DEQ meeting doesn't quell questions about leaking landfill site
The Bay City Times
Friday, December 16, 2005 By Jeff Kart Times Writer

The old Hartley and Hartley dump has contaminated Bay County's Tobico Marsh with pollutants that pose a risk to human health.

But the extent of the contamination is still being questioned.

A recent human health and ecological assessment of the now-closed, 170-acre landfill, shows that harmful pollution that poses a risk to humans, animals and aquatic creatures has leaked from the landfill and into the marsh.

The assessment was done as part of cleanup activities by SC Holdings, a subsidiary of Waste Management.

But the harmful contamination hasn't spread very far into the marsh, which features a nature trail used by the public and school children, the state says.

Tim Bertram, Department of Environmental Quality project manager, gave varied answers during and after a public information session Thursday on just how far the contamination has migrated, which created doubts in the minds of some audience members.

Bertram said after the meeting the contamination hasn't spread more than 25 feet into the marsh; he said during the meeting it hasn't spread more than a couple of feet.

He also said during the meeting that a contractor tested the nature trails on Monday - which are hundreds of feet from the landfill boundary - and results should be available in about six weeks.

Two Bangor Township school board members at the meeting, attended by about a dozen people at the Bay County Community Center, said they left with continued doubts about how safe it is for students to visit the marsh.

The schools banned field trips into the marsh this summer over concerns that the dump may pose a health risk to students; they voted to have the DEQ do testing in October.

School board member Patrick Shaffer noted a few discrepancies during the meeting about the movement of contaminants into the marsh.

He said it seems "very strange" that harmful contamination from the dump has barely moved when the landfill didn't always have clay caps and slurry walls to keep pollutants from spreading, and the area has flooded in previous years. The landfill was closed in 1978, but the caps and slurry walls have leaked since then, Bertram said.

Bertram said after the meeting that he misunderstood questions about how far the contamination has moved off site when giving varied answers.

He said contamination that spread in previous years was cleaned up and all that remains are two hot spots of chromium and polychlorinated biphenyls, no more than 25 feet into the wetlands, which pose a human health and ecological risk.

He said the health assessment, submitted in 2003, will be used to create a cleanup plan, to be submitted in 2007, that will address hot spots on and off the site. He said 19 samples were taken from the trail and near the trails this week, with 6-inch borings, and of nearby surface water.

School board member Mark Seymour said testing the trails is "a step in the right direction."

Seymour said one reason the school district banned field trips was because the DEQ said months ago that the trails were safe to use, and offered to do testing, but then sent a letter saying there was no risk.

Shaffer said the data the DEQ relied on to make that determination was about 15 years old.

Mike Bristow, a Bangor Township resident who has been raising questions about marsh contamination for years, said he'll reserve judgment on Thursday's meeting until the trail test results are back.

- Jeff Kart covers the environment and politics for The Times. He can be reached at 894-9639 or by e-mail at jkart@bc-times.com

Sullivan County Democrat. National Award-winning, Family-run Newspaper
District Plans Response to Mold
By Nathan Mayberg

LIBERTY — December 16, 2005 – After 13 years of complaining about moldy conditions and a leaking roof at the Liberty Middle School Library, Angela Page, the school’s librarian, was able to get the federal government to document the safety hazards and issue a report on them.

Her reward? A unanimous decision by the Liberty Central School District Monday to force her into retirement.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH, a division of the United States Department of Health and Family Services) has issued a detailed and lengthy report which identifies a host of health threats caused by mold, water leaks and damage.

Among the areas cited for mold damage were the Middle School stairwell and mural. The south side of the school was cited for numerous water leaks around its windows. One boiler room in the elementary school was found to have water incursion. Rusty and possibly moldy blinds were located in the high school library.

The full report can be found on the Internet at www.libertyk12.org/ niosh/reports.shtml.
According to NIOSH, the request for the report on the elementary school was initially made by the district’s faculty union, but the request on the middle and high school was officially made by Superintendent Lawrence Clarke.

The list of health concerns brought by teachers included respiratory problems, allergies, asthma, rashes, sinus problems, headaches and numbness.

The issuance of the report and the word that Page would be forced to retire sent over 100 parents, students, and teachers to the Board of Education meeting Monday. But most of their voices were silenced through the actions of the board, led by President David Burke. Burke limited public comment at the start of the meeting to just a few speakers. He said anybody who wished to speak about the NIOSH report must choose a representative to speak for them. A number of parents and teachers spoke out in disgust, and many walked out.

Among those who signed up to comment was Miranda Hardy, a student in the high school and the daughter of Page. When asked why she wasn’t allowed to be heard, Burke told her the board was following its own procedure which allows meetings to move on and be more productive.

Although the policy was adopted in 1999, it had rarely, if ever, been enforced, according to people who had attended meetings in the past.

“If you want to write us, you can,” said Burke to those who protested his clamping down on public comment. “We’re not going to have a debate on it.”

“Isn’t this America?” responded one woman.

And at least one person pointed out that Burke could be misinterpreting the board’s own policy. The policy says that any group or organization wishing to address the board must identify a single spokesperson. He referred to some people as belonging to the NIOSH group – although there was no such group. The same parent recommended that the board revisit its public comment policy.

Hardy was ultimately allowed to comment on her mother’s forced retirement at the end of the meeting after most of the people had already left. She asked if the school had a policy on how to act if a teacher or student gets sick from mold. Clarke said there is no policy, but there is a written procedure.

Throughout the back-and-forth, there was no comment by the rest of the board.

Outside the meeting, John Buchanan voiced his displeasure with the actions.

“I am really concerned by this. This doesn’t seem like democracy at all. There were a lot of people there who wanted to speak about this issue.”

John Webber said, “Everyone here is a part of a community. We all want to be treated like a community.”

One of the few allowed to speak was Sue Huggler, head of the union representing teachers’ assistants and aides. She used to work in the coal bin room at the elementary school, which allegedly had high amounts of carbon dioxide in the air. The room is used for classrooms. She said she has suffered many respiratory problems as a result.

She called on the board to close the room as recommended by the NIOSH report.

“We have a right to a safe working environment,” she said.

Gary Sawyer, the Director of Facilities for the district, was asked to give a presentation on what the school is doing to address the issues made in the report. He began in hushed voice but was urged by the crowd to speak up. He stated that all areas where mold was identified have been cleaned up. Windows still need to be replaced, he said. Air sampling will be conducted by Sullivan County BOCES, he stated.

Sawyer admitted that there are “a lot of things we haven’t gotten to yet.” He said he had a limited staff which is doing the best it can. After he spoke, Sawyer attempted to leave the building but was stopped by some in the crowd who urged him to stay and answer questions. However, Sawyer never had to answer any questions from the public, as most of them were not allowed to speak.

Former Board President Philip Olsen noted the district’s residents approved a $375,000 renovation project for the middle school, which is expected to remediate a longstanding drainage issue at the school. The school was controversially built on a damp parcel which has had leaking problems since it was first constructed.

Olsen said that part of the project will replace the roof at the middle school library, which has been the focal point of Page’s concerns for the last 13 years. Burke said the board will review the bids in private this Thursday.

Local resident Padme Devine asked if the public would be invited to ensure the contractor who is hired is qualified. Burke said that was not the normal practice, and there were no indications that the meeting would be opened to the public.
She also questioned whether the board was attacking the problems in the right manner. She was among those, including Page, who support the hiring of a toxicologist to handle the work.

“I am very, very concerned about the health of our kids here,” Devine said.

Anthony Hibbert, who runs Perfect House – a home consulting business which provides professional home and mold inspections, mold removal, radon and water testing services – recommended hiring an industrial hygienist. He said there is a specific procedure in removing mold. If not followed correctly, people could become sicker, he said.

He said simply hiring an architect to make renovations, as the board had said it was doing, would not be enough. The problem could get worse, and it would only make the school pay more in the long run. Burke then said he agreed and called Hibbert’s advice a very good recommendation.

Tim Hamblin, the president of the Liberty Faculty Association (the teachers’ union), called the action by the board to place Page on involuntary retirement “intolerable.” He said Page wasn’t allowed to return to work due to the unhealthy atmosphere of her work environment. He said the board should solve the safety hazards so she can return.

He also alleged that the board had put the fear of retribution into teachers by retaliating against others who complained in the past about work conditions.

Burke defended the board’s response to the matter by pointing to the $375,000 renovation project. He said the board was the first to tackle a problem that has been ongoing for more than a decade.

“We are going to do whatever needs to be done,” he said.

Clarke said the project would include roofing, chimney work, drainage work to mitigate water runoff, landscaping to protect soil from sliding into the building, and sealing windows from water leakage.

Both Burke and Clarke declined to comment on the forced retirement of Page, citing it as a personnel matter.

On Tuesday, Page said she had been told the district had submitted papers to the New York State Teachers’ Retirement System for her disability retirement. The union is working on her behalf, she said.

But Page wanted to concentrate more on the health hazards she believed still remain in the school. She said the conditions in the library where she used to work were so harmful, she started fainting. Toxins from constantly breathing in the mold overwhelmed her immune system. Her system has been penetrated so deeply, she can’t tolerate gas or perfume. She wears a respirator when she goes out in public. She hasn’t worked in over a year.

The library was bleached, but that only made the mold grow more toxic, she said. For 13 years, the roof leaked, causing the ceiling to collapse and the rug to be replaced. Shelves fell down, books became moldy and had to be discarded. It was in the process of examining such books that Page said she was exposed most significantly.

She said there are many toxic threats in the school which need to be dealt with by professionals who deal with such chemicals.

“Our children deserve nothing less than a safe place to go to school. My issue has become secondary next to the larger health issue,” she said.

The people who breathe the nation's most unhealthy factory air worry about more than just asthma and other respiratory problems. They also want to know if their daily dose of toxic pollution is slowing the academic and physical development of their children.

In the Ohio River Valley along the Ohio-West Virginia border, factories annually send into the air hundreds of thousands of pounds of manganese dust, a heavy metal that can harm the brain and nervous system.

Biologist Dick Wittberg, who heads the mid-Ohio Valley Health Department, has been pressing for years for a full-blown government study to determine if those releases are harming the children in his hometown of Marietta, Ohio.

Several years ago, Wittberg took part in a study that compared Marietta children with those in a similar-sized Ohio town on academic and physical tests. The Marietta kids fared significantly worse.

"We didn't do anything that in any respect proves that this is manganese that has done this, because there are other scenarios that are entirely possible," he said. "But in my opinion, it really points to some environmental problem that is causing some neurological differences, and one has to suspect manganese. Nobody knows for kids how much is too much."

Similar concerns span the country, though communities with the worst factory pollution sometimes are frustrated they don't have more research to rely on.

In the Detroit suburb of Ecorse, which has sued U.S. Steel over decades of air pollution, Mayor Larry Salisbury wants the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate how industrial toxins affect health.

"We think there have been citizens who had an early death because of health issues related to that steel plant," Salisbury said. "It would be great if the CDC would study certain towns to make the case."

"Sometimes I think the government doesn't want to know the answers," he said. "Once they do, they have a certain liability to enforce."

U.S. Steel spokesman John Armstrong said his company took over the Ecorse plant in 2003 from bankrupt National Steel and has spent millions cleaning up problems. "We take great pride in our environmental stewardship and are addressing these issues as quickly as possible," he said.

An Associated Press analysis of federal pollution, health and Census data found that more than 30 neighborhoods around the Great Steel Works plant in Ecorse rank among the worst 5 percent nationally for potential health risks from industrial air pollution.

AP used health risk scores calculated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The measures can be used to compare the chronic health risk from industrial air pollution from one part of the country to another.

The study found that eight states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin and Missouri — account for almost half the total health risk nationally from factory air. Nearly one-tenth of the total risk is concentrated in Ohio, especially along the heavily industrialized Ohio River corridor.

Farther east, Camden, N.J., is home to more than 100 contaminated industrial sites and seven minority neighborhoods that rank among the top 1 percent in the nation for the long-term health risk posed by factory pollution.

Dr. Robert Pedowitz said his Camden practice sees about 25 patients a day for asthma or allergy complaints, more than any other private practice in New Jersey. One of the main triggers, he said, is air pollution.

"It severely affects the quality of life," Pedowitz said. "It makes people tired, affects their ability to function."

In the Ohio River Valley where Wittberg lives, nine neighborhoods in and around Marietta and Wood County, W.Va., rank among the worst 100 nationally for health risks from factory emissions.

There are more than 20 industrial plants along or near the Ohio River. Those plants regularly spew tens of thousands of pounds of manganese, chromium, sulfuric acid, and formaldehyde.

"It's a toxic soup of contaminants because of all the different facilities in the area," said Michelle Colledge, an environmental health scientist with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

The river corridor also is a major contributor to factory air pollution in West Virginia, which has the highest health risk per person of any state. Indiana ranks second in per capita health risk, followed by Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Alabama.

Residents around Marietta, with the help of Sen. Mike DeWine (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio, petitioned the government several years ago to study the health impact of the region's air.

Tina Trombley, president of Recover, a local environmental group, said residents want to find out for sure if the high incidence of asthma and several types of cancer are the result of air pollution.

"We need to do a full-fledged study and we're hoping that's what they will be able to do for us," she said.

The initial study found arsenic and manganese in the air consistently exceeded levels that scientists believe harm health. Colledge said there wasn't enough information to determine if pollution actually was a health hazard. Further monitoring at specific sites was ordered.

The initial federal study focused on an industrial complex south of Marietta that includes four major facilities. The largest, the Eramet Marietta metal refinery, released more than 550,000 pounds of manganese compounds in 2000, and more than 25,000 pounds of chromium compounds. Another facility, Eveready Battery, releases more than 16,000 pounds of manganese compounds a year.

Jeff McKinney, environmental manager at Eramet, said neither the study nor any other data suggest that "emissions from area industry have adversely impacted the health of residents. Moreover, we have not seen manganese exposure-related neurological effects in our long term employees."

Colledge and Wittberg said the area offers an unusual opportunity to study the impact of manganese dust on humans, particularly children.

Wittberg has been campaigning for such a study since the late 1990s, when he teamed with an EPA researcher and a University of Quebec scientist to measure differences between children in Marietta and Athens, a similar-sized Ohio town 45 miles away.

They gave a battery of 13 tests to fourth-graders in both cities, who had been matched for age, sex and parental education. The tests measured such things as educational proficiency, balance, visual contrast sensitivity and short-term memory.

"The Marietta kids did worse on almost everything," Wittberg said.

The implications are potentially far-reaching if the children's IQ scores turn out to be 10 to 15 points lower, he said.

"Brilliant kids are now simply smart; smart kids are average and average kids are not average any more," Wittberg said. "I believe it is the whole lives of the kids that are affected. I don't think that the damage can be undone."

___

On the Net:
The Environmental Protection Agency: http://www.epa.gov
Details of the EPA's Risk Screening Environmental Indicators Project at: http://www.epa.gov/opptintr/rsei/views.html

Ohio EPA declares risk of cancer; school closed
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
The Plain Dealer, Associated Press

Addyston, Ohio- State environmental regulators said toxic emissions from a plastics plant along the Ohio River pose an increased cancer risk for residents, and an elementary school across the street was ordered closed.

A seven-month analysis of air quality in Addyston, about 20 miles west of Cincinnati, found that the cancer risk for lifelong and long-term residents is 50 times greater because of two chemicals emitted into the air by Lanxess Corp., the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency said Monday.

The study also found unacceptable risks of heart and blood problems, along with birth defects.

The state EPA has ordered the plant to reduce emissions of the two chemicals: acrylonitrile, a raw material used in making plastics, and 1,3-butadiene.

Officials in the Three Rivers School District responded to the study by closing the Meredith Hitchens Elementary School across the street from the plant. The 370 students at the school will be transferred to other elementary schools in the district.

The plant has operated in the town since 1952 under various owners, including Monsanto and Bayer.

"We have to review their findings, and compare them with our own data to try and understand what these numbers mean," said plant manager Sandy Marshall. "We feel we are in compliance with our permits and [that we] meet federal standards."

Marshall said he doesn't believe employees of the plant are in danger from fumes.

The state EPA began investigating the air quality in Addyston after Lanxess had three accidents in five months, which released thousands of pounds of acrylonitrile, butadiene and styrene into the air.

October 19, 2005
Even Very Low Levels Of Environmental Toxins Can Damage Health
Public Library of Science

Four of the most widespread environmental toxins--lead, trihalomethanes (found in drinking water), ionizing radiation from indoor radon gas, and tobacco smoke--can cause serious damage to health even at very low levels, say researchers in the international medical journal PLoS Medicine. What this means, say the researchers Donald Wigle of the University of Ottawa and Bruce Lanphear of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, is that there are simply no safe levels of exposure to these toxins and they must be "virtually eliminated to protect human health."

Children can suffer brain damage from being exposed to very low levels of lead, they say. Although the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend public health or medical action unless the blood lead level of children exceeds 0.48 micromoles/liter, several longitudinal studies of children found inverse relationships between IQ and blood lead levels over a range extending below 0.48 micromoles/liter. These studies found no evidence of a "safe" threshold.

The Canadian government has concluded that the human lifetime cancer risk associated with drinking water containing trihalomethanes at 100 micrograms per liter (the current Canadian trihalomethane drinking water guideline) would be negligible. But recent research showed that there was an excess bladder cancer risk in men exposed to trihalomethanes at levels above one microgram per liter compared to less exposed men (the excess lifetime risk was about seven per 1000). This excess risk, say Wigle and Lanphear, is "much higher than those usually designated as negligible."

The researchers say that both radon and environmental tobacco smoke can damage health at very low levels. A recent expert committee concluded that the most plausible relationship between ionizing radiation and cancer was a linear relationship with no safe threshold, while studies have shown that even low level exposure to passive smoking can reduce fetal growth.

"The public depends on decision makers, scientists, and regulators to restrict exposure to widespread toxins that have known or suspected serious potential health effects," say Wigle and Lanphear.

Citation: Wigle DT, Lanphear BP (2005) Human health risks from low-level environmental exposures: No apparent safety thresholds. PLoS Med 2(12): e350.

October 17, 2005
Schwarzenegger Signs AB 405: Bill Protects Kids from Exposure to Experimental Pesticides
Kids & Teachers Are NOT Lab Rats!

Sacramento, CA - Governor Schwarzenegger, who has portrayed heroes on film became a real hero to more than six million children and hundreds of thousands of teachers and school employees when he signed Assembly Bill AB 405, banning the use of experimental pesticides in California Schools. AB 405 authored by Assemblymember Cindy Montanez and sponsored by California Safe Schools, a children's environmental health organization, is a common sense bill that prevents K-12 public schools from being used as test sites for experimental pesticides, and protects children, teachers and schoolworkers from being exposed to chemicals whose health effects are unknown.

"California Safe Schools is extremely grateful to Governor Schwarzenegger, Assemblymember Montanez, the California Legislature, and many supporters for ensuring that California's most vulnerable population will now be protected," said Robina Suwol, Executive Director of California Safe Schools, the bill's sponsor.

To their credit, Los Angeles Unified School District, second largest school district in the United States, have already committed to implementing the measures required by AB 405 and currently employ significant policies to protect students from chemical exposures.

"The fact that threshold levels of pesticide exposure and health studies are currently based solely on an adult male of approximately 160 pounds underscore that children are counting on adults to protect them. With the signature of AB 405, we have taken a step toward fulfilling that responsibility," Suwol said.

The bill's long list of endorsers included : California Medical Association, California State PTA, California School Boards Association, California Teachers Association, Asthma & Allergy Foundation of America, Los Angeles Unified School District, Learning & Disabilities Association of America, California Communities Against Toxics, California Environmental Rights Alliance, Sierra Club,California League of Conservation Voters, and the Environmental Health and the Environmental Justice Community.

October 13, 2005
Mold Attacks!
If Gilbert school officials had played straight, Mesquite Junior High kids and teachers would've run for their lives.
By Robert Nelson, Phoenix New Times
Jeff Corn didn't have a doctor before 1988. Never needed one. He may have been the healthiest health nut in Gilbert. The former collegiate runner coached Gilbert's junior high and high school cross-country teams by running out ahead of his athletes, playing rabbit to make his greyhounds stronger. He ate smart; he was a cauldron of positive energy. In physical-education class, his students loved him because he was a walking runner's high.

In 1987, a new Gilbert High School was built. That year, Corn and the other junior-high teachers moved into the old high school, a collection of 24-year-old buildings just south of Gilbert's downtown.

And all of a sudden, the 40-year-old superhuman needed a doctor.

He began having sinus infections and high blood pressure. He began getting fungus growths on his body. Through the 1990s, he was visiting the doctor almost monthly -- sinus infection, fungal growth, fatigue, pneumonia, eye ulcers, cysts.

In 2000, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, and 13 lymph nodes were removed. Several months later, new cancer was found, which led to more chemotherapy. Again, he beat the cancer.

Corn kept returning to work, kept coaching. But by 2003, he was barely making it through the school day. When he wasn't at school, he was usually asleep.

In August 2003, Corn returned to school after the summer break. What he found in his office, he says, explained everything:

It was the building that was killing him.

When he arrived, men in hazard suits were tearing out parts of the gymnasium's ceilings and walls. Most of the gym was cordoned off and locked up, but teachers and students could still walk through the girls' and boys' locker rooms.

After one student walked past a worker in a hazard suit, he asked Corn, "How come we don't have to wear those suits, if they do?"

Great question. And Corn had no answer. Like all the teachers, he wasn't told what the workers were doing or why they were treating the gym like a Superfund site.

When teachers asked why parts of the gym were being torn apart, their principal, Marti Farmer, said it was just routine maintenance.

That wasn't true.

The truth was, the gym was full of mold and asbestos. It had been that way for years.

And the wall against which Corn's desk sat for 17 years was one of the worst spots.

What Corn discovered from speaking with other employees, and a New Times investigation seems to confirm, is that Mesquite Junior High had been a breeding ground for black mold since at least the early 1990s.

For years, though, school officials essentially told maintenance crews to just paint over the problem, not fix it. And school officials spent that time ignoring staff concerns that the buildings might be toxic.

The health effects of their actions on students and teachers can never be fully known.

However, anecdotal evidence, and a review of teacher and student illnesses while in the buildings, would suggest that Mesquite Junior High was -- and, to a lesser extent, continues to be -- a sick complex of buildings.

For his part, Jeff Corn is a broken man.

He continues to be plagued with odd ailments, so much so that he felt he could no longer work by autumn 2004. He can't sleep, then he sleeps for days at a time. His memory is hit-and-miss; he has trouble concentrating. He now has no medical insurance and no job. He recently sold his home to free up money for living and medical costs.

Gilbert school officials contend there is no scientific proof that links Corn's illnesses to toxic mold at the school. They say the medical pathologist -- who says Corn is full of mold toxins -- could be wrong and definitely can't prove Corn was exposed at work.

"How do we know he wasn't exposed at home?" the Gilbert Public School District's attorney asked New Times.

Therefore, Corn is on his own.

Over the past few years, officials say, they have removed the swamp coolers and faulty plumbing responsible for any mold problems at Mesquite. Air tests in 1998, 2003 and 2004 show the school is now free of mold, they contend.

In fact, though, this isn't what the tests say.

In addition, a Mesquite custodial employee says the officials' assessment doesn't fit with the reality of the aging buildings involved.

"We're still chasing the problem," he told New Times, on condition of anonymity. "The mold is like a cancer in these buildings."

Now, Corn says, his only interest is in making sure that Mesquite Junior High doesn't destroy anyone else.

"I know that building did this to me," he says. "So how many others have been affected, how many more will be affected? The district administrators don't care about those questions. All they care about is finding a way to avoid liability."

He is concerned that the same game may be being played at schools across the Valley.

"All you need is a leaky old building, a district strapped for money and [school officials] trying to keep things running at all costs," he says. "It's a deadly combination."

But the story of Mesquite Junior High shows how difficult it is to identify an unhealthy building. Here, students come and go in two years; staffers, looking for better jobs in better facilities, leave almost as quickly.

New Times' investigation found that numerous students, teachers and maintenance workers believe they were made ill by the building. The problem is, in the transient society of a large junior high school, nobody stayed long enough to make any solid connection between their illness and the mold.

Nobody except school old-timer Jeff Corn.

Marti Farmer, the longtime Mesquite principal who left the school last year for a new job, didn't return telephone calls from New Times.

Although Farmer was the official with whom school employees dealt, she reported to the school district and presumably the school superintendent, who must have known what was going on at the junior high and sanctioned her actions. Even now, the district's lawyer -- to whom all questions about black mold are referred -- refuses to admit that the mold was a health threat to teachers and children.

Therefore, it becomes difficult to know when Farmer first became aware that her school had a serious problem with black mold.

What is known, though, is that teachers were complaining about black mold outbreaks as far back as the early 1990s.

One of them was Tim Rutt, now a teacher and football coach at Hamilton High School in the Chandler Unified School District.

Rutt taught P.E. and coached basketball and football at Mesquite from 1991 to 1998. Rutt says he was "coughing constantly" through his time at Mesquite. And during that time, he was continually finding mold growing in the gymnasium, locker rooms, P.E. offices and storage rooms.

"It was especially bad at the beginning of the school year," Rutt says. "Every August, you'd come in there and everything would be covered with mold. Every year we'd take the equipment in to Marti [Farmer] and every year she'd just say 'clean it up.' The walls would be covered so they'd come throw up some new drywall. Like clockwork, after a few months, the mold was back. "

In the fall of 1997, Rutt again arrived at school to a pile of mold-covered sports equipment. Again, he says, he took it in to Farmer complaining that something was "seriously wrong with this building."

Same thing. She again told him to clean it up.

But this time, something strange happened, Rutt says. He left the equipment with her and told her it needed to be tested.

"She calls me at night a little later and asks, 'Tim, you didn't touch any of that equipment, did you?' I said, Of course I touched it. I've been touching it for years.' She said, 'Well, stop.'

"She said she was ordering us all new equipment. That led to the obvious question, 'So what were the results of the test?' I can still remember [that she said]: 'I can't tell you.'

"It was crazy. At that point, I knew I had to get out of that environment."

And so, a year later, he did. And once he arrived at Hamilton High School, the wheezing and coughing stopped.

"I know it was that building," he says. "I knew if I taught there long enough, it was really going to destroy my [immune] system."

Ashlie Perro never had breathing problems in elementary school. But once she reached Mesquite Junior High, she spent much of the next two years carrying inhalers.

She was a runner, but running became increasingly difficult for her in junior high. At cross-country meets, she would run with asthma inhalers in each hand. Her coach, Jeff Corn, joked that he would need to get her holsters for her inhalers.

She was known as "Wheezer" by the other kids.

"It was really scary," says Perro, now 23. "It would just be, all of a sudden, I couldn't breathe."

Once, during a race in Coolidge, Perro had such a severe attack that Corn called 911. Perro spent the night in the emergency room, with Corn at her side, trying to get her breathing stabilized.

During her eighth-grade year, Perro tested positive for an allergy to mold. Mold couldn't be the problem, her mother thought, because they had just moved into a new home with no signs of mold or water damage.

"I never associated it with the school," Perro's mother, Corina Noirfalise says. "That seems stupid now, but I just didn't."

And once Ashlie left Mesquite, the breathing problems slowly disappeared. By her sophomore year, Ashlie and her mom had forgotten about those problems back in junior high.

Another student, Steve Granados, remembers collapsing from an apparent asthma attack in a Mesquite classroom, which was later discovered to have heavy water damage. The teacher, who later died of cancer, had to call 911. Granados had forgotten the incident until last year, when he happened to be over repairing Jeff Corn's air conditioning.

"When your lives are so busy, once a problem ends, you forget about it," says Betty Penn, whose son and daughter both went to Mesquite. "You just move on with your lives. That's what happened with us."

Penn's daughter Danielle started at Mesquite in 1997. Soon after, she began having intense asthma attacks at the school.

Through Danielle's seventh- and eighth-grade years, Penn says, she was frequently called to go pick up her daughter at the nurse's office. Penn says that every time she went to the office, there were "seven or eight other kids wheezing just like her.

"I did say something to the nurse because they were all in there with these croupy coughs," she says. "It was just weird. I've never seen another nurse's office that crowded. But [school officials] said they were just normal colds.

"I guess," she says with a wry smile, "it was always the cold season there or something."

Then Danielle graduated. Then Danielle stopped needing inhalers.

Then Dustin Penn went to Mesquite. Then he suddenly needed an inhaler.

Penn would have breathing attacks that would cause him to miss many days of school at a time. Doctors put him on cortisol steroids that made him bloat.

"He was miserable," Penn says.

Then he left Mesquite. Then he got better.

"You'd think we all would have thought something [was going on]," Penn says. "But you're so busy with your lives. You just never put two and two together."

Mesquite Junior High was run down when Ninfa Gonzales was a student there back in 1991.

By the time she started working at the school as a custodian 10 years later, "it was a disaster," she says.

Gonzales sees the degraded condition of Mesquite in racial colors.

Mesquite serves the old central core of Gilbert, where the majority of the booming city's poorer Hispanics live. As Gilbert has grown, she says, "all the money has gone out to build new schools for the new wealthier suburbanites.

"It was considered the old dump for Hispanic kids back when I went there," she says. "The district just has never given it much attention."

In 1998, after years of mold caking the school's locker rooms, school officials conducted the first "mold remediation."

An industrial hygiene survey by Hutzel and Associates found extremely elevated levels of fungal growth in the gym's locker and equipment rooms. One fresh-air vent showed fungi counts 1,000 times higher than a typical clean wall in the building, while one racquetball racket had a count more than 10,000 times higher than a clean surface.

In November of that year, a company cleaned the locker room and storage room, tested for fungi and, finding none, reported that the problem was solved.

Rutt, then the P.E. Department head, was told that any mold problems the school might have had were gone.

Which was a sick joke.

Within months, the mold was back.

And even if it had been eradicated, research on toxic mold's long-term effects suggests it might have already done damage to the immune systems of teachers and students.

School officials never tested teachers or students for toxins in their bodies. Never have. Indeed, most were never told there was even a problem.

In 2001, Gonzales transferred from her job at Highland High School to take a custodial position at Mesquite Junior High. The school was closer to her home.

"That was a huge mistake," she says. "Highland was a good school."

At Mesquite, she says, she learned how the school's administration dealt with what she called "an epidemic" of toxic mold.

"I'd see mold growing on pipes or whatever, I'd put in a work order and somebody would come wipe the pipe off and tape it," she says. "I started going to [Principal Farmer] saying, 'We've got to do something.' And she made it real clear: Gilbert isn't going to do anything about this school. She just said, 'Clean it up as best you can.'"

Gonzales says she knew it was toxic black mold because the district had given custodians seminars in how to identify it.

"It was sad. We were trained to identify problems and then told to ignore them."

Both summers she worked at the school, she and the other custodians were asked to go into the buildings and clean them before the teachers and students got there.

"In some places, mold covered the walls and the floors; it was amazing," she says. "One of the sinks was just full of it. We literally took pressure washers to some of the areas. That was the only thing that would work."

The sewer would back up often in the buildings, she says. She would try to suck it up with a shop vacuum, then disinfect. Time and time again, it would happen.

She began to have health problems, she says. A nephew who went to school at that time had respiratory problems.

During the 2002 school year, she says, she would ask Farmer to contact district officials to plead with them that something had to be done to fix the school.

"If you saw that place day in and day out, it made you crazy knowing that teachers and students were in there," Gonzales says. "But the principal was more upset that I kept making an issue out of it.

"By the end of that second year, I just had to get out of there," she says. "It was just too much."

A year later, school administrators and district officials apparently decided it was finally time to attempt to clean up the gymnasium again.

Again, though, they didn't tell teachers what they were doing.

For years, in the entry of the gymnasium, water had been seeping through the ceiling, creating two large fetid puddles at the gym's entrance.

When a maintenance employee climbed up into the ceiling, he found a blanket of mold covering a blanket of asbestos.

The school's teachers learned about the mold and asbestos from building and custodial staff. At the time, though, teachers say, Marti Farmer kept telling them the gym would be blocked off during the summer of 2003 for routine maintenance.

The locks on the gymnasium were changed. But when P.E. teachers peeked in the windows, they saw a sign warning of asbestos.

When one P.E. teacher asked the principal about the sign, the teacher says, Farmer told her she was wrong. She hadn't seen an asbestos sign.

The asbestos sign was gone the next day, the teacher says.

Frustrated, the P.E. teachers banded together in September 2003 and wrote a letter to Farmer and other administrators.

"We feel we have gone through the proper channels in trying to resolve our concerns -- with no results. We have two staff members who are continually sick, with one being diagnosed with cancer. Supposedly, our mold situation was taken care of years ago. Yet, on numerous occasions, we have had equipment thrown out due to the mold. This is how the problem is remedied. We had a teacher who mysteriously contracted a rash. The rest of us are continually working through our ailments, which include sinus congestion, chronic colds, dry coughs, eyes, nose and throat irritation, rashes, arthritic pains and aches.

"We believe that our health and that of our students are in jeopardy, if not now, in the future."

The letter was signed by six teachers and coaches, including Jeff Corn.

Following the writing of that letter, Corn began trying to compile a list of other teachers at Mesquite Junior High who had contracted odd ailments since working there.

"That's when it finally started making sense to me what was happening," he says.

He says he found seven other teachers or aides at the school who were suffering from diseases often associated with a failure of the autoimmune system, one of the hallmarks of toxic mold poisoning.

Two teachers had died of lung cancer. Corn says those teachers were non-smokers, a statement that New Times couldn't independently confirm.

Then, he took his information to the principal, who, he says, told him he was crazy.

And since that time, this is how district officials have treated Jeff Corn.

"For 18 years, they say I'm this wonderful teacher and coach," he says. "Then I bring this up, so now I'm crazy. It's shocking how quickly these people turn on a person, how quickly they'll turn on the teachers and students."

The science of mold isn't terribly complex.

And everyone knows mold's habitat -- any wet, warm place.

Like New Orleans.

Or, any wet wall in an otherwise dry, warm place, like Phoenix or Gilbert.

Indeed, if given water, mold loves Arizona just as much as Louisiana.

What is complex, though, is trying to tie toxic mold to human health problems.

The first question: Are molds present in the person's environment?

In Corn's case, in Mesquite Junior High, the answer is yes.

The district's air-quality tests, even as spotty and incomplete as they were, confirmed that.

The 1998 tests showed extremely high levels of mold.

In the summation of a May 2004 air-quality test of the P.E. building, inspectors noted that fungal spore counts were much higher in tests of outside air than inside air.

True, but the numerous outside spores were all harmless. Buried deep in the test results was the fact that Stachybotrys chartarum, the most notorious of toxic molds, showed up in both the "East Gym" and "West Gym" samples.

In November 2004 -- after officials again claimed to have taken care of the mold problem -- more testing of the gymnasium by Health Effects Group, Inc. showed four rooms with elevated spore counts of toxic molds. The inspectors noted "water staining and sporadically located drywall deterioration in the boys' locker room. There was evidence of corroded plumbing systems throughout the gymnasium facility."

The building, the inspectors said, "should be considered for renovation activities."

But here's where that question gets complicated.

Were the toxic molds present when the person was there? Was it possible for the toxins from those molds to reach humans? How long were the humans exposed to the toxins?

Beyond that, scientists continue to argue two critical points in assessing mold damage to humans:

What signs in the human body indicate damage from toxic molds?

What are the effects of long-term exposure versus short-term exposure?

After Corn left Mesquite, a former student who is now a physician suggested he contact a medical pathologist named Dr. William Croft, a longtime professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Wisconsin before starting his own toxicology lab.

Croft asked Corn for a urine sample as well as a tissue sample taken during Corn's treatments for cancer.

Croft, who, since the 1980s, has examined more than 7,000 cases of potential toxic mold poisoning, determined that Corn's urine sample showed that he had been exposed to "moderate levels of Trichothecene Mycotoxins," the toxic byproduct of certain molds.

Croft continued, "There is no safe level of Trichothecene Mycotoxins. This mycotoxin can affect every cell in the body, but the brain, lungs, immune, gastrointestinal and reproductive organs are especially susceptible."

Besides the show of mycotoxins in the urine, Corn's tissue sample, Croft said, "clearly demonstrates the chronic exposure to trichothecene mycotoxins to this subject."

The report Croft sent to Corn included hundreds of pages of medical literature supporting his conclusion.

Earlier this year, armed with Croft's diagnosis, along with numerous photos he had taken in 2003 of black mold in many locations at Mesquite Junior High, Corn went to Gilbert district officials seeking $675,000 in damages, an amount, he says, that he would invest so he could live out his life on the interest.

He also asked for assurance that Mesquite Junior High would be made genuinely mold-free as soon as humanly possible.

District officials said Mesquite already was mold-free.

They said Corn's request was absurd.

The district hired a University of Arizona toxicologist, Dr. John Sullivan, to review both the conclusions of Corn's doctor and the air-quality test results taken from Mesquite in 1998, 2003 and 2004.

Sullivan concluded that with the evidence provided, there was no way to link Corn's cancer to his workplace. Oddly, Sullivan didn't address any of Corn's myriad other illnesses. Sullivan brought into question, too, Croft's methodology in determining that Corn's body showed evidence of mold poisoning.

Sullivan's report was thrown back at Corn in late September. The district's offer: Three months' pay. Take it or leave it.

The only real conclusion reached in the standoff was that much more testing needed to be done on Jeff Corn's body.

But Jeff Corn has run out of money. He sold his house recently, a move that he hopes will cover some of his medical and living expenses.

More tests would strap him financially. He can't afford what would be a very expensive legal fight.

And the school district isn't going to pay for any tests because it argues it is not responsible.

Heck, Sullivan claimed, health-nut Corn might have gotten sick from the foods he ate.

So, the district wins. And Corn is left out in the cold.

By February of this year, Jeff Corn was on the verge of suicide. His sleeping problems were at a zenith. He was in pain. His memory was failing. He was deeply depressed at the thought of life with a chronically collapsing immune system.

In 2003, he had been struck by a drunk driver. After that, doctors put him on antidepressants.

In December 2004, his school insurance was discontinued. He no longer could afford the antidepressants.

In April, a friend of Corn's, seeing that he was slipping, asked a psychologist friend to evaluate Corn at no cost.

The psychologist noted the frightening collapse of Corn's physical and mental well-being.

The man once named by the Arizona Republic as the state's "Coach of the Year" was now "unable to get out of bed four days out of the week," the psychologist wrote in his report of Corn's condition. "Corn is suffering from frequent crying and suicidal ideations. He is having difficulty with concentration and memory." The psychologist also noted that Corn suffered from nervousness, trembling, headaches, dizziness, pains in the chest, heart pounding, pains in the lower back, nausea, sore muscles, hot and cold spells, numbness and "the feeling of being trapped."

Clyde Dangerfield, the attorney for the school district, noted in his interview with New Times that Corn also told him "he was hearing voices."

The implication being that Corn is too unstable to know that mold from his workplace made him unstable.

The psychologist determined that Corn was permanently disabled.

Croft, the medical pathologist who determined Corn was full of mycotoxins, said the best treatment for Corn would be at the facility of an expert in toxic mold poisoning in Dallas.

Great idea. But can Corn afford it, even with proceeds from the sale of his house?

Most likely, the Gilbert school district is free of Jeff Corn.

The problem is, Jeff Corn may not be a medical anomaly.

Corn's problems began with respiratory ailments that seemingly advanced to a host of debilitating conditions.

According to a recent study by University of Southern California researchers, Corn's progression of ailments closely mirrors the problems experienced by 65 patients who had been exposed to mold in California, Texas and Arizona.

The mold-exposed patients first complained of asthma-like symptoms, followed by persistent flu-like illnesses, severe fatigue, and impaired memory and concentration.

Compared to more than 200 non-exposed patients, the mold-exposed patients showed sometimes profound decreases in cognitive ability. Balance, motor skills, verbal recall and long-term memory were all damaged. Several patients suffered from severe depression after their mold exposure.

What is most frightening, though, is what happened when researchers gave eight of the patients the same battery of tests more than a year later, long after they had left the mold-contaminated buildings that caused their problems.

None of the eight patients showed improved functioning.

In fact, seven of the eight had gotten worse.

"Absent additional mold exposure, function in 88 percent of these patients had deteriorated during the course of the year," the study's author, Dr. Kaye Kilburn, wrote.

The point:

If Corn is dying because of toxic mold exposure at Mesquite Junior High, he may not be alone.

Which means that instead of making fun of Jeff Corn, Gilbert officials might want to provide testing for students or teachers who have shown symptoms of toxic mold exposure during their time at Mesquite.

For now, though, everyone involved with Mesquite Junior High is looking to the upcoming Gilbert schools bond issue. If voters approve the bond proposal, more than $4.5 million will go toward renovating the Mesquite complex.

Corn is trying a renovation of his own.

Amid bouts with pain and depression, he says he's regained the strength to "earnestly try to fight this stuff in my body." He plans to use some of the money from selling his house to place himself in that toxin treatment center in Dallas.

Meantime, he is self-medicating. For example, one basic treatment attempted by some toxicologists for purging the body of toxins is frequent saunas.

So, when he's up for it, Corn has begun running again -- in the heat of the day.

"I've got to try to fight this," he says. "It may not work, but I'm going to give it my best shot."

As for his old school, Corn simply hopes that Gilbert officials will finally give their best shot to helping other teachers and students who were made ill by years of moldering decay at Mesquite.

"I have this terrible fear it's going to start catching up with others who came into that school later than I did," Corn says. "What makes me so mad is this could have been stopped a long time ago. But instead, [the school district] just let the problem grow."

Jul. 04, 2005
LA school district wrestles with environmental issues in building boom

LAURA WIDES
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES - The gold walls and chrome balconies of Santee High School gleam against a backdrop of warehouses and aging homes. The newly planted grass on the football field awaits trampling by hundreds of cleats.
When it opens July 5, the campus in tough South Los Angeles will become the first completely new high school built in 35 years in the city. It's part of the biggest ongoing school construction project in the United States and stands as a symbol of revival for the nation's second-largest district.

Yet Santee, built upon the contaminated site of an old dairy, also symbolizes the challenges the Los Angeles Unified School District faces in building environmentally safe schools in an area where contamination and earthquake faults cut through the earth.
Last month, the state Department of Toxic Substances Control said Santee's developer used contaminated rubble from the dairy as backfill about 15 feet beneath the school. The material contained varying levels of PCBs, lead and other potentially toxic chemicals.
Tests overseen by state officials later determined the rubble posed no threat to students, but the state is looking into whether the district violated the law by failing to report the contaminants when the material was first discovered in 2003.

For some parents, the situation has stirred bitter memories of past environmental fiascos. The most notorious occurred at Belmont High School five years ago, when the district spent $270 million on what became the nation's most expensive public school campus.
However, its doors remain closed because it was built atop explosive pockets of methane gas and an earthquake fault just west of downtown.

"If you're going to develop in Los Angeles, especially in the inner city ... you find toxic materials because usually it was land that was used for industrial purposes," said Roger Carrick, who oversaw an investigation into Belmont.
"The issue is how well you characterize the potential problems and whether you correct it," he said. "The question was whether it was handled properly."

Some parents remain suspicious.

"It's not a question of science. Now it's a question of distrust, of public opinion," said Margarita Jackson, whose son will attend the new school. District officials insist the problem at Santee was an isolated incident that occurred under a special contract giving unusual independence to Emerald Development, which built the campus.

Emerald vice president Steve Spillman, who joined the firm after the tainted soil was used, blamed an independent contractor for the problem. He said he did not know why the tainted material was used.

School officials also point out that Santee is just one of more than 160 new campuses in the works as part of the $14.6 billion school construction and renovation project funded through bonds.

Superintendent Roy Romer acknowledged that each of the sites has the potential to be a toxic land mine but added the district has opened 17 new schools in less than five years and will complete nearly 40 more by the end of the year.
All have been cleared by state environmental officials.

Even so, Romer conceded the district "made a mistake" at Santee by giving the builder too much independence and by waiting for the company to alert state officials about the contamination.

"In this large a project, you're going to have people do something wrong," he said. "The most important thing is to correct it and don't do it again."

The LAUSD building boom is one of several large school construction projects underway across the country. Las Vegas is building 90 schools to accommodate enrollment growth of 13,000 students a year. New York has 51 schools in the works to help house its nearly 1.2 million students.

In the Los Angeles district, where enrollment has reached 746,000, families in heavily minority communities have pushed for decades for new classrooms to help eliminate year-round classes and ease violence attributed to overcrowding. But after construction began in the mid-1990s, several highly touted projects became environmental albatrosses. A middle school was built over contaminated groundwater, and a new elementary school was located over leaking, abandoned gasoline tanks. Those sites have since been opened under close monitoring.

Cecilia Nunez, a founder of Neighbors for an Improved Community, said that troubled history is one reason she is concerned. "It begs the question," Nunez said. "What other dirty little environmental secrets are there?"

Since being hired five years ago, Romer has tried to turn things around by replacing project administrators with a team of retired Navy engineers. He has vowed to finish the huge building initiative by 2012 and insisted that Belmont can be saved and opened by 2007.
"I didn't come out here to build buildings. I came out here to improve instruction. But when I came out here, I found out I had to build buildings to get that done," he said.

LAUSD has seen an influx of more than 200,000 students in the past three decades - roughly the total number of kids now in Las Vegas schools. But until the arrival of Romer, the district had done little to catch up with its explosive enrollment.

More than 3,000 students are now packed into high schools designed for less than half that number. Laboratories are relics from the 1960s, and teachers roam year-round campuses without having a desk of their own.

"You go out in the hallways, and they're full, you can barely walk," said 16-year-old sophomore David Estrada. "You have to wait for everything, for food, for talking to counselors. Sometimes kids just leave because no one even notices if they're there."

Sitting in Santee's auditorium, which features a smaller version of the sound system used at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Marta Renteria smiled at the thought of sending her daughter Jennifer to the new school.

"I've lived here for 28 years, and not one of my kids has ever gone to a new school, a school as nice as this one," she said. "It's about time they build them."

Romer believes safe, new campuses are only one part of the equation for improving the LAUSD and winning back the trust of parents.
"Ultimately you get the confidence of people back when they see their kids entering a good school with quality education," he said.

Los Angeles Times
EPA Is Faulted as Failing to Shield Public From Toxins
A federal report says the environmental agency has insufficient data on chemical dangers.
By Marla Cone Times Staff Writer

July 13, 2005

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is failing to protect the public from tens of thousands of toxic compounds because it has not gathered data on the health risks of most industrial chemicals, according to a report by the investigative arm of Congress to be released today.

The report by the Government Accountability Office found that chemical companies had provided health data to the EPA for about 15% of chemicals that had been introduced over the past 30 years.

In addition, the report said the EPA had sought information about health dangers for fewer than 200 of the tens of thousands of industrial compounds that had been in use since before the late 1970s.

"EPA does not routinely assess existing chemicals, has limited information on their health and environmental risks, and has issued few regulations controlling such chemicals," the report said. The investigators concluded that the environmental agency "lacks sufficient data to ensure" that the public is protected.

About 80,000 chemicals are used by U.S. industries, and scientific studies suggest that many pose health threats, such as cancer, birth defects, altered sex hormones and damage to developing brains. Included are many substances — such as flame retardants in furniture and electronics, phthalates in cosmetics and various chemicals in plastics — that people are exposed to in everyday products.

The investigators recommended that Congress amend the Toxic Substances Control Act, the 1976 law that regulated industrial chemicals, to give the environmental agency more power to require companies to provide health data about chemicals and to restrict their use.

"EPA has had difficulty proving that chemicals pose unreasonable risks and has regulated few existing chemicals under TSCA," the report said. The current law is "unlikely to address more than the most serious chemical risks," the accountability office investigators concluded.

In recent years, tests by federal health officials and others have found that human bodies contain hundreds of chemicals. Such findings have drawn attention to the toxics law and prompted Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) to ask the accountability office last year to investigate the the environmental agency's efforts to regulate chemicals.

Lautenberg plans today to unveil the proposed Child, Worker and Consumer Safe Chemicals Act, a bill he wrote with Jeffords that would strengthen the toxics law. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) plans to introduce the same bill in the House.

"In the GAO report, we will learn that [the toxics law] is an ineffective and burdensome law that often fails to protect our families," Lautenberg said. "In 29 years, the agency has formally requested health information on just 200 chemicals — out of about 80,000, according to the report."

The findings echo the concerns of many environmental scientists and health activists.

"The existing law is broken," said Andy Igrejas of the National Environmental Trust in Washington. "It doesn't protect the American public from toxic chemicals. It's arguably our weakest environmental law, and people don't realize that."

The law "tells EPA that before you can regulate the chemical, you have to amass enormous evidence to prove it guilty. But EPA doesn't have the authority to get that evidence," Igrejas said.

EPA officials, in a written response to the report, said they were "proud of the progress that we have made in protecting human health and the environment." In the last 20 years, the agency has regulated more than 1,600 chemicals, and a similar number has been voluntarily withdrawn by companies, wrote Susan B. Hazen, the agency's principal deputy assistant administrator. She wrote that amendments to the law were unnecessary because "the EPA believes that there is currently strong legal authority" to require testing of compounds.

Representatives of the chemical industry were unavailable for comment Tuesday. But in the past, they have said that they subject chemicals to rigorous safety tests and that a stronger law is unnecessary.

In 1998, the Chemical Manufacturers Assn., now the American Chemistry Council, initiated a voluntary program to provide information on the basic properties of about 2,800 chemicals used in high volumes. But the federal report said it was "unclear whether the program will produce sufficient information for EPA to determine chemicals' risks to human health and the environment."

The environmental agency has not banned any existing industrial chemical since 1989, when it tried to phase out asbestos. The asbestos ban was overturned in 1991 when a federal appeals court ruled that the EPA had not proved it was necessary to protect human health. Since then, the agency has relied mostly on voluntary efforts by chemical companies.

The report comes as Europe debates a controversial proposal, called REACH, that would require extensive testing of chemicals. The Bush administration and U.S. chemical industry have lobbied against the proposal, saying it is unworkable, would cost the industry billions of dollars and could lead to bans on important compounds.

The accountability office report does not endorse the European Union proposal. But it suggests several options for Congress to strengthen the U.S. law by requiring testing before a chemical is introduced and reducing the burden of proof needed to regulate a chemical.

Many U.S. environmental experts agree. Joel A. Tickner, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts' School of Health & Environment, said the United States "is behind the curve" and "needs a fundamental new chemicals policy" similar to the EU proposal.

July 7, 2005
RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS
Environmental Toxicants and Developmental Disabilities

"Sixth grade was a trying time for Karen Singer's autistic son, who spent recess wandering the periphery of the playground by himself and sometimes hid in the school bathroom when he needed a safe place to cry. He knew he was doing something wrong as he reached the social crucible of middle school, but he did not know how to fix it. At home he begged his mother to explain: "Why am I like this? What's wrong with me?" ...Parents, educators, researchers and clinicians all say that the majority of such children become conspicuous in the third grade and are bullied or ostracized by the time they reach middle school."[1]

Developmental disabilities such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia and uncontrollable aggression currently affect an estimated 12 million U.S. children under age 18 -- almost one child in five. A group of public health scientists led by Dr. Susan Koger estimates that between 3 and 25% of all developmental disabilities result from exposure to neurotoxic chemicals in the environment.[2] These disabilities ultimately impact all aspects of human development -- our ability to learn, socialize and become productive members of society.

Reading and writing difficulties affect nearly 4 million school-age children. Disabilities in children pose lifelong difficulties for the affected individuals. It is harder for them to keep jobs, learn new skills, work and generally get along with others. Many developmental disabilities (like aggression and impulsivity) are precursors to violent and criminal behavior. In 2004, the U.S. prison/jail population increased at the rate of 933 each week and 75% of these new inmates were black or Hispanic -- populations disproportionately impacted by heavy metals and other toxicants.[3]

Costs to Society

Even if the developmental effects of environmental toxicants are subtle (which is not always the case), the economic and social impacts can be profound. Consider reduced intelligence: If the cumulative effects of environmental toxicants reduced the average American's IQ by just one percent (about one IQ point) the annual cost to society would come to $50 billion and the lifetime costs to trillions"[4]. The impacts are felt at both ends of the intelligence spectrum -- there is a greater burden on the social system, reduced productivity en masse, and there are fewer shining stars to discover new and better ways of living sustainably.

Mercury emissions from power plants alone impact approximately 500,000 children each year in the U.S. Their resulting lowered IQ translates into an annual economic loss of $1.3 billion (in 2000 dollars; this estimate is $8.7 billion if you consider all sources of environmental mercury).[5] And these statistics say nothing of the other costs to society including medical/therapeutic treatment, special education, incarceration, addiction counseling, etc.

Meanwhile, industry and government argue that its not economically viable to take a precautionary approach. As a result, Americans spend between $81 and 167 billion dollars each year on neurodevelopmental deficits, hypothyroidism and related disorders.

The Bush administration actively puts down European initiatives like REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of
Chemicals) that would force industry to evaluate the safety of chemicals prior to their marketing to the general public. This
kind of precautionary stance might cost the U.S. $30 billion in lost sales of chemicals and products.[6] One study concluded
that today's generation of newborns has a $110 to $318 billion GREATER earning capacity as a result of NOT being exposed to the levels of lead faced by infants a generation ago. [7]

Toxicants' Effect on the Developing Child

Growing children are particularly at risk to chemicals in their environment because they face greater exposure and are physiologically more susceptible. They ingest more food/water per pound of body weight than adults. Children spend more time near the ground and thus breathe up to ten times more dust and residues than adults. Children also put contaminated items in their mouths. When the National Academy of Sciences studied pesticides and children's health in 1993, the Academy concluded, "A fundamental maxim of pediatric medicine is that children are not 'little adults'.... In the absence of data to the contrary, there should be a presumption of greater toxicity to infants and children."[8]

Dr. Koger reviews some the literature on lead, mercury and pesticides: We now know that environmental exposure to lead
causes learning disabilities, reduced IQ, attention deficit, impulsivity, hyperactivity and violent behavior. Initially
scientists believed that there was a threshold for lead toxicity but recent studies have confirmed that there is no
safe level of lead exposure. If you ingest lead your IQ will be reduced. In the mid-1970s, 40% of American children under age 5 had average (mean) lead levels of 20 ug/dl or more. 10 ug/dl blood lead is the current safety threshold established by EPA.
Among African-American children in the mid-1970s, more than half had blood-lead levels greater than 15 ug/dl.[9]

Methylmercury (an organic form of mercury that accumulates in fish and the animals that eat fish) acts directly on the
central nervous system by damaging or destroying nerve cells. It impairs brain development and can lead to mental
retardation, cerebral palsy, lowered IQ, loss of memory, reduced attention span and physical coordination. The FDA and
EPA currently recommend that nursing mothers and young children avoid fish known to have high mercury levels (including
albacore tuna, shark, swordfish, and king mackerel).[5] The major sources of environmental mercury are coal burning power
plants, waste incinerators and volcanoes. Human sources account for 70% of the 5,500 metric tons (12.1 million pounds) of
mercury released into the environment each year.[5] The EPA estimates that 1.16 million women of childbearing age "eat
sufficient amounts of mercury-contaminated fish to pose a risk of harm to their future children."[10]

Pesticides are toxic by design and meant to kill weeds, insects, rodents and other pest organisms; they do so by
impairing the nervous and immune system function. Many pesticides and their byproducts (which include PCBs) are highly
toxic, persistent and bioaccumulative in humans. Because our nervous system shares basic physiology with other living
things, pesticides also harm the human nervous and immune systems [see Rachel's #660]. Of the 140 pesticides officially
known to be neurotoxicants, only 12 (8.5%) have been tested for potential impacts on children's development.[10] A study of
Mexican children exposed to pesticides found impaired memory, creativity and motor skills compared to an unexposed
population. The pesticide exposed children had trouble drawing an ordinary stick figure of a human, something the unexposed
children could readily do.[11]

Limits of Science

Koger identifies six reasons why it is inherently difficult to
document a cause-effect relationship between toxicants and
impaired health:

1. Lack of a control group -- because environmental toxicants are so widespread, it is difficult (though not impossible) to
find unexposed groups for comparison with exposed individuals;
2. Multiple chemical exposure -- the interaction between chemicals may cause different effects than a chemical acting
alone;
3. Behavioral and cognitive effects are typically subtle and difficult to measure;
4. The majority of research on toxicants is done on lab animals which limits their application to human health;
5. The effects of exposure may not be seen for months or years;
6. The brain and other systems of the human body are more susceptible to chemicals during specific development phases --
exposure at one time may have no effect while the same exposure at a different developmental stage could have significant effects; and
7. Genetic variation and gene-environment interactions greatly complicate the matter.

Conclusions and Regulatory Issues

Humans have long recognized the potential harm of environmental chemicals to child development. Unfortunately, regulatory efforts focus on proving harm before limiting the exposure of countless innocents, with the associated cascade of health,
social and economic losses. When the U.S. finally banned lead in paint and gasoline, blood levels of lead improved
dramatically. But left to its own devices, industry will do what is best for industry -- pursue profits for shareholders at
any cost (see Rachel's #771, #419, #421, and #427). The alternative is to take a proactive approach like that being
pursued by Sweden which calls for new products to be largely free from (a) persistent and bioaccumulative substances; (b)
polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics and endocrine (hormone system) disruptors; (c) heavy metals like lead, cadmium and
mercury.[2] The U.S. is currently standing on the sidelines of this significant ethical and technological advancement for
society.

Dr. Koger calls on her colleagues in the scientific/mental health professions to take a stand against the historical risk-assessment- reliant prove-harm approach that costs society so much human suffering and misery. The grand human experiment currently being conducted by industry is inconsistent with the ethical standards applied to pharmaceutical testing where erring on the side of precaution is customary.

Koger urges psychologists -- as the most qualified front-line professionals dealing with the problems of developmental
disabilities -- to play a more active role in exploring alternatives like integrated pest management, speaking out in
their local community, and applying their technical expertise to the widespread and growing problem of environmental
toxicants. As scientist-citizens psychologists can reduce the toxic burden shared by all. A healthy and sustainable future
for our children depends on it.
========

[1] Jane Gross, "As Autistic Children Grow, So Does Social
Gap," THE NEW YORK TIMES, February 26, 2005, p. A1.

[2] Susan M. Koger, Ted Schettler, and Bernard Weiss,
"Environmental Toxicants and Developmental Disabilities: A
Challenge for Psychologists," AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST (April
2005) Vol. 60, No. 3, pgs. 243-255.

[3] Incarceration Project
http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/1044.pdf

[4] Bernard Weiss, "Vulnerability of children and the
developing brain to neurotoxic hazards," ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH
PERSPECTIVES, (June 2000) Vol. 108 (Supplement 3), pgs.
375-381.

[5] Leonardo Trasande and others, "Public Health and Economic
Consequences of Methyl Mercury Toxicity to the Developing
Brain," ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES (May 2005) Vol. 113,
No. 5, pgs. 590-596.

[6] Elizabeth Becker, "White House Undermined Chemical Tests,
Report Says," THE NEW YORK TIMES, April 2, 2004 p. C2.

[7] S.D. Grosse, and others, "Economic gains resulting from the
reduction in children's exposure to lead in the United States,"
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES, (June 2002) Vol. 110, No. 6,
pgs. 563-569.

[8] Philip J. Landrigan and others, PESTICIDES IN THE DIETS OF
INFANTS AND CHILDREN (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press,
1993), pg. 9.

[9] James L. Pirkle and others, "The Decline in Blood Lead
Levels in the United States," JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL
ASSOCIATION (July 27, 1994) Vol. 272, No. 4, pgs. 284-291.

[10] Ted Schettler and others, IN HARM'S WAY: TOXIC THREATS TO
CHILD DEVELOPMENT (Cambridge, Mass.: Greater Boston Physicians
for Social Responsibility [GBPSR], May 2000).

[11] Elizabeth A. Guillette and others, "An Anthropological
Approach to the Evaluation of Preschool Children Exposed to
Pesticides in Mexico," ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES (June
1998) Vol. 106, No. 6, pgs. 347- 353.

RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 160
New Brunswick, N.J.  08903
 

Living Well: Exposure to toxins driving up healthcare costs
Exposure to toxins costs us billions each year, study shows

By BOB CONDOR
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Money talks, we all know that. For Kate Davies, money and economics can say plenty toward arguing for tighter regulation of toxic chemicals used by companies in Washington.

"It is important for environmentalists to use economic arguments to control toxic chemicals," said Davies, a researcher in environment and community at Antioch University Seattle's Center for Creative Change. "Of course, monetary valuations of diseases and disabilities are only part of the picture. They do not take account of people's suffering or the emotional costs to families and friends.

"But whether we like it or not, legislators are heavily influenced by economic arguments. It is important for environmentalists to speak this language.

In an exclusive interview with the P-I and the Living Well column, Davies released her findings from a new study that links big money -- billions -- in health-care costs to environmental toxins. The Antioch study shows environmental contaminants cause $1.6 to $2.2 billion in direct and indirect costs in the state for childhood conditions such as asthma, cancer, lead exposure, birth defects and neurobehavioral disorders. Adult conditions (asthma, heart disease, cancer and more) run up $2.8 billion to $3.5 billion.

That's a lot of money that can be trimmed from a legislative budget or health-care costs program. It represents the sort of dollars that make legislators sit up and notice.

The findings are timed to Wednesday's public hearings about "persistent bioaccumulative toxic substances," or PBTs. She hopes to catch the attention of state legislators and Department of Ecology officials attending the hearings who will be writing a draft rule on PBTs.


"This is exactly the sort of evidence we need to present to legislators as they develop new regulations for environmental toxins," said Elise Miller, director of the Institute for Children's Environmental Health based in Freeland.

Davies' new study is based on an "environmentally attributable fraction" model that estimates proportions of each disease or disability that can conservatively be linked to exposure to environmental toxins. So Davies' numbers may even be on the low side.

Her well-documented research is part of a national trend to track health-care costs related to environmental factors, but Davies is the first scientist to specifically target how the numbers affect our state.

These environmental health researchers are smart to include mainstream government and medical sources in their papers.

It marks the first time state legislators will have access to such eco-economics during public hearings. It is what makes Davies' work so important -- and encouraging to any environmental activist.

An important point: Cost-benefit analysis has been part of environmental policy making for years, yet in most cases only the costs of managing toxic chemicals is included in any analysis.

Davies said the environmental health costs associated with children's conditions is roughly .7 percent of the state gross national product, while environmental health costs for adults equates to 1 percent of the local annual GNP.

Funding programs that reduce health-care costs associated with environmental toxins means the state GNP would increase nearly 2 percent. This is attractive to state legislators.

Some of the individual costs attached to conditions are worth noting. For instance, a large part of the eco-health costs can be traced to lead exposure. There is no "safe" threshold for lead exposure in young children, especially age 5 and younger. Total cost for 2004 is pegged at $1.5 billion for the potential damage of lead exposure to the developing brain and central nervous system.

Childhood asthma is another instructive case. Dr. Philip Landrigan at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York conducted a landmark study that estimates 10 to 35 percent of kids' asthma is linked to outdoor non-biologic pollutants (translation: toxic man-made chemicals). About $50 million per year goes to treating Washington children with asthma caused by these pollutants.

Davies' study also connects a portion of the huge costs of cardiovascular disease to toxic chemicals used by industry. Her analysis shows $564 million was spent in 2004 on heart patients adversely affected by pollutants.

Just the mere act of counterbalancing industry lobbyists is a significant outcome for Davies. She and Miller both anticipate this report will create some momentum for a tougher draft rule on PBTs.

Their goal for Wednesday's public hearings is to "influence the debate," said Davies.

"It is important to look at this issue from a Washington state perspective," she said. "We could significantly improve the state's economic performance by eliminating or controlling the use of toxic chemicals."