The Center for Public Integrity

Two refineries owned by oil giant BP account for 97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors over the past three years, a Center for Public Integrity analysis shows. Most of BP’s citations were classified as “egregious willful” by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and reflect alleged violations of a rule designed to prevent catastrophic events at refineries.

The Environmental Protection Agency is ordering clearer labels for all “spot-on” flea and tick treatments applied directly to dogs’ and cats’ skin, and will consider banning the products if pet deaths and illnesses linked to them don’t decline.

After years of fielding complaints about the ubiquitous weed-killer and water pollutant atrazine, the Environmental Protection Agency has decided to take a closer look at the product, used on corn and other crops, mainly in the Midwest. Some of those complaints are documented in a database produced by the Center in 2008 as part as of our Perils of the New Pesticides investigation.

Earlier this month, the Center received a five-page “open letter” from Hartz Mountain Corporation alleging that our 12/16/08 story, Pets and Pesticides: Let’s Be Careful Out There, contained inaccurate and misleading information about spot on flea and tick treatments for pets.

The Environmental Protection Agency stirred some excitement last month when it announced plans to begin “intensifying” the evaluation of spot on flea and tick products for pets due to an increase in the number of illnesses reportedly associated with those products. What the agency meant by “intensifying” wasn’t really clear initially, but now we have an official answer.

Back in December, our story, Pets and Pesticides: Let’s Be Careful Out There, reported that an alarming number of deaths had been linked to spot-on pesticide products for pets. This afternoon, the Environmental Protection Agency agreed there was cause for concern. The agency announced that it would intensify its evaluation of these products “due to recent increases in the number of reported incidents.”

Last June Diane Bromenschenkel applied a flea-and-tick product to her English pointer, Wings, so the dog wouldn’t get ticks while hunting pheasant in the tall grasslands of western Idaho. Wings, a healthy five-year-old with a sleek white coat and a chocolate brown mask, enjoyed long walks in the woods, bacon treats, and burying things in the yard. But three months after the pesticide was applied, the animal was dead.

The European Parliament’s environment committee voted last week in favor of new pesticide regulations that make America’s laws look a little, well, wimpy. The European package cracks down on chemicals that pose a risk to human health or the environment, setting strict guidelines that could result in bans on a large number of common agricultural products — up to 10 percent of insecticides, 10 percent of herbicides, and 32 percent of fungicides, according to estimates from the U.K.’s Pesticide Safety Directorate. The committee vote serves as a recommendation to the whole parliament, which will consider the proposal in January.

Before setting off a neurotoxic bug bomb in your house, you might want to try a couple of less extreme measures first: maybe clean up a little so there’s no food or water for the creepy crawlies, or try using bait traps. And if you decide to use those bombs, be careful: that’s the message from a new Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention report released Thursday.

Warning: the following contains an actual example of environmental advocates agreeing with the chemical industry. Both sides say that the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program is flawed.