Is Agrochemical Contamination Killing Nebraska's Children?

In 2011, Jacob Peters was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of lymphoma. Nine months later, at the age of 17, he died.
A decade later, Jacob Peters’ death turns out to be much more than a dreadful heartbreak for a farm country family. His parents, Gary and Shari Peters, documented six more kids in Aurora diagnosed with cancer from 2005 to 2013. There are others across Nebraska.
Agrochemicals used to increase crop production, kill insects and weeds, and prevent plant and animal diseases are well-recognized hazards. Even so, nitrate pollution is in a category to itself. The chemical fertilizers that farmers insist are needed to assure high crop production, and the nitrogen-rich manure produced by contemporary animal agriculture, are largely unregulated. The result is nitrates are causing health and ecological trauma in farming regions across the country and around the world.

What’s Up With Water – January 31, 2022

Featured coverage from this week's episode of What's Up With Water looks at:

Polluted Rivers, Scarce Water, Sinking Capital: Report Warns of Dire Water Threats Facing Indonesia
For decades, Indonesia’s largest city has been sinking into a water crisis — literally.
The northern margins of Jakarta, which once stood on solid ground, are now an island network of abandoned buildings. Some districts are sinking more than 20 centimeters, the bright of a road curb, every year—a tribute which the sea exacta from the city of 10 million people for unsustainable consumption of groundwater.
Jakarta’s subsidence is a symbol of the manifold and long-ignored water threats that haunt the country: a list that includes party sanitation networks, polluted rivers, lack of water storage, regulatory dysfunction, and more.
A new report from the World Bank quantifies the crisis. Not addressing these water-related problems could cut Indonesia’s GDP by over 7 percent by 2045, the study found. There is a silver lining, though. Proactive measures to fix these deficiencies could boost the economy by 3 percent in that same time frame.

Toxic Water, Toxic Crops: India’s Public Health Time Bomb
Across India, and particularly in the nation’s big metropolitan regions, countless numbers of farmers raise their crops with untreated wastewater. Medical specialists say farmers and their families risk serious disease from exposure to harmful sewage-borne microorganisms and metals. Scientists have measured unsafe levels of heavy metals and other toxic substances in Indian crops – posing a public health threat if consumed.
Indian public health and safety authorities have displayed limited action in tackling the impending public health crisis, Circle of Blue reported in 2018. Just 30 percent of wastewater undergoes any sort of treatment before being discharged in a wretched stream of industrial effluent that contains heavy metals and toxic chemicals.
To date there is no regulatory framework for testing primary products, such as vegetable and fruits, for toxic contaminants.
The widespread use of untreated wastewater – particularly in urban and peri-urban areas – to grow a considerable portion of India’s food supply, coupled with current inaction from officials, has converged to produce, say some scientists, a toxic time bomb in a nation that soon will overtake China to become the world’s largest.

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