Real threat is a lack of information
By Fred Lebrun
Copyright 1999 The Times Union (Albany, NY)
March 13, 1999
The Boston chapter of the Sierra Club got this chilling
note in the mail two
weeks ago, postmarked Manchester, N.H.:
''Why is the Sierra Club sponsoring the false and plain
wrong advertisements
about the Rep. (John) Sununu? It is the kind of tactics that
terrorists use. It
is full of lies and distortions... There is
nothing I can do to stop the ads but I can punish you people.
''I work in the electric generation industry. I have access
to large amounts of
PCBs from old transformers. I am going to start dumping five gallon
pails of
this transformer oil in some of
your favorite rivers as soon as the ice breaks up...I have plenty
of oil to
use. This is your fault. Blame yourself.''
Police agencies in all Northeastern states have been
alerted, and federal
investigators are taking this threat seriously. Obviously a couple
of pails
full of PCBs aren't likely to affect the health of a major river,
but the
demented undertone to this note is as scary as if he or she were
talking about
cyanide, and a knock
on the door from the FBI sounds just about right.
The irony of the letter, though, is that our own Hudson
River already has a gun
to its head over PCBs, only in reverse. Tons and tons were dumped
in the river
by General Electric's Fort Edward and Hudson Falls plants
back in the bad old days, and now GE is trying every loose trick,
confusion and
delaying tactic to avoid a major river cleanup.
This week we were treated to another shameless exercise in
GE's continual
effort in this endeavor. With great hoopla, a ''major'' study was
announced by a GE-paid researcher that seems to show no increased
cancer death
rate for 7000 plus workers at the above named plants compared to
the general
population.
In its narrow focus, Dr. Renate
Kimbrough's study seems to add another valid
opinion over whether PCBs are carcinogenic. Why the announcement
was shameless
is that GE tried to imply much more from
Kimbrough's research than the study even begins to claim. It's as
if GE sets up its own
bull's-eye far off the mark, claims to hit it with this study, then
intimates
that PCBs are therefore harmless and hardly worth the
effort to clean up. Balderdash.
Keeping in mind that no GE workers have been involved with
PCBs in 20 years,
the study was done primarily by evaluating death certificates. So
the
statistics are as sound as the few words scribbled down by a
physician or
medical examiner. This is not
a small consideration. In the late 1970s, the state of
Massachusetts did a
study of GE's PCB-steeped Pittsfield plant and found excess
mortality from
leukemia and cancer of the large intestine. GE then hired a leading
epidemiologist, Dr. David Wegman, who issued his own research on
the
subject by looking at death certificates, similar to Dr.
Kimbrough's methodology.
He published the results in 1990. Most significantly, he
took issue with the
depth of information available to him. He noted incomplete company
records, the
difficulty of determining the ''real'' cause of death, the
inclusion of only
cancers that killed, and limited
data on historical workshop exposures.
''There is a high probability, therefore, that even if
elevated cancer risks
exist in this environment, they might not be found,'' Dr. Wegman
concluded.
So, for now all we really need to know here in New York
about PCBs and GE is
this: neither the DEC, nor
state Health Department nor the EPA even blinked when the
Kimbrough study came out. A huge body of research condemns PCBs as
a health risk, to
humans, to fish to birds.
You couldn't eat most of the fish taken out of the Hudson
yesterday, and you
won't be able to tomorrow -- because of PCBs. That seems
remarkably like a river being held hostage to me. Fred LeBrun can
be reached
at 454-5453.
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