Driven largely by Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network, results show that in 76 percent of those appearances, the guest was opposed to EPA regulations while 18 percent were in favor. Of the appearances by elected officials, 86 percent were Republican. Only one guest in 17 months of coverage across nine news outlets was a climate scientist — industry-funded Patrick Michaels.

Background

Responding to a lawsuit brought by states, cities, and advocacy groups, the Supreme Court ruled on April 2, 2007, that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases (GHG) under the Clean Air Act. The Court stated that ‘EPA can avoid taking further action only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot or will not exercise its discretion to determine whether they do.’

The Bush administration ensured that a response to the ruling would be delayed until the following administration, and it wasn’t until December 2009 that the EPA issued a GHG scientific endangerment finding, the legal […]

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WASHINGTON — Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health and underscoring the rising toll of smoking and record obesity.

Nationwide, life expectancy for American men and women has risen over the last two decades, and some U.S. communities still boast life expectancies as long as any in the world, according to newly released data. But over the last decade, the nation has experienced a widening gap between the most and least healthy places to live. In some parts of the United States, men and women are dying younger on average than their counterparts in nations such as Syria, Panama and Vietnam.

Overall, the United States is falling further behind other industrialized nations, many of which have also made greater strides in cutting child mortality and reducing preventable deaths.

In 737 U.S. counties out of more than 3,000, life expectancies for women declined between 1997 and 2007. For life expectancy to decline in a developed nation is rare. Setbacks on this scale have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, according to demographers.

‘There are just lots of places where things […]

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Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. has long sold weed killer. Now, it’s hoping to help people grow killer weed.

In an unlikely move for the head of a major company, Scotts Chief Executive Jim Hagedorn said he is exploring targeting medical marijuana as well as other niches to help boost sales at his lawn and garden company.

‘I want to target the pot market,’ Mr. Hagedorn said in an interview. ‘There’s no good reason we haven’t.’

Sales at Scotts rose 5% last year to $2.9 billion. But the Marysville, Ohio, company relies on sales at three key retailers-Home Depot Inc., Lowe’s Cos. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.-for nearly two-thirds of its revenue. With consumers still cautious about spending, the retailers aren’t building new stores as quickly as they used to, making growth for suppliers like Scotts harder to come by. Against that backdrop, Mr. Hagedorn has pushed his regional sales presidents to look for smaller pockets of growth, such as the marijuana market, that together could produce a noticeable bump in sales.

Sixteen states have legalized medical marijuana, the largest being California and Colorado. The market will reach $1.7 billion in sales this year, according to a report by See Change Strategy LLC, an information data services […]

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Rerouting ambulances away from overcrowded emergency departments is linked to a 3 percent higher risk of death in heart attack patients, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). ‘Now we actually have empirical evidence to show crowding affects patients in a very real way,’ said lead study author, Dr. Renee Hsia, an emergency physician at the University of California, San Francisco in a Reuters article.

Researchers surveyed nearly 14,000 Medicare patients with acute myocardial infarction and 149 emergency departments in California between 2000 and 2005 and found that patients who were diverted for at least 12 hours by the nearest ED were associated with increased mortality (30-day, 90-day, 9-month, and 1-year).

Ambulance diversion is a practice in which hospitals temporarily close off services to new patients typically because their emergency department is already filled to capacity and/or limited staffing reasons. In 2009, Massachusetts was the first state to issue a ban on ambulance diversion. Early reports showed that the ban has not negatively affected patient waiting times, according to the study.

Researchers concluded that ambulance diversion does not only affect the diverted patients but also patients receiving care while the ED is on diversion status […]

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