26 November - Quick Picks

Toxic water rising below Johannesburg

Mining below the South African city left a huge pit now rapidly filling with blood red water. Experts warn that it will soon be too late to build the pumps and treatment plants needed.

The spring, just over 20 miles northwest of Johannesburg, flows blood red.
It is toxic, highly acidic and full of heavy metals, so nasty that newly weaned impala and other animals in the Krugersdorp Game Reserve downstream can't drink the water — and some of them die of thirst.
The water, a poisonous legacy of the gold mining industry, is dead. Not one living organism survives in it.

Millions of gallons of the same kind of toxic water lie underneath Johannesburg, a city of nearly 4 million people, and it's rising 50 feet a month.

The technical term is acid mine drainage. If nothing is done, subterranean parking garages will fill with the toxic red water in about two years' time.

 Gold mines operated along a 25-mile strip from Roodepoort to the west of Johannesburg to Boksburg to the east, as hundreds of mining companies gouged out a gigantic hole under the city and its suburbs.
The void, McCarthy calls it.

When rain falls, water runs off the hills and much of it is absorbed by the earth. The water turns toxic when it reacts with heavy metals underground.

Environmental scientist Shan Holmes of Realsearch, a private environmental management company, said water resources around Johannesburg were grossly contaminated by mining.

"When I speak to American scientists, they can't believe it. They think I have got the numbers wrong."

Stephan du Toit, an environmental specialist with the Mogale municipality near the Krugersdorp Game Reserve, said at a meeting Thursday that the water flowing through the reserve had extremely high sulfate concentrates.

Residents: Mosque, other structures demolished in Palestinian village

68 residents in the village were displaced by Thursday's demolitions in the village of Khirbet Yarza.

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On Wednesday, Israeli authorities destroyed houses and animal structures in the Palestinian Bedouin village of Abu Al-Ajaj in the Jordan Valley

B.C. revamping acclaimed drug watchdog program

B.C.'s internationally acclaimed drug watchdog is being defanged in favour of a new system that gives pharmaceutical companies advanced inside information on drug coverage decisions.

"It is like putting biker gangs in charge of street crime," says Michael McBane, national co-ordinator of the Canadian Health Coalition, a public advocacy organization that predicts B.C.'s revamped drug review program will cost lives and add millions of dollars to the province's drug bill.

The UBC group, which has attracted international attention, is widely credited with helping keep a lid on prescription drug costs in B.C., which are the lowest in Canada. It often warns of the potential dangers of medications and has delayed use of unproven, costly new drugs such as the arthritis drug Vioxx, which was eventually pulled from the global market because it increased the risk of heart attacks. Because of restrictions placed on the drug at the recommendation of the UBC group, it's estimated there were 500 fewer deaths from Vioxx in B.C.

McBane says the UBC group's input should be expanded, not reduced and potentially eliminated, as appears to be happening.


Read more: http://www.canada.com/health/revamping+acclaimed+drug+watchdog+program/3874353/story.html#ixzz16Mmf09UQ