Great Lakes health data hidden

The Center for Public Integrity has released data on chemical health hazards that were part of a report allegedly blocked by CDC.

The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) released a report at the beginning of February on health effects related to chemicals in "areas of concern" around the Great Lakes region. The nonprofit organization claims that the data were quashed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The study was commissioned by the International Joint Commission (IJC)—a Canadian–U.S. group that advises both countries on Great Lakes governance issues—and carried out by researchers at CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). The report, Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great Lakes Areas of Concern, remains under wraps.

IJC member David Carpenter, head of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, State University of New York, says that he saw the report several times, and in a recent letter, he encouraged CDC's director to publish it. Other reviewers reported technical problems, such as outdated information on the status of hazardous waste sites, and they are still waiting to see whether those problems have been rectified, Carpenter reports.

The initial IJC call was triggered by a 1998 assessment from Health Canada. That report used data from the country's public health care system to show increased hospitalizations for various diseases, more birth defects, and other adverse health outcomes, in communities exposed to 17 hazardous waste sites on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes region. IJC's intent was to get the same geographically correlated evidence for the U.S. side.

Although such data have been published in the literature or are available in state databases, no one had gathered them together until the ATSDR report in question. Carpenter points to his group's work, which provided evidence from New York sites that was quite similar to that in the Canadian report. He and his colleagues published data in the scientific literature last year linking elevated hospitalization rates from diabetes, particularly near the Hudson River, to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as PCBs.

Levels of PCBs and some other chemicals have flattened out in the Great Lakes since the 1970s, but the current concentrations are still dangerous, Carpenter says. Even more worrisome is that "levels of new POPs are increasing." He points to "an almost exponential rise" of brominated flame retardants—with structures similar to PCBs but unknown health effects—over the past few years.

"It's better to face it, even if we don't have easy solutions" or have no solutions at all, Carpenter says. "But reassuring people that there is no problem when there is is inappropriate."

The report was scheduled to be released last July. To build a cohesive strategy to communicate the findings clearly once it was released at state and regional levels, in February 2007, ATSDR sent a final, embargoed version that was peer-reviewed to interested parties, including U.S. EPA regional offices, local citizens' interest groups, and others, notes the report's lead author Chris De Rosa of ATSDR. De Rosa served as director of ATSDR's Division of Toxicology and Environmental Medicine from 1991 until he was removed from that position last October. Reasons for his dismissal are under investigation by the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology. De Rosa says that the version sent out a year ago clearly stated the report's limitations.

The ATSDR report, De Rosa adds, was intended as "a snapshot from 30,000 feet [that] would allow people on the ground to begin looking at this more closely, to find out for themselves" about the issues that might affect them. "This is not your traditional epidemiological study [but] an informational resource" that took 5 years to produce.

What remains unclear is whether the version leaked by CPI is a revised version or an earlier draft. No one ES&T spoke to has attempted to make that determination.

Bernadette Burden, a spokesperson for CDC, says that the final version of the report is currently under review. After much scrutiny and revision, she says, it is a "more scientifically sound" incarnation that will take into account a "number of concerns raised" in earlier reviews. —NAOMI LUBICK