ExposureBlog

Just in from the New York Times, a jury acquits WR Grace executives in their town-poisoning case.  According the federal prosecutors, the executives in question knew that the vermiculite they were pulling from the earth under Libby, Montana was deadly, but did little or nothing to ensure that the townspeople were warned or otherwise protected.  Apparently the jury didn’t agree, and now the execs can go back to their Sun City retirement homes. 

But there’s more to the story. 

Much of the vermiculite that WR Grace mined in Libby was sent to companies and distributors around the U.S. and marketed as insulation for homes and businesses.  It was also sold as a fire retardant to contractors putting up buildings.  I’ve seen this stuff being used as filler for potted plants. 

While not all vermiculite is the same—the levels of asbestos vary—it is certainly something you don’t want in your home.  In the past, some people have come down with mesothelioma with no known prior exposures to asbestos.  Actor Steve McQueen died of mesothelioma and it was generally assumed he had been exposed to it wearing asbestos-lined suits while racing cars.  But what if it had come from an attic in a house he lived in?  Perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at the epidemiology of mesothelioma cases around the country.

Not long ago, the Department of Defense announced that they would detonate a 700-ton cache of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil at Area 16 of the Nevada Test Site.  Dubbed Divine Strake, the test was to “determine the potential for future non-nuclear concepts.”  The shot, expected to produce a dust cloud 10,000 feet tall, was scheduled for June of this year. 

In May, after questions regarding their environmental impact statement came up, the feds decided to postpone the Divine Strake test indefinitely.  Now, it seems “indefinitely” means “until September or thereabouts.”  Apparently the Department of Defense believes it can come up with a proper EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) that addresses all the concerns (including mine, discussed earlier in this web log).  

Now, while the mainstream press has remained characteristically quiet regarding the revival of the test, the activists are angry.  In a Tom Dispatch letter, author Chip Ward pointed out that visitors to the nuclear test site are restricted from taking home chunks of NTS rock and that the same material that will likely be entrained into the air when Strake is detonated.

As part of their earlier sampling protocol the Defense Department took what are essentially radiation measurements somewhere near the Strake blast site.  In an affadavit filed with the court, I and several other environmental professionals argued that it would be necessary to sample area to identify the specific radioisotopes in the soil that produced the radiation. Here is why:

1. The soil at Area 16 has been contaminated by debris from prior nuclear tests, such as shots Gailieo, Kepler , Coulomb B, Shasta, Smoky, and Turk.  Some of these tests, such as Kepler, Galileo and Turk produced the long-lived alpha-emitter americium-241; while shot Galileo produced high quantities of the long-lived radioisotopes cobalt-60 and cesium-137.
2. The same radiation (i.e. gamma, beta, alpha particles, x-rays, etc) can be produced by chemically-different radioisotopes.
3. The way a radioisotope behaves in the body is determined by the chemistry of the radioisotope rather than the radiation it produces.

So, in order to do a proper environmental impact assessment, the Department of Defense must identify the specfic radioisotopes in the soil–both quantitatively and quantitatively. In other words, they should determine not only what radioisotopes are in the soil at Area 16, but how much of each radioisotopes are there.

But that is only half of the assessment.  Since these materials will be entrained in a 10,000-ft tall dust cloud—and since what goes up must come down, the feds must acknowledge that this material will potentially affect any site downwind–all the way to the Eastern seaboard.  Nuclear debris clouds certainly made it to the East Coast in the 1950s, and the Strake cloud will make it that far as well.

Recently I heard rumors that the DOD scientists were planning to counter that the Strake fallout would not be detectable above background (ambient levels of radiation.)  Of course, that brings up the second half of the EIS:  the impact of the fallout on the target site (mostly, the rest of the United States.)  Again, just assessing radiation levels won’t fulfill the requirments of a proper Environmental Impact Statement: they must identify the radiation-producing radioisotopes at the downwind sites as well.  While there are some wonderful books on the subject (ahem), for accuracy and precision nothing beats actually taking samples in the potentially-affected areas.  This would mean core samples taken at such sites where radioisotopes from earlier testing may have accumulated–namely soil at the bottom of lakes and ponds.  Soil sampling for radioisotopes is an accepted protocol that has been used for years by government scientists.

Only until soil sampling in the downwind areas is completed and the samples analyzed, will we be able to properly assess the potential impact of the Strake shot on the rest of the United States. 

But potential impact is only part of the story.  Once the device is detonated, once the cloud is airborne and heading north and east, the DOD still has one additional requirement: monitoring of the path of the Strake dust cloud.  Given the current state of the EPA radiation monitoring system, this may be a problem.  The EPA monitoring apparatus consists of only 59 air radiation monitoring sites —a little more than half of what was available in the U.S. in the 1950s–located primarily in the northeastern U.S.  Unfortunately, there are no monitoring stations in Wyoming, Montana or Nebraska—states that could be affected by higher amounts of radioactive debris.   Two years ago, I had the opportunity to speak with some EPA technicians familiar with the system.  They told me that the sites were staffed by volunteers who recorded the raw radiation data and then mailed the samples to the main EPA Laboratory in Montgomery, Alabama.  Hopefully, that situation has changed since then.

Glasstone and Dolan, in their book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, that a radioactive debris cloud can be completely scavanged (washed clean) by a rainstorm in about an hour .  An encounter between the Strake debris cloud and even a small thunderstorm could result in a area of concentrated radioactivity on the ground below. 

Any Environmental Impact Assessment should also include information and protocols regarding what should be done if such radioactive rainouts occur.  For example, if a thunderstorm deposited significant amounts of NTS americium-241 on a farmer’s corn field, should he be allowed to bring the corn to market—or be compensated for the economic loss?  If the rainout drops radioactive NTS material squarely onto a small town, should the residents be offered free medical tests and followups?

Tough questions, but ones the Strake EIS should address.

The Plaintiffs in this series of trials think so.  Former Corpus Christi welder Ernest J. Solis is the plaintiff in a trial being held in Cleveland.  His is one of 3,800 other lawsuits regarding Parkinsonism and welding fumes that have been consolidated in federal court there.  The toxin alleged to cause the Parkinsonism is manganese, an element occasionally found in welding fume–and, oddly enough, nuclear fallout.  Manganese is certainly a neurotoxin, but the symptoms it produces are fairly specific and don’t always correlate with classic Parkinsonism. According to Leikin and Paloucek, in the well-regarded (by me anyway) Poisoning and Toxicology Compendium, manganese-toxic patients “have a tendency to fall backwards, not have a prominent tremor and do NOT respond well to dopaminomimetic medication as opposed to idiopathic parkinsonism patients.” I’m betting one of the experts for the defense in this case will be Denver physician Scott D. Phillips.  He wrote an article in Greenbergs Occupational, Industrial and Environmental Toxicology, in which he had this to say about manganese: “Symptoms (of manganese exposure) are typical of parkinsonism. However, the brain lesions from manganese occur in the striatum and palladium in distinction to parkinsonism, in which the substantia nigra is damaged.”  He cites A Barbeau et al, “Role of manganese in dystonia,” Adv Neurol. 14:339, 1976.  Damage to the striatum and palladium is something that, presumably, can be differentiated from damage to the substantia nigra.

Then there’s the issue of naturally-occuring manganese in the environment.  For example, an average cup of tea may contain 2-7 ppm of manganese.

Making matters even more difficult for the Plaintiffs, the conditions of exposure to welding fume are going to be difficult to quantify years after the fact, especially when there may be no clear record of the specific types of welding rods that were used over the time period.  I can imagine the request for production: “all invoices for welding rods going back to 1960, all industrial hygiene monitoring results from 1970 to the present. . .”

Of course, I haven’t seen the court documents, but if the Plaintiff is asserting that welding rods -> manganese -> Parkinsonism in the welder, then it might be a tough case to make.

Prediction: 8:4 Defendant.

Read about it here. 

Back in 1979, while with OSHA, I received a phone call from a medical student.  His neighbor, who worked at a nearby petrochemical facility in Texas City, TX, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.  Against all odds, this neighbor worked in the very same facility where another tumor case had appeared almost twenty years earlier.  I investigated, and soon turned up four cases—all at the same facility.  We called in the epidemiology team from the national office and before long, we had identified 10 cases.  Worse, we found the possibility of 18 more cases at another facility about 40 miles south of the original cases.  Unfortunately, the 18 suspect cases was at Dow—and Dow didn’t consider 18 cases much of a problem.  When Industrial Hygienist Dave Elskamp and I visited Dow to open an inspection there, we were shown the door. 

Then our troubles promptly continued.  Pro-OSHA Jimmy Carter was out, Ronald Reagan was in, and the new OSHA boss, a Florida contractor named Thorne Auchter, didn’t seem to like OSHA.  Not long after our Dow visit, we received word that no further epidemiological work was to be done on this case.  Seeing some pretty obvious writing on the wall, the principal investigators got together, wrote up a paper and sent it off to a new medical journal for consideration.  The paper was published by the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, —just as the new OSHA Director terminated the study—and two years later, terminated the OSHA office where the study had originated.

Eventually, a researcher at the University of Texas School of Public Health continued work on the case via a string of National Cancer Institute grants that eventually totalled about $700,000 over nine years.  Despite the massive amount of money poured into that study, no final report has ever surfaced.

I’ve heard of other possible brain tumor clusters-the 1985 cluster in western Missouri, the 1996 Amaco case in Napierville, IL, the Pratt&Whitney case in North Haven Connecticut,and recently a possible cluster in Ocean City, NJ.

Interestingly, the researcher who took over the OSHA brain tumor study in 1980 was also the principal investigator of a paper discussing what is probably the Amoco case in Napierville.  The findings?

“Although conclusions are limited by the small study population and lack of specific exposure data, these findings were not consistent with an occupational explanation for the observed brain tumor cluster.”

Compare that finding with the statement from Monash University epidemiologist Michael Abramson regarding the Melbourne RMIT cluster:

“To be quite frank, I think it’s an unfortunate coincidence.”

Perhaps.  But when these unfortunate coincidences–stretch from Texas in 1979 through western Missouri, through Napierville, IL, through New Jersey and now, in Melbourne, Australia—well, it would seem that something other than chance might be involved.

Louie Slesin over at Microwave News reports a cluster of 7 people with brain tumors all working in a single building. Very strange.  More later.

An e-coli infection can be hazardous to one’s health.  Lethal, in fact.  As always, it’s a good idea to avoid eating things that might include this type of bacteria.  Unfortunately, the list seems to be getting longer.  Dateline has a report on e-coli found in Dole bagged salads.  Read about it here.  NBC Dateline isn’t sure how it got there, but promise to stay on the story until the culprit is found.  MSNBC offers shopping tips to avoid bacteria-ridden food. 

Back while I was with OSHA I co-authored a paper regarding a cluster of glioblastoma multiforme that showed up in some Texas petrochemical refineries.  The investigation had begun with a phone call about a single case at one chemical plant and before it was over possibly 18 cases were uncovered. The study was ended and eventually turned over to a School of Public Health.  Later, after leaving OSHA I began work on a book about nuclear fallout.  It was around this time that I received a large package in the mail—a three volume set of an NCI publication titled US Cancer Mortality Rates and Trends 1950-1979. 

It had been sent to me by one of the co-authors, Thomas J. Mason, PhD.  I had spoken with Dr. Mason years earlier regarding another cluster investigation in the Missouri-Iowa area, and he was aware of our paper on glioblastoma in Texas. 

The books remained in my library for years, and when the National Cancer Institute published the 1997 I-131/thyroid cancer study I brought it out to compare fallout deposition levels with county-by-county cancer rates during the 1950s through 1970s.  Then, in 2000 while researching my series on Nuclear Testing, I decided to get a backup copy of the Rates and Trends book. I knew that the volumes were referenced at a number of sites, such as here, here and here—and that the series was found in a few isolated libraries such as this one.  But when I checked with Amazon.com, I discovered the series was out of print. 

So, last year, after I had finished up on my series on nuclear testing, I decided to republish the entire series. This involved going back over the pages one by one, removing highlighting, ink and notes.  By February of this year the entire series was ready to be sent to the printer.  Today, the first proof came back, and it looks pretty good.

The entire series will be published as a LEGIS Books imprint of 260Press, and ready for sale by mid-May, 2006.