Waste from animal enclosures poses many risks

'Cricket Hollow Zoo violations ‘pervasive,' judge finds”, reads a Gazette front page headline (Feb. 12). In that case, a judge ordered a troubled Iowa zoo to relocate three lemurs and four tigers after ' … inspections found ‘chronic' problems, including excessive feces in enclosures.”

Each year 40 million Iowa pigs spend the entirety of their 6-month lives in confinement buildings. Never living outside smelling or rooting in dirt, grass, trees, or streams, these pigs live in a closed building. Their feces and urine drop through a slatted floor to a pit, which is their basement. That waste, never pumped out while the pigs are there, decomposes into poisonous sewer gasses, including hydrogen-sulfide and ammonia, and the explosive greenhouse gas, methane. The fumes from that waste pit are so poisonous that air must be vented continuously or the pigs will die.

Those poison sewer gasses are blown out into the surrounding neighborhoods, affecting the health of humans. Studies have shown heightened respiratory ailments (including asthma) and central nervous system problems in humans, especially children, who live in proximity to these buildings. And we know about the human and pig deaths in confinements.

Because confinement pigs live in a sewer environment, sub-therapeutic antibiotics have to be administered through feed to protect their health (80 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. each year are used in agriculture). Confinement sewer environments allow antibiotic-resistant organisms to flourish. Studies have shown that people can be colonized and infected with MRSA and other antibiotic resistant organisms simply by living in proximity to confinements or fields where confinement waste has been spread. One study showed veterans who used the Iowa City VA Hospital and who lived 1 mile from a confinement had almost three times the risk of being colonized with MRSA versus a veteran who lives outside that 1 mile distance.

In our lawsuit against the EPA (Zook, et al v EPA), we filed 177 medical and scientific studies showing the human health and environmental damage from poison sewer gases that are created by using confinement buildings to raise pigs. Although the lawsuit was unsuccessful (the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear our case), the Washington, D.C. Federal District Court did not dispute our 177 studies. Neither did the EPA since some of those studies were done under their auspices. It turns out that even though the EPA knows the damage to people's health who live in proximity to these buildings, because of statute language in the Clean Air Act, they don't have to do anything about it.

In Iowa three lemurs, four tigers, 40 million pigs, and thousands of people are at risk from 'excessive feces” in enclosures.

' Bob Watson, of Decorah, is an environmental activist who makes his living in the wastewater industry. Comments: bobandlinda@civandinc.net