Cleanlink News October 15 2010
A once unthinkable day of reckoning is looming on the Colorado River, which provides water for 28 million people in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, neighboring communities, as well as farming locations throughout the Southwest.
The Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. agency directly involved with water distribution in the country, estimates that for the first time Lake Mead-the heart of the lower Colorado River basin's water system-could drop below 1,075 feet, a crucial demarcation line. This is the result of an 11-year drought, according to Terry Fulp, who is the Bureau's director of the Lower Colorado Region."This is the lowest 11-year average in the 100-year-plus history of flows on the basin," Fulp says.The water shortage could impact all water customers, home and industry, as well as cleaning professional who use water for a variety of cleaning tasks from cleaning carpets to mopping floors.An emergency option the plan allows is to draw more water from Lake Powell in Utah, the river's other key reservoir. At this time, Lake Powell has actually risen 60 feet over its 2004 low, mainly because certain states, such as Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, have not been accessing their full allocation.Adding to the concerns, scientists predict that prolonged droughts will likely be even more frequent in decades to come."Really the only answer is conservation," says Klaus Reichardt, president and founder of Waterless No-Flush Urinals. "In the last ten years, the average per-capita household use of water in Phoenix and Las Vegas has dropped more than 20 percent, but it looks like even more will be necessary." Reichardt attributes this reduction mainly to:• Less water being used for landscaping• The introduction of more advanced low-flow/no-water restroom fixtures• More responsible use of water in manufacturing facilities."Technology is on our side, we are developing more ways to reduce water use," Reichardt adds. "I just hope Mother Nature will give us a little more time to get these systems up and running."
Monday, October 25, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
BED BUG FEVER
Reports of the bloodsuckers are up – and so is the paranoia
By Dakshana Bascaramurty – The Globe and Mail – September 20, 2010
When Ottawan Lisa Vod traveled to Toronto, this past weekend, she brought the grubbiest contents of her wardrobe to the hotel: a ripped hoodie, an old sweatshirt and worn-out sweatpants. Before she left Ms. Vod, a 34-year-old factory worker, knew she’d trash those clothes before she went home. She kept her nice outfits in the car to change into right before she went out on the town.
They may seem like extreme measures, but Ms. Vod has been bitten by the bed-bug hysteria infesting major Canadian cities in recent months. Last year, Toronto Public Health received 1,500 reports of bed bugs. As of the end of August, they’d already racked up 1,334 reports for 2010, including 258 that month alone.
Rising even faster than the reports is bloodsucker paranoia. Victims trade stories about the lasting psychological effects on online bed bug forums, those in charitable organizations business have become leery of donations, and people who have infestations keep mum among friends and colleagues out of fear they’ll be stigmatized.
Exterminators and entomologists have floated various theories of why bed bugs – whose numbers had declined in the past few decades only to tick upward recently - are back.
Susan Sperling, a spokeswoman for Toronto Public Health, says their increase could be due to the fact that people are traveling more and taking the critters with them in their suitcases from one city to another. Another reason could be the ban of broad-spectrum residual pesticides – which were found to have other serious negative health effects. A built-up resistance to chemicals could also be to blame, she says.
Ms. Vod researched hotels on Trip Advisor before finding one she hoped was bed bug free. “I will inspect the room … to make sure,” Ms. Vod wrote in an email before she left for Toronto. “Now because it seams to be all over the news, I’m overstressed.”
Adam Radomsky, an associate psychology professor at Montreal’s Concordia University who is completing a three year body of work on contamination fears, likens bed-bug disgust and discomfort to what happened with SARS and H1N1.
“Things were very narrow in the beginning for those problems. The anxiety, the fear, the panic spread much further and I think it’s the same phenomenon happening here.” Fear can take shape even when there isn’t clear evidence of contamination, he says. “We can feel contaminated thinking about something, remembering something.”
Another problem with bed bugs, says Andrew Keddie, an insect pathologist at the University of Alberta, is that “as a rule, you don’t find them.”
Their shape – they’re small, dark and have flattened bodies – make them hard to detect, he says. In many cases the bites are the only evidence of bed bug presence. They’re often flat and itchy and appear in arcs of three on the skin, which are nauseatingly described as “breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
After a sleepless night in her Toronto condo in April, Jessica showed up to work groggy and on edge. When her co-workers asked if she was ok, she broke down into tears and confessed she might have bed bugs.
“They said, ‘We’re going to support you, but we’re not going to touch you or go near you,’ “ she recalls.
For Jessica, 26, who did not want her last name used for fear of seeing her property value decline, the pests not only consumed her blood (as evidenced by the bite marks all over her body), but also her thoughts. Could she hug her colleagues? Could she have guests over? Was it ok for her to sleep at a friend’s place?
While she dealt with her share of cockroach, mice and ant infestations in previous Toronto apartments, the bed bugs affected her the most, she says.
For weeks, even after two visits by an exterminator who sprayed her apartment, she’d come home from work and search every nook and cranny in the house for bed bug carcasses.
“I just wanted to find evidence, to find proof they were there,” she says.
On websites such as Bedbugger.com, users – cloaked in anonymity – share tales of how their own bed bug problems affected their sleep and their ability to concentrate at work. Many confess to feeling shame about their infestations and being labeled as unhygienic despite the fact that even luxury condos and five-star hotels have been sites of infestations.
In Michelle Heath’s Winnipeg apartment, there’s a light sprinkling of white power around all the baseboards. “I look like a cocaine addict,” the 24-year-old office manager says with a laugh. “I just need to know there’s something there.” A year ago, at her previous residence, Ms. Heath discovered bed bugs just a few weeks after she moved in. Her apartment was sprayed, but it didn’t solve the problem, so she found a new place to live.
During the ordeal, she only told her bosses about the problem - and that was just because she needed time off to deal with it. She feared others at the office would treat her differently if they knew. “I felt like a total freak because I had bed bugs,” she says. “Do I go to work, do I not go to work?”
While she gets more shut-eye now than she did a year ago – when it was only three or four hours a night – she says thoughts about the bloodsuckers keep her up and have caused her to over think everything.
“[Bed bugs] poo on your bedding and it’s like little black spots. So any time I see a little black spot , nine times out of 10 it’s lint or something, but I have to look at it right away and figure out what it is,” she says.
In Toronto, the fact that bed bugs are on the rise has alarmed some non-profit organizations and second hand merchants, as well. Red Door Family Shelter, a Toronto charity, stopped accepting donations of upholstered furniture and mattresses this spring because of the city’s bed-bug problem. “We were receiving complaints from our ex-residents who had received [furniture],” Bernnitta Hawkins, the organization’s executive director, says. The cost of testing furniture for bed bugs is so high that it just made more sense to turn down all couches, armchairs and mattresses, putting the onus on residents to use what money they have to make such purchases themselves.
Ms. Heath trashed her brand new $1,000 mattress and all other furniture when she moved to a new apartment, but she still sometimes worries bed bugs may be lurking in various corners of her apartment: hiding in shoes, burrowing under her box spring, scurrying up her bedroom walls at night. “Even if there hasn’t been one, you’re totally psychologically like, ‘I can feel it! I can feel it!’”
By Dakshana Bascaramurty – The Globe and Mail – September 20, 2010
When Ottawan Lisa Vod traveled to Toronto, this past weekend, she brought the grubbiest contents of her wardrobe to the hotel: a ripped hoodie, an old sweatshirt and worn-out sweatpants. Before she left Ms. Vod, a 34-year-old factory worker, knew she’d trash those clothes before she went home. She kept her nice outfits in the car to change into right before she went out on the town.
They may seem like extreme measures, but Ms. Vod has been bitten by the bed-bug hysteria infesting major Canadian cities in recent months. Last year, Toronto Public Health received 1,500 reports of bed bugs. As of the end of August, they’d already racked up 1,334 reports for 2010, including 258 that month alone.
Rising even faster than the reports is bloodsucker paranoia. Victims trade stories about the lasting psychological effects on online bed bug forums, those in charitable organizations business have become leery of donations, and people who have infestations keep mum among friends and colleagues out of fear they’ll be stigmatized.
Exterminators and entomologists have floated various theories of why bed bugs – whose numbers had declined in the past few decades only to tick upward recently - are back.
Susan Sperling, a spokeswoman for Toronto Public Health, says their increase could be due to the fact that people are traveling more and taking the critters with them in their suitcases from one city to another. Another reason could be the ban of broad-spectrum residual pesticides – which were found to have other serious negative health effects. A built-up resistance to chemicals could also be to blame, she says.
Ms. Vod researched hotels on Trip Advisor before finding one she hoped was bed bug free. “I will inspect the room … to make sure,” Ms. Vod wrote in an email before she left for Toronto. “Now because it seams to be all over the news, I’m overstressed.”
Adam Radomsky, an associate psychology professor at Montreal’s Concordia University who is completing a three year body of work on contamination fears, likens bed-bug disgust and discomfort to what happened with SARS and H1N1.
“Things were very narrow in the beginning for those problems. The anxiety, the fear, the panic spread much further and I think it’s the same phenomenon happening here.” Fear can take shape even when there isn’t clear evidence of contamination, he says. “We can feel contaminated thinking about something, remembering something.”
Another problem with bed bugs, says Andrew Keddie, an insect pathologist at the University of Alberta, is that “as a rule, you don’t find them.”
Their shape – they’re small, dark and have flattened bodies – make them hard to detect, he says. In many cases the bites are the only evidence of bed bug presence. They’re often flat and itchy and appear in arcs of three on the skin, which are nauseatingly described as “breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
After a sleepless night in her Toronto condo in April, Jessica showed up to work groggy and on edge. When her co-workers asked if she was ok, she broke down into tears and confessed she might have bed bugs.
“They said, ‘We’re going to support you, but we’re not going to touch you or go near you,’ “ she recalls.
For Jessica, 26, who did not want her last name used for fear of seeing her property value decline, the pests not only consumed her blood (as evidenced by the bite marks all over her body), but also her thoughts. Could she hug her colleagues? Could she have guests over? Was it ok for her to sleep at a friend’s place?
While she dealt with her share of cockroach, mice and ant infestations in previous Toronto apartments, the bed bugs affected her the most, she says.
For weeks, even after two visits by an exterminator who sprayed her apartment, she’d come home from work and search every nook and cranny in the house for bed bug carcasses.
“I just wanted to find evidence, to find proof they were there,” she says.
On websites such as Bedbugger.com, users – cloaked in anonymity – share tales of how their own bed bug problems affected their sleep and their ability to concentrate at work. Many confess to feeling shame about their infestations and being labeled as unhygienic despite the fact that even luxury condos and five-star hotels have been sites of infestations.
In Michelle Heath’s Winnipeg apartment, there’s a light sprinkling of white power around all the baseboards. “I look like a cocaine addict,” the 24-year-old office manager says with a laugh. “I just need to know there’s something there.” A year ago, at her previous residence, Ms. Heath discovered bed bugs just a few weeks after she moved in. Her apartment was sprayed, but it didn’t solve the problem, so she found a new place to live.
During the ordeal, she only told her bosses about the problem - and that was just because she needed time off to deal with it. She feared others at the office would treat her differently if they knew. “I felt like a total freak because I had bed bugs,” she says. “Do I go to work, do I not go to work?”
While she gets more shut-eye now than she did a year ago – when it was only three or four hours a night – she says thoughts about the bloodsuckers keep her up and have caused her to over think everything.
“[Bed bugs] poo on your bedding and it’s like little black spots. So any time I see a little black spot , nine times out of 10 it’s lint or something, but I have to look at it right away and figure out what it is,” she says.
In Toronto, the fact that bed bugs are on the rise has alarmed some non-profit organizations and second hand merchants, as well. Red Door Family Shelter, a Toronto charity, stopped accepting donations of upholstered furniture and mattresses this spring because of the city’s bed-bug problem. “We were receiving complaints from our ex-residents who had received [furniture],” Bernnitta Hawkins, the organization’s executive director, says. The cost of testing furniture for bed bugs is so high that it just made more sense to turn down all couches, armchairs and mattresses, putting the onus on residents to use what money they have to make such purchases themselves.
Ms. Heath trashed her brand new $1,000 mattress and all other furniture when she moved to a new apartment, but she still sometimes worries bed bugs may be lurking in various corners of her apartment: hiding in shoes, burrowing under her box spring, scurrying up her bedroom walls at night. “Even if there hasn’t been one, you’re totally psychologically like, ‘I can feel it! I can feel it!’”
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
New drug – resistant superbugs spreading
Hamilton Spectator September 14, 2010 P.A7
BOSTON - An infectious-disease nightmare is unfolding: A new gene that can turn many types of bacteria into superbugs resistant to nearly all antibiotics has sickened people in three states, has popped up in Canada and worldwide, health officials reported yesterday.
The U.S. cases and two others in Canada all involve people who had recently received medical care in India, where the problem is wide spread. A British medical journal revealed the risk last month in an article describing dozens of cases in Britain in people who had gone to India for medical procedures. How many deaths the gene may have caused is unknown.
Scientists have long feared this – a very adaptable gene that hitches onto many types of common germs and confers broad drug resistance. “It’s a great concern,” because drug resistance has been rising and few new antibiotics are in development, said Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, director of infectious diseases at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “It’s just a matter of time” until the gene spreads more widely person-to-person.
Grayson heads an American Society for Microbiology conference in Boston, which was buzzing with reports of the gene, called NDM-1 and named for New Delhi.
The U.S. cases occurred in 2010 in people from California, Massachusetts and Illinois. Three types of bacteria were involved, and three different mechanisms let the gene become part of them.
What can people do? Don’t add to the drug resistance problem, experts say. Don’t pressure your doctors for antibiotics if they say they aren’t needed, use the ones you are given properly, and try to avoid infections by washing your hands.
The Associated Press
BOSTON - An infectious-disease nightmare is unfolding: A new gene that can turn many types of bacteria into superbugs resistant to nearly all antibiotics has sickened people in three states, has popped up in Canada and worldwide, health officials reported yesterday.
The U.S. cases and two others in Canada all involve people who had recently received medical care in India, where the problem is wide spread. A British medical journal revealed the risk last month in an article describing dozens of cases in Britain in people who had gone to India for medical procedures. How many deaths the gene may have caused is unknown.
Scientists have long feared this – a very adaptable gene that hitches onto many types of common germs and confers broad drug resistance. “It’s a great concern,” because drug resistance has been rising and few new antibiotics are in development, said Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, director of infectious diseases at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “It’s just a matter of time” until the gene spreads more widely person-to-person.
Grayson heads an American Society for Microbiology conference in Boston, which was buzzing with reports of the gene, called NDM-1 and named for New Delhi.
The U.S. cases occurred in 2010 in people from California, Massachusetts and Illinois. Three types of bacteria were involved, and three different mechanisms let the gene become part of them.
What can people do? Don’t add to the drug resistance problem, experts say. Don’t pressure your doctors for antibiotics if they say they aren’t needed, use the ones you are given properly, and try to avoid infections by washing your hands.
The Associated Press
Monday, October 4, 2010
Bedbugs take bites out of peoples' mental health
By JENNY YUEN, Toronto Sun. Friday, October 1, 2010
The stigma of having bedbugs might be too much for some to bear.
In a packed conference room inside Queen’s Park during the city’s first bedbug summit Wednesday, registered nurse Betty Graham recalls the mental meltdown she encountered speaking to residents in a St. Clair Ave. apartment who were dealing with the blood-sucking pests. Many of them contemplated suicide.
“One lady said to me, 'I was so afraid of living like a hermit, I thought about jumping off my balcony,’ and another lady said, 'If only they could exterminate me',” Graham recalled.
“We need to do something, because bedbug bites may not pose something to someone’s physical health, but the threat to people’s mental health is potentially disastrous.”
The bedbug summit – which attracted experts from the pest control industry, municipal public health units, landlords and politicians – was spearheaded by Liberal MPP Mike Colle. He is calling for a national plan to help shoot down the tiny bloodsuckers.
“We know nothing about how widespread this is because there’s no scientific research or quantification that’s been done,” Colle said at the conference.
“We need to find out why they’re coming here and how do we prevent this.”
Colle said he will present information gathered at the summit to provincial health and government officials in hopes it will lead to an education program and standards for pesticides to kill the bugs.
“We’ll say, 'Here’s what the evidence is, what can we do to help?’ ” he said.
“It’s a way of reinforcing the case people are making.”
The number of bedbug cases in Toronto has skyrocketed from about 190 cases in 2005 to almost 10 times that number, according to Toronto Public Health.
Some speakers at the meeting said prevention and education are key to defeating the rising bed bug infestation in Ontario and called for more provincial money to deal with the problem.
The stigma of having bedbugs might be too much for some to bear.
In a packed conference room inside Queen’s Park during the city’s first bedbug summit Wednesday, registered nurse Betty Graham recalls the mental meltdown she encountered speaking to residents in a St. Clair Ave. apartment who were dealing with the blood-sucking pests. Many of them contemplated suicide.
“One lady said to me, 'I was so afraid of living like a hermit, I thought about jumping off my balcony,’ and another lady said, 'If only they could exterminate me',” Graham recalled.
“We need to do something, because bedbug bites may not pose something to someone’s physical health, but the threat to people’s mental health is potentially disastrous.”
The bedbug summit – which attracted experts from the pest control industry, municipal public health units, landlords and politicians – was spearheaded by Liberal MPP Mike Colle. He is calling for a national plan to help shoot down the tiny bloodsuckers.
“We know nothing about how widespread this is because there’s no scientific research or quantification that’s been done,” Colle said at the conference.
“We need to find out why they’re coming here and how do we prevent this.”
Colle said he will present information gathered at the summit to provincial health and government officials in hopes it will lead to an education program and standards for pesticides to kill the bugs.
“We’ll say, 'Here’s what the evidence is, what can we do to help?’ ” he said.
“It’s a way of reinforcing the case people are making.”
The number of bedbug cases in Toronto has skyrocketed from about 190 cases in 2005 to almost 10 times that number, according to Toronto Public Health.
Some speakers at the meeting said prevention and education are key to defeating the rising bed bug infestation in Ontario and called for more provincial money to deal with the problem.
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