Coughing Fish: Environmental Canary in the Coal Mine?

Even though we already have sophisticated test instruments to assess levels of environmental pollution but can a “coughing fish” provide a better and faster water quality assessment? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Environmentalists had always been looking for ways to monitor water pollution are turning for help to creatures that have a vested interest in clean water – as in fishes. French technicians began the trend in 1973; they checked the waters of the Oise River by observing one peculiar kind of fish behavior: trout that are swimming upstream reverse their direction upon encountering pollution. Back in April 1974, scientists of the US Environmental Protection Agency announced the discovery of another potentially useful piscatorial reaction in the behavior of bluefish, sunfish, flathead minnows, trout and salmon. 

The researchers had found out that the fish began to cough more frequently when concentrations of mercury and copper became great enough to interfere with growth and reproduction. Aquatic biologist Robert Drummond, who directed the study, suggested that monitoring devices could be installed in waters near industrial and waste-treatment plants to record fish coughing and sounds an alarm if there were any sudden increase. Environmentalists would thus be warned that a plant in the vicinity was releasing a potentially harmful effluent into the water and would be able to act immediately to halt the discharge. 

Bhopal’s Toxic Legacy

After becoming synonymous with the corporate world’s callous disregard to environmental and social responsibility, will the victims of the Bhopal tragedy ever get just compensation?


By: Ringo Bones


A quarter of a century has passed since that tragic industrial accident in Bhopal, India back in December 3, 1984, and yet no one has been successfully prosecuted since then. Instead, Union Carbide had managed to conveniently blame the local rank-and-file of their pesticide plant for the tragedy. With the toxic legacy of that tragedy from 25 years ago still posing a health threat to the local inhabitants, will the victims of the Bhopal tragedy ever get the just compensation that they truly deserve?

The Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India has been set up mainly to produce the pesticide Sevin in which India being mainly an agricultural country has a high demand for the product. Unfortunately, the two main chemical precursors of the pesticide Sevin – phosgene gas and methyl isocyanate or MIC – can be very deadly to humans when released in the atmosphere – especially in very large industrial quantities.

As a widely used chemical weapon during World War I that makes people drown in their own mucus on dry land, the safety staff of the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal paid special attention to the safe handling of the phosgene gas during the manufacture of the pesticide Sevin. Though methyl isocyanate can kill humans by interfering with the oxygen-transporting properties of hemoglobin, the safety staff assumed that methyl isocyanate is not as toxic as phosgene gas on a gram-by-gram basis, so they placed a lesser importance on its handling safety in comparison to phosgene. Or is it because phosgene has a more familiar smell akin to a combination of newly mown grass and crushed green tomatoes while no one – prior to the tragedy of Bhopal back in 1984 – knows what methyl isocyanate smells like?

Unfortunately, during the night of that fateful accident, the attending personnel had underestimated the volatility of the methyl isocyanate that are being stored in very large quantities in designated storage tanks. After a mishap with the MIC tanks cooling water system, the volatile chemical created so much pressure that it ruptured the safety valves of their storage tanks. Resulting in the release of 40,000 tons of methyl isocyanate gas windward to the sleeping residents of Bhopal. Thus initiating the most tragic industrial accident in history.

Twenty-five years later, 100,000 inhabitants of Bhopal still experience chronic health problems that resulted from the December 3, 1984 accident. Not to mention a generation of children born with genetic disorders due to their parent’s exposure to methyl isocyanate gas. Even the groundwater of Bhopal has been contaminated with carbon tetrachloride from the abandoned Union Carbide chemical plant at concentrations 1,000 times the allowable limit set by the World Health Organization. Even the cow and breast-milk analysis in Bhopal show carcinogen and teratogen levels higher than that compared to other industrial sites elsewhere in the world. Despite of environmental groups like Greenpeace pressuring the Union Carbide Corporation for just compensation for the industrial accident victims of Bhopal, it seems that the victims of history’s most tragic industrial accident has denied justice yet again. Not to mention the on-going environmental degradation that is still imperceptibly claiming victims.

A (Not So) Brief History of Asbestos

A somewhat rather indispensable and somewhat unhealthy building block of our modern civilization, has our current industry completely weaned itself from asbestos?


By: Ringo Bones


There are probably only a few times in our history where the health risk of asbestos produced a significant outcry to have it banned from everyday use. One was way back in 1973 when researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York established a link between mesothelioma – a rare form of lung cancer – and workers with long-term asbestos exposure. And the other one was the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center towers highlighting the dangers of old buildings built before the ban on asbestos for architectural use was fully embraced. Even the United Nations headquarters in New York are one of the few remaining buildings containing large amounts of asbestos in its structure. Even though we managed to drastically wean ourselves from asbestos (it wasn’t easy by the way) in such a short period of time, looking back to the history of its use, one could conclude that our present almost asbestos-free technological society would certainly never have happened.

Asbestos is - or was - very useful in our long march to achieve our present state of technological prosperity. Asbestos was known in ancient times. Pliny the Elder even wrote about shrouds of woven asbestos used in the cremation of the nobility. Pausanias’ “Tour of Greece” describes a lamp wick not consumed by flame as being made “Carpasian Linen” a cloth of mineral fiber from Carpasius a district in Cyprus. Plutarch also recorded “perpetual lamp wicks” in the temples of the vestal virgins. Charlemagne is fabled to have amazed guests by tossing an asbestos tablecloth into the fire to be cleansed - While Marco Polo reported a working mine and an asbestos cloth manufacturing facility in Central Asia. The modern asbestos industry began with the working of an Italian mine in 1868. And the large-scale industrial production began with the discovery of asbestos in Quebec, Canada. Thanks to our search for a better steam engine.

Unlike other man-made products that were later on found out to be serious carcinogens, asbestos is neither man-made nor derived via the chemical processing of crude oil. It occurs as a natural mineral. Asbestos occurs in the form of veins and lenses within rock bodies as a byproduct of geologic metamorphism. And there are two main types of asbestos minerals, namely: serpentine and amphibole. Quite ironic for a serious environmental pollutant that is 100% natural.

Serpentine asbestos is also known as chrysotile whose chemical makeup is a hydrated form of magnesium silicate. Chrysotile makes up about 95% of the asbestos commercially mined making it the most important variety in terms of extraction and usage. Its fibers are of superior length, flexibility, fineness, and tensile strength. Chrysotile is found in rock as lustrous greenish veins. Its fibers are so fine that a single pound of this mineral provides almost six miles of asbestos thread. The fiber has a tensile strength that equals some grades of steel – i.e. 80,000 to 100,000 lb. per sq. in. Chrysotile asbestos possesses excellent resistance to heat, but turns progressively more brittle as temperature rises to about 400ºC.

Amphibole asbestos varieties that are commercially useful are crocidolite, anthophyllite, amosite, tremolite, and actinolite. Crocidolite asbestos is a soda-iron amphibolite and is also known as blue or Cape Blue asbestos because of its dull-blue color. Its fibers are of higher tensile strength (100,000 to 300,000 lb. per sq. in.) than those of chrysotile asbestos but crocidolite asbestos fuses at relatively lower temperatures.

Anthophyllite asbestos has a chemical makeup of magnesium-iron silicate type of asbestos that is composed of long coarse fibers of low tensile strength, while amosite asbestos is an iron-rich variation of the anthophyllite asbestos with a gray to brown color.

Tremolite asbestos, a calcium-containing magnesium silicate variant of chrysotile asbestos, is composed of fine silky fibers with a gray to white color. Tremolite asbestos is also the first form of asbestos that was widely used. While actinolite asbestos is a variant of tremolite asbestos where iron substitutes for as much as 2% of the magnesium in its chemical composition.

Asbestos is both quarried in open pits and mined in tunnels. The asbestos is initially removed manually from large pieces of quarried or mined rock matrix with the aid of a small hammer in an operation called cobbing. In later stages of the mining process, the asbestos fibers are removed from the crushed and screened matrix by air streams.

Crude asbestos is graded according to fiber length, fineness, flexibility, tensile strength, and infusibility. The longer fibers are carded and spun, sometimes with the addition of cotton thread. The spun fiber is woven into asbestos fabrics of varying thickness and densities. The smallest fibers, along with the rock dust from the matrix, are used to make asbestos cement. The amphibolite asbestos varieties all possess excellent resistance to chemical action, and are used to make filter pads and pipe-joint packing in chemical plants. They are also used as fillers in welding rods and plastics.

Asbestos board, a construction or insulating material is made of asbestos and portland cement molded into sheets by pressure. Asbestos paper is composed of thin sheeting of asbestos fibers bonded usually with a solution of sodium silicate. It is white, flexible and fireproof.

Belts of asbestos woven with fine brass wire are used as brake linings and to convey blast furnace slag, cement clinker, and other hot materials. Spun asbestos is made into fireproof ropes. Asbestos threads are woven into fireproof theater curtains and are also made into gloves for workers who must handle hot materials.

Given the myriad uses of asbestos in our modern technological society before it was banned in such a short period of time, it is quite a miracle that we even achieved a ban of over 90% when it comes to asbestos use. But with the looming threat of mesothelioma that first came to light in the early 1970s, the United States was among the first countries to achieve an almost total ban – greater than 90% - in the industrial and architectural use of asbestos. Even the visionary architects of the Sears Tower in Chicago decided not to use any form of asbestos during the start in its construction. After the preliminary reports of a rare form of lung cancer – i.e. mesothelioma – was uncovered by Mount Sinai Medical Center researchers during their study of workers exposed to high levels of asbestos fibers.

Given the health and environmental safety concerns of asbestos, there are even some towns in various isolated parts across the planet that were rendered as no-go areas after they were found out to contain too much free-floating asbestos particles. Such is the long-term legacy of our flirtation with asbestos – not to mention the probable long-term health concerns for workers involved in jobs with high asbestos exposure; Especially ship-breaking and working in old buildings with large amounts of old asbestos insulation.