This study describes the results of a survey of 432 homeowners in Ohio, USA concerning their perceptions and practices regarding management of residential landscapes. The results reveal that outdoor residential environments are extremely important to homeowners, who tend to view their yards as serving multiple functions: a place to observe nature and to socialize as well as a place of beauty an...

Animals are constantly exposed to a wide variety of foreign chemicals, many of which are potentially toxic and some of which result in the clinical poisonings. Pesticides are applied on or around animals for the control of insects and rodents. These chemicals may be placed in areas without regard for accessibility to household pets and domestic livestock. Insecticides, herbicides, and fungicide...

Gabb and Blake put forth a database to assess potential exposure risk to 55 asthmaassociated and endocrine-disrupting chemicals in a range of 38,975 consumer products. The foundation of their database is publicly available ingredient information. While the authors acknowledge that products may not disclose all ingredients, they did not acknowledge the potential magnitude of that nondisclosure a...

The increasing incidence of autism suggests a major environmental influence. Epidemiology has implicated many candidates and genetics many susceptibility genes. Gene/environment interactions in autism were analysed using 206 autism susceptibility genes (ASG's) from the Autworks database to interrogate ∼1 million chemical/gene interactions in the comparative toxicogenomics database. Any bias tow...

Workers and fence-line communities have been the first to benefit from the substantial reductions in toxic chemical use and byproducts in industrial production resulting from the Massachusetts Toxics Use Reduction Act (TURA). As TURA motivates reformulation of products as well as retooling of production processes, benefits could extend more broadly to large-scale reductions in everyday exposure...

Berhan et al. (1) report that the increasing incidence of type 1 diabetes in children has begun to level off in Sweden, beginning with children born around the year 2000. One possible explanation for these encouraging data is Sweden’s voluntary phase out of brominated flame retardants (BFRs), including polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), during the 1990s. The concentrations of various BFRs ...

Approximately 25% of the world’s population has no access to clean and safe drinking water. Even though freshwater is available in most parts of the world, many of these water sources contaminated by natural means or through human activity. In addition to human consumption, industries need clean water for product development and machinery operation. With the population boom and industry expansi...