By Don Hopey and David Templeton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Stacy Beisler's hand is covered with black soot she wiped from her backyard grill, which she had cleaned two days earlier. Robin Rombach/Post-Gazette

In many places around Western Pennsylvania residents see clusters of death and clusters of people sickened by cancer or heart and lung diseases.

And, like Lee Lasich, a Clairton resident, they’re frustrated that government health and environmental agencies don’t see them too, don’t do something about the problems and don’t take a tougher stance on enforcement of air pollution regulations.

Ms. Lasich, whose husband worked in U.S. Steel Corp.’s Clairton Coke Works and died after suffering from lung, prostate and throat cancers in 2004 when he was 53, is typical. She uses all the fingers of her right hand to tick off the names of friends who have died from brain cancer in her Constitution Circle neighborhood. She uses her left hand to count “a whole family that’s got pancreatic cancers.”

“They’re on our street and near where we live and they’re not that old,” said Ms. Lasich, a leader of the local grassroots group Residents for a Clean Healthy Mon Valley. “It’s too coincidental, and there’s too much there. This is a scary time to live here. People are starting to notice that something is going on; that something just isn’t right.”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s analysis of Pennsylvania Department of Health mortality data from 2000 through 2008 found that 14,636 more people died from heart and respiratory disease and lung cancer in 14 Western Pennsylvania counties than national rates would predict, or 12,833 after adjusting for excess smoking in the region. And the yearlong investigation found numerous people throughout the region who talked about what seemed like unnatural and unexplained clusters of illnesses and death in their communities.

This overlap of high mortality rates and pollution raises questions about whether there is a causal relationship. The question has not been definitively answered, but for the people who live among these clusters, the connection seems clear.

• In Lincoln, across the Monongahela River from Clairton, Stacy Beisler can quickly count the names of a dozen residents who either have some form of cancer or have died from it recently. There’s a half dozen more in her neighborhood who have lung disease or have died from it.

• In LaBelle, Fayette County, Gary Kuklish is one of several residents who point to nine cases of cancer in the 18 homes on Sauerkraut Hill.

• In Clearfield County, the United Methodist Church’s Greater Shawville Parish has numerous cases of cancer and respiratory disease, according to former pastor Jennifer Heikes. There’s hardly a family in the church that hasn’t been touched by cancer, said Leslie Shaw, a parishioner.

• Street maps hand-drawn by George Simo of his Jefferson Hills neighborhood, on top of a ridge along the Mon, are crowded with names and scribbled notations about fatal cancers, heart and respiratory disease at more than three dozen homes.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines a “cluster” as an unusual number of illnesses or deaths grouped together in the same time frame or location and reported to a public health agency. Cluster investigations seek to confirm cases of a single disease; establish whether the reported cases represent an unusually high occurrence of the disease; and explore potential causes when possible.

Epidemiologists say it is almost impossible to verify with scientific certainty reports of environmental disease and death clusters. But for the residents the clusters seem real and they raise real concern.

“In 36 houses on Silverdale and Silver roads I identified 17 cases of heart disease, three cases of lung disease, 17 cancers and five cases of dementia or Alzheimer’s,” Mr. Simo said.

Known around the neighborhood as “the cat man,” or “animal man,” Mr. Simo takes in stray animals. As he did with his neighbors, he’s kept records of death rates of those animals.

“People drop off live animals here all the time, but they’re dying young,” he said, pointing to the front of his 2 1/2-acre yard where homemade wooden markers adorn weedy graves of more than 60 cats, 280 birds and 13 dogs. “These dogs should have died of old age out on the farm but they’re dying here between young and middle age. What’s happening?”

It’s a question that hangs in the air in many communities. One is Greene Township, Beaver County, which has a mortality rate 44 percent above the national average for the three diseases reviewed by the Post-Gazette.

“There seems to be a lot of heart problems and a high rate of cancer around here, and it’s been around a while. Just about every road you go on I can name two or three people with cancer who lived there,” said Russell Morgan, board of commissioners chairman in Greene Township, home to FirstEnergy Corp.’s sprawling, 1,300-acre Little Blue Run coal-ash impoundment for the Bruce Mansfield power plant in nearby Shippingport.

“We should be looking at doing a study of the higher [mortality] rates,” said Mr. Morgan, whose father died of a heart attack there at age 56.

And upwind from highly industrialized Neville Island is Avalon, where each individual disease category — heart and respiratory disease and lung cancer — is above the adjusted national average and the total three-disease mortality risk rate is 18 percent higher. Janet Strahosky, a long-time Avalon activist, lamented the public apathy despite the community’s knowledge of the eight women with breast cancer and the dead-end street in neighboring Ben Avon where there are five people with cancers.

“I’ve canvassed all of these communities door-to-door and people know what’s happening, but they don’t speak out,” she said. The Allegheny County Health Department “needs to expand the chemical pollutants it tests for. There’s lots of stuff coming out of local industries that we don’t test for and don’t measure or monitor or connect them to health effects.”

A committee appointed by the Health Department board is working on new guidelines to regulate the emissions of air toxics by local industries. The board tabled a proposal in July 2009 that would have covered 300 hazardous chemicals, including all of the 187 hazardous air pollutants — many of them dangerous carcinogens — listed in the federal Clean Air Act. The county’s existing air toxic guidelines, which date to 1988, have never been updated.

Cause of clusters unproven
The Pennsylvania Department of Health gets 50 or more requests to investigate reported “clusters” every year — including calls from towns around Neville Island, from Shaler and Washington County — but hasn’t identified the environmental cause of any.

“They’re anecdotal, so we look at the mortality rates and try to get some sort of objective measure of what’s happening,” said Gene Weinberg, head of the department’s Bureau of Epidemiology. “As to clusters, well, we’ve seen some unusual rates. But discovering the factor causing them is rare.”

Even though it gets approximately 1,000 citizen referrals or reports a year, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in the CDC has never issued an environmental cause finding for a community “cluster” of death or disease in the United States.

The ATSDR, the principal non-regulatory federal public health agency responsible for addressing health effects associated with toxic exposures, works in cooperation with state health departments, which almost always act as the lead investigating agencies.

While such collaborations haven’t identified community clusters, the ATSDR has made determinations of a number of “occupational clusters,” including asbestos-related cancers and diseases related to W.R. Grace Co.’s mining of vermiculite in Libby, Mont. Even though that cluster is classified as occupational, the agency said, it caused health problems, disease and cancers for many women and children in Libby who never worked for W.R. Grace.

The CDC, working with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, is updating its 20-year-old cancer cluster investigation guidelines to incorporate new epidemiological survey and computer tools and best practices.

But those 1990 guidelines and any eventual updates of them are only advisory, which creates problems due to inconsistent investigations in different states, said Terri Nordbrock, executive director of the National Disease Clusters Alliance and an environmental health scientist.

“There’s also a lot of pressure not to declare a ‘cluster’ exists because it’s a controversial thing that takes a lot of work and attracts media attention,” Ms. Nordbrock said. “Many states don’t have the resources to do such investigations and any cluster findings can get them into a lot of trouble with not a lot of payback.”

In a written statement about the Post-Gazette’s ecological mortality study, Dr. Weinberg said the state Department of Health “recognizes that environmental pollution has health consequences.” Although associations may appear, he cautioned against attributing the mapped findings to any factor or combination of factors.

According to the ATSDR, the state health department has conducted 129 public health assessments and health consultations for the registry since 1994 and found no environmental cause for any cluster.

“It is important to understand that clusters, or elevated rates in time and space, can be identified,” said Beth Abrams, a spokeswoman for the ATSDR, “but that does not mean that those diseases necessarily share the same cause or an environmental cause.”

Another cluster view
Daniel Wartenberg, an epidemiologist, professor and director of the Division of Environmental Epidemiology at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., said he’s concerned that state health departments and the CDC are missing legitimate clusters.

“Some of the pollutants cause multiple types of cancer and even multiple diseases,” he said. “To say that a state health department will look at only one type of cancer or one disease when considering a cluster is crazy. It’s like calling a doctor when you don’t feel good and he treats your cold symptoms but not your broken leg.”

Dr. Wartenberg, who is on the board of the National Disease Clusters Alliance and also a member of the CDC committee working to update cluster investigation guidelines, said there’s better science, computer techniques and years of experience that states should be applying to cluster investigations that will make them work better for communities and the states.

There’s also a better way to approach such investigations, including analyzing death and disease data and pinpointing problem areas, he said.

“Now the health departments wait until they are called up or approached by individuals or communities about a perceived problem. The state doesn’t go out and look for these clusters. It’s passive.” he said.

In Clairton, Rex Cole Jr., a lifelong resident, has seen family members — uncles, aunts, father, grandparents — die of some form of cancer or heart disease in their 60s along with many neighbors. It’s the way of life and death in the mill town dominated by the world’s biggest coke plant.

“What you did was, you went to high school, then got a job at U.S. Steel,” said Mr. Cole, 28, who is leading a faith-based effort to attract alternative energy industries and jobs to Clairton. “The neighbors said everybody on the street basically died of cancer … Sometimes the smell is so thick you can taste it. But most people are more worried about putting food on the table than the long-term effects of lung or heart diseases.”

U.S. Steel declined to comment on the Post-Gazette’s study and its findings, or comment on whether its emissions have affected the health of residents in the Mon Valley. It did outline its ongoing $1.2 billion replacement and upgrade of its operations in Clairton, including new coke batteries and three new coke quenching towers.

Pollution in the Liberty-Clairton region has exceeded federal health standards for airborne particles since 1995. The coke works is the largest local contributor of airborne particles. It is operating under a county consent order and agreement designed to reduce those emissions.

Don Hopey: dhopey@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1983. David Templeton: dtempleton@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1578.

First published on December 13, 2010 at 12:00 am

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By Gary White
The Lakeland (Fla.) Ledger

Published: Saturday, December 11, 2010 at 3:30 a.m.
LAKELAND, Fla. | They have been called “Poisoned Patriots,” and no one is sure exactly how many of them are out there.

Their numbers include former Marines, their wives, children and civilian employees at Camp Lejeune, the sprawling United States Marine Corps base in Jacksonville, N.C. They drank, showered and bathed in water contaminated by chemical compounds with unpronounceable names, chemicals that have been linked to cancers.

The Marine Corps has acknowledged that water supplies at Camp Lejeune were tainted with dangerous compounds between 1957 and 1987. Following orders from Congress, the Marine Corps has taken steps to inform the hundreds of thousands potentially affected.

But many ex-Marines and former Camp Lejeune residents are far from satisfied. Activists, including former Winter Haven resident Mike Partain, have sifted through reams of documents, challenging minute details of the Marine Corps’ version of events at Camp Lejeune.

They say the contamination was far more widespread than the Marine Corps has admitted. They accuse the leadership at Camp Lejeune of ignoring repeated warnings about hazardous drinking water for years before it took action. They charge the Marine Corps with deliberately withholding crucial information and misleading investigators.

“Trying to get the truth out of the USMC is akin to nailing Jell-o to the wall,” Partain said. “As we unravel lie after lie, the USMC simply changes their story.”

Camp Lejeune represents the worst contamination of a public water system in United States history, according to Congressional testimony by scientists. The maximum level of toxins was more than five times the highest measured at Woburn, Mass., in the case detailed in the book and movie “A Civil Action.” In that case, a leukemia cluster was traced to contamination of water supplies resulting from improper disposal of industrial solvents.

One contaminant at Camp Lejeune was measured at 1,400 parts per billion in water from a faucet at the base hospital where Partain was born. That is 280 times the current allowable limit, though the government had not established limits for the chemical compound at the time.

An estimated 700,000 to 1 million people lived or worked at Camp Lejeune during the period of water contamination.

Marine Corps officials say the base leadership followed all pollution regulations of the era. They say investigations by federal agencies absolve the base leadership and the Corps of any intentional wrongdoing.

Advocates push for wider investigations, support legal actions against the Marine Corps and lobby for Congressional action to assure medical care for those with health claims.

Many Floridians exposed

More than 161,000 people have joined an official online registry for former Camp Lejeune residents and employees created in 2008. Floridians compose more than 14,000 of that total, second only to North Carolina.

Those Floridians include Kim Ann Callan of Lakeland. Callan, the daughter of an ex-Marine, was conceived at Camp Lejeune and lived there for the first nine months of her life.

Callan, 52, was treated for malignant melanoma a few years ago and was diagnosed in July with leukemia.

“It’s not just me,” Callan said. “Everyone in my immediate family that was associated with even a short period of time on the base has significant medical issues.”

Carla Morris of Auburndale is convinced that impure water at Camp Lejeune is to blame for her mother’s death from a rare gastric cancer in 2006 at age 69. Cora Hoffman worked as a labor and delivery nurse at Camp Lejeune’s Naval Hospital from 1966 through 1976 and again in the 1990s.

Morris, 45, said she has investigated her mother’s ancestry and found no other examples of cancer.

“I sat there … and watched my mother beg the doctor to cut her stomach out,” Morris said. “I’m mad as hell. I don’t know any other way to put it. That was my mama. Like I told my husband, she was only 69. That’s not old. My mom’s mom lived to be 92 years old.”

Partain, 42, was diagnosed with male breast cancer, an extremely rare condition, in 2007. He underwent a modified mastectomy, with the removal of one lymph node, and endured chemotherapy.

Partain said he has found 66 other men connected to Camp Lejeune who have been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Partain, the son and grandson of Marine Corps officers, was born in the base hospital at Camp Lejeune, where his father, Warren Partain of Winter Haven, was stationed, and the family resided in base housing during the first 13 months of Mike’s life. Partain said Camp Lejeune had been little more to him than a name on a birth certificate until he first learned about the water contamination through a CNN report in 2007.

It is almost impossible to determine clear causation for cancer and other diseases, said Dr. John Kiluk, a breast cancer specialist at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. But Kiluk said some of the male breast cancer cases in men with ties to Camp Lejeune are unusual.

Kiluk said the lifetime risk for a man to develop breast cancer is one in 1,000. Kiluk said he has treated about 20 men for breast cancer, and some — he wouldn’t give an exact number — have connections to Camp Lejeune.

The average age of diagnosis is 70. Partain was just 39 when he was diagnosed.

Kiluk said most men who develop breast cancer have a family history of female breast cancer. Partain said he knows of no breast cancer in his family.

“I think the thing that’s surprising in meeting a few of these gentlemen is some of them fall outside of that normal description,” Kiluk said. “Some are very young. When you’re very young with a very rare disease combined with no family history, it just makes you wonder what’s going on.”

Partain has testified twice about Camp Lejeune before Congressional committees. He has been interviewed for a film documentary about Camp Lejeune scheduled for release next year.

“I would like very much to have never been born at Camp Lejeune and never set foot in that place,” Partain said. “Who in their right mind would go overseas and fight for this country knowing that their family was being poisoned at home? These people left their families on this base and other bases across the country thinking they’re safe, and in reality they were in just as much danger as the guys overseas being shot at. That’s the betrayal part.”

Focus on fuel leaks

The saga of toxic water at Camp Lejeune is a complicated one covering decades and involving questions about military orders, federal pollution regulations and emerging knowledge about the dangers of certain chemical compounds.

Investigations have focused on four contaminants: trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (PCE), benzene and vinyl chloride (VC). The Environmental Protection Agency lists all four as known or suspected carcinogens, meaning they can cause cancer in humans.

TCE and PCE are both solvents. TCE is commonly used as an engine degreaser and PCE is used in dry cleaning. Investigations have traced some of the contamination at Camp Lejeune to two private dry cleaners adjacent to the base.

Benzene, an ingredient in motor fuels, has been linked to leukemia and other diseases. Vinyl chloride, which arises from the breakdown of TCE and PCE, can affect the heart, liver and immune system.

Partain and other activists have uncovered a history of fuel leaking from underground tanks at Hadnot Point Fuel Farm, constructed in the early 1940s. Recently discovered documents estimate the amount of fuel lost at between 400,000 gallons and 1.1 million gallons.

“Imagine taking a freighter and dumping (the contents) in the ground,” Partain said. “That’s what they did at Hadnot Point Fuel Farm. The Marine Corps has known this since 1996.”

First Lt. Gregory A. Wolf, a spokesman for the Marine Corps based at the Pentagon, said the Marines aren’t sure how much fuel leaked at Hadnot Point. He said 1.1 million gallons is the upper end of an estimate from a 1996 draft document.

The Marine Corps says the first clear evidence of contamination in drinking-water wells at Camp Lejeune came in 1984, after which it promptly closed down those wells.

Partain and others argue that Camp Lejeune’s leaders should have acted much earlier, noting volatile organic compounds were detected in water systems in 1980.

Documents posted on the “Forgotten” website show repeated warnings from 1980 onward, first from Army chemists and later from employees with a private company hired to analyze the water. One, written by U.S. Army Lab Services Chief William Neal in 1981, reads, “Water highly contaminated with other chlorinated hydrocarbons (solvents)!”

Camp Lejeune officials ordered testing of water systems located near a landfill in the lightly populated Rifle Range area in 1980. Water-supply wells at Hadnot Point and Tarawa Terrace, where thousands lived and worked, were not tested until 1984. Wolf, the Marine Corps spokesman, said wells were not tested there earlier because “sources of contamination … had not yet been identified.”

Partain makes the analogy to the average person learning that the water coming out of his kitchen faucet contains harmful chemicals.

“A reasonable person would go and find the source,” he said. “The Marine Corps claims it didn’t know the source for 4½ years. In the court system that’s called negligence.”

As the Marine Corps has repeatedly pointed out, the federal government did not set safe standards for the contaminants detected at Camp Lejeune until 1989, meaning the Marines were not required to take action before then.

Activists deride that stance as legally correct but irresponsible. Partain points to historical documents setting standards for drinking water at Department of Navy facilities, including Camp Lejeune. A 1963 order defines pollution as “the presence of any foreign substance (organic, inorganic, radiological or biological) in water which tends to degrade its quality so as to constitute a hazard …”

Another order from 1974 described organic solvents in drinking water as hazardous.

“Where is the due diligence?” Partain asked. “Do you have to have a (federal) regulation to say it’s hazardous? If they were following their own orders, they could have prevented all this contamination going back to 1963.”

Investigations, skepticism

Several federal agencies have investigated the issue. The Environmental Protection Agency in 1989 added Camp Lejeune to Superfund, a program that designated federal money for the cleanup of major hazardous waste sites. That remediation project is expected to last for decades.

As part of the Superfund process, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in 1997 issued a public health assessment that said Camp Lejeune residents faced little or no risk from drinking and using water at Camp Lejeune. Last year, though, the agency withdrew the assessment, saying it was flawed by inaccuracies and the failure to consider the presence of benzene in the water.

The EPA and the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, found no evidence of improper actions by Camp Lejeune’s leadership or the Marine Corps.

Partain and other activists, though, are highly critical of those reports. They say the investigations missed key documents and didn’t review historical regulations on water quality from the Department of the Navy, which oversees the Marine Corps.

An EPA investigator told a Congressional committee in 2007 that he recommended that charges be filed but was overruled by the Department of Justice, which is defending the Marine Corps for any tort claims filed in relation to Camp Lejeune. Partain also dismissed the results of an investigation by a Marine Corps Commandant Blue Ribbon Panel released in 2004 as tainted by a conflict of interest.

The National Research Council, a federal scientific agency, released a report in 2009 finding no conclusive link between water contamination at Camp Lejeune and diseases. In October, the director of the ATSDR released a letter criticizing the NRC report as flawed and incomplete.

The ATSDR is compiling a new assessment of water quality at Camp Lejeune that is scheduled for release late in 2011.

Advocates say the Marine Corps has withheld crucial information from investigators. As one example, Partain said a sub-contractor to the ATSDR last year accidentally found an undisclosed web portal operated by the Department of the Navy that yielded new details about Camp Lejeune.

Another activist, Jerry Ensminger of North Carolina, said the Marine Corps is unable to produce crucial documents that were the basis for the original ATSDR public health assessment from 1997.

“They mysteriously got lost,” Ensminger said of the documents. “I said, ‘For God’s sake, how can you stand behind an official public document for which you can’t even produce the supporting documents you created it from?’ ”

The Marine Corps insists it has cooperated with all investigations.

“The Marine Corps’ primary goal is to get answers for our Marines and their families,” said Wolf, the Marine Corps spokesman. “We have proactively preserved and forthrightly provided relevant documents and information to the scientific community and the public.”

Marine feels betrayed

Ensminger, a retired Marine Corps drill sergeant, ranks as probably the most prominent Camp Lejeune activist. Ensminger’s daughter, Janey, died of leukemia in 1985 at age 9.

“Anybody who has a child who’s been diagnosed with a catastrophic, long-term illness, once you get over the initial shock the first natural thing for a parent to do is start wondering why,” Ensminger said. “I was no different from anybody else. … I never thought I’d get an answer. I never dreamed I would.”

After seeing a TV news report in 1997, Ensminger said he began calling the environmental management department at Camp Lejeune and was assured the water contamination had been small and posed no health threat. As more details emerged, partly through Freedom of Information Act requests by other activists, Ensminger became convinced the military had deliberately understated the problem.

Ensminger, a co-creator of the “Forgotten” website, now devotes most of his waking hours to research about Camp Lejeune. He said he and other former Marines feel betrayed by what they see as deceit on behalf of the Marine Corps’ leaders.

“I trained over 2,000 new Marines at Parris Island,” Ensminger said. “I instilled in those young people our core values, our saying, ‘Semper Fidelis,’ which means ‘always faithful,’ and our slogan, ‘We take care of our own,’ and I can tell you without any doubt that no one is more disillusioned by the misconduct of the leadership both past and present of the United States Marine Corps and the Department of the Navy than I am.”

Partain was never a Marine, but his father — Warren Partain of Winter Haven — was.

“My dad had a bunch of sayings,” Mike Partain said. “One of them was, ‘Character is defined by what you do when nobody’s looking.’ The Marine Corps has known about this. They’ve known the extent of the contamination, and instead of doing the right thing and taking care of their people they turned their backs on us and left us out there to die. That goes against everything about the Marine Corps.”

Morris, the Auburndale woman whose mother died of gastric cancer, applauds the efforts of Partain and other advocates but doubts the military leadership will admit to what she sees as its culpability in the water contamination at Camp Lejeune.

“The first thing I told Mike (Partain) was, ‘They can come here and offer me every penny in the world; it ain’t going to change the fact that my mama’s gone,’ ” Morris said. “Money’s not going to bring my mama back to me, but if getting the story out reaches someone who doesn’t know about it and makes them find out something conclusive, then I’m all for it.”

Callan, the Lakeland woman with leukemia, also expressed anger at the government’s handling of the issue.

“It makes me absolutely sick that our government asks men and women who serve to fight for our country and then they don’t have our backs,” Callan said. “People are not necessarily looking for, ‘Here’s a check to make good all the trauma you’ve gone through.’ I don’t want that. I want accountability for the past and future. … I in no way think money cures that, but an admission or an apology for putting people through something that didn’t have to happen — that’s justice to me.”

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com

Cancer epidemics in Turkey could hold the secret to staving off a public health disaster in North Dakota.

Nature 468, 884-885 (2010)
Brendan Maher

Cappadocia, a region in central Turkey is known for stunning rock formations. But several small villages in the region have a less welcome reputation. For generations they have been plagued by mesothelioma. Photo credit: M. Carbone/H. Yang

They became known as the cancer villages — tiny hamlets in Cappadocia, Turkey, that for generations have been haunted by an extremely rare lung condition. Mesothelioma, responsible for up to half of the deaths in these towns, is almost always associated with exposure to asbestos. But here, researchers found a different cause: a mineral called erionite, which is built into the very fabric of the villages. It is on the roads, in the fields and in the stone used to construct the houses.

Now, decades of research in Turkey may help to save lives 9,500 kilometres away, in a rural corner of North Dakota. The Killdeer mountains in the western part of the state are rich in erionite, and they serve as the only nearby source of stone for surrounding Dunn County. When Ed Murphy, the state geologist, heard about the Turkish cancer villages five years ago, he grew concerned and launched an investigation that found erionite in gravel covering hundreds of kilometres of roads. It also turned up in driveways, car parks and even a playing field used by children. The North Dakota study eventually grew into a global collaboration including cancer biologists, geologists, epidemiologists, environmental scientists and physicians. And this week, the team is reporting some worrying results: that levels of exposure to erionite in North Dakota are the same as in some of the Turkish villages ravaged by mesothelioma.

The cancer hasn’t yet shown itself in North Dakota, but mounting evidence suggests that large-scale clean-up efforts should commence immediately, says Michele Carbone, a mesothelioma expert at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu who has worked in both North Dakota and the Turkish villages. “The reason that I find it exciting is that here we have a chance to do something,” he says.

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More than 100 residents poured in to the McCullom Lake Village Hall this week after a crushing development in a court case that many had hoped would resolve once and for all whether a nearby chemical plant had polluted the water and air, causing dozens of their friends and neighbors to develop brain tumors.

In all, 32 separate claims were filed against the chemical company. But recently, a judge in a Philadelphia courtroom abruptly halted the first of the cases to go to trial and sent the jury home, reserving harsh words for the expert witness whose report had tried to show the cancers were somehow linked.

Margaret Boyer, a longtime resident of the tiny McHenry County community, voiced the fears of many when she said, “We’ll never find out how this story ends.”

Some who gathered Wednesday night tried to channel their disappointment as they discussed the offer by the Philadelphia-based chemical company, Rohm and Haas, to pay $100,000 to have more than 300 wells tested and evaluated beginning next month. Although wary of the company’s intentions, many admitted they were desperate. If they couldn’t get an answer in court, maybe the independent testing of their wells could provide one.

“The residents are all in fear,” said Terry Counley, the village president. “We have this black cloud over the village. Between the economy and the brain cancer, it’s very hard to sell a house here.”

Even if a buyer comes forward, it doesn’t guarantee a sale. About a month ago, an appraiser attached a newspaper story about the possible cancer cluster with the appraisal report to the bank, and the financing fell though, Counley said. It wasn’t the first time.

The shock waves from the legal setback in Philadelphia continue to ripple through McCullom Lake, where some residents wonder if a forgetful moment or a twitching leg will end with a diagnosis of brain cancer.

Of the claims of those who lived or worked around McCullom Lake, 18 contracted malignant brain tumors, 13 contracted benign brain tumors and one developed liver problems, documents show.

The judge who stopped the trial last month said he will soon either declare a mistrial or rule in favor of Rohm and Haas. The case involved a widow suing on her husband’s behalf after he and his two next-door neighbors were all diagnosed with rare forms of malignant brain cancer within a year of each other.

The suit alleges that the company spilled, leaked and dumped highly toxic chemicals into the soil and groundwater for more than five decades.

But some McCullom Lake residents who remain healthy after years of living in the community say they don’t believe cancer-causing chemicals invaded their village. They are sympathetic but say they just haven’t seen the evidence. Others have resigned themselves to the possibility.

“(I’m) up there in age, and if brain cancer doesn’t get (me), something else will,” said 76-year-old Eireen Rybak, who has lived for more than two decades in the same house overlooking the lake.

“It would be a comfort to know either way,” Rybak acknowledged.

McCullom Lake, population 1,200, has one restaurant (All Sports Bar & Grill) and six main streets. It’s overwhelmingly white and blue collar. Neighbors know each other and let their kids play together on the park’s green plastic alligator and grassy field.

The glistening, 245-acre McCullom Lake is the crown jewel of the town originally meant as a vacation destination for Chicagoans looking for a close getaway.

Dave Post, a retired truck driver, has lived in the village for 22 years. Like others, he worries he can’t sell his house.

Post, 52, followed the trial in hope of finding out if there truly is a higher risk of contracting cancer in the village where he raised his two daughters.

“My neighbor two doors down died of the small brain cancer,” he said.

On a recent afternoon, he stood in his backyard, his eyes squinting in the sun as he struggled to remember the name of a movie.

“Yeah, ‘Erin Brockovich.’ This is kind of like that,” he said triumphantly of the film, based on a true story about a legal secretary who exposed a utility company that contaminated the water of a small California town.

Rohm and Haas officials insist their plant in nearby Ringwood hasn’t tainted the water. An 8.2-acre chemical waste pit was in use on the site from 1959 to 1977, but it has since been closed.

The lawsuit alleges that vinyl chloride seeped into the water supply and caused the tumors. Although the company acknowledges the presence of an underground contamination plume, it asserts it has not reached private or public water supplies. Officials have previously said vinyl chloride has not been detected in the drinking water.

Rohm and Haas, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Co., has been working with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to clean up toxic chemicals on the site since 1991, and a 2009 letter from the state EPA states that “no potable water supply wells are currently at risk from the groundwater contamination.”

In stating there was no connection between cancers and their plant, Rohm and Haas has previously cited reports from the McHenry County Health Department, the Illinois Department of Public Health, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But attorneys for the residents took issue with the findings. The judge in the case had ruled the McHenry County Health Department report — which stated that an environmental analysis didn’t support evidence of a cancer cluster — and statements from a handful of other public agencies were inadmissible because they looked at the larger population instead of the McCullom Lake subset.

Citing a gag order by the judge, a spokeswoman for Rohm and Haas declined comment.

Although the residents’ attorney, Aaron Freiwald, said he couldn’t discuss specifics of the case, he argued that there was “no doubt based on the facts that there is a brain cancer cluster in McCullom Lake.”

During the hearing last month, the judge had called the expert testimony by Richard Neugebauer, the Columbia University scientist hired by the plaintiffs, “tantamount to being fraudulent,” according to court transcripts. Neugebauer had made a number of changes to his report alleging the existence of a cancer cluster.

The modifications were so egregious, the judge said, he couldn’t allow him to continue his testimony. Neugebauer described it as “a misunderstanding” and said the changes didn’t affect the validity of his report.

The trial’s sudden conclusion didn’t shake Sandy Wierschke’s conviction that the water and air caused her glioblastoma, a rare form of brain cancer. She and her husband, Tim, had made the grueling drive to Philadelphia for opening statements.

“They must think we’re idiots, that people are going to believe that it’s a coincidence,” said Tim Wierschke, 61, who owns a bowling pro shop in Crystal Lake. “This many brain cancers in this little community.”

Every few minutes, Sandy Wierschke, 48, adjusts her crooked glasses. The right temple had to be removed when it would no longer fit over the lump that starts in the middle of her head and juts all the way down to her ear. Her

life is reflected in two cardboard boxes in her living room — one filled with old bowling trophies and the other with empty pill bottles. She is eager for her day in court.

“They just have to admit that they did wrong,” she said.

Her daughter, Stephanie, has put off going to college so she can help take care of her mother.

At 22, she has her mother’s blue eyes, the same blond locks. And since her mother’s cancer diagnosis, she can’t bear to imagine a life without her.

Her eyes fill with tears before she gets a single word out.

“I try to have a positive attitude about it, but after four years, it’s kind of hard to stay positive,” she says.

She worries that her mother won’t be around for her wedding or for the birth of her children.

By now, she’s sobbing, gasping for air between words.

“Mostly, I’m scared that she’s not going to be around in the future, to see me grow up,” she said.

Tribune correspondent Terry Ganey contributed to this report.

–Duaa Eldeib

Randy White, upper left, with his daughters Kristen, center, and Angie, son Brandon and ex-wife Debra Cross.

Family calls on Congress for help

Thursday, 18 Nov 2010

Roby Chavez
roby.chavez@foxtv.com
By ROBY CHAVEZ/myfoxdc

FREDERICK, Md. – The recent death of another person in the family closely connected to the ongoing cancer cluster investigation near Fort Detrick has turned personal loss into rage.

Debra Cross, the ex-wife of local activist Randy White, died Friday night after battling stage four renal cell carcinoma for months.

Many people in Frederick blame a soaring number of cancer cases on the Army post’s track record of testing dangerous chemicals.

Last month, the Maryland Department of Health declared there was no cancer cluster.

The latest victim’s family is at the center of that fight for Frederick families. On Wednesday, they are sending an emotional message to Congress.

“I collapsed on the floor because it was a replay of what I had just been through two years ago with my daughter in this exact funeral home,” said Randy White, as he grieved at a Frederick Funeral Home.

White’s daughter, Kristen Renee, died of brain cancer two years ago. Now his ex-wife has died too.

“The people in Frederick need to be aware that there is a serial killer in the back yard,” he said.

White has spent $220,000 on his own independent research and testing to investigate contamination. He says it found high levels of chemicals in the ground and water.

With another death in his family, he’s making an urgent plea.

“I’m calling on Senator Barbara Mikulski and Senator [Ben] Cardin to get behind this. They need to get behind this because the people of Frederick need to be aware of what’s happening in their own backyard,” said White.

That backyard, Fort Detrick, used to be the place where White’s children used to play.

Fort Detrick officials have already admitted to testing Agent Orange and nerve gas in the past.

For the two surviving White children, the death of their mother brings sadness and fear about their own young lives. Angie has already had benign stomach cancer.

“Me and my brother live in fear if we’re going to be next. I wish I could say she died a peaceful death. It was horrific,” said Angie Pieper, Cross’ daughter.

“She couldn’t walk. We had to carry her and take care of her physically. She deteriorated. She couldn’t eat. Slowly we watched. The hardest thing I had to face besides my sister’s death,” said Brandon White, as he described his mother’s last days.

White painfully recalled his ex-wife’s dying words just days ago.

“She told me don’t quit. She looked at me and said you fight. Don’t let any other families go through the pain we’ve been through. It’s why I’m doing it,” said White as he wiped away tears.

White says by his count, his wife is the fourth person in 21 days with ties to Fort Detrick to die of cancer in Frederick.

Fort Detrick maintains it is still collecting information and reviewing government records. It is also working with the health department on its ongoing study.

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Kristen Renee Foundation

BY JOSIE RAYMOND
Tonic.com

Trevor Schaefer beat cancer as a kid. Some of his peers weren’t as lucky. Today, he advocates for better laws so other teens don’t need chemotherapy.

Charlie Smith tells a story about her son, Trevor Schaefer, who was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2002 while the pair lived in idyllic McCall, Idaho.

He was just 13 years old, in the midst of 14 months of chemotherapy, bald, thin, with sunken eyes, when he sat at the breakfast table thinking of other children from his hometown who had also been diagnosed with cancer. Smith remembers, “He looked up at me and said, ‘Mom, I’m so angry that this happened to me but it happened for a reason. We need to find out why this is happening to so many kids. I want to get some answers.’”

Trevor during treatment

Boxer’s In His Corner

Now a cancer-free 21-year-old business major at Boise State University, Schaefer has been looking for answers, and finding some, for the last eight years. His biggest success came at the end of September, when Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), the Chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Environment & Public Works, introduced “Trevor’s Law,” federal legislation three years in the making aimed at improving the investigation of disease clusters. “It’s about preventing future clusters by finding the causes,” Schaefer explains.

“Disease clusters” are geographical pockets with higher-than-average incidences of disease, such as the unofficial cluster of childhood cancers in McCall. Schaefer’s Senator, Mike Crapo (R-ID), joined the bill as a co-sponsor, spurring hopes that the Senate will pass the bipartisan effort sometime next year, despite the recent gridlock.

read full article at Tonic.com

Community Wants Answers On Cancer Rate

Spartanburg WSPA TV, South Carolina
By CHRIS CATO
Published: November 16, 2010

Whoever came up with the saying “good fences make good neighbors” clearly never lived on Bennett Dairy Road.

Here in the Cannons Campground community east of Spartanburg, the yards are not separated by fences. But the quality of the character of the person next door is never in question.

Take Benjamin “Frog” Bennett, for example. At 75 years old, Frog would never let a fence impede him from his daily duty of walking to the house next door to check on Karen Murph.

“She needs somebody and I’m the closest one to her, and I’m retired,” says Bennett, “so why shouldn’t I look after her?”

The neighbors share more than a cup of sugar. An unfortunate bond binds them. Both lost their spouses to cancer. Frog’s Martha died of lymphoma in 2008 at age 73. She fought the disease for 14 years. The last two were the worst.

“When she passed away, she weighed 75 pounds,” says Bennett. “If it had been something I could have fought with my hands, it would be different. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything for her.”

Murph knows his feeling of helplessness. Her Tommy lived for only 18 months after developing a brain tumor in 1997 at the age of 44. While he was undergoing treatment, she was also diagnosed with cancer.

“We had always been so healthy,” says Murph. “It was so weird how it just hit us both like that. But we weren’t the first on this road to get sick.”

WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Karen and Tommy Murph moved to Bennett Dairy Road from Landrum in 1990. In this area where most of the surnames are Bennett or Chapman or Arthur, the Murphs stood out. But after their diagnoses with cancer, they knew they were officially part of the neighborhood. The house across the road from them was home to a mother-daughter pair of Chapmans who had survived uterine and breast cancers, respectively. Next door, Frog Bennett’s wife was battling lymphoma. Next door to the Bennetts, Fred Arthur was in his final struggle with colon cancer. Next door to Fred Arthur, Ralph and Joyce Arthur were still haunted by the loss of their youngest child, Kimberly, who died in 1975 at the age of 15 with leukemia.

“I will never, ever, ever get over it,” says Ralph Arthur, now 80. “I don’t care how long I live, I will never get over losing Kim, so young.”

The sad pattern continues down Bennett Dairy Road, which stretches just over a mile from Old Converse Road to Bud Arthur Bridge Road. In a door-to-door survey of homes in this small area, WSPA documented 25 cases of cancer, 14 of them fatal, dating back to the Kim Arthur case in ’75. The most recent diagnosis was in 2001, a 60-year old man with bone cancer.

“It just makes you wonder why?” asks Frog Bennett. “Why has this particular area had so many deaths?”

That’s the question WSPA set out to answer at the onset of this investigation in August 2010, a journey that would lead to some places this community had forgotten about and, ultimately, to a place everyone knows.

NOT A CANCER CLUSTER…

Your first impulse when hearing of a seemingly high number of cancer cases in a limited area is to label it a “cancer cluster”. Your second impulse is to take the information to South Carolina’s authority on such matters: the Department of Health & Environmental Control. But DHEC spokesperson Adam Myrick quickly informed us the illnesses on Bennett Dairy Road do not constitute a cancer cluster for a number of reasons. The first and foremost being, cancer is common.

“Cancer’ is an umbrella term given to a wide variety of diseases of a cellular nature for which there is no cure,” says Myrick. “Because of that, you are always going to be able to find a certain level of cancer in every community.”

He also points to other factors, such as heredity and lifestyle. Cancer is genetic (many of the families on Bennett Dairy Road and the surrounding area are related). Cancer is more common in people over age 50 (many of the patients in this area are older). And cancer clusters are usually made up of the same type of cancer because of a common environmental factor (such as asbestos causing lung disease).

A true cancer cluster, as defined by DHEC, exists when the number of cancer cases that occur is more than would be expected by chance to occur in a certain location or time period. To determine if this exists, DHEC’s South Carolina Central Cancer Registry (To learn more about cancer clusters, click here) conducts what is called a community cancer assessment by looking at the number of cases and deaths that occurred in the zipcode of the area of concern. In fact, SCCCR conducted an assessment of the Bennett Dairy Road zipcode, 29307, in 2002, using data from 1996 to 2000. (1996 is the earliest year that can be studied by SCCCR because that is the first year legislation required hospitals, labs, and doctors’ offices to report new cancer incidences to DHEC.) The assessment found there were fewer cancer cases and cancer deaths than expected in 29307, concluding there was no evidence of cancer clustering.

To find out cancer rates in your community, click here.

…OR IS IT?

However, many of the cases documented by WSPA in Cannons Campground were diagnosed prior to 1996. Seeking a second opinion, we took our findings to Dr. Jim Burch, an epidemiologist with the University of South Carolina’s Cancer Control Program.

He echoed many of the things DHEC told us regarding cancer clusters. And he told us it’s hard to make an assessment without knowing the community firsthand. But he also said three things about our data caught his eye:

1) While the cases are not all the same type of cancer, there are several hematological forms of the disease, including three cases of leukemia and variations of bone cancer. The three leukemia cases are located almost next door to one another.

2) While many of the patients are older, there are several young victims. In 1976, one year after Kim Arthur died of leukemia at age 15, a 17-year old named David Putman was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma in his leg. He died two years later. Also in 1976, 35-year old Loretta Richburg developed a mass in her leg and died four years later. None of these victims were related.

“It does seem unusual to me,” said Dr. Burch, looking at a map pinpointing the homes of those afflicted. “A lot of the cancer clusters that have been investigated — and there have been a lot of them with problems all across America — started in just the same way.”

3) The third thing about our information that struck him as odd was the story of Karen and Tommy Murph — not the fact that they developed cancer at the same time; Burch says that’s not unheard of. But there was a third member of the Murph household affected during the same time period: Petey, the family dog.

“She wasn’t even that old,” says Karen. “She just had these big knots come up on her. (The veterinarian) said she had tumors.”

The dog died of cancer just before Tommy Murph succumbed to the tumor in his brain.

“That’s unusual,” says Dr. Burch. “Pets can serve as sentinels for situations where there might be an environmental contaminant.”

CONTAMINATED?

If there was a contaminant in the environment on Bennett Dairy Road, Karen believes she knows how it entered her household: through the well in her backyard. Most of the homes in this area were on private wells until the mid-to-late 1990s. Karen says her water tasted awful.

“It was just so doggone strong, it just about made me sick to my stomach,” says Karen.

She says she stopped drinking the water and refused to let her son do so. Tommy kept drinking it, and so did Petey the dog. But Karen says she did enjoy taking long baths in the tub.

“I was the kind that would just get in there and soak for hours,” she says.

The disease she was diagnosed with in 1997 was anal cancer.

After undergoing radiation treatment, the cancer went away. But she says it came back in 2005 in another part of her body and is now in her brain. She says her doctor recently gave her six months to live, but she doesn’t accept it.

“I’m fighting it and I’m gonna win it, by doggies,” says Karen. “i’m gonna fight with everything I can.”

Frog Bennett says he never had a problem with the way his well water tasted. But another neighbor, Corinne Dillard, says she did. She says it started tasting strange in the 1970s.

“Everybody in my family just started getting sick,” says Dillard, 79.

She says over the years, they had their water tested three times and each time it was contaminated. She couldn’t remember with what it was contaminated, but she says she remembers what her doctor said when she showed him the test results.

“He told us not to use the water, not to even take a bath in it,” says Dillard.

That was the year before her husband died of heart trouble. Dillard says shortly before his death, doctors found a cancerous tumor in his throat.

RECENT TESTS COME BACK CLEAN…SORT OF

As part of this investigation, WSPA paid a private lab, Rogers & Callcott, to test water samples drawn from six wells in the community, including Karen Murph’s inactive well and two active wells. Three of the samples came back with high levels of acetone, but the lab determined that’s because the bottles used by Clemson University researchers to collect the samples were pre-rinsed in acetone. There were no suspicious levels of any other volatile organic chemicals.

These results were not a surprise. Volatile organics break down rapidly in the environment. And ground water is constantly moving.

“Test performed today don’t tell us what was in those wells 20 or 30 years ago,” says Dr. Burch.

read online and watch video

Will Steele was diagnosed earlier this year with a rare form of cancer that has no cure. He has the love and support of his family: (from left) 6-year-old Paige, 3-year-old Liam, 5-year-old Emma and his wife, Kerri.

By Jessica Rush, jrush@acnpapers.com
Published: Monday, November 15, 2010

Will Steele, 34, of Frisco was diagnosed in February this year with desmoplastic small round cell tumor (DSRCT), an aggressive sarcoma (cancer of the soft tissue and/or bone) so rare that the Texas Cancer Registry only reports between three and eight cases a year statewide. And yet, 20-year-old Joffrey Swieczkowski, who lives about a mile away from the Steele family, received a DSRCT cancer diagnosis in September.

The coincidences continue.

Two local girls in high school also have rare forms of cancer, Ewing’s sarcoma. DSRCT is a combination of both Ewing’s sarcoma and Wilms’ tumor. One of the girls lives in the same neighborhood, Plantation Resort, as the Steele family.

Submitted Photo: From left: Joffrey Swieczkowski stands with his older brother, Hudson, and younger brother, Stefan. Joffrey was diagnosed with the same rare form of cancer that Will Steele has, and they live within a mile of each other.

Dr. Jon Trent is an associate professor of medicine at MD Anderson’s Department of Sarcoma Medical Oncology in Houston. He said both DSRCT and Ewing’s are very rare diseases. There are only a few hundred cases in the United States every year.

“Where there are four rare cancers in a small area, you could be concerned about an environmental exposure,” Trent said. “It certainly could be due to really bad luck and chance, but it’s highly unlikely.”

It is very difficult to find out what causes rare cancers, because there are not enough cases to study, he said.

“Presumably, there is some kind of genetic event, whether that is due to something in the environment or a mistake internally in the cell,” Trent said.

The Texas Cancer Registry’s website defines a cancer cluster as the occurrence of a greater-than-expected number of cases within a group of people, a geographic area or a period of time. Christine Mann, assistant press officer for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said it would be difficult for the state to evaluate if the Frisco residents are indeed a part of a cancer cluster.

“There’s no statistical data on that cancer in Collin County,” Mann said.

The records, which go back to 2001, show no cases of DSRCT in the geographic region. Mann said recent diagnoses from this year would not yet be updated in the cancer registry and that there is little known about the possible environmental factors that could cause or precipitate growth for this type of cancer.

Still, Steele and Swieczkowski were both healthy before their sudden health problems. Steele, an athlete since middle school, was a semi-professional runner, often running between eight and 10 miles a day.

“We were really surprised by his diagnosis,” his wife, Kerri, said. “He rode his bike to work every day.”

The father of three found a lump in January of this year that eventually led to the discovery of more tumors.

“His entire abdominal cavity, organs and lymph nodes were all full of tumors,” Kerri said.

Doctors told the Steele family that Will had from a year to 18 months left to live.

Swieczkowski’s diagnosis came as a similar surprise. His mother, Rebecca, noticed her son becoming extremely fatigued throughout the summer. He worked on changing his diet and adding exercise, but then stomach pains surfaced. Joffrey was misdiagnosed several times before DSRCT was confirmed.

“That’s what’s so unusual – he was so completely healthy, living and eating,” Rebecca said. “He never smoked or did drugs or alcohol. You have no hints at all. We don’t really have cancers in our family at all.”

Joffrey was also active outdoors. As a former marching band member at Centennial High School, he practiced in the school’s parking lot, and Rebecca said he spent most of his weekends over at two friends’ houses in Plantation Resort.

The families have not yet been able to get together at the same time to discuss possible commonalities as they focus on chemotherapy treatments and its side effects, but Rebecca is anxious with questions.

“What was in the soil?” she asked. “Last winter we had lots and lots of rain and more snow that broke records. You just don’t know what really triggers it, but they were all outside in this area.”

The families speculated that Exide Technologies, a battery-recyling plant about five miles north and west of Plantation Resort, could have contributed to the environmental catalyst. Historically, wastewater from Exide’s facility used to be discharged to the then-operating Stewart Creek wastewater treatment plant. The wastewater contained certain concentrations of lead and cadmium, known human carcinogens, which Exide officials said could have ended up in the sludge-drying beds of the treatment plant.

However, topographical maps of the city show that water near the plant would flow in the southwest direction, away from Plantation Resort. City officials said the prevailing winds blow northeast of the plant, which does not put Plantation Resort in its direct path.

Last Saturday, more than 250 other runners joined together in the Frisco Trails community to raise money for the Steele family and help out with the onslaught of medical bills. Wim Schalken of The Trails Runners helped organize Will’s Run after neighbor Kathy Dann approached the running group.

“This is so close to home, and we realize that this could happen to any of us,” Schalken said. “It’s like the typical Frisco family, and it just makes you humble. You have to appreciate every day that you have.”

Visit willsrun.com for information.

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Report about contracts signed between 10 US universities and global oil companies

by Margot Roosevelt
Los Angeles Times

Have hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from major oil companies compromised the ethics of energy research at such institutions as UC Berkeley, UC Davis and Stanford?

That’s what Jennifer Washburn, a longtime critic of academic conflicts of interest, contends in “Big Oil Goes to College,” a new report that delves into the details of contracts signed between 10 major U.S. universities and global oil companies.

According to the 212-page study, released by the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank, such companies as BP, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips have funded more than $800 million in potentially compromised research with few protections for academic independence.

For example, since 2002, Stanford has received $225 million from a consortium led by ExxonMobil to study technology to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The company operates refineries, oil drilling facilities, tankers and gas stations, making it a major emitter of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases globally.

As part of the Stanford contract, the industry controls all four voting seats on the research alliance’s governing body, and peer review of faculty research proposals is done “at the discretion of industry sponsors,” the report says.

However, the report notes, ExxonMobil and other major oil companies are currently investing little of their considerable profits in clean-energy research and development within their companies, suggesting that grants to Stanford and and other prestigious universities may be largely a public relations effort designed to “green” company images.
Stanford strongly disputed the characterization of the research at its Global Climate and Energy Project as compromised or controlled by corporate interests.

Washburn is the author of the book “University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.” In a 2007 op-ed piece for the The Times, “Big Oil Buys Berkeley,” she examined BP’s $500-million deal with UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to fund the Energy Biosciences Institute, devoted to biofuels research. “For a mere $50 million a year, an oil company worth $250 billion would buy a chunk of America’s premier public research institutions, all but turning them into its own profit-making subsidiary,” she wrote.

After the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP has come under increasing public scrutiny for limiting the academic freedom of scientists it is funding to study the environmental consequences of the spill.

Read Tribune Washington reporter Neela Banerjee’s account of the Center for American Progress report on oil company contracts with universities.

– Margot Roosevelt
Greenspace Environmental News from California and Beyond
read full article online at the LA Times

RELATED:

Planned distribution of BP funds worries some scientists

Why no campus protest over Berkeley-BP connection?

Big Oil Buys Berkeley

Big Oil Goes to College 200 pages pdf. Center for American Progress.

Study shows women who live in areas with high levels of benzene are most affected

By MATTHEW TRESAUGUE
Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle
Oct. 27, 2010

Women who live in Texas neighborhoods with higher levels of benzene, a pollutant from refineries and tailpipes, are more likely to have babies with a serious neurological defect, according to a new study.

Scientists have long known that the highly toxic chemical can cause cancer and damage the immune system.

But the new study links benzene to a birth defect for the first time and adds to the growing body of evidence showing that air pollution can harm a fetus, the authors said.

A team of researchers from the University of Texas School of Public Health and Texas Department of State Health Services conducted the study, which appeared in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

The study suggested that pregnant women exposed to the highest concentrations of benzene had two times greater risk for their children to be born with spina bifida — a condition in which a piece of the spinal cord protrudes from the spinal column.

People with spina bifida may have paralysis of all or part of the lower body. They also may have water on the brain, learning disabilities and depression.

Benzene can pass from mother to fetus through the placenta, possibly causing damage to DNA material. The defects occur during the first month of pregnancy.

“Spina bifida is a relatively rare birth defect, and though our study may show greater risk if one lives in an area with high levels of benzene, the absolute risk is still very small,” said Philip Lupo Jr., one of the study’s authors and an epidemiologist at the UT School of Public Health.

Other pollutants

At the same time, the study’s authors did not find statistically significant ties between neural tube defects such as spina bifida and other air pollutants – toulene, ethylbenzene and xylene.

The researchers studied data on live births, stillbirths and aborted fetuses with neural tube defects in Texas from 1999 to 2004 and U.S. Census tract-level emissions estimates.

They found that the risk of spine bifida more than doubled for those living in areas with estimated benzene concentrations greater than 3 micrograms per cubic meter of air. Federal data shows Harris, Bexar, Jefferson and Travis counties had median concentrations of benzene between 1.38 micrograms and 4.93 micrograms in 1999.

Texas leads the nation in benzene releases, accounting for more than one-third of emissions among the states. But Texas’ benzene emissions have dropped 37 percent over the past five years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s latest data shows.

Elena Craft, an Austin-based health scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, who was not involved in the study, said the greater risk for spina bifida is significant.

In Texas, she noted, it’s cause for concern, because state regulators don’t consider chronic benzene concentrations less than 4.5 micrograms per cubic meter of air to be hazardous enough to affect health. Michael Honeycutt, chief toxicologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said the agency would take a closer look at the study.

“This link to spina bifida at lower concentrations of benzene is interesting,” he said.

Multivitamin intake
Honeycutt said he wanted more information about the women’s use multivitamin pills containing folic acid. A recent study found that those who lived within a mile of an industrial facility or waste site are less likely to take the multivitamins, he said.

The authors acknowledge that lack of information on the maternal use of folic acid is one of the study’s potential limitations.

But they noted that a recent study found little evidence linking neural tube defects and folic acid intake since a federal order to add the B vitamin to enriched grain products in 1998.

Lupo said the researchers intend to take a closer look at the mothers’ lives, such as daily exposure to benzene and diet, in future studies.

“We see this study as a first step,” he said. “It is not the end of the story.”
matthew.tresaugue@chron.com

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By Drew Brooks and Mike Hixenbaugh
Staff writers

Fort Bragg officials say test results have ruled out the possibility that conditions inside homes on the installation contributed to the inexplicable deaths of 10 infants since 2007.

But a separate and ongoing probe into military housing by the Army Criminal Investigation Command and the Consumer Product Safety Commission has yet to eliminate any environmental factors in the deaths.

Despite the ongoing probe, officials with Fort Bragg and Picerne Military Housing declared Tuesday that the houses where infants died are safe.

Fort Bragg’s Directorate of Public Works ordered environmental tests at each of the 10 homes associated with the deaths, and those results were announced Tuesday.

“Across the board, none of them tested positive for anything that would contribute (to the deaths),” said Col. Stephen Sicinski, garrison commander at Fort Bragg.

The announcement came about a week after Fort Bragg officials disclosed the test results to current residents at the homes. Some of the parents whose babies died said they also were notified.

Jamie Hernan, a lawyer who represents the parents of four of the dead babies, said he and his clients are not satisfied with Fort Bragg’s findings.

“I’m not surprised the military has claimed there is no link between these deaths, but note that the Criminal Investigation Command maintains an open and ongoing investigation, as do other federal agencies,” Hernan said. “So clearly, the issue is not resolved, and the testing conducted by the military – in some cases years after the fact – certainly was not comprehensive enough to declare that their housing is safe.”

Drywall concerns
More thorough tests by CID and the Consumer Product Safety Commission are pending.

Investigators with the agencies have been testing air quality, building materials and other environmental factors at each of the homes where infants died.

It’s unclear when those tests will be complete, officials with both agencies said.

But an initial Consumer Product Safety Commission inspection of at least one of the Fort Bragg houses in question raised concerns about toxic Chinese drywall, according to a detailed safety commission investigative report obtained by The Fayetteville Observer.

The federal report, released this week following a Freedom of Information Act request by the newspaper, focuses on the home on Groesbeck Street in the Ardennes neighborhood where three infants were living at separate times before dying suddenly.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the lead federal agency looking into claims related to Chinese drywall, was called in to assist in the military probe of infant deaths after residents on post raised concerns about the possible use of the toxic imported building material, which is known to emit harmful sulfur gasses.

A Consumer Product Safety Commission investigator visited the Groesbeck Street house on Sept. 9, the report said.

The agent noted that many of the home’s metal fixtures were corroded, according to the report, and several of the home’s copper pipe fittings and wires had become blackened. Both are signs of Chinese drywall, the investigator wrote in the report.

At least two different types of drywall were used throughout the home, which was built in 2005, the investigator said in the report. He also noted a strong chemical odor throughout the home.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission report also details unexplained health troubles experienced by the parents and siblings of the three infants while they were staying at the home.

Pearline Scully, whose 2-month-old son died Feb. 24, 2008, after living at the house, told the investigator she and her husband had breathing problems while living at the home, and her other children developed boils and rashes on their skin.

Melissa Pollard’s 3-month-old son died at the house on April 15, 2009. She told the CPSC agent she and her husband also had respiratory problems while living at the house, which she said smelled of “rotten eggs” and chemicals.

Bianca Outlaw, whose 7-month-old daughter died at the Groesbeck Street house a few months later on July 23, 2009, told the investigator her baby was healthy before they moved into the house, but she soon developed a runny nose and a cough. Outlaw said she and her husband also became ill while living at the home, according to the report.

Many of the conditions described in the safety commission’s investigative report are indicative of Chinese drywall, according to federal guidelines. Further testing was needed, the investigator said in the report.

The imported building material was used in mass quantity earlier this decade during the housing boom and during rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Picerne, the private contractor charged with managing housing at Fort Bragg, has torn down, rebuilt or renovated thousands of homes at the installation in recent years.

Six of the homes where infants died suddenly, including the Groesbeck Street home, were built or renovated during or after the housing boom.

The CPSC investigator collected drywall samples from the Ardennes neighborhood home and inquired about the origins of building materials used in the house.

Those and other tests are pending, a spokesman with the federal agency said.

Tests ‘conclusive’
Sicinski said he was unaware of the CPSC report and said he would question the validity of any investigation that raised the possibility of Chinese drywall being in the houses.

The tests ordered by Fort Bragg ruled out the possibility of toxic drywall at each of the houses where infants died, Sicinski said.

“From our perspective, the tests are conclusive,” he said. “I’m pretty confident that the homes are safe.”

Sicinski said the testing by Fort Bragg wasn’t meant to offer closure for families whose babies died, but added that he “hoped to provide reassurance that it wasn’t the house.”

Audrey Oxendine, chief of the Fort Bragg Directorate of Public Works Environmental Compliance Branch, echoed Sicinski’s remarks.

“I think our tests have shown that there are no problems with the houses,” she said.

Oxendine said the environmental tests were based on adult exposure limits because there are no limit standards for infants.

Testing on behalf of Fort Bragg was conducted by Matrix Health and Safety Consultants and Womack Army Medical Center’s Environmental Health Service Department of Preventive Medicine. The analysis of the results was then completed by two other private firms, EMSL Analytical and Microbac Laboratories.

The full findings have not been released publicly as Sicinski said officials needed time to redact names and addresses from the results, he said. But he said the full reports would be made available.

“We are prepared to share all of the findings,” Sicinski said.

Staff writer Drew Brooks can be reached at brooksd@fayobserver.com or 486-3567. Staff writer Mike Hixenbaugh can be reached at hixenbaughm@fayobserver.com or (910) 486-3511.

# # #

COMMENTS

mht102299
Sorry but don’t have alot of faith in the military testing. Think of how long it took for them to admit there was a problem at Camp Lejeune with the water. I can remember 15 years ago going to my sisters house down there and all of them complaining back then about the water. Her neighborhood alone had 2 children die and 6 more come down with cancer in a 2 year period. Not to mention all the health problems everyone in the area had. I live in some of the new housing in Linden Oaks and there is something wrong with the housing here. I keep mildew in the garage, house smells like it all the time, neighbors house smells like soured milk ( and they just moved in) other neighbors indoor plants keep getting mold in the dirt and she has replanted time and again with fresh soil, have piles of vomit looking orange mold in the mulch they put around the house and numerous other things. Have had the air quality tests done no results yet. As for the mold outside they just tell you they have had complaints about it. Nothing done. They don’t care as long as they get their money. Getting out of here ASAP before one of my kids get sick.
10/27/2010 7:34:55 AM
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@@
The military is just trying to cover its butt. I am glad to see CPSC doing there own testing. I bet there findings are different.
10/27/2010 8:35:31 AM
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Ellie Ruby
I agree with the people that already posted. The post will try there hardest to cover up anything and everything and I think it is sad. It is almost like these people have no heart and only care about the impact to if the tests came out positive. If you look up Chinese drywall you will see that it states that most builders will use the US safe drywall and the Chinese drywall to cut costs on building.. so if in your home someone walks in and tests one wall you never know if it is the wall with the safe or unsafe drywall but the wall next to it could be the bad one.. I say tear down the houses and test everything.. Oh but they won’t do that because it will cost more “money” and more “paperwork” and more “time” .. things the Military makes sure to cut all the time and do not like to do.. I do not trust any military post due to the fact I have first hand been part of a post wanting to cover up an “incident” due to the negative impact it would have caused..
10/27/2010 8:51:38 AM
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BBrincku
American drywall is also having problems. I hope they are looking into American tainted drywall. Here is our story:

On December 20, 2008 we read an article in the paper pertaining to Chinese Drywall, described all of the issues we were experiencing. We began our own investigation of our drywall and after reviewing pictures taken of the upstairs drywall before the installment, we determined at least in the upstairs we had no Chinese drywall. All of the pictures indicate the only drywall used upstairs was from National Gypsum Goldbond (Gridmarx). Additionally, our subcontractor insisted he used only American drywall in our home. At that point we were confused since we did not find any Chinese drywall in our home.

We began searching the internet for answers. We contacted Thomas Eagar, Sc.D., P.E. of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We explained our situation and our health concerns regarding our 8 year old son, Harrison. He agreed to help us by testing samples of our drywall and other corroded items from our house. On January 5, 2009 we submitted samples to Thomas Eagar and Dr. Harold R. Larson, both of MIT. The samples consisted of drywall from National Gypsum Gridmarx & US Gypsum, corroded copper pennies, copper wiring & metal from our jewelry box.

From the drywall samples sent, MIT only tested the National Gypsum Gridmarx drywall sample taken from our air conditioning closet upstairs. They indicated our electrical system must be inspected and replaced as the sulfurous gases causing the corrosion have accelerated the aging process of wiring by tenfold or more. In other words, our four year old home has the wiring of a 40 year old home. Based on the report we received, both Professor Thomas Eagar and Dr. Harold Larson believe our drywall to be defective.

National Gypsum and Packer Engineering visited our home on March 5th-11th, 2009 and opened every wall. They determined our home didn’t contain any Chinese Drywall. National Gypsum acknowledged there was a serious problem in our home, but denied any issues with the drywall. Our test from MIT and Rimkus Consulting Group, the testing company that our builder’s insurance company hired, both confirmed that our drywall is off gassing. Rimkus tested our well water & told us our water is normal. We also have other scientists that also agree that our drywall is off gassing. Over the past four years our family has experienced various health problems including nose bleeds, respiratory issues, irritated eyes, dizziness, shortness of breath, severe headaches and fainting.

In conclusion, this ordeal has completely consumed our lives and we are worried about health concerns from our tainted drywall. With that said we are deeply committed to finding the truth. Our drywall came from Apollo Beach, FL. that is next to Teco Energy. There are no standards in making drywall. How was the consumer to know that the drywall was not pure mined gypsum anymore? We are digging deeper into what actually went wrong with our drywall. Our concern is that the drywall industry is totally unregulated. When we buy drywall we don’t know if it was made from byproducts from coal scrubbers or has had some recycled Chinese drywall scrap added to the mix. We had this drywall installed in our homes with no information as its contents nor will the manufactures provide this information. Now that our homes are contaminated we need to know and we have had to file a lawsuit to find out if we have hazardous material in our homes. This is not right! Our attorneys Robert Gary and Greg Weiss are investigating almost a hundred homes with contamination problems from a single drywall plants that makes it’s drywall from flue gas desulfurization. None of these people and perhaps thousands more have any way to find out the source of the raw material in their drywall. If flyash is designated as a hazardous material we as homeowners would have the right to know what we are putting in our homes and what we are exposing our children too. This should be our right these are our homes and they are unlivable and we have to fight in court to get the most basic information if our drywall was made with hazardous materials. That is just plain wrong! Regardless, attention and further detailed investigations need to occur in order to uncover the truth and restore not only our home, but those of the thousands of families that are being affected by this tragedy. I hope that my statement will serve as a catalyst to examine the health and safety issues that may involve American as well as the Chinese drywall. Please watch our two Youtube videos search “Brincku House” & “A Cry For Help”.
10/27/2010 9:21:45 AM
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Armywife80
There is just too much coincidence for any of this to not be related. I guarantee if this was happening in the post commanders home, or any senior officer house, it would have been taken care of after the first baby died. Have the post officials forgotten that everything the Army has is made by the lowest bidder?
10/27/2010 9:25:39 AM
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Jose I Cardona
The problem is the water!
I have stated before on another blog that the problem is the water that Ft Bragg gets from the river coming of the little river area.
But if it is not the water and I will like to read about the federal findings before I believe the Ft Bragg Findings, Then what is the common denominator among these military families? The common denominators is plain as day and right in front of you. It is the combat uniforms or the so called ACU”S. These uniforms were dump on the military a few years ago with out proper testing of the materials and the chemicals that they are laced with. Yes, in case you didn’t know, the acu’s are laced with chemicals that is supposed to give protection to soldiers against radar detection. Some acu’s are also fire retardant and more chemicals are placed in them. If these soldiers went and bought new uniforms and never wash them right away or just put them in their closets, then I can see that as a major problem. I have known some of my friends that removed all their clothes before they come into their homes because of the smell that these uniforms put out once the body heat and sweat mixes with the chemicals on the uniforms. How many uniforms do soldiers have around the house? The more the bigger the problem. Good luck on your quest and hope that the problem is found right away before another child is lost. “Starve a soldier,Feed the for profit ASOM”.
10/27/2010 9:48:07 AM
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mht102299
I am glad to see that others have the same feeling toward this as I do. A coverup. I wonder if they have considered invesitgating any of Picerne’s other property holdings to see if the same problem is going on with any of them? They don’t just do military housing, they have apartments, condos and houses throughout the country. Maybe if they researched this they could narrow down if it was a problem local to the area, if it was a problem with building materials or if it was contrators fault. I would hate for anyone military or not to get sick or lose a child because of the negligence of a company or it’s contractors.
10/27/2010 10:29:28 AM
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Marena Groll
“Sicinski said he was unaware of the CPSC report and said he would question the validity of any investigation that raised the possibility of Chinese drywall being in the houses…From our perspective, the tests are conclusive,” he said. “I’m pretty confident that the homes are safe.”

I’m “pretty confident” you’re jumping through hoops now to get that report. And I’m 100% confident that the validity of the transparency and truthfulness of the military investigative efforts are being questioned by some soldiers and family members reminded by you that it was a privilege to live in these homes. Try the fit of that insult on coming not from your perspective but the perspective of a gravesite.

We do not know what caused these death conclusively as yet. But we do know that institutions that threaten their members aren’t trusted to investigate objectively by those members.
10/27/2010 10:59:23 AM
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Marena Groll
“The agent noted that many of the home’s metal fixtures were corroded, according to the report, and several of the home’s copper pipe fittings and wires had become blackened. Both are signs of Chinese drywall, the investigator wrote in the report.

At least two different types of drywall were used throughout the home, which was built in 2005, the investigator said in the report. He also noted a strong chemical odor throughout the home.”

So are the military invesitigators saying there was no corrosion or chemical odor or were they wearing blindfolds with clothespins on their noses during their investigations?

The stories are just not lining up. It leaves the soldiering families in a quandry. CPSC says this. Military says that.
10/27/2010 11:07:12 AM
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Cork Lock
“I think our tests have shown that there are no problems with the houses,” she said.
Oxendine said the environmental tests were based on adult exposure limits because there are no limit standards for infants.

Well lady, Infants aren’t adults. And Infants
are dead.

Col. Stephen Sicinski, garrison commander at Fort Bragg, and Audrey Oxendine, chief of the Fort Bragg Directorate of Public Works Environmental Compliance Branch,
need to spend the next six months living in that no problem home where two infants died.
Big talk soon put to rest. Proof in the pudding. Are they willing to back up their words?
I think not!
10/27/2010 11:48:21 AM
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Marena Groll
Cork Lock,
Agreed. Moreover, maybe they would have liked to have gamble the lives of THEIR children when they were infants. I doubt “no standards” would have have been a sufficient response.
10/27/2010 1:24:58 PM
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Georgia Denyse
I suggest that Sicinski and other high ranking officials move into these homes if they believe they are safe. PROVE IT! The military lies and lies to cover up crap. Agent Orange, Gulf War Syndrome, issues with depleted uranium, radical muslims serving… Seriously, does anyone believe that the homes are safe?
10/27/2010 3:59:49 PM
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william campbell
The perpetrators were allowed to investigate themselves and found themselves innocent of any wrongdoing. Is anyone surprised? The US Military cannot handle the truth about ANYTHING.
10/27/2010 4:37:49 PM
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mht102299
tax payer
Stop crying AIRBORNE those houses are fine they were built with my tax dollars AIRBORNE u live there free AIRBORNE

tax payer- They were built with my tax money too. You do realize that military pay taxes don’t you? We don’t live in housing for free. They take our BAH for this housing. You should know this since you seem so well informed. (sarcasm intended) Kinda a waste of my time to even acknowledge your post but had to make a point. I am sure my tax dollars are paying for something for you. AIRBORNE imbecile.
10/27/2010 11:09:11 PM
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really
I’ve got to point this out. Most of you posting here are “support the troops anytime any where people”, but when it affects you or is close to home the military “can’t be trusted”.

Surely you don’t think that an Army made up of upstanding, patriotic individuals who claim to sacrifice thier entire lives and families for the country would lie or cover things up??????

You guys need to make up your mind, an organization made up of noble, self sacrificing people with noble values and the well being of people around the world can’t be corrupt enought to endanger babies and lie about it. Of course a group of people who will expose themselves to war and the worst that humanity has to offer for a paycheck and retirement benefits/free medical care could do this easily, so which is it??????
10/28/2010 6:21:52 AM
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Cubist Tut
It seems to me that a lot of you are questioning the Army’s values. Which are Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage. If so… Then you will continue to question the Army in everything they do because you have lost faith in them. And if you are in the Army and you continue to serve, even though you have no faith in it, does not that make you a hypocrite! So my question is… who is the hypocrite here? The soldiers that serve or their leadership?
10/28/2010 7:09:52 AM
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Grot 6
“I’ve got to point this out. Most of you posting here are “support the troops anytime any where people”, but when it affects you or is close to home the military “can’t be trusted”.

Surely you don’t think that an Army made up of upstanding, patriotic individuals who claim to sacrifice thier entire lives and families for the country would lie or cover things up??????

You guys need to make up your mind, an organization made up of noble, self sacrificing people with noble values and the well being of people around the world can’t be corrupt enought to endanger babies and lie about it. Of course a group of people who will expose themselves to war and the worst that humanity has to offer for a paycheck and retirement benefits/free medical care could do this easily, so which is it?????? ”

It’s not about anything other than good old fashioned American greed, Blatant incompetence, Ineptitude, and more than a little denial.

This is what you get when you combine contracted government housing with someone who is only interested in their next OER.

We know for a fact that the housing was put up in haste, without more than a thought in someone’s mind that the place that the housing was set up at was acceptable.

Next we get the added insult of distributing our soldiers housing issues to someone who is only interested in their bottom line, and then to top it all off we have AMERICAN SERVICE MEMBERS tied at the hip to an organization that’s only interest is their pocket book.

Is there any wonder that babies have to pay the price for failure?

When was the last time soil testing was done in this particular area?

When was the last time the EPA conducted an environmental survey of the site?

Aside from the fact that the issues were well documented, and an air of cover-up exists, it is high time that the denial cease, and that honest community efforts be given this issue.

Honestly, these people have babies blood on their hands, if they have taken the stance that nothing is wrong, when clearly there is a pattern of dead children in the area, then they forfeit the issue to outside scrutiny that needs to be seen to by the FBI or other outside agencies for profiteering, outright deficient standards, and graft.

At the end of the day, what is really on the table is credability.

WHAT have these so called investigators done about this issue to keep thiers?
10/28/2010 7:32:26 AM
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Curious
I’m still betting cash money that it’s vaccines the children were given. Bragg did have Benzene in the water years ago. It could be recurring. The problem is some of these children have died through neglect. My appologies to those for their loss. My source which shall stay anonymous lives there. He/She stated half these women are dancers and hookers downtown and not taking care of their kids while the husband is deployed. This will make it hard to investigate to get to the truth. I hope they find the cause.
10/28/2010 9:20:57 AM
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Jo
Having lost a child to SIDS (not on Ft. Bragg) and as sad as this is, it does happen. Living on base is a choice. Also the number of babies who have died versus the number of families and the number of years this is covering, this isn’t an extraordinary percentage. When you place a large number of people together your going to find traits. This is a very sad one, however it is not only on Ft Bragg. I would hope that parents like I and others that are concerned enough to post anything, research and aide the common fact SIDS. Help find a cure for this and we may be on to something.
10/28/2010 10:38:45 AM
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travis da frog
the gov is a lie
10/28/2010 12:19:58 PM
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This one guy
Is it just me , or is the government just a bunch of liars and messed up people
10/28/2010 12:25:44 PM
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StillSickOfTaxPayer
This is quit disturbing. I agree with the person that said that they investigated themselves & found themselves innocent. {Big eye roll.}

TaxPayer, are you an internet troll & hater of the Military because you couldn’t get in?
10/28/2010 1:10:14 PM
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voter and taxpayer
The other common denominator is stress. Deployments, seperation from families . I am sorry they lost their chidren but all things cannot be blamed on housing their are many reasons that children do not survive to be adults. I know many women that cannot carry a child to term and they nor their spouse or other family members were not in the military. So please lets keep looking for the real cause and stop jumping to conculsions
10/28/2010 2:45:02 PM
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Pentagon Papers
Sounds like another conspiracy to me.
10/28/2010 3:44:58 PM
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mlh
“piles of vomit looking orange mold in the mulch”. Even though it may look gross, this is probably a naturally occurring slime mold that loves moist/humid soil & lawns. It is not harmful & will go away if the ground dries out and you get some extended sun.

Similarly, it sounds like it is damp & humid inside the house, which molds love. Getting the humidity below 60% indoors is key to solving the mold problem inside, as well as some of the odor problems. Many volatile chemicals like formaldehyde off-gas more when it’s humid. Find & fix all water leaks, then use a dehumidifier to control moisture in the air. Most newer units have an automatic shut-off, so if the power is on, it will only run when it needs to. Running the air conditioner all of the time will also help ring water out of the air.
10/28/2010 5:37:11 PM
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Myrt Hurley
Did they test the water system and the water itself?
10/29/2010 8:33:44 PM
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lori gray
Ok, so you say the house tested positive for chinese drywall, then you say the secondary test came back negative, then you say it was based on adult limitations, but u dont know about infants. so how do we know what the truth is. i think personally you dont know what the hell u are talking about sicinski needs to step and let the big dogs get in there that knows what they are doing. i personally dont think he knows what the hell hes talking about or hes talking out the side of his mouth. everything that comes out of the side of his mouth has done nothing but hurt the families of these babies. what would you do sicinski if it was one of your babies….. b mad or have faith in the military….. i dont think so!!!!!!!! lori gray, nana of mya and jay….. Thank you mr. hixenbaum for everything you have done in keeping us updated and letting us know what we have in the military(CID, SICINSKI) lori gray
10/30/2010 6:31:14 PM
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read article at the Fay Observer site

Last week, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) took the very rare step of issuing a public health advisory in Garfield, NJ due to extremely high levels of toxic hexavalent chromium (VI) found in basements of homes.

The ATSDR advisory was the subject of a standing room only public meeting on Oct. 5 at Garfield’s Roosevelt School, which is located less than 300 feet from EC Electroplating, the source of the chromium pollution.

This meeting attendee reported that three members of her family have cancer.

ATSDR found that the high levels found in residential basement samples create an “immediate and significant risk to human health”. The risk level translates into a cancer risk of 3 in 10 (see Table 5), which is 300,000 times HIGHER than NJ’s legal cancer risk standard of one in a million.

ATSDR was created by the 1980 Superfund law to provide scientific advice to EPA and inform the public about health risk of hazardous chemicals. They do health assessments in 300-400 communities per year across the country. Since their creation in 1980, ATSDR has issued only 27 advisories in the entire country, and none since 1999.

“I asked the head of ATSDR’s Division of Health Assessment Bill Cibulas point blank whether he had ever seen cancer risks like Garfield chromium (3 in 10) anywhere in the US – including notorius Superfund sites like Love Canal, NY; Times Beach Missouri; and Libby Montana – and he said “no”, reports Bill Wolfe, who spent 13 years as a Policy Analyst and Planner with the NJ Department of Environmental Protection. “That makes Garfield perhaps the highest cancer risk site in the US,” Wolfe notes.

A cancer study is expected to be released in November.

For more information:

Health Consultation. E.C. Electroplating
(A/K/A Garfield Chromium Groundwater Contamination Site)
Garfield, Bergen County, New Jersey
Epa Facility Id: Njd002006773
Prepared By The
New Jersey Department Of Health And Senior Services
September 28, 2010

EPA documents about Garfield NJ

Garfield Cancer Risk From Chromium in Basements is Highest in US WolfeNotes.com 10/8/2010.

New Jersey DHHS Information on Garfield Chromium Groundwater Contamination Site

Bergen Record editorial asks “what took so long?” Garfield’s chromium problem

From 2005:
NEW JERSEY FACING CHROMIUM EMERGENCY – 1 IN 10 CANCER RISKS — State Scientist Reveals DEP Cover-Up; Demand for Federal Intervention

By Mitra Malek, The Palm Beach Post

THE ACREAGE — Federal regulators have signed off on the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s conclusion that no evidence exists of water or soil pollution in The Acreage, despite that community’s state-declared cancer cluster.

The nod is yet another indication that the state is winding down its investigation after more than 15 months of searching for a cause for the childhood brain cancer cluster.

In a short letter, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency summed up its review of state environmental officials’ work toward studying the cluster, and said the DEP did a thorough job testing soil and ground water in The Acreage. The Palm Beach County Health Department posted the letter on its website on Thursday.

“The FDEP’s investigation was comprehensive in its analytical testing and included sufficient number of ground water samples to screen this large area for drinking water contamination and sufficient number of soil samples to support the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) evaluation of health concerns,” the Oct. 5 letter said. “We agree with FDEP’s conclusion that the data show no indication of widespread ground water or soil contamination; nor any evidence suggesting the existence of any significant localized source(s) of contamination.”

State environmental officials have said that water quality in the semi-rural community of 40,000 is “generally good.”

The state health department launched an investigation into the cancer cluster in June 2009 at the request of an Acreage mother whose child had a brain tumor. The state declared the cluster in February, saying it had found four cases of childhood brain cancer from 2005 to 2007 in the central Palm Beach County community, when one or two would be considered normal.

The state’s soil, water and radiation tests, along with historical and lifestyle interviews of cancer-stricken families, haven’t turned up a cause for the elevated rate.

State environmental investigators tested for more than 200 industrial and agricultural pollutants in the water and soil.

Soil tests at 46 locations showed levels for three chemicals were too high at 11 homes: arsenic, benzo(a)pyrene and total recoverable petroleum hydrocarbons. But Florida Environmental Health Director Lisa Conti said those contaminants are not known to cause brain cancer, nor were the levels high enough to harm health.

Water tests completed at 23 homes showed untreated well water at four locations had elevated levels of radium or alpha particles. Radium-226 and radium-228 are naturally occurring radioactive metals that could cause cancer at elevated levels. Alpha particles are a product of radiation.

“The radiological data … show no results that would warrant further investigation, or would cause any elevated risk to the public,” the EPA letter said.

The state doesn’t plan to do any more environmental tests. It has sent its study to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for review.

By KEVIN P. CRAVER – kcraver@nwherald.com

A Philadelphia judge hearing the first McCullom Lake brain cancer lawsuit against Rohm and Haas abruptly ended the trial and dismissed the jury five weeks into the case.

Judge Allan Tereshko late Thursday declared the trial over, an assistant to the judge confirmed Friday. The trial, which started Sept. 20, was expected to run eight to 10 weeks.Ring

A Friday order handed down by Tereshko indicates that his decision is related to “changes” in the expert report of plaintiff epidemiologist Richard Neugebauer, which concluded that a cluster of glioblastoma multiforme brain cancer exists in the McCullom Lake area.

Tereshko ordered plaintiff’s attorneys by close of business Monday to produce all communication between the law firm and Neugebauer regarding changes to his expert report. It also orders Neugebauer, a Columbia University epidemiologist, to “preserve the contents of his computer and any other devices that he has used in connection with this work on this case and/or for communications with Plaintiff’s counsel and his staff.”

That order reveals that plaintiff’s attorneys made an oral motion for a mistrial, and that attorneys for Rohm and Haas asked Tereshko to rule that the company is not liable. Tereshko gave both sides until Nov. 15 to file briefs in support of their motions.

Rohm and Haas attorney Kevin Van Wart declined to comment, and plaintiff’s attorney Aaron Freiwald would not elaborate on the development.

“We are disappointed that the trial is over, but the case is not concluded,” Freiwald said in a statement. “Plaintiff and defense motions that will impact the proceedings are pending before the court.”

The lawsuit by longtime village resident Joanne Branham is the first of 32 that alleges that air and groundwater pollution from the Ringwood specialty chemicals plant caused a brain and pituitary cancer cluster in the village and the Lakeland Park subdivision in McHenry. Branham lost her husband, Franklin, to glioblastoma in 2004, and her two former next-door neighbors were diagnosed with an even rarer but much more survivable form of brain tumor.

Rohm and Haas declined to comment.

“Rohm and Haas intends to reserve comment until all issues are resolved,” spokeswoman Maureen Garrity said Friday.

Neugebauer’s study, released last August with updated data from the Illinois State Cancer Registry, concluded that the incidence rate of glioblastoma multiforme in the area is between three and five times higher than the county and state. The year 2006 was the latest data set for the cancer registry, which runs three years behind as a quality control measure.

Van Wart, from the study’s release to trial, had said that Neugebauer’s work contained deep and significant problems.

A month after Branham and her two neighbors filed the first lawsuits in April 2006, the McHenry County Department of Health concluded that area brain cancer rates were not above normal, and that contamination oozing from a closed 8-acre waste pit at the Rohm and Haas site never reached village wells.

Northwest Herald investigations concluded that the health department’s work was deeply flawed and biased in favor of Rohm and Haas; several company executives got to review the department’s work before its public release.

The original lawsuits included Modine Manufacturing, a plant directly south of Rohm and Haas, which contributed to the contamination plume. Modine denied culpability for any illnesses but settled out of court with plaintiffs in 2008.

On the Net

You can read and watch the Northwest Herald’s ongoing coverage of the McCullom Lake brain cancer lawsuits at NWHerald.com/mccullomlake.

By Christopher Dunagan

BREMERTON, Wash. — Puget Sound Naval Shipyard has agreed to pay a $56,000 fine for the improper handling and storage of hazardous chemicals, officials say.

The fine was issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency following an unannounced inspection in January 2009. Inspectors from both the EPA and Washington Department of Ecology were involved.

State and federal officials had worked with the shipyard over the years to improve waste-handling techniques, said Jack Boller, an EPA inspector. During the surprise inspection in 2009, “we started finding things that we thought we had addressed years ago.”

Among the more serious violations was an open-grated floor in the shipyard’s plating shop, where hexavalent chromium was allowed to drip down and accumulate in the basement below.

Jeff Kenknight, manager of EPA’s hazardous waste compliance unit, said hexavalent chromium can cause respiratory illnesses and increase the risk of lung cancer.

“This is a toxic compound that can cause health problems and harm the environment,” he said. “Handling it improperly can have serious consequences.”

Officials with Puget Sound Naval Shipyard & Intermediate Maintenance Facility acknowledged that chemicals dripping into the subfloor should have been cleaned more frequently — but that system is specifically designed to contain and segregate waste, said public affairs officer Mary Anne Mascianica. The system protects the health of employees and prevents releases to the environment, she said.

“The facility’s design and operational controls have always ensured potential exposures to be far below OSHA permissible exposure limits,” she added.

Since the inspection, the shipyard has improved operating procedures in the plating shop to reduce the likelihood of drips going into the containment system, she said. Any drips that are contained get cleaned up promptly.

The inspectors also made note of an open drum of paint solvent near an open bay door in a storage shed at the pier. Because the pier was over the water, a spill had the potential of releasing the toxic chemical into Puget Sound.

When the inspectors noted the open drum, it was immediately closed up, Mascianica said, adding that there was no danger of it tipping over. Since the inspection, lids have been purchased to make it easier to seal the drums, and employees have been trained about the closure requirements.

“PSNS & IMF continues its commitment to be a good steward of the environment, striving for excellence in its work practices and processes to protect and improve the quality of our environment,” Mascianica said.

The two issues cited by inspectors were considered violations of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which regulates hazardous waste.

Join an ongoing discussion about all things water-related at the blog Watching Our Water Ways.

read more

Study focuses on clusters to find cause of Del.’s high rates

By JEFF MONTGOMERY
The News Journal

A quarter century after Delaware found itself with the nation’s highest cancer death rate, health officials have narrowed their search for cancer clusters to the neighborhood level, where for the first time local rates of rare cancers could provide clues to environmental or other causes.

In one of the most unique studies of its kind, state epidemiologists identified 45 out of 196 zones with total cancer rates exceeding state and national rates by margins health officials regard as significant.

Some of those cancers are of a type known to have environmental links, an ominous discovery in a state with a national legacy of asthma-inducing air pollution, toxic waste dumps and groundwater contamination that has now breached an aquifer serving tens of thousands in Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland.

Across the state, cancers most often found to be significantly elevated were breast, colorectal, lung and prostate, already the most common types in Delaware and nationwide.

But in some spots, rarer cancers emerged at rates far higher than state averages, even after the Division of Public Health made large allowances for margins of error due to age and small sample sizes in U.S. census tracts with an average of 4,000 residents. Researchers examined reports of all cancers from the most recent years available, 2002-2006.

Among the worst neighborhood-level clusters, they found:

• Laryngeal cancer cases in Northeast Wilmington next to Brandywine Creek between Northeast Boulevard and Market Street.

• Melanoma in a small tract around Brandywood, south of Naamans Road between Grubb and Foulk roads.

• Ovarian cancer rates in the Hockessin area that were more than four times the state average.

• Thyroid cancers in the Overview Gardens and Minquadale areas southwest of Memorial Drive.

• Leukemia in a suburban and rural tract west of Dover and northwest of Wyoming.

• Ovarian cancer east of Bridgeville and Greenwood.

• Melanoma, kidney and esophageal cancers west of Rehoboth Beach.

Census tracts with unusually high cancer rates turned up in all three counties, from the top of Brandywine Hundred to west Dover and the Love Creek area in coastal Sussex County.

Epidemiologists looked for four patterns: the rates of all types of cancers in a single tract, the rates for specific cancers in those tracts, differences between men and women, and average ages of diagnosis, especially early or late.

The top 10 average rates for cancers of all types and the highest rates for men and women were confined to New Castle County and Kent County, but scattered tracts in all three counties had unusual spikes of specific cancers.

The tract-level cancer study was ordered by the Delaware General Assembly after The News Journal waged a long struggle to persuade state health officials to release detailed cancer rate data. Delaware now is one of the few states in the nation to assess cancer rates for every census tract. To prevent identifying any one person with cancer, health officials released only average annual rates for all cancers and did not list the actual counts, which range from one or two new cases a year to a few dozen.

The Centers for Disease Control has investigated and confirmed dozens of clusters in dozens of states over the years. But federally led investigations seldom turn up a single, clear-cut cause. Cancers can have many, hard-to-verify triggers, the agency pointed out, including family background, lifestyle choices such as smoking and eating habits, occupational exposures and pollution encountered in communities far removed from the home of record where the cancer was diagnosed.

How far Delaware researchers will continue to explore the data depends on money and political will.

“There are a lot of red flags here,” said Dr. Paul Silverman, Public Health’s associate deputy director for health information and science. “I would agree with the concern. However, as is true with all of these census tracts, all you can do at this point is hypothesize. We would actually have to have additional information in order to answer any questions.”

Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control Secretary Collin P. O’Mara said his agency is reviewing the results and will take the small-area cancer statistics into account while setting priorities in the future.

A lack of evidence of any direct tie to air or water toxins will not inhibit his agency from taking steps to reduce pollution, he said.

Environmental health concerns were behind DNREC’s recent push to curb releases from larger pollution sources, including NRG’s Indian River power plant, O’Mara said. The census tract findings could help focus its efforts on smaller sites or environmental programs that may have a large impact.

Initiatives have expanded

State lawmakers voted in 2008 to require an analysis of each year’s cancer reports by census tract. It was the latest in a series of cancer control initiatives that date as far back as 1986, when then-Gov. Mike Castle announced a push that included fielding mobile mammography vans and talk of statewide environmental reviews.

Castle’s move followed release of grim national health rankings that pegged Delaware as having the nation’s highest death rate from some cancers.

Cancer control services and initiatives have expanded in the years since, and cancer mortality rates have fallen. Yet rates for both deaths and new cancers in Delaware remain higher than the average for the nation as a whole.

In this latest study, overall rates in eight tracts appeared to reach “significant” levels, according to Public Health, because rates for several individual cancers in that area randomly edged higher than the state average.

For the remaining 37 tracts where Silverman said there could be concern, however, rates were significantly high for at least one of 23 types of cancer, including several diseases sometimes tied to environmental exposures, such as bladder, thyroid, liver and brain cancers, leukemia and non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

Bladder cancer can be caused by workplace exposure to chemicals. Liver cancer has been tied to arsenic in water, steroids and on-the-job pollution exposures. Radiation exposure can cause thyroid and brain cancer, as well as leukemia and non-Hodgkins lymphoma, although certain chemicals also can cause leukemia.

Retiree Irene Butcher rarely hears neighbors talk about the cancers that turn up far too often among residents in her Jefferson Farms community, just north of New Castle.

“I haven’t heard any talk, but I read the paper a lot and I do know that Delaware is kind of high up on the list,” for cancer rates, Butcher said. “It seemed like it used to be that if somebody in your family didn’t have it, you didn’t have to worry about it. Now cancer strikes anybody.”

Rates in Jefferson Farms were 70 percent higher than the Delaware average for all cancers — higher than anywhere else — according to Public Health’s study.

Just a few blocks from Butcher, Irene Jones has been battling breast cancer since 2004. Jones described cancer as a personal and family burden, recalling grandparents stricken with or lost to the disease. A retired Colonial School District teacher, Jones said her family originally was from New Jersey, but she also worried that cancer might fall more heavily on the neighborhood where she’s now settled.

“It’s something you’re always concerned about, maybe because of your family history, or where you work, or where you live,” said Jones, who said she has been cancer-free since treatment. “I worry here sometimes because of all the landfills around.”

“People need to be kept informed about cancer, and they needed to be reminded about taking care of their health care,” said Jones, whose cancer was detected by a routine mammogram. “You need to monitor your own health and you need to go for checkups.”

Both men and women had higher-than-average rates for cancer in Jones’ community, prostate cancer was detected at a rate 85 percent higher than the state as a whole, and breast cancer rates were just slightly over the state average.

Push for information

One tract that also stood out in the Public Health study is a swath of land between I-95 and Del. 273, northwest of the Delaware City petrochemical complex.

The zone from Salem Woods in the west to Raintree Village in the east had a cancer rate for men more than double the state average, with an average age at diagnosis eight years younger than was typical.

Prostate cancer rates were 1.7 times higher than the state average. Breast cancer rates were 84 percent higher, laryngeal cancer rates were four times the state’s average and leukemia rates 2.5 times higher.

Leukemia is a disease that state officials noted can have environmental ties, such as exposure to benzene, a common industrial chemical and motor fuel ingredient found in cigarette smoke and auto exhaust. In a yearlong investigation published this year by The News Journal, benzene was one of a number of chemicals found in groundwater across the state.

Salem Woods resident William K. Dadson said the state should press on and quickly share what it finds about the cancer clusters.

“I think it’s good for them to pinpoint it, and let people know what’s going on,” Dadson said. “Cancer is a concern for everyone. It’s very important, and health information should be available to the public.”

State’s rate 9.5% higher

Delaware has attempted several close-up looks at cancer in recent years, an effort partly rooted in nagging, decades-long concerns about the state’s chronically higher average rates of cancer detections and cancer deaths compared with national findings.

State officials struggled through the late 1980s to fend off connections between the state’s cancer rates and its industrial past, high pollution levels and proximity to a so-called “Cancer Alley” in neighboring New Jersey, where high cancer rates led to state and federal investigations.

The state’s most recent five-year report, released in May, found that cancer turned up 9.5 percent more often in Delaware residents than the nation as a whole, with cancer 4 percent more likely to kill.

Despite those sobering numbers, officials have pointed out, the state’s cancer mortality rate has fallen 18.9 percent from a decade ago, when it was among the nation’s highest. The annual rate of new cancer cases has dropped 3.8 percent over the same period.

“Looking at one point in time or one five-year period is not nearly as helpful as looking at trends,” said Dr. Karyl Rattay, Delaware’s public health director.

State officials were prodded again to dig deeper into cancer rates in 2006 and 2007, amid public demands for studies in southeastern Sussex County. Health concerns in that area had become entangled with politically charged debates over offshore wind power, clean energy and emissions from the oil- and coal-burning Indian River power plant near Millsboro.

The result was a widely reported cancer-cluster reflecting higher-than-average lung cancer rates in a large swath of land southeast of the power plant.

Those findings however, were based on ZIP code boundaries, geographic areas that sprawl across several census tracts, some far removed from the power plant.

But it also got the attention of lawmakers troubled by the state’s resistance to releasing cancer rate data by census tract to The News Journal.

State objections to data releases included claims that statistics could be used to identify patients. They also said that such small areas are more likely to be affected by random spikes or drops in cancer cases, distorting true rates.

The Legislature brushed those concerns aside, giving health officials 90 days to produce census tract studies after each year’s statewide cancer report.

Now that the first census tract report has been compiled and broken down further by individual cancers, Heather Woods resident Patsy A. Howaniec says the state needs to share what it knows.

Her neighborhood stands on the edge of a tract newly identified as having the state’s second-highest cancer rate.

“Scary stuff,” Howaniec said. “I’d like to know more.

Lung cancer rates in the tract, north of Du Pont Highway in Bear and including Brookmont Farms and Wellington Woods, were double the state’s average, and oral cancer rates 4.7 times higher.

Small areas produce quirks

Recent findings in Sussex show just how complicated cancer investigations can get in smaller areas, and some of the troubling quirks that they can turn up.

In the new census tract report, neither the greater Millsboro area nor any of the census tracts adjacent to it had unusually high average rates for any cancers, despite lung cancer statistics by ZIP code that inflamed earlier debates over the Indian River power plant emissions.

In fact, Sussex County had the lowest number of tracts with significantly elevated cancer statistics of any in Delaware. In two of the six tracts, no single cancer could be found with notably higher-than-average rates.

Silverman cautioned that Public Health would need more data, time and research to determine whether environmental cancers signal a problem.

“I regard all of these [findings] as clues, which may or may not bear fruit,” Silverman said.

In the case of the suspected lung cancer clusters in the Millsboro area, a series of individual surveys found that higher prevalence of the disease was mainly due to higher prevalence of tobacco use and past work in a range of “high-risk” jobs.

The high-risk job category takes in a huge share of the county work force, including those in jobs involving agriculture, chemicals, construction, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

In some areas, clusters represent real puzzles.

Among the tracts with the top 10 highest rates are three areas of Kent County where land use runs the gamut from suburban to small-town and rural — including parts of the county’s small Amish community.

Two tracts in Kent accounted for the state’s fourth- and fifth-highest average rates of all cancers. In some tracts in Kent, cancer was discovered at earlier ages, with high rates for scarce cancers including leukemia and non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which has been linked to radiation, weakened immune systems and some infections.

Some scientific studies also have found correlations between non-Hodgkins lymphoma and exposures to pesticides and emissions from older types of waste incinerators.

Inaccurate population data

Census tract studies are especially tricky, said Elizabeth Ward, the American Cancer Society’s vice president for surveillance and research.

High rates deserve a second look, she said, but a high prostate cancer rate may be evidence of better diagnosis rather than a higher incidence of the disease.

“If you see higher rates of prostate cancer, it may actually reflect higher utilization of screening, said Ward, who lives in Atlanta. “There are some cancers where it’s pretty clear that one of the things really driving the rates is utilization of testing.”

Another complication is the possible inaccuracy of population estimates. Delaware’s census tract populations estimates are based on the 2000 census. The new population count will not be available to the public until February.

Precision especially suffers, Ward said, if several years have passed since a full census tally.

“The smaller the area, the more the chances are that you can get statistical errors,” Ward said. “We saw that toward the end of the time before the last census. We started seeing some strange patterns in cancer rate by county, especially when we looked at cancer rates by county and race.”

In Delaware, Public Health has investigated cancer clusters in small areas of the state for years, based on cancer surveillance reports, requests from residents or other triggers. Studies have never confirmed a cause for any cluster, but some have raised eyebrows.

In fact, an individual resident’s concern about cancer in the Brandywood census tract last year led to a conclusion that melanoma rates among women were significantly higher than the state rate for 2001-2005. That same cluster also turned up in the latest study of the average for 2002-2006, with melanoma more than 330 percent higher than state rates.

A different citizen request this year led to a study of childhood cancer rates and deaths, and found that Kent County childhood cancer rates exceed national rates by a significant amount. In that case, Public Health said it would continue monitoring and “assume position of watchful waiting for childhood cancer incidence trends in Kent County.”

In Salem Woods — south of Old Baltimore Pike near Newark, part of a census tract with the third-highest rate for all cancers — longtime postal worker Earl C. Cunningham has plenty of questions about cancer. Some focus more on how he’s lived than where.

Cunningham was treated for prostate cancer in 1999 but has long wondered whether his sometimes-heavy exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange decades ago during two combat tours in Vietnam set the stage for discovery of the disease. Public Health does not include prostate cancer as having a confirmed environmental cause.

“If there’s a problem in this area, they need to own up to it. But it’s hard to say,” Cunningham said. “Most of the people in this community come and go; they move in and out. The longer-term ones, I’m not aware of them having any cancer-related illnesses.”

Gerard Rushton, a University of Iowa professor who developed Iowa’s cancer mapping program, praised Delaware’s effort but echoed Ward’s concern that random swings can get magnified when the focus gets too tight and the census records stale.

“Once you get down to saying that in this small area we have four or five cancers, the rates go up and down like a yo-yo. You can be looking at a map, but it’s really not a valid map. We call it the small number problem,” said Rushton, who said he is wary of any studies based on zones with fewer than 50 cases.

Rushton, who is awaiting a decision on a National Cancer Institute grant for research on cancer tracking, said that New York and California have developed census tract surveys in recent years. But the practice remains rare in statewide use.

“On the whole, it’s very useful and important to look at data for as fine a geographic area as possible,” said Ward, of the American Cancer Society. “Very often, the factors that determine whether or not there’s a high risk for a specific disease do vary at levels smaller than the county. You may see patterns that you wouldn’t see if you were just able to look at the county level.

“On the flip side,” Ward added, “for some diseases, there are just so few cancer cases that you would be concerned about looking at them at the census tract level, because of confidentiality reasons” and statistical swings.

Proceeding cautiously

Delaware is far from alone in its struggle to use state and national cancer data to improve prevention and detection, Ward said. While census tract records have been available to health agencies for years, public studies using those records are rare.

“I don’t think it’s common. I’m aware that New York did it, but there’s a fine balance with concerns about confidentiality when you bring the data down to that level,” Ward said. She added that high rates can be deceiving.

“It’s very tricky for numerous reasons, not just statistical variations,” Ward said

Rattay said that Public Health is moving cautiously.

Plans are now in the works to brief members of the state Cancer Consortium’s environmental committee, with a blueprint for follow-up action due later this month.

Steps are likely to include talks with community groups and the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control on possible reasons for the higher rates, including access to health care and possible sources of pollution exposure.

“We’re going to reach out to the communities in all 45 census tracts and let them know that this report is available, and that we would like to work with these communities to educate them on prevention efforts, screening services and to learn from them about their concerns,” Rattay said. “What this report does is help us to think about where the geographic areas are where we can prioritize our efforts.”

The results also could help the state prepare for more detailed studies of chemical “body burdens,” an idea that also arose out of the Millsboro cancer controversy and past debates over the state’s high rate. Delaware has made several attempts to launch such a study over the years and applied without success for federal help. A body burden study involves an analysis of selected chemical contaminants inside the bodies of residents in a selected part of the state. State officials have estimated in the past that a targeted study would cost as much as $5 million.

“It certainly would be helpful to get that funding,” Rattay said. “That would help us not so much to draw conclusions about whether people are getting cancer from certain exposures, but it would help us identify whether or not certain chemicals were higher in certain individuals’ bodies.”

Jay B. Hammond of Jefferson Farms, whose father died of prostate cancer, said he was unaware the disease was so common around the community.

“I don’t know of anyone here with it, but that’s one of the things that guys don’t talk about,” Hammond said. “With my family history, I keep an eye on it, but I also don’t know why this development would be any different.”

Environmental studies might leave plenty of questions unanswered, Hammond said.

“I don’t know why this development would be any different from one across the street or across the tracks. It’s not like it was built on a toxic waste dump,” Hammond said.

“We’re right up the street from the Delaware City Refinery, down the road from Marcus Hook [refinery] and across the river from a big chemical plant,” he said. “We’re east of everything that goes on in the western part of the country. So what the hell are you going to do?”

The News Journal

September 13, 2010

Jury selection begins Wednesday, September 15 and opening arguments on September 20 in the first of 31 related brain cancer-cluster trials, in which Dow Chemical’s Rohm & Haas subsidiary faces allegations that include wrongful death and negligence. Here is a summary of the case, believed to be the largest brain cancer cluster on trial in the U.S. courts.

Location: City Hall, Philadelphia – Courtroom 243 (The Hon. Allan Tereshko presiding). Philadelphia is the trial venue because Dow/Rohm and Haas, the primary defendant, is headquartered in Philadelphia. The trial is open to the public, but cameras and audio recording devices are prohibited by state Court rule.

Plaintiff: The lead case is that of Franklin Delano Branham (deceased, cause of death, brain cancer), formerly of McCullom Lake, Illinois, a village of about 1,000 in suburban Chicago. A former contractor, Branham is survived by his wife, Joanne Branham, who currently works as a waitress and lives in Apache Junction, Arizona. She represents his Estate and will be attending and testifying.

Defendant: Dow’s Rohm and Haas Chemical Company subsidiary owns and operates the chemical plant (the former Morton International plant) in Ringwood, Illinois, adjacent to McCullom Lake. Plant operations are at the center of the claims.

Allegations: Over decades, the plant secretly, recklessly and negligently dumped into a waste lagoon millions of pounds of hazardous chemical waste – including carcinogenic vinyl chloride – which seeped into the groundwater, eventually poisoning individuals, including Mr. Branham and at least 30 others who have filed claims. Ten of the brain-cancer victims to date have died as a result of their exposure. Mr. Branham and two of the other brain-cancer victims were next-door neighbors.

Related: An original defendant, Modine Manufacturing, which operates a condenser-manufacturing plant in Ringwood adjacent to the Rohm and Haas plant, settled with plaintiffs and agreed to pay $1.4 million toward a medical monitoring program to the benefit of the victims and their community. The monitoring program concluded this past spring, and the excess funds, approximately $850,000, will be distributed to several non-profit organizations to serve the community.

PHILADELPHIA, PA (September 12, 2010) – Jury selection is scheduled to begin September 15 in the first of 31 brain cancer-cluster trials, in which Rohm and Haas Chemical Company is the defendant. And opening arguments are set to begin September 20 in what is believed to be the largest brain cancer cluster series of cases being tried in the U.S. courts.

The trial focuses on allegations that the company dumped millions of pounds of chemical waste at the Ringwood, Illinois chemical manufacturing plant. The plant was operated for many years by Morton Chemical. In 1999, Philadelphia-based Rohm and Haas bought Morton for $5 billion. On April 1, 2009 the company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical, which acquired it for more than $18 billion.

Years of chemical waste dumping at the plant site have caused air and groundwater contamination. Among the chemical contaminants is vinyl chloride, which is associated with causing brain cancer. There have been more than two-dozen documented brain tumor cases and one case of severe liver toxicity in the nearby community of McCullom Lake, a village of about 1,000.

The victims, represented by attorney Aaron J. Freiwald, Esq., of Layser Freiwald, P.C., are seeking compensatory and punitive damages. Freiwald plans to begin his case by calling the company’s former CEO and the plant’s former manager following opening statements before presiding Pennsylvania Common Pleas Court Judge Allan Tereshko. According to court documents, both witnesses knew as early as 1973 that chemical waste from the plant’s eight-acre waste pit had leaked into the groundwater. However, they did not inform state or federal regulatory agencies of the situation for nearly a decade. Despite knowing that the waste pit was causing groundwater contamination, and suspecting that drinking water supplies were being impacted, records obtained through pre-trial discovery document that the company continued to dump waste into the pit for several years and then failed to implement a groundwater remediation plan until nearly another 20 years had passed.

The chemical plant, located in McHenry County, about 60 miles north of Chicago, came under scrutiny when on April 25, 2006, three McCullom Lake next-door neighbors, all diagnosed with rare malignant brain cancer within the same year, became the first of the victims to file complaints against Philadelphia-based Rohm and Haas, its then subsidiary Morton International and Modine Manufacturing.

Modine, which operates a condenser-manufacturing plant in Ringwood adjacent to the Rohm and Haas plant, settled with plaintiffs and agreed to pay $1.4 million toward a medical monitoring program to the benefit of the victims and their community. A Federal judge in Philadelphia is reviewing proposals to distribute funds remaining after the medical screening program was completed earlier this year. The funds will be distributed to several non-profit organizations to serve the community.

According to Freiwald, 17 of the 31 plaintiffs have been diagnosed with malignant brain cancer; 13 have benign brain tumors (most requiring brain surgery and other treatment); and one required a liver transplant due to severe organ toxicity. Ten victims – ranging in age from 42 to 74 – have since died, including Franklin Delano Branham, the subject of the first trial. Mr. Branham died in June 2004, just a few weeks after being diagnosed with glioblastoma, a malignant form of brain cancer. His wife, Joanne, a resident of Apache Junction, Arizona, near Phoenix, will represent his Estate at the trial in Philadelphia.

Palm Beach Post, The (FL) – Tuesday, September 7, 2010
By MITRA MALEK Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

When children were coming down with leukemia roughly once a month in a small farming community in western Nevada, health experts were confident they would pinpoint the cause.

Potential culprits weren’t hard to find in Fallon, 30 miles from an old underground nuclear test site and not far from the naval air station that’s home to the “Top Gun” training program. Amid one of the largest cancer-cluster investigations in U.S. history, scientists and residents alike said they suspected some type of pollution.

“It’s not random,” Floyd Sands, whose daughter had leukemia, told the Reno Gazette-Journal in 2001, a year into the seven-year study. “The cause is out there, somewhere in Fallon.”

But in the end, the study found no answers. And since 2004, only one new case of childhood leukemia has been reported in Fallon or the surrounding county.

A similar ending without closure may be in store for The Acreage, where more than a year of state investigations has failed to explain a spike of tumors in children’s brains and central nervous systems.

In some ways, The Acreage’s case is unique among Florida cancer studies: The northwestern Palm Beach County community is the only place where the state Department of Health has declared that a suspected cancer cluster exists.

Yet here, too, tests of soil and water have turned up no signs of pollution that could explain the cluster, the state’s health and environmental agencies say. In a summary released last month, the state Department of Environmental Protection declared that “residential property in The Acreage is safe.”

It may be baffling, but it should be no surprise. Rarely, if ever, have scientists found a firm environmental cause for a cancer cluster afflicting a geographic region.

Real cases not as simple as Hollywood scripts

Hollywood movies about these types of cases usually suggest a far different conclusion: With enough digging, investigators discover that pollution is the root problem — then collect big money from the polluters. Examples include A Civil Action, starring John Travolta as a crusading lawyer, and Erin Brockovich, with Julia Roberts in an Oscar-winning role.

“There’s this intuitive sense that seems so straightforward: If there’s too much of something occurring, there must be some reason to it,” said David Savitz, director of Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Disease Prevention and Public Health Institute in New York. “The problem is, in practice, it just doesn’t work that way.”

One reason is that cancer is complicated: It has many origins, including random genetic mutations, and not everyone exposed to even high doses of carcinogens will get the disease.

Moreover, scientists say that even if disease rates are normal, some areas are bound to have more cases than others — creating clusters with no environmental cause.

Some scientists even argue that chance is the most plausible explanation for a cluster when artificial boundaries are drawn around an area where cases exist. That’s how the state determined the cluster boundaries for The Acreage, where health officials say the community experienced four cases of pediatric brain tumors from 2005 to 2007 — when one or two would be normal.

“You never know when you’re simply drawing a target around the bulls-eye,” said Michael Thun, vice president emeritus of epidemiology and surveillance research for the American Cancer Society.

And not all who live in a community are exposed to the same hazards. “It’s not like working in the same factory with the same chemical,” Savitz said.

Historically, cancer investigations based on geography — “community-based” clusters — have been harder to solve than those based on exposures in a workplace.

In one classic example, a surgeon discovered in 1775 that chimney sweeps developed scrotal cancer from exposure to soot from coal. In 1965, researchers identified the link between World War II-era exposure to asbestos and ship workers’ cases of mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the lining of the chest and abdomen.

The full list of “solved” clusters isn’t much longer.

Among them: In 1974, an angiosarcoma cluster was found among chemical workers working with vinyl chloride. And mothers who took diethylstilbestrol, or DES, to prevent premature labor during the 1940s and 1950s caused their unborn daughters to develop vaginal clear-cell carcinoma, a cluster discovered in 1971.

The key to all these: The cancer was rare, and contaminant exposure was clear and intense.

Community-based cluster investigations don’t usually fit that mold.

CDC sometimes assists state investigations

Take the cluster of childhood leukemia that struck Woburn, Mass., made famous in A Civil Action. That cluster led to an $8 million settlement from the chemical company W.R. Grace –but it, too, closed with a caveat.

In that case, 21 children who lived near contamination from tannery and chemical operations were diagnosed with leukemia from 1969 to 1986. Two municipal wells were closed in 1979 when tests found solvents.

Still, a subsequent study only “suggested” that the risk of leukemia was higher for a child whose mother drank from the contaminated wells while pregnant. The study warned that “results must be interpreted with caution as small numbers of study subjects lead to imprecise estimates of leukemia risk.”

And the case from Hinkley, Calif., that hit the screen as Erin Brockovich was never declared a cancer cluster, although Pacific Gas & Electric paid $333 million in damages to more than 600 victims in 1996. The suit blamed the company for leaching chromium 6 into the town’s water supply, causing problems varying from cancer to miscarriages.

Despite the difficulties, health departments are ethically obliged to pursue community-based cluster investigations.

People report about 1,000 potential clusters to state health departments each year, the American Cancer Society says. Only 50 to 150 turn out to be clusters — defined as a statistically elevated number of cases of a particular kind of cancer in a certain population over a certain period.

States are primarily responsible for cancer cluster studies, sometimes seeking help from federal agencies.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gets as many as six requests a year for aid. It doesn’t have a record of how many investigations it has participated in, but it has never been involved with one that proved an environmental contaminant to be the cause.

The Fallon case was one investigation the CDC assisted. The study held the promise of finding a culprit, in part because of new technology that could trace toxins in blood and urine.

“The CDC was very hopeful that they might be able to pinpoint something,” said Martha Framsted, a spokeswoman for the Nevada State Health Division.

Yet tests for dozens of contaminants in blood, urine, soil, dust and the air showed the cancer-stricken families had virtually the same exposure to pollutants as did healthy neighbors.

Only two readings came back abnormally high: tungsten and arsenic. But tungsten isn’t considered a carcinogen, and arsenic isn’t associated with leukemia.

“They’ve acknowledged that this occurred, but they’ve pretty much moved forward,” Framsted said.

Florida officials hope Acreage residents will do the same. The state is wrapping up the second phase of its investigation.

In its Aug. 10 summary, the DEP said that despite finding some contaminants beyond acceptable limits in soil samples, it “found no evidence of significant spills, dumping or area-wide contamination.” And water quality in the community of 40,000, which relies mainly on wells, is “generally good.”

Staff researchers Niels Heimeriks and Michelle Quigley contributed to this story.

~mitra_malek@pbpost.com

Kettleman City mothers—including Magdalena Romero, left, and Maura Alatorre, center—show photos of their babies to EPA officials.

Maybe it’s the toxic waste dump. Maybe the pesticides, or the diesel fumes, or the arsenic. How a small-town mystery could change the way we look at pollution.

Mother Jones
— By Jacques Leslie
July/August 2010 Issue

THE FIRST BABY’S NAME was America. She was born in September 2007, with Down syndrome, two heart murmurs, and part of her upper lip missing. She couldn’t suck from a nipple, so her mother, Magdalena Romero, would stay up through the night to feed her with a special tube. America showed pleasure in music and delighted in being held by her four siblings. Magdalena thinks they felt a special tenderness for her because of her vulnerability.

Hospital officials told Magdalena that the baby wouldn’t live a year, but she didn’t want to believe it. Then, one morning when America was nearly five months old, her lips turned purple. Concluding that paramedics would consider a rescue futile, Magdalena drove the baby to the hospital herself and insisted that all efforts be made to save her. For a few days, America survived, tethered to machines. Then she died in her mother’s arms.

A few flowers struggle to grow in the tiny patch of soil in front of the Romeros’ house in Kettleman City, California, a farmworker community halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Outside, the powder blue trim is peeling; inside, the house looks sparse, unfinished, except for an alcove off the living room that has become a memorial to America. On the wall hangs a carefully embroidered cloth with her name and birth date in red script and her tiny hand- and footprints rendered in pink; rosary beads are draped over the frame. Nearby, three photos of America sit atop a VCR—they’re typical baby pictures, filled with pink and lace, that startle because of America’s missing lip. Magdalena stands in front of the shrine; her lips form a slight smile, but her eyes look uncertain. “You feel all the time, every hour, that something is missing,” she says. Magdalena, now 33, dared to have another child, whom she also named America. The toddler is healthy, but Alondra, her six-year-old sister, keeps asking, “Is this baby going to die too?”

There are between 30 and 64 births each year in Kettleman City. In 15 of the 22 years since California’s public health department began tracking birth defects, all babies in the town were healthy, and in five other years, only one birth defect occurred. But in the last two years and 10 months, residents say, at least 11 babies have been born with serious birth defects. Three eventually died; another was stillborn. Most have cleft lips or palates, and some have other, graver maladies. “When my child was born,” Magdalena says, “I thought she was the only one with a deformity. But when it began happening to other babies, I realized there was something abnormal in my community.”

Maricela Mares-Alatorre, who is related to Maura by marriage, has been battling Kettleman City’s hazardous-waste dump for years; her son Miguel, 15, is part of a youth group called Kids Protecting our Planet.

KETTLEMAN CITY—a dot on the map so insignificant that it is technically not even a town but a “census-designated place”—rose out of the scrublands of the western San Joaquin Valley in the late 1920s, following the discovery of oil in the nearby Kettleman Hills. The second-longest street in town, all half a mile of it, is named General Petroleum Avenue, and the third-longest is Standard Oil Avenue. Those names are as close to wealth as the town gets. Nearly half its 1,500 residents live below the poverty line, according to the 2000 census. A couple of miles south on Highway 41, at the junction with Interstate 5, sits an agglomeration of motels, gas stations, an In-N-Out Burger, and a Starbucks, but the town itself has no pharmacy, high school, or movie theater. It also lacks sidewalks, a supermarket, and a clean drinking-water supply (though the 444-mile California Aqueduct, which conveys water from the Sierras to dozens of Southern California cities, runs just past its border). Most Kettleman families travel 32 miles to Hanford, the county seat, to shop for food and bottled water.

Kettleman City does have a few convenience and liquor stores, three well-attended churches (Catholic, evangelical, and Pentecostal), and one tiny restaurant, La Perla, where the most popular menu item is a $3 burrito. Then again, popularity at La Perla is a relative concept; on most days it attracts only five or six patrons. Many families hail from the same Mexican town—La Piedad, in the state of Michoacán. Many have lived in Kettleman City for three generations; others arrived in the last few years. Maricela Mares-Alatorre, a 38-year-old teacher in a GED program for farmworkers, is one of a tiny number of residents with a college degree. She describes Kettleman City as having “a Mayberry feeling with a Latino twist—that’s why I stay. Even if I left, that doesn’t mean the problems get solved. There are still vulnerable people here who can’t speak for themselves, and we’re supposed to abandon them?”

The “problems” are not just the recent wave of birth defects, but the many possible explanations for it, and, most worrisome of all, the prospect that the reason will never be identified. That uncertainty—which no one quite wants to admit—hovers over the town like smog.

Alatorre with her son, Emmanuel, who was born with a cleft lip.

Despite Kettleman City’s remote setting amid almond groves and tomato fields, its residents are exposed to a startling array of toxic chemicals (PDF). Nearly 100 trucks spewing diesel fumes roll through town daily on Highway 41, and many more come by on Interstate 5. More than half of Kettleman City’s labor force consists of farmworkers who are routinely exposed to toxic pesticides, and residents can smell the chemicals sprayed on the fields that border the town on three sides. Kettleman City’s two municipal wells are contaminated with naturally occurring arsenic and benzene. And there are projects in the works to build a massive natural gas power plant nearby, as well as to deposit 500,000 tons per year of Los Angeles sewage sludge on farmland a few miles from the town.

But the biggest environmental villain, in the view of local residents, is Waste Management Inc., which operates a vast hazardous-waste dump three miles from town. Waste Management is the nation’s largest waste-disposal company, and the Kettleman Hills landfill is the biggest toxic-waste dump west of Alabama, where another Waste Management facility is located in another poor, minority community. California’s two other toxic-waste dumps are also located near Latino farmworker towns.

A wooden cross made by a friend hangs in one of the Romero household’s two shrines to baby America, who died at five months.

Last year the Kettleman site accepted 356,000 tons of hazardous waste, consisting of tens of thousands of chemical compounds including asbestos, pesticides, caustics, petroleum products, and about 11,000 tons of materials contaminated with PCBs—now-banned chemicals linked to cancer and birth defects. Waste Management has been seeking permission since 2006 to increase the dump’s size by nearly 50 percent.

read full article at Mother Jones website