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Many Red Flags Preceded a Recall of Hamburger
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and ANDREW MARTIN, The New York Times, October 23, 2007
ELIZABETH, N.J. — Over the summer, as Americans fired up their grills, the Topps Meat factory here scrambled to produce thousands of frozen hamburger patties for Wal-Mart and other customers, putting intense pressure on workers.
As output rose, federal regulators said in interviews, the company was neglecting critical safeguards meant to protect consumers. Three big batches of hamburger contaminated with a potentially deadly germ emerged from the plant, making at least 40 people sick and prompting the second-largest beef recall in history.
Topps is now out of business, but the case points up broader problems in the nation’s system for protecting consumers from food-borne illness.
Five years ago, the government demanded more stringent safeguards against contamination because of a deadly form of the germ E. coli. But federal regulators now acknowledge that the controls are not working in some meat plants. They are trying to figure out what went wrong and how to overcome the dangers.
In the case of Topps, the government has determined that the company reduced its testing of ground beef and neglected other safety measures in the months before the recall.
The Topps case is the most serious of 16 recalls this year involving E. coli contamination of beef. That is a sharp increase from 2005 and 2006, and the resurgence of the pathogen raises questions about whether the Agriculture Department has given the meat industry too much leeway to police itself.
“We’re beginning to feel that the 2002 guidelines have not been enacted to the maximum,” Dr. Richard A. Raymond, the Agriculture Department’s under secretary for food safety, said in an interview in Washington.
While noting that the amount of harmful E. coli in beef may be increasing as part of a natural cycle or for other reasons outside the control of the meat industry, Dr. Raymond said that “some of the plants that may have had less-than-stellar systems in place are getting caught.”
Two years ago, after an 8-year-old girl in Albany County, N.Y., was sickened by Topps ground beef, the Agriculture Department scrutinized the Elizabeth plant and found relatively few problems. But since then, the department said, Topps cut its microbial testing on finished ground beef from once a month to three times a year, a level the department considers inadequate.
Federal investigators said they had recently learned that the company failed to require adequate testing on the raw beef it bought from its domestic suppliers, and it sometimes mixed tested and untested meat in its grinding machines.
The Agriculture Department acknowledged that its safety inspectors, who were in the Topps plant for an hour or two each day, never cited the company for these problems.
Additionally, Topps, like many other beef processors, had bought an increasing amount of meat from overseas. Some types of meat from foreign countries — where E. coli has not been prevalent — are not required to be tested for contamination. But the Agriculture Department said the Topps case had prompted it to consider requiring such checks.
In response to the problems, the Agriculture Department directed its inspectors on Oct. 12 to conduct a nationwide survey of what meat plants are doing to fight E. coli., and it plans to send special assessment teams into any plants that seem to be lagging to urge them to adopt more stringent measures.
“When someone says we are a toothless tiger and we are not doing anything, this is an example of something we are doing that I believe is making the food supply safer,” Dr. Raymond said.
While the government has long allowed meat plants to establish their own safety plans, Dr. Raymond added that “we haven’t shut the door” on setting mandatory standards for E. coli testing and prevention.
Consumer groups and other critics say it is startling that the agency does not have a better handle on the problems, which they see as emblematic of a cozy relationship between the Agriculture Department and the meat industry. Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said the Agriculture Department’s approach to enforcement was “haphazard, catch as catch can.” She added, “They just lay it out and make recommendations” that are “summarily ignored.”
The owner of Topps, Strategic Investments & Holdings of Buffalo, declined to be interviewed for this report, nor would the firm respond in detail to written questions.
“Topps Meat Company prided itself on providing quality and safety, which is one reason the company was in business for 67 years,” the company said in a statement. “The health and safety of consumers was a top priority at Topps.”
James Hodges, president of the American Meat Institute Foundation, the research arm for a meat trade organization, said the industry had “climbed a very high mountain” in reducing E. coli contamination and was working hard to stop the increase in recalls.
“We’re concerned because we’ve had a very good track record here both in the prevalence of E. coli in meat and in the reduction of illnesses,” Mr. Hodges said.
Escherichia coli is a normally harmless bacterium. But the strain E. coli 0157:H7 produces a lethal toxin and can cause severe diarrhea, kidney failure and even death. Ground beef is vulnerable to contamination, and health experts advise consumers to cook burgers thoroughly to kill germs. The government has estimated that up to 73,000 Americans a year are sickened by E. coli 0157:H7.
Many of the nation’s largest meat plants have taken substantial measures to try to minimize the problem, from sterilizing carcasses with steam to testing ground beef once an hour. But the industry still has many small and mid-size plants that have not adopted the most expensive measures.
Topps began in Manhattan as a small operation in 1940. The original owners, the Sachs family, sometimes donned hair nets and joined their workers on the floor.
After Strategic Investments & Holdings, a diversified private equity firm, bought Topps in 2003, it brought in outside managers, invested $2.5 million in new machines and began ramping up production, ex-workers said in interviews.
“The whole time, the whole year, there was a lot more pressure,” Alberto Narvaelzi, a supervisor who worked at Topps for 23 years, said referring to this year.
The first worries about E. coli surfaced in July 2005, when a supplier mistakenly delivered raw beef trimmings that had tested positive for the pathogen. Later that summer the illness in Albany also prompted scrutiny from the government, and Topps agreed to adopt better safeguards, including increased testing.
During the next two years, the company received citations for persistent cleanliness problems. Some experts say that could have alerted inspectors to probe more deeply, but the Agriculture Department described the citations as routine.
The department did not learn of a problem it considered significant until late August, as illnesses around the country started coming to light. Eventually, 40 E. coli cases were linked to Topps ground beef.
Agriculture Department investigators found that “something had changed,” Dr. Raymond said. “A lot of the policies they had had in place were not being followed.”
Federal investigators found that three different lots of hamburger meat were tainted with E. coli. Moreover, they said, the company’s record keeping was so poor they could not rule out contamination of other lots.
Batches that had been tested by suppliers were mixed with those that were not, officials said. Untested boxes from the freezer were tossed in with the daily grind, as were untested scraps from the plant’s steak line.
To be safe, the regulators finally urged the company to recall a full year’s worth of production, or 21.7 million pounds. “They couldn’t say, ‘This started two months ago,’” said Kenneth E. Petersen, assistant administrator of field operations for the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. “Because they couldn’t prove it, we went back a whole year.”
Daniel L. Engeljohn, another top food safety official, said a more sophisticated test for E. coli became available in 2004, and most of the largest meat companies now use it. He said the agency plans to use the current review to prod other companies to use that test as well.
Former Topps workers say the company had rarely used the often-cheaper imported beef before Strategic Investments & Holdings bought Topps in 2003. But after the buyout, it began using a significant amount of beef trimmings from countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Uruguay.
Department officials said that on the three days when contaminated batches were known to have been produced at the Topps plant last summer, the company was grinding both domestic and foreign trimmings.
As more questions arise about the safety of imported products, Mr. Petersen said department officials are asking themselves, “Should we be looking for better support from the country, or should we require lot-by-lot testing?”
Perhaps the biggest question is why government inspectors did not catch the Topps problems as they were occurring, and whether inspectors in other plants around the country have missed similar problems.
Not only is the government beginning special assessments of meat plants to try to figure that out, but it plans additional training for meat inspectors to be sure they understand the safety plans — and how to hold companies to them.
Dr. Raymond said, “We are going to do this survey to find out if we just had a couple of plants that had fallen apart or if we’ve got a bigger problem.”
Contributing reporting were Ken Belson and Michael Barbaro in New York, Nate Schweber in Elizabeth and David Staba in Buffalo.
Citing Global Warming, Kansas Denies Plant Permit
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, October 20, 2007
A Kansas regulator has turned down a permit for a large coal-fired power plant solely because of the global warming gases it would emit.
Opponents of the plant say this is the first instance of a regulatory agency’s rejecting a permit for that reason alone.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment on Thursday turned down a permit for twin 700-megawatt coal-fired generators that a group of electric cooperatives is seeking to build near Holcomb in southwest Kansas. The ownership and the electricity would be shared by 67 cooperatives in Kansas and neighboring states.
The department’s staff had recommended issuing the air quality permits, but Roderick L. Bremby, the secretary of the department, said in a statement, “I believe it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing.”
Mr. Bremby cited a Supreme Court ruling this year, Massachusetts v. the Environmental Protection Agency, in which the court found that carbon dioxide was a pollutant and could be regulated.
At the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, which would be the operator and part-owner of the plant, a spokesman, Stephen J. Miller, said the court decision merely permitted regulations on carbon dioxide but did not create them. “There are no carbon dioxide regulations in the federal rules or in Kansas,” Mr. Miller said.
A spokesman for the environment and health department, Joe Blubaugh, said, “What it really boils down to is the secretary is authorized by Kansas statute to affirm, modify or reverse a decision on an air permit to protect health and the environment of Kansas.”
Mr. Miller said that if the plant cannot be built, the cooperatives would try to build a power line to import electricity from a coal-fired plant planned in Missouri.
Kansas has a goal of getting 10 percent of its electricity at peak periods from the wind. Mr. Miller said the co-ops would meet the goal by the end of the year, two years ahead of the state deadline.
He said the builders would file an administrative appeal of the decision, which they expected to lose, and then go to court.
At the Sierra Club, which is involved in two suits against the project, Bruce E. Nilles, director of the group’s national coal campaign, said, “I went back through all the rejections I could think of, and none of them were explicitly on the basis of carbon dioxide.” Other environmental groups said they would use the Kansas decision as a precedent in fighting plants elsewhere.
The Kansas decision points to a problem in determining the value of carbon dioxide. Mr. Miller said that as an alternative, the cooperatives could build plants powered by natural gas, which creates half as much carbon dioxide per unit of heat produced. But at a market price of $8 per million B.T.U.’s for gas, the fuel cost for a kilowatt-hour from the co-op’s existing gas-fired plant is about 8 cents, while from coal, the price is 1.5 cents. (A new plant would need less gas to make a kilowatt-hour, experts say, but the price difference would still be substantial.)
Since there is no tax or trading system for carbon dioxide in the United States, there is no common yardstick for determining whether the additional amount that consumers would pay for gas is offset by the carbon saved.
Environmental Laws Waived to Press Work on Border Fence
By JULIA PRESTON, The New York Times, October 23, 2007
Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, waived several environmental laws yesterday to continue building a border fence through a national conservation area in Arizona, bypassing a federal court ruling that had suspended the fence construction.
Citing “unacceptable risks to our nation’s security” if the fence along the border with Mexico was further delayed, Mr. Chertoff invoked waiver authority granted him under a 2005 bill that mandated construction of the fence.
He ordered work to continue on 6.9 miles of fence along the border through the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area in Cochise County in southeastern Arizona.
In a ruling on Oct. 10, Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle of the federal court for the District of Columbia held up construction of the fence, finding that the government had failed to carry out the required environmental assessment. The decision came in a suit brought by the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife.
In a statement yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security said it “disagrees with the court’s ruling” and was confident of eventually winning the case. It noted that two federal land management agencies had authorized the department to proceed with the fence.
In addition, department officials said that some 19,000 illegal immigrants were detained passing through the conservation area in the 2007 fiscal year and that the immigrants’ trash, human waste and illegal roads had caused more damage to plant and animal life than the fence would.
Sean Sullivan, a spokesman for the Sierra Club in Arizona, said that “we can secure our borders while we protect our public lands” and that “bulldozing” the conservation area was not necessary to manage the border.
The plaintiffs described the area near the San Pedro River as “one of America’s most unique and biologically diverse areas.”
The Elderly Always Sleep Worse, and Other Myths of Aging
By GINA KOLATA, The New York Times, October 23, 2007
As every sleep researcher knows, the surest way to hear complaints about sleep is to ask the elderly.
“Older people complain more about their sleep; they just do,” said Dr. Michael Vitiello, a sleep researcher who is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington.
And for years, sleep scientists thought they knew what was going on: sleep starts to deteriorate in late middle age and steadily erodes from then on. It seemed so obvious that few thought to question the prevailing wisdom.
Now, though, new research is leading many to change their minds. To researchers’ great surprise, it turns out that sleep does not change much from age 60 on. And poor sleep, it turns out, is not because of aging itself, but mostly because of illnesses or the medications used to treat them.
“The more disorders older adults have, the worse they sleep,” said Sonia Ancoli-Israel, a professor of psychiatry and a sleep researcher at the University of California, San Diego. “If you look at older adults who are very healthy, they rarely have sleep problems.”
And new studies are indicating that poor sleep may circle back to cause poor health. At least when it comes to pain, a common cause of disrupted sleep, a restless night can make pain worse the next day. Then with worse pain, sleep may become even more difficult — a vicious cycle common in people with conditions that tend to afflict the elderly, like back pain and arthritis.
The new view of sleep emerged from two parallel lines of research. The first asked what happened to sleep patterns when healthy people grew old. The second sought to uncover the relationship between sleep and pain.
To find out what happens with aging, some investigators, including Dr. Vitiello, studied older people who reported no sleep problems. They actually make up a large group — nearly half of people over 65. Were these people somehow spared age-related changes in sleep?
They were not. Their sleep turned out to be different from sleep in young people: it was lighter, more often disrupted by brief awakenings, and shorter by a half hour to an hour. Dr. Vitiello reasoned that the age-related changes in sleep patterns might not be an issue in themselves. Something else was making people complain about their sleep.
Dr. Vitiello and his colleagues also asked what normally happened to sleep over the life span. It had long been known that sleep changes, but no one had systematically studied when those changes occurred or how pronounced they were in healthy people.
With analysis of 65 sleep studies, which included 3,577 healthy subjects ages 5 to 102, the investigators had their next surprise. Most of the changes in sleep patterns occurred when people were between the ages of 20 and 60. Compared with teenagers and young adults, healthy middle-aged and older people slept a half hour to an hour less each night, they woke up a bit more often during the night, and their sleep was lighter. But after age 60, there was little change in sleep, at least in people who were healthy.
And even though sleep changed during adulthood, many of the changes were subtle. Middle-aged and older people, for example, did not have more difficulty falling asleep. The only change in sleep latency, as it is called, emerged when the investigators compared latency at the two extremes, in 20- and 80-year-olds. The 80-year-olds took an average of 10 more minutes to fall asleep.
Contrary to their expectations, the investigators found no increase in daytime drowsiness in healthy older people. Nor did aging affect the time it took for people to start dreaming after they fell asleep.
Instead, the biggest change was the number of times people woke after having fallen asleep.
Healthy young adults sleep 95 percent of the night, said Dr. Donald Bliwise, a sleep researcher at Emory University. “They fall asleep,” he said, “and don’t wake up until the alarm goes off.”
By age 60, healthy people are asleep 85 percent of the night. Their sleep is disrupted by brief wakeful moments typically lasting about 3 to 10 seconds. “There is some aspect of sleep that isn’t going to be as good as when you were 20,” Dr. Bliwise said. But he added, “When that crosses the threshold and becomes a significant complaint is difficult to say.”
The real sleep problems, he and others say, arise when people have any of a number of conditions that make them wake up in the night, like sleep apnea, chronic pain, restless leg syndrome or urinary problems. That, of course, describes many older people.
“The sheer number of challenges to maintaining solid sleep in old age is just huge,” Dr. Bliwise said. “You come out with the question, Well, what is normal? What should I expect?”
The new frontier of what to expect, and what to do about it, involves studies of the relationship of sleep to pain. It’s no surprise that pain can disrupt sleep. But what is new is that a lack of sleep can apparently increase the sensation of pain.
Michael T. Smith, the research and training director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, reached that conclusion with a study of healthy young people. One group slept normally for eight hours in the hospital. Another was awakened every hour by a nurse and kept up for 20 minutes. Their sleep pattern was meant to mimic the fragmented sleep of elderly people. A third group was allowed four hours of solid sleep.
Comparing the second and third groups allowed Dr. Smith to tease apart the causes of the problems that arise from fragmented sleep: were they because of the short total sleep time, or because of the disrupted nature of the sleep?
Fragmented sleep, he found, led to severe impairments the next day in pain pathways. The subjects felt pain more easily, were less able to inhibit pain, and even developed spontaneous pain, like mild backaches and headaches.
Timothy Roehrs, director of the sleep disorders research center at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, also found that healthy young people became exquisitely sensitive to pain after a night of fragmented sleep.
And getting more sleep, Dr. Roehrs found, had the opposite effect. His subjects were young healthy people who said they were chronically sleepy, just not getting enough time to sleep at night. Dr. Roehrs had them stay in bed 10 hours a night. The extra sleep, he said, reduced their sensitivity to pain to the same degree as a tablet of codeine.
Now, Dr. Smith says, he and others have markedly changed their attitude about sleep problems and aging.
Of course, he said, sleep is different in 20-year-olds and 70-year-olds. But he added, “It’s not normal to get a clinical sleep disorder when you get old.”
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and ANDREW MARTIN, The New York Times, October 23, 2007
ELIZABETH, N.J. — Over the summer, as Americans fired up their grills, the Topps Meat factory here scrambled to produce thousands of frozen hamburger patties for Wal-Mart and other customers, putting intense pressure on workers.
As output rose, federal regulators said in interviews, the company was neglecting critical safeguards meant to protect consumers. Three big batches of hamburger contaminated with a potentially deadly germ emerged from the plant, making at least 40 people sick and prompting the second-largest beef recall in history.
Topps is now out of business, but the case points up broader problems in the nation’s system for protecting consumers from food-borne illness.
Five years ago, the government demanded more stringent safeguards against contamination because of a deadly form of the germ E. coli. But federal regulators now acknowledge that the controls are not working in some meat plants. They are trying to figure out what went wrong and how to overcome the dangers.
In the case of Topps, the government has determined that the company reduced its testing of ground beef and neglected other safety measures in the months before the recall.
The Topps case is the most serious of 16 recalls this year involving E. coli contamination of beef. That is a sharp increase from 2005 and 2006, and the resurgence of the pathogen raises questions about whether the Agriculture Department has given the meat industry too much leeway to police itself.
“We’re beginning to feel that the 2002 guidelines have not been enacted to the maximum,” Dr. Richard A. Raymond, the Agriculture Department’s under secretary for food safety, said in an interview in Washington.
While noting that the amount of harmful E. coli in beef may be increasing as part of a natural cycle or for other reasons outside the control of the meat industry, Dr. Raymond said that “some of the plants that may have had less-than-stellar systems in place are getting caught.”
Two years ago, after an 8-year-old girl in Albany County, N.Y., was sickened by Topps ground beef, the Agriculture Department scrutinized the Elizabeth plant and found relatively few problems. But since then, the department said, Topps cut its microbial testing on finished ground beef from once a month to three times a year, a level the department considers inadequate.
Federal investigators said they had recently learned that the company failed to require adequate testing on the raw beef it bought from its domestic suppliers, and it sometimes mixed tested and untested meat in its grinding machines.
The Agriculture Department acknowledged that its safety inspectors, who were in the Topps plant for an hour or two each day, never cited the company for these problems.
Additionally, Topps, like many other beef processors, had bought an increasing amount of meat from overseas. Some types of meat from foreign countries — where E. coli has not been prevalent — are not required to be tested for contamination. But the Agriculture Department said the Topps case had prompted it to consider requiring such checks.
In response to the problems, the Agriculture Department directed its inspectors on Oct. 12 to conduct a nationwide survey of what meat plants are doing to fight E. coli., and it plans to send special assessment teams into any plants that seem to be lagging to urge them to adopt more stringent measures.
“When someone says we are a toothless tiger and we are not doing anything, this is an example of something we are doing that I believe is making the food supply safer,” Dr. Raymond said.
While the government has long allowed meat plants to establish their own safety plans, Dr. Raymond added that “we haven’t shut the door” on setting mandatory standards for E. coli testing and prevention.
Consumer groups and other critics say it is startling that the agency does not have a better handle on the problems, which they see as emblematic of a cozy relationship between the Agriculture Department and the meat industry. Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said the Agriculture Department’s approach to enforcement was “haphazard, catch as catch can.” She added, “They just lay it out and make recommendations” that are “summarily ignored.”
The owner of Topps, Strategic Investments & Holdings of Buffalo, declined to be interviewed for this report, nor would the firm respond in detail to written questions.
“Topps Meat Company prided itself on providing quality and safety, which is one reason the company was in business for 67 years,” the company said in a statement. “The health and safety of consumers was a top priority at Topps.”
James Hodges, president of the American Meat Institute Foundation, the research arm for a meat trade organization, said the industry had “climbed a very high mountain” in reducing E. coli contamination and was working hard to stop the increase in recalls.
“We’re concerned because we’ve had a very good track record here both in the prevalence of E. coli in meat and in the reduction of illnesses,” Mr. Hodges said.
Escherichia coli is a normally harmless bacterium. But the strain E. coli 0157:H7 produces a lethal toxin and can cause severe diarrhea, kidney failure and even death. Ground beef is vulnerable to contamination, and health experts advise consumers to cook burgers thoroughly to kill germs. The government has estimated that up to 73,000 Americans a year are sickened by E. coli 0157:H7.
Many of the nation’s largest meat plants have taken substantial measures to try to minimize the problem, from sterilizing carcasses with steam to testing ground beef once an hour. But the industry still has many small and mid-size plants that have not adopted the most expensive measures.
Topps began in Manhattan as a small operation in 1940. The original owners, the Sachs family, sometimes donned hair nets and joined their workers on the floor.
After Strategic Investments & Holdings, a diversified private equity firm, bought Topps in 2003, it brought in outside managers, invested $2.5 million in new machines and began ramping up production, ex-workers said in interviews.
“The whole time, the whole year, there was a lot more pressure,” Alberto Narvaelzi, a supervisor who worked at Topps for 23 years, said referring to this year.
The first worries about E. coli surfaced in July 2005, when a supplier mistakenly delivered raw beef trimmings that had tested positive for the pathogen. Later that summer the illness in Albany also prompted scrutiny from the government, and Topps agreed to adopt better safeguards, including increased testing.
During the next two years, the company received citations for persistent cleanliness problems. Some experts say that could have alerted inspectors to probe more deeply, but the Agriculture Department described the citations as routine.
The department did not learn of a problem it considered significant until late August, as illnesses around the country started coming to light. Eventually, 40 E. coli cases were linked to Topps ground beef.
Agriculture Department investigators found that “something had changed,” Dr. Raymond said. “A lot of the policies they had had in place were not being followed.”
Federal investigators found that three different lots of hamburger meat were tainted with E. coli. Moreover, they said, the company’s record keeping was so poor they could not rule out contamination of other lots.
Batches that had been tested by suppliers were mixed with those that were not, officials said. Untested boxes from the freezer were tossed in with the daily grind, as were untested scraps from the plant’s steak line.
To be safe, the regulators finally urged the company to recall a full year’s worth of production, or 21.7 million pounds. “They couldn’t say, ‘This started two months ago,’” said Kenneth E. Petersen, assistant administrator of field operations for the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. “Because they couldn’t prove it, we went back a whole year.”
Daniel L. Engeljohn, another top food safety official, said a more sophisticated test for E. coli became available in 2004, and most of the largest meat companies now use it. He said the agency plans to use the current review to prod other companies to use that test as well.
Former Topps workers say the company had rarely used the often-cheaper imported beef before Strategic Investments & Holdings bought Topps in 2003. But after the buyout, it began using a significant amount of beef trimmings from countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Uruguay.
Department officials said that on the three days when contaminated batches were known to have been produced at the Topps plant last summer, the company was grinding both domestic and foreign trimmings.
As more questions arise about the safety of imported products, Mr. Petersen said department officials are asking themselves, “Should we be looking for better support from the country, or should we require lot-by-lot testing?”
Perhaps the biggest question is why government inspectors did not catch the Topps problems as they were occurring, and whether inspectors in other plants around the country have missed similar problems.
Not only is the government beginning special assessments of meat plants to try to figure that out, but it plans additional training for meat inspectors to be sure they understand the safety plans — and how to hold companies to them.
Dr. Raymond said, “We are going to do this survey to find out if we just had a couple of plants that had fallen apart or if we’ve got a bigger problem.”
Contributing reporting were Ken Belson and Michael Barbaro in New York, Nate Schweber in Elizabeth and David Staba in Buffalo.
Citing Global Warming, Kansas Denies Plant Permit
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, October 20, 2007
A Kansas regulator has turned down a permit for a large coal-fired power plant solely because of the global warming gases it would emit.
Opponents of the plant say this is the first instance of a regulatory agency’s rejecting a permit for that reason alone.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment on Thursday turned down a permit for twin 700-megawatt coal-fired generators that a group of electric cooperatives is seeking to build near Holcomb in southwest Kansas. The ownership and the electricity would be shared by 67 cooperatives in Kansas and neighboring states.
The department’s staff had recommended issuing the air quality permits, but Roderick L. Bremby, the secretary of the department, said in a statement, “I believe it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing.”
Mr. Bremby cited a Supreme Court ruling this year, Massachusetts v. the Environmental Protection Agency, in which the court found that carbon dioxide was a pollutant and could be regulated.
At the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, which would be the operator and part-owner of the plant, a spokesman, Stephen J. Miller, said the court decision merely permitted regulations on carbon dioxide but did not create them. “There are no carbon dioxide regulations in the federal rules or in Kansas,” Mr. Miller said.
A spokesman for the environment and health department, Joe Blubaugh, said, “What it really boils down to is the secretary is authorized by Kansas statute to affirm, modify or reverse a decision on an air permit to protect health and the environment of Kansas.”
Mr. Miller said that if the plant cannot be built, the cooperatives would try to build a power line to import electricity from a coal-fired plant planned in Missouri.
Kansas has a goal of getting 10 percent of its electricity at peak periods from the wind. Mr. Miller said the co-ops would meet the goal by the end of the year, two years ahead of the state deadline.
He said the builders would file an administrative appeal of the decision, which they expected to lose, and then go to court.
At the Sierra Club, which is involved in two suits against the project, Bruce E. Nilles, director of the group’s national coal campaign, said, “I went back through all the rejections I could think of, and none of them were explicitly on the basis of carbon dioxide.” Other environmental groups said they would use the Kansas decision as a precedent in fighting plants elsewhere.
The Kansas decision points to a problem in determining the value of carbon dioxide. Mr. Miller said that as an alternative, the cooperatives could build plants powered by natural gas, which creates half as much carbon dioxide per unit of heat produced. But at a market price of $8 per million B.T.U.’s for gas, the fuel cost for a kilowatt-hour from the co-op’s existing gas-fired plant is about 8 cents, while from coal, the price is 1.5 cents. (A new plant would need less gas to make a kilowatt-hour, experts say, but the price difference would still be substantial.)
Since there is no tax or trading system for carbon dioxide in the United States, there is no common yardstick for determining whether the additional amount that consumers would pay for gas is offset by the carbon saved.
Environmental Laws Waived to Press Work on Border Fence
By JULIA PRESTON, The New York Times, October 23, 2007
Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, waived several environmental laws yesterday to continue building a border fence through a national conservation area in Arizona, bypassing a federal court ruling that had suspended the fence construction.
Citing “unacceptable risks to our nation’s security” if the fence along the border with Mexico was further delayed, Mr. Chertoff invoked waiver authority granted him under a 2005 bill that mandated construction of the fence.
He ordered work to continue on 6.9 miles of fence along the border through the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area in Cochise County in southeastern Arizona.
In a ruling on Oct. 10, Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle of the federal court for the District of Columbia held up construction of the fence, finding that the government had failed to carry out the required environmental assessment. The decision came in a suit brought by the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife.
In a statement yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security said it “disagrees with the court’s ruling” and was confident of eventually winning the case. It noted that two federal land management agencies had authorized the department to proceed with the fence.
In addition, department officials said that some 19,000 illegal immigrants were detained passing through the conservation area in the 2007 fiscal year and that the immigrants’ trash, human waste and illegal roads had caused more damage to plant and animal life than the fence would.
Sean Sullivan, a spokesman for the Sierra Club in Arizona, said that “we can secure our borders while we protect our public lands” and that “bulldozing” the conservation area was not necessary to manage the border.
The plaintiffs described the area near the San Pedro River as “one of America’s most unique and biologically diverse areas.”
The Elderly Always Sleep Worse, and Other Myths of Aging
By GINA KOLATA, The New York Times, October 23, 2007
As every sleep researcher knows, the surest way to hear complaints about sleep is to ask the elderly.
“Older people complain more about their sleep; they just do,” said Dr. Michael Vitiello, a sleep researcher who is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington.
And for years, sleep scientists thought they knew what was going on: sleep starts to deteriorate in late middle age and steadily erodes from then on. It seemed so obvious that few thought to question the prevailing wisdom.
Now, though, new research is leading many to change their minds. To researchers’ great surprise, it turns out that sleep does not change much from age 60 on. And poor sleep, it turns out, is not because of aging itself, but mostly because of illnesses or the medications used to treat them.
“The more disorders older adults have, the worse they sleep,” said Sonia Ancoli-Israel, a professor of psychiatry and a sleep researcher at the University of California, San Diego. “If you look at older adults who are very healthy, they rarely have sleep problems.”
And new studies are indicating that poor sleep may circle back to cause poor health. At least when it comes to pain, a common cause of disrupted sleep, a restless night can make pain worse the next day. Then with worse pain, sleep may become even more difficult — a vicious cycle common in people with conditions that tend to afflict the elderly, like back pain and arthritis.
The new view of sleep emerged from two parallel lines of research. The first asked what happened to sleep patterns when healthy people grew old. The second sought to uncover the relationship between sleep and pain.
To find out what happens with aging, some investigators, including Dr. Vitiello, studied older people who reported no sleep problems. They actually make up a large group — nearly half of people over 65. Were these people somehow spared age-related changes in sleep?
They were not. Their sleep turned out to be different from sleep in young people: it was lighter, more often disrupted by brief awakenings, and shorter by a half hour to an hour. Dr. Vitiello reasoned that the age-related changes in sleep patterns might not be an issue in themselves. Something else was making people complain about their sleep.
Dr. Vitiello and his colleagues also asked what normally happened to sleep over the life span. It had long been known that sleep changes, but no one had systematically studied when those changes occurred or how pronounced they were in healthy people.
With analysis of 65 sleep studies, which included 3,577 healthy subjects ages 5 to 102, the investigators had their next surprise. Most of the changes in sleep patterns occurred when people were between the ages of 20 and 60. Compared with teenagers and young adults, healthy middle-aged and older people slept a half hour to an hour less each night, they woke up a bit more often during the night, and their sleep was lighter. But after age 60, there was little change in sleep, at least in people who were healthy.
And even though sleep changed during adulthood, many of the changes were subtle. Middle-aged and older people, for example, did not have more difficulty falling asleep. The only change in sleep latency, as it is called, emerged when the investigators compared latency at the two extremes, in 20- and 80-year-olds. The 80-year-olds took an average of 10 more minutes to fall asleep.
Contrary to their expectations, the investigators found no increase in daytime drowsiness in healthy older people. Nor did aging affect the time it took for people to start dreaming after they fell asleep.
Instead, the biggest change was the number of times people woke after having fallen asleep.
Healthy young adults sleep 95 percent of the night, said Dr. Donald Bliwise, a sleep researcher at Emory University. “They fall asleep,” he said, “and don’t wake up until the alarm goes off.”
By age 60, healthy people are asleep 85 percent of the night. Their sleep is disrupted by brief wakeful moments typically lasting about 3 to 10 seconds. “There is some aspect of sleep that isn’t going to be as good as when you were 20,” Dr. Bliwise said. But he added, “When that crosses the threshold and becomes a significant complaint is difficult to say.”
The real sleep problems, he and others say, arise when people have any of a number of conditions that make them wake up in the night, like sleep apnea, chronic pain, restless leg syndrome or urinary problems. That, of course, describes many older people.
“The sheer number of challenges to maintaining solid sleep in old age is just huge,” Dr. Bliwise said. “You come out with the question, Well, what is normal? What should I expect?”
The new frontier of what to expect, and what to do about it, involves studies of the relationship of sleep to pain. It’s no surprise that pain can disrupt sleep. But what is new is that a lack of sleep can apparently increase the sensation of pain.
Michael T. Smith, the research and training director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, reached that conclusion with a study of healthy young people. One group slept normally for eight hours in the hospital. Another was awakened every hour by a nurse and kept up for 20 minutes. Their sleep pattern was meant to mimic the fragmented sleep of elderly people. A third group was allowed four hours of solid sleep.
Comparing the second and third groups allowed Dr. Smith to tease apart the causes of the problems that arise from fragmented sleep: were they because of the short total sleep time, or because of the disrupted nature of the sleep?
Fragmented sleep, he found, led to severe impairments the next day in pain pathways. The subjects felt pain more easily, were less able to inhibit pain, and even developed spontaneous pain, like mild backaches and headaches.
Timothy Roehrs, director of the sleep disorders research center at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, also found that healthy young people became exquisitely sensitive to pain after a night of fragmented sleep.
And getting more sleep, Dr. Roehrs found, had the opposite effect. His subjects were young healthy people who said they were chronically sleepy, just not getting enough time to sleep at night. Dr. Roehrs had them stay in bed 10 hours a night. The extra sleep, he said, reduced their sensitivity to pain to the same degree as a tablet of codeine.
Now, Dr. Smith says, he and others have markedly changed their attitude about sleep problems and aging.
Of course, he said, sleep is different in 20-year-olds and 70-year-olds. But he added, “It’s not normal to get a clinical sleep disorder when you get old.”
