While You Were Sleeping

The Gist of What You Might Have Missed

by Brian K. Mahoney, August 27, 2009

A study published in the August issue of the journal Pediactrics shows that kids exposed in the womb to heavy doses of common combustion pollutants—car and truck exhaust, industrial boiler and coal-fired power plants emissions, cigarettes—showed an average 5 point loss in IQ by kindergarten age. The study followed 400 pregnant women from inner-city neighborhoods in New York City between 1998 and 2003. A five-point drop in IQ is in the range of what might triggered by exposure to high levels of lead or by fetal alcohol syndrome.

“For any individual child, unless it’s your own, you might consider a five-point drop in IQ as no big deal,” notes Dr. Bruce Lanphear, a pediatric epidemiologist at Simon Fraser University. Extrapolated across the entire US population, however, a five-point downward shift in IQ would increase the number of mentally retarded children by 3.5 million.
Source: Science News

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey appeared at a Republican bicameral hearing on climate change on July 30. At the hearing, the former Texas congressman decried “eco-hysteria” and wondered whether America wasn’t becoming a nation of “environmental hypochondriacs.” “If the Lord God Almighty made the heavens and the earth,” said Armey, “and he made them to his satisfaction, it is quite pretentious of we little weaklings here on earth to think that we are going to destroy God’s creation.”
Source: ThinkProgress.org