PADOH Meeting Sparks Anger - and Promises

The Jan. 18 public meeting to discuss the Pennsylvania Department of Health's latest study of Hometown-area residents was an exercise in frustration for many of the 250 people who attended.

But don't give up yet - officials are promising further action.

The meeting at the Hometown Fire Co. opened with a presentation by Dr. Gene Weinberg of the DOH's Bureau of Epidemiology. Weinberg was one of the authors of the study, which dismissed local residents' concerns that high rates and unusual patterns of illness are linked to the area's toxic pollution problem.

Weinberg "rambled on ... for almost an hour," reports Dante Picciano, director of the grassroots Army for a Clean Environment. "At one point, the DOH was explaining to us what community was represented by a given ZIP code. In other words, the DOH was telling us what our ZIP codes are. Questions were then asked but the answers were evasive."

(For more details on the meeting, read the reports in the Lehighton Times-News, Pottsville Republican, Hazleton Standard-Speaker and Allentown Morning Call. The Times-News also ran a nice story about this Web log. Thank you!)

Today I called state Rep. Dave Argall to find out what would happen next. He promised that he and state Sen. James Rhoades would "find the money" to pay for additional tests of the Still Creek drinking-water reservoir. One wonders why they haven't done that already, but OK. It's always good to know whether your drinking water is poisonous. Sure hope we find out soon.

I also called Weinberg to ask him what steps his department would take to help Hometown-area residents. He said he'd like to study local polycythemia vera cases further.

"We're committed to tracking those cases and working to refine the rates for that area," he said.

That's all well and good, I said. But what did his department intend to do about all the sick and suffering people in the area?

Direct people to cancer screening and smoking cessation programs, he answered.

But what about all the toxic pollution there?, I asked. How would his department address its impact on local residents' health? You are aware of all the pollution there, aren't you?, I asked.

Weinberg hemmed and hawed and finally admitted that no, he had not considered environmental exposures other than the McAdoo Associates Superfund site. He hadn't even looked at the toxic release inventory data I sent him.

I must confess that I blew up in frustration. But I ended up talking with Weinberg for about an hour, during which time I told him about all the many toxic exposures and the illnesses besides polycythemia vera and cancer such as autoimmune and thyroid conditions.

"My dream would be for the DOH to come in, look at all the exposures in the area, and to offer people some information to help them deal with the situation," I told him. "The reality is what it is. Now what do we do? I would love to see a forum addressing that, and maybe even aimed at the medical professionals in the area who take care of people."

To Weinberg's credit, he listened patiently and seemed receptive to my concerns. He said DOH staff would meet internally to discuss the situation further and would probably have additional conversations with the state Department of Environmental Protection to better assess local residents' toxic risks.

"The way you're presenting the situation now does leave a strong impression on me," Weinberg said. "I'll take this back and see if there's not a bigger role for us in this."

Let's hope he's serious.

PADOH, Argall Must Consider Widespread Toxic Threats to the Hometown Area

The meeting to discuss the Pennsylvania Department of Health's study of the Hometown area will take place at 7 p.m. tonight at the Hometown Fire Co. I wish I could attend, but work and other responsibilities here in North Carolina make that impossible. I will be there in spirit, though.

I did offer my thoughts on the matter in a letter I sent to state Rep. Dave Argall and copied widely to regulators and others in the local community. In it, I mentioned my concern that much of the recent public discussion about the unusual patterns of illness in the Still Creek community north of Hometown has focused on residents' proximity to the McAdoo Associates Superfund site.

"Of course, McAdoo Associates and other local Superfund sites - Eastern Diversified Metals in Hometown and Tonolli several miles east of the village - are undoubtedly public health threats; that's why they came under federal Environmental Protection Agency jurisdiction in the first place," I wrote. "But they're not the sole source of toxic exposures for people in the Rush Township area."

I went on to explain that other toxic threats include air emissions from industrial facilities and power plants as well as widespread water pollution, radiation and dioxin contamination. My letter included several attachments documenting these pollution sources, including the official toxic release inventories for Air Products, Silberline, J.E. Morgan Knitting Mills, Northeastern Power Co., Gilberton Power Co., Wheelabrator near Frackville, St. Nicholas Cogeneration outside Shenandoah and WPS Westwood Generation in Tremont.

I noted that many Hometown-area residents work, shop, worship or attend school in Tamaqua, where they are exposed to toxic dust from the mine-reclamation projects involving river dredge and ash from coal-fired power plants. I also noted that there's widespread groundwater pollution in the area from various sources and the likelihood the municipal reservoir at Still Creek is contaminated with industrial chemicals due to its location near several pollution sources.

My letter also reported on toxic exposures that haven't been widely discussed in the context of the local health problems: radiation from radon, Three Mile Island and routine releases from the nearby Susquehanna nuclear power plant as well as dioxin contamination from the fires that burned at Eastern Diversified's polyvinyl chloride waste piles back in the 1970s. (Please note that I made an error in this section of my letter, calling tritium a radioactive isotope of helium rather than hydrogen. My apologies.)

"Whatever the findings of any official health surveys, Rush Township residents past and present already know we suffer from high rates and unusual patterns of illnesses associated with environmental pollution," I wrote. "At the very least, we - along with the medical professionals who care for us - need information on the potential health impact of all of the local toxic exposures combined. We need to understand the full scope of the toxic threat, what can be done to help those of us who are already sick, and what can be done to prevent more pollution-related illnesses in the future."

I went on to say that I imagine it can be difficult for elected leaders to speak out about polluting companies, since they're so important to the local economy - and an important source of campaign funds. Since 1998, for example, Argall has received at least $6,900 from Air Products, $4,435 from the Anthracite Region Independent Power Producers Association representing the waste-coal-burning plants and $4,000 from Silberline, according to the Institute on Money in State Politics.

"But Rush Township residents are facing a dire environmental crisis that threatens their wellbeing and the wellbeing of future generations," I concluded. "Please do everything you can to help them."

I pray he does. Lives depend on it.

PADOH Fiddles (With Data) While Hometown Suffers

The Pennsylvania Department of Health's cancer study that will be the subject of the Jan. 18 public meeting at the Hometown Fire Co. claims to show that local residents and natives have nothing to worry about when it comes to health damage from the area's toxic pollution.

Unfortunately for us, it does nothing of the sort.

PADOH undertook its latest study of the area after local residents blasted its previous study, released in September 2004, for failing to adequately explore unusual patterns of illnesses associated with environmental pollution. PADOH conducted the first study after learning that three residents of Ben Titus Road in Still Creek just north of Hometown - a community located downhill from the McAdoo Associates Superfund toxic waste site and Northeastern Power Co.'s waste-coal-burning plant and downwind of the Air Products industrial gas facility - were suffering from polycythemia vera. A malignant stem-cell disorder affecting the blood, PV is relatively rare in the United States, with studies finding incidence rates for the condition ranging from 1 in 50,000 to 1 in a million. So its triple appearance in a small rural community understandably set off alarms.

I don't have a copy of the latest PADOH study yet, but Hometown resident Joe Murphy does, and he was kind enough to fax me a few pages. For those of us concerned about the area's environmental health, the report is far from reassuring.

To begin with, PADOH found that the Carbon-Luzerne-Schuylkill county area has elevated incidence rates of 12 cancers compared to the state: melanoma in Carbon; stomach, colorectal, larynx, uterus, thyroid, leukemia and PV in Luzerne; and mouth, colorectal, cervix and uterus in Schuylkill. The study also found a "significantly elevated" incidence of PV in Luzerne County. While PADOH's report downplays environmental pollution's role in these cancers and blames "modifiable risk factors," PV is not associated with diet like colon cancer, or with smoking like lung cancer, or with human papillomavirus like cervical cancer. But the condition is associated with exposure to benzene, one of the many pollutants in the toxic stew that is McAdoo Associates.

Furthermore, despite local residents' request to compare local cancer rates to national rates, PADOH continues to compare local rates to state rates. But Pennsylvania has the fifth-highest cancer rate in the nation. What would happen if PADOH were to compare local rates to the national rate? Dante Picciano of the Tamaqua environmental nonprofit Army for a Clean Environment did just that:

"The U.S. annual incidence rate for cervical cancer is 8.4 cases per 100,000," Picciano writes. "Schuylkill County has 15.2 cases per 100,000. The national average for colon and rectum cancer is 53.1 cases per 100,000. Schuylkill County has 71.5 cases per 100,000.

"DOH reports a total of 354 cases of polycythemia vera throughout the entire state for 2001-2002. Luzerne County has 32 cases (9%) and Schuylkill County had 12 cases (3.4%). In other words, Luzerne and Schuylkill County had 12.4% (44 cases) of polycythemia vera in the state during 2001-2002. If you assume a conservative occurrence rate of 1 case per 50,000 people per year, Luzerne and Schuylkill Counties would need a population of 1,100,000 (22 x 50,000) to be within the normal rate for the state. In fact, Luzerne and Schuylkill Counties have a combined population of approximately 470,000. Thus, polycythemia vera is occurring at about 2.3 times the normal rate in Schuylkill and Luzerne Counties."

PADOH's single-minded focus on cancer also limits the study's usefulness. Even though locals report what seem to be high rates of other autoimmune disorders including Graves' disease and multiple sclerosis, PADOH looked only at cancer. And the study was lazy in its methodology. Faced with the serious concern that something's wrong with a community's health, PADOH didn't bother to send anyone to talk with local residents or even to survey them by mail or phone. PADOH staff simply sat at their desks, crunched some readily available numbers, and drew conclusions utterly disconnected from the reality on the ground.

Hello, PADOH? Too many people in the Hometown area are sick. If you don't believe me, ask the doctors. Ask the pharmacists. Ask the oncologists. There's something wrong there. When are you going to stop fiddling with statistics and do something to help people? In tiny little Still Creek alone, three people are suffering from PV. Doesn't that set off alarm bells for you? And it's not just PV. When my father was dying of kidney cancer in 1998, three other men in that Hometown neighborhood - one next door to my family's house, one four doors away, the other five doors away - also were suffering from kidney cancer. They have all since died. Within a few doors of my family's home, there have been at least two brain cancers, six breast cancers, an intestinal cancer, lung cancer, testicular cancer, three cases of Graves' disease, two Parkinson's disease, one rheumatoid arthritis, and one polymyositis, a rare autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks its own muscles. And have you heard about all the cases of multiple sclerosis in Hometown?

Doesn't all that autoimmune illness in one small, rural community worry you? Don't you want to know what's happening there? Don't you think a door-to-door survey is in order to assess residents' health?

Or could it be that you don't really want to know what's going on? Could it be that you're seeking not the truth about Hometown's health but plausible deniability?

Because that's what it's starting to look like.