In the past five years, companies and workplaces have violated pollution laws more than 500,000 times. But most polluters have escaped punishment.

Nancy Holt, a retired nurse from Mebane, N.C., is beset by mysterious neurological problems. She blames the cause of her illness on the multiple unknown toxicities of the sewage sludge that has been spread since 1991 on the fields across from her house as “fertilizer.”

Months after a federal judge said the city of Augusta used "fudged" data to show that spreading sewage sludge on dairy pastures is safe, the University of Georgia faces a separate lawsuit in Athens over the safety of the sludge applications.

A chance to score a federal research facility is driving the University of Georgia to deny intentionally spreading false data that supported the Environmental Protection Agency’s sewage sludge program, claims an attorney for a former EPA scientist.

Lin Eyer, of Havre de Grace, didn’t know she was riding her horse through a field of freshly spread sewage sludge last summer in Susquehanna State Park along the Susquehanna River in Harford County — one of more than 300 sites around the state where the treated waste is spread. A week later she was confined to her bed, shaking with chills, worn down by migraines. A dentist pulled out all her teeth in an effort to stop infections

Joe Behun has no doubt his 11-year-old son, Tony, died from a sludge-induced infection.

The head of the Maryland chapter of the NAACP asked the state attorney general's office Monday to conduct criminal and civil rights investigations into research in which fertilizer made from sewage sludge was spread onto lawns in poor black neighborhoods.