PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Urban stream contamination increasing rapidly due to road salt

2014-12-16
(Press-News.org) Average chloride concentrations often exceed toxic levels in many northern United States streams due to the use of salt to deice winter pavement, and the frequency of these occurrences nearly doubled in two decades.

Chloride levels increased substantially in 84 percent of urban streams analyzed, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study that began as early as 1960 at some sites and ended as late as 2011. Levels were highest during the winter, but increased during all seasons over time at the northern sites, including near Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Chicago, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; and other metropolitan areas. The report was published today in the journal Science of the Total Environment at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969714017148.

"Some freshwater organisms are sensitive to chloride, and the high concentrations that we found could negatively affect a significant number of species," said Steve Corsi, USGS scientist and lead author of the study. "If urban development and road salt use continue to increase, chloride concentrations and associated toxicity are also likely to increase."

The scientists analyzed water-quality data from 30 monitoring sites on 19 streams near cities in Wisconsin, Illinois, Colorado, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Texas and the District of Columbia. Key findings include:

Twenty-nine percent of the sites exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's chronic water-quality criteria (230 milligrams per liter) by an average of more than 100 days per year from 2006 through 2011, which was almost double the amount of days from 1990 through 1994. This increase occurred at sites such as the Menomonee and Kinnickinnic Rivers near Milwaukee and Poplar Creek near Chicago. The lowest chloride concentrations were in watersheds that had little urban land use or cities without much snowfall, such as Dallas, Texas. In 16 of the streams, winter chloride concentrations increased over the study period. In 13 of the streams, chloride concentrations increased over the study period during non-deicing periods such as summer. This finding suggests that chloride infiltrates the groundwater system during the winter and is slowly released to the streams throughout the year. Chloride levels increased more rapidly than development of urban land near the study sites. The rapid chloride increases were likely caused by increased salt application rates, increased baseline conditions (the concentrations during summer low-flow periods) and greater snowfall in the Midwest during the latter part of the study.

"Deicing operations help to provide safe winter transportation conditions, which is very important," Corsi said. "Findings from this study emphasize the need to consider deicer management options that minimize the use of road salt while still maintaining safe conditions."

Road deicing by cities, counties and state agencies accounts for a significant portion of salt applications, but salt is also used by many public and private organizations and individuals to deice parking lots, walkways and driveways. All of these sources are likely to contribute to these increasing chloride trends.

Other major sources of salt to U.S. waters include wastewater treatment, septic systems, farming operations and natural geologic deposits. However, the new study found deicing activity to be the dominant source in urban areas of the northern U.S.

INFORMATION:

The USGS conducted this study in cooperation with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. For more information about winter runoff and water-quality, please visit the USGS Wisconsin Water Science Center website at http://wi.water.usgs.gov.

The USGS provides science for a changing world. Visit USGS.gov, and follow us on Twitter @USGS and our other social media channels.



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

What was the 'Paleo diet'? There was far more than one, study suggests

2014-12-16
ATLANTA--The Paleolithic diet, or caveman diet, a weight-loss craze in which people emulate the diet of plants and animals eaten by early humans during the Stone Age, gives modern calorie-counters great freedom because those ancestral diets likely differed substantially over time and space, according to researchers at Georgia State University and Kent State University. Their findings are published in The Quarterly Review of Biology. "Based on evidence that's been gathered over many decades, there's very little evidence that any early hominids had very specialized diets ...

Men in recovery from Ebola should wear condoms for at least 3 months

2014-12-16
Los Angeles, CA (November 16, 2014) A new article reports that despite a clear lack of research on male survivors of Ebola, the current recommended practice of waiting at least three months after recovery to have unprotected sex should be upheld. This study was published today in Reproductive Sciences, a SAGE journal. "Our exercise demonstrated that the current recommendations to prevent the sexual spread of Ebola are based on one mere observation," the researchers wrote. "Despite the evident need to conduct more research, for now, health care professionals should strongly ...

New technology directly reprograms skin fibroblasts for a new role

New technology directly reprograms skin fibroblasts for a new role
2014-12-16
PHILADELPHIA - As the main component of connective tissue in the body, fibroblasts are the most common type of cell. Taking advantage of that ready availability, scientists from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the Wistar Institute, Boston University School of Medicine, and New Jersey Institute of Technology have discovered a way to repurpose fibroblasts into functional melanocytes, the body's pigment-producing cells. The technique has immediate and important implications for developing new cell-based treatments for skin diseases such as ...

Top blood transfusion-related complication more common than previously reported

2014-12-16
Two studies published in the January issue of Anesthesiology, the official medical journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists® (ASA®), shed new light on the prevalence of transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI) and transfusion-associated circulatory overload (TACO), the number one and two leading causes of blood transfusion-related deaths in the United States. According to researchers, postoperative TRALI is significantly underreported and more common than previously thought, with an overall rate of 1.4 percent. While the rate of TACO was found ...

Targeting inflammatory pathway reduces Alzheimer's disease in mice

2014-12-16
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia and is characterized by the formation of β-amyloid plaques throughout the brain. Proteins known as chemokines regulate inflammation and the immune response. In both patients with AD and mouse AD models, the chemokine CXCL10 is found in high concentrations in the brain and may contribute to AD. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation indicates that activation of the CXCL10 receptor, CXCR3, contributes to AD pathology. Using a murine model of AD, Michael Heneka and colleagues at the University ...

Microbial-induced pathway promotes nonalcoholic fatty liver disease

2014-12-16
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common liver disorder and affects approximately 1 billion people worldwide. It is not clear how this disease develops, but recent studies suggest that the bacterial population in the gut influences NAFLD. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation provides a link between molecular signaling pathways in the gut, the intestinal microbiome, and development of NAFLD. Frank Gonzalez and colleagues at the National Cancer Institute found that disruption of the gut microflora prevented development of NAFLD in mice fed ...

How to treat Ebola during pregnancy

2014-12-15
A pregnant woman in Africa who has contracted Ebola is likely to suffer with a spontaneous abortion, pregnancy-related hemorrhage, or the death of her newborn. Although the risk of caring for a pregnant woman with Ebola in the United States may be rare, the Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN) has published a practice brief in its Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, & Neonatal Nursing to guide nursing care for pregnant women and newborns. "Nurses play a vital role in caring for patients with Ebola," said Dr. Debra Bingham, who is Vice President ...

Shame on us

Shame on us
2014-12-15
Emotions are complicated and never more so than in the realm of the scientific, where commonly accepted definitions are lacking. In a paper published in the journal Qualitative Inquiry, UC Santa Barbara's Thomas Scheff examines the basic emotions of grief, fear/anxiety, anger, shame and pride as they appear in scientific literature in an attempt to take a first step in defining them. "Emotion terms, especially in English, are wildly ambiguous," Scheff writes in the paper's introduction. An emeritus professor of sociology at UCSB, Scheff set out to explore why the language ...

Herceptin found to improve long-term survival of HER2-positive breast cancer patients

2014-12-15
VCU Massey Cancer Center physician-researcher Charles E. Geyer, Jr., M.D., was the National Protocol Officer for one component of a large national study involving two National Cancer Institute (NCI)-supported clinical trials that demonstrated that trastuzumab significantly improves the long-term survival of HER-2 positive breast cancer patients. The combined study was designed to determine the long-term safety and efficacy of the drug trastuzumab, which is commonly known as Herceptin and is primarily used alongside chemotherapy to treat HER2-positive breast cancer. The ...

Switching to vehicles powered by electricity from renewables could save lives

2014-12-15
Driving vehicles that use electricity from renewable energy instead of gasoline could reduce the resulting deaths due to air pollution by 70 percent. This finding comes from a new life cycle analysis of conventional and alternative vehicles and their air pollution-related public health impacts, published Monday, Dec. 15, 2014, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study also shows that switching to vehicles powered by electricity made using natural gas yields large health benefits. Conversely, vehicles running on corn ethanol or vehicles powered ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Sandra Shi MD, MPH, named 2025 STAT Wunderkind

Treating liver disease with microscopic nanoparticles

Chemicals might be hitching a ride on nanoplastics to enter your skin

Pregnant patients with preexisting high cholesterol may have elevated CV risk

UC stroke experts discuss current and future use of AI tools in research and treatment

The Southern Ocean’s low-salinity water locked away CO2 for decades, but...

OHSU researchers develop functional eggs from human skin cells

Most users cannot identify AI bias, even in training data

Hurricane outages: Analysis details the where, and who, of increased future power cuts

Craters on surface of melanoma cells found to serve as sites for tumor killing

Research Spotlight: Mapping overlooked challenges in stroke recovery

Geographic and temporal patterns of screening for breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer in the US

Cannabis laws and opioid use among commercially insured patients with cancer diagnoses

Research Spotlight: Surprising gene mutation in brain’s immune cells linked to increased Alzheimer’s risk

Missing molecule may explain Down syndrome

Donor diabetes and 1-year Descemet membrane endothelial keratoplasty success rate

Endothelial cell loss 1 year after successful DMEK in the diabetes endothelial keratoplasty study

Overactive Runx1 gene triggers early disc degeneration linked to aging

NYU Langone Health chair of ophthalmology, Dr. Kathryn Colby, honored with Castroviejo Medal at AAO 2025

Chemotherapy combination boosts overall survival in patients with EGFR-mutant non-small cell lung cancer

FAU’s Queen Conch Lab receives prestigious international award

Post-traumatic vasospasm: An overlooked threat after brain injury

Scientists smash record in stacking semiconductor transistors for large-area electronics

Large language models prioritize helpfulness over accuracy in medical contexts

In a surprising discovery, scientists find tiny loops in the genomes of dividing cells

Printing technique could vastly improve the environmental impact of digital displays

‘Skinny fat’ linked to silent artery damage, McMaster study reveals

Sulfated yeast rises to the challenge facing rare earth metals

Global analysis reveals how biochar supercharges composting and cuts greenhouse gases

Blocking a cellular switch could prevent lung-scarring disease

[Press-News.org] Urban stream contamination increasing rapidly due to road salt