Here's an agency that can give the Texas Department of State Health Services a run for its money in finding ways to discount industrial pollution for absolutely any irregularities in public health. The New York Department of Health sent out letters to a dozen folks living in Ravena, where there's a big old LaFarge cement plant, saying that while "their blood mercury was elevated -- high enough to require being reported to the state -- there is no need to worry about their health or obtain further tests from their doctors."

And in giving the LaFarge plant a clean bill of health, Department officials offered these reassuring words:

"Most of the mercury released from the Lafarge cement stack travels great distances from the plant, Therefore any additional exposures that people may have had ... are expected to be very small".

Besides being wrong from a technical perspective (yes, a lot of Mercury is gaseous when it goes out the stack and floats miles away, but it can also hitch a ride on the heavier soot/particulate matter coming out of the same stack and stay there in the local vicinity, waiting to be inhaled by a local resident), that explanation isn't really very charitable for a Department of Health, is it?   Read More