Other Toxic Substances: At Home - White House sides with chemical industry against kids, stalls EPA hazard reviews of toxic chemicals indefinitely

TCE (Trichloroethylene) is a widely-used solvent and is one of the most commonly found chemicals at Superfund sites across the country. You may recall it was TCE that gave kids leukemia in Woburn, MA and because the subject of a famous book and movie, A Civil Action.

EPA was set to release its final updated assessment of TCE on Friday, September 2nd, (the same day the Administration blocked EPA from issuing a new health standard for ozone).

The updated assessment concludes that TCE is a known human carcinogen (whether you drink it, breath it, or absorb it through your skin), and causes even more chronic diseases than previously thought. In addition to cancer, TCE has been linked with harmful effects to the central nervous system, kidney, liver, immune system, male reproductive system, and developing fetus.

Because the updated assessment would lay the groundwork for more protective cleanup standards and exposure limits, the chemical industry has fought for more than twenty years to prevent EPA from updating its assessment – along with the Departments of Energy and Defense, which created a lot of those Superfund sites. Meanwhile, the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, and the National Academies of Science have consistently endorsed EPA’s updated assessment. In 2006, the National Academies recommended that EPA finalize its assessment so that efforts to reduce exposure to TCE could be made “expeditiously.” Friday came and went, but the TCE assessment was not released. The same day draft assessments of two other chemicals – (1,4 dioxane and n-Butanol) that had been made available for public comment on August 31st were mysteriously rendered “temporarily unavailable”.

The public wants to be protected from exposure to toxic chemicals in the air, the water, and in the products they bring into their homes every day. But it seems that the White House isn’t thinking about health, the environment, or the public, only what the chemical industry and other big polluters are demanding.

Preventing EPA from issuing a final assessment of TCE -- or reverting to the Bush administration’s approach of continual White House interference to block release of assessments or demand weakening changes sought by the chemical industry – would be a deliberate decision to consign America’s children, and the public at large, to prolonged exposure to carcinogens and other toxic substances in their air and water. In the health realm, it is hard to think of a worse legacy than that.

The Source

Other Toxic Substances at Home: Uncle Sam’s Dioxin Cover-Up

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Another, vital missing element is for a knowledgeable insider to come forth and, like Admiral Zumwalt did on Agent Orange, bang some bureaucratic heads together until they do right the job of protecting the public from dioxin and other toxic substances, and helping the injured.

Vietnam and New Jersey, despite the vast distance between them, share a deadly link. Both places, lushly beautiful this time of year, were poisoned by United States government actions regarding one of the most toxic chemicals, dioxin

A new documentary, Mann v. Ford, that opened on HBO television channels this week highlights the painful reality for a Garden State community that was poisoned despite government assurances that safety measures were in place to protect people's health from industrial pollution. In a stunningly symbolic scene, two leaders of the contaminated neighborhood walk along a path beside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington on their way to the Capitol Building, their reflected figures weaving in and out among the long columns of names of soldiers who died in the war.

In the early 1980s, years before Zumwalt’s scathing report, officials in New Jersey created an Agent Orange study commission, which found that contrary to federal government assertions dioxin could be found in Vietnam veterans’ bodies years after the war. As reports of long-suppressed health studies about dioxin exposure piled up, Congress in the early 1990s mandated that the VA treat or pay compensation to Vietnam veterans for a number of cancers, other illnesses, and their children with spina bifida. The list of illnesses associated with dioxin exposure has since grown substantially, and includes many if not most of the illnesses that beset the Ringwood neighborhood nearly surrounded by Ford dump sites.

The Source