EPA scientists blast FDA advice on fish
Experts insist mercury warnings for women, kids 'inadequate'
By MICHAEL HAWTHORNE Chicago Tribune Dec. 20, 2008, 5:32PM
In the waning days of the Bush presidency, the Food and Drug Administration is pushing to scuttle the government's advice about mercury-contaminated seafood, a dramatic policy change that would, in effect, encourage women and children to eat more fish despite growing concerns about the toxic metal.
The FDA's recommendations, sent recently to the White House Office of Management and Budget for approval, prompted a sharp rebuke from scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency who, in memos circulated earlier this month, described them as "scientifically flawed and inadequate."
A joint advisory issued by the two agencies in 2004 cautions women of childbearing age, nursing mothers and young children to limit seafood consumption to 12 ounces a week. But in a draft version of the FDA's new report, the agency says its own modeling shows that kids can benefit from eating fish.
The FDA argues that nutrients in fish offset the risks posed by mercury and could boost a child's IQ by three points. Its conclusion is similar to claims by the seafood industry.
EPA scientists, though, say the FDA's report reaches conclusions that aren't supported by the studies it cites, and at various points either trivializes or overstates existing research.
Moreover, the EPA scientists say, the FDA fails to consider that some species of fish tend to have much higher mercury levels than others. The EPA's comments reflect long-standing criticism that the government isn't giving Americans enough advice about which types of seafood are safest to eat.
Before Bush leaves office The FDA's proposal is among a series of controversial policy changes moving quickly as the Bush administration prepares to leave office. Seafood industry lobbyists want to scale back the government's mercury warning, which they contend is depressing sales and scaring women away from eating fish.
In contrast, President-elect Barack Obama and leaders of the Democratic-controlled Congress have pledged to enforce tougher mercury policies.
"Once again, the Bush administration seems intent on ignoring sound science on mercury poisoning," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said. "This backroom bouquet for special interests should be stopped in its tracks."
The Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that obtained the FDA report, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson urging him to fight the proposal.
In an e-mail response to questions, the FDA said a final decision had not been reached. "The FDA will make no final determination until all the relevant comments and scientific analysis has been carefully considered," the agency wrote.
Choosing low-mercury fish Studies have shown that exposure to mercury in the womb, mostly from fish eaten by mothers, can irreversibly damage the brain before birth, causing subtle delays in walking and talking as well as decreased attention span and memory. Some research suggests that mercury also could increase the risk of heart disease in adults.
A recent study found that the percentage of women with high mercury levels declined from 2000 to 2004, even though those women were eating the same amount of seafood. The study's authors said their finding suggests that consumer advisories are prompting women to eat fish low in mercury.
Sniping between the FDA and EPA is nothing new. The two agencies have fought for years about how to caution women and children about mercury.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/6174650.html
TSS
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Company advances on plan for West Texas nuclear dump
.jpg)
(railcars loaded with MOUND COLD WAR NUCLEAR AFTER-BIRTH headed to Texas)
By JANET ELLIOTT Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau Aug. 5, 2008, 11:23PM
AUSTIN — Waste Control Specialists is moving ahead with construction of a radioactive waste dump in Andrews County in West Texas, despite a pending lawsuit challenging the project.
The Dallas company said Tuesday it has awarded a three-year $80 million contract to URS, a San Francisco-based engineering and construction firm.
The contract includes the addition of a railroad loop and facilities for unloading hazardous waste from rail cars, as well as construction of two adjacent landfills for different categories of radioactive waste.
1 of 2 applications OK'd State environmental regulators in May granted Waste Control a license to dispose of byproduct material, including waste from nuclear weapons processing and uranium mining.
The company has a second application pending for "low-level" waste, which would allow the disposal of a higher level of radioactive material, including waste from nuclear power plants.
Waste Control President Rodney Baltzer said construction would begin immediately on the rail facilities and byproducts landfill.
No work will be done on the low-level site until the company receives a license.
Baltzer said in a news release that URS has been involved in the licensing process and is familiar with the site.
"URS used that knowledge in a competitive bidding process to provide the best value for WCS," he said.
Waste Control is owned by Harold Simmons, a major donor to Gov. Rick Perry and other state politicians.
Risk to water questioned The Sierra Club filed a lawsuit last month in Travis County to overturn the byproducts disposal license.
The environmental group went to court after the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality denied its request for a contested hearing on the project.
"It's a concern that they're moving forward," said Cyrus Reed, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club.
"We think the underlying geology has not been adequately studied and, therefore, confirmed as being safe for the disposal of this type of waste."
The site is controversial because of its location near underground water.
A team of geologists and engineers who reviewed the location for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality concluded last year that the low-level waste disposal license should be denied.
They said one water table may be closer than 14 feet, making it "highly likely" that water could seep into the dump as annual rainfall increases because of climate change.
Both landfills would be on 1,300 acres WCS owns near the Texas-New Mexico border. Baltzer said the site has been extensively tested to ensure the material can be contained safely.
"The landfills will have similar designs, with disposal in the site's almost impenetrable red bed claystones," he said.
Among the materials to be buried are 3,776 steel containers of waste from an Ohio facility that processed uranium for Cold War-era nuclear weapons.
janet.elliott@chron.com
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
TEXAS WINS TO BE NEXT BIG DUMPING GROUND FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS RADIOACTIVE WASTE
(see more photo's of railcars loaded with MOUND COLD WAR NUCLEAR AFTER-BIRTH headed to Texas)
Terry S. Singeltary Sr., Bacliff, Texas USA 77518
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
TEXAS WINS TO BE NEXT BIG DUMPING GROUND FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS RADIOACTIVE WASTE
-----Original Message-----
From: Terry S. Singeltary Sr. [mailto:flounder9@verizon.net]
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2008 5:01 PM To: janet.elliott@chron.com Cc: viewpoints@chron.com; tbeyerlein@DaytonDailyNews.com
Subject: re-Company wins license to bury nuclear waste
re-Company wins license to bury nuclear waste Houston Chronicle May 22, 2008
AUSTIN — State environmental regulators voted 2-1 Wednesday to grant a Dallas company a license to dispose of waste from nuclear weapons processing and uranium mining in Andrews County in West Texas.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Buddy Garcia and Commissioner Bryan Shaw voted to issue the "by-products" license to Waste Control Specialists. The company is owned by Harold Simmons, a top donor to Gov. Rick Perry, who appoints members to the TCEQ.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5795238.html
http://www.chron.com/disp/commnts.mpl/metropolitan/5795238.html?plckCurrentPage=2
IT seems a more correct headlines would have read ''Company bribes Governor Perry to bury nuclear waste and contaminate Texas''. Waste Control Specialists. The company is owned by Harold Simmons, a ''TOP DONOR TO GOV. RICK PERRY, WHO APPOINTS MEMBERS TO THE TCEQ.'' The good governor has sold out to the citizens of Texas for train car, after train car of nuclear waste from 'the mound' Monsanto plant in Miamisburg Ohio. It just so happens, my father-in-law, who is down visiting now with us, has pictures of those railroad cars just sitting and waiting to come down to Texas. Odd how I was watching the news today, about this small plane that had crashed, it had showed pictures of where it had crashed right up near a bunch of tractor-trailer cargo container boxes in a parking lot. What would keep this from happening with those radioactive toxic containers in Ohio, at 'the mound', and or in route to Texas? You see, it's been killing my father-in-law, he has been on oxygen for years, but his breathing is getting more and more labored now, even with the oxygen. He worked at 'the mound' for years and years, and he is now dying a slow death from asbestosis, among other ailments caused by working at 'the mound'. NOW here is what I just cannot understand. This material is so toxic, in trying to gain further medical assistance from the DOE, the evidence that was needed to show that indeed my father-in-law worked their i.e. work records, paperwork records, payment records etc., they told my father-in-law, that they could not dig those records up, that they were buried due to high nuclear contamination, it was just too toxic, and that he had to prove that he had worked there. In which he did finally prove, and did gain further assistance. Also, ''Soward said a contested hearing could either rebut or support allegations that the agency ignored it's own scientific evidence that the site is geologically unsuitable to store material that will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years.'' This is typical of the Bush Administration, and it happens all the time. The only science that the Bush administration knows, is junk science, bought and paid for by industry scientist. This has been proven time and time again ;
Reports and Research
Interference at the EPA
Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
The results of these investigations show an agency under siege from political pressures. On numerous issues—ranging from mercury pollution to groundwater contamination to climate change—political appointees have edited scientific documents, manipulated scientific assessments, and generally sought to undermine the science behind dozens of EPA regulations.
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/a-to-z-alphabetical.html
Executive Summary
snip...
The Bush administration’s direct abuse of science—combined with systemic changes to the regulatory system that threaten the integrity of EPA science—highlight the need for strong action by the next president and Con- gress to restore scientific integrity to the agency’s decision making. Only then can the EPA fully mobilize to serve the public good and ensure the nation’s health.
Report: Federal Science and the Public Good
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/interference-at-the-epa.html
posted February 19, 2004 (March 8, 2004 issue) The Junk Science of George W. Bush
The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall. Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, "If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster." .....
February 18, 2004
Preeminent Scientists Protest Bush Administration's Misuse of Science Nobel Laureates, National Medal of Science Recipients, and Other Leading Researchers Call for End to Scientific Abuses .....
snip...
* National Medal of Science † Nobel laureate
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/preeminent-scientists-protest-bush-administrations-misuse-of-science.html
full text ;
http://sciencebushwhacked.blogspot.com/
http://sciencebushwhacked.blogspot.com/2008/05/junk-science-of-george-w-bush.html
My point is this, why in the world would the Governor of Texas make a sound decision on accepting this nuclear waste$ It's simply amazing what enough money can buy, even the Governor of Texas. ''TCEQ's executive director rejected their request, saying there is not sufficient public interest because no Texas residents sought a review.'' Well, I am one Texan that does not want any more Toxic waste in Texas, nuclear or not. Why should we take other states nuclear waste? Texas is NOT a nuclear dump for the highest bidder, the good Governor may think so, but myself and many others here in Texas just cannot accept this. This is insane, or just business as usual, make your choice. Governor Perry sold us all out, and he must be held accountable. ...
PART 1
Piketon: A troubled past Cold War factory created secret dump, set own rules By Lynn Hulsey, Tom Beyerlein
Staff Writer
Sunday, November 12, 2006
PIKETON — Inside the closely guarded confines of this 3,714-acre federal complex, deer lope along roadways, chubby groundhogs munch clover and wild turkeys gather during breeding season.
But this is no nature preserve.
Thousands of metal cylinders of corrosive radioactive waste — most weighing 14 tons and many heavily etched with rust — stretch across industrial yards.
Five plumes of poisoned groundwater lie beneath the surface, one of them so close to private land that traces of contamination were found in a monitoring well on a nearby farm.
Access is restricted inside three buildings that sprawl for more than a mile and are contaminated with radiation, beryllium, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and asbestos.
What dangers lie beneath the thick concrete floors of those buildings is anybody's guess.
Welcome to the old Piketon atomic plant 100 miles southeast of Dayton, once a proud monument to Ohio's nuclear legacy.
Today that legacy is one of mounting bills for U.S. taxpayers, an environmental cleanup that has no end in sight, and thousands of former workers or their survivors who sought compensation, claiming work-related cancers and other illnesses.
Government investigators blame problems at the now-closed Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant on decades of slipshod safety practices, accidental toxic releases and routine mishandling of chemical and radioactive material.
The cleanup cost at the uranium enrichment plant, estimated at $3 billion, could eventually top the $4.5 billion spent at the U.S. Department of Energy's former Feed Materials Production Center in Fernald, according to Ohio Environmental Protection Agency officials. That would make the Piketon cleanup the most expensive environmental reclamation project in Ohio history.
For decades, operators of the government-owned plant created a secret dump, spraying PCBs and uranium-contaminated oils on dusty roads, burying hazardous waste in unlined landfills, pouring toxins into waterways, allowing radioactive incinerator ash to scatter in the wind — even tilling radioactive oils into the ground.
Former workers told the Dayton Daily News chilling tales of a workplace in which managers downplayed risks, enforced a code of silence, and failed to protect employees against some of the most dangerous substances on earth.
Gary Sexton, 56, said he didn't know hazardous levels of the metal beryllium were in the plant when he started work as a chemical operator in 1974. He now has trouble breathing because of a potentially fatal and incurable ailment known as chronic beryllium disease that afflicted about 38 Piketon workers.
"Of the ones that have chronic beryllium disease, there are more dead than living," said Sexton, a safety representative for United Steelworkers Local 5689.
Donald Cruse, 65, said he was often sent to dismantle radiation-contaminated equipment and handle PCBs and asbestos without protective gear. He recently underwent surgery for melanoma, and breathes through a tube in his neck after losing part of his larynx to cancer.
"All the hottest places on the plant site, I worked," said Cruse, who was employed there from 1975 to 1996. "They said none of that would hurt us. There wasn't enough there to bother us."
Kenny Estep coached peewee football, was an auxiliary police officer and headed the local Moose Lodge. But in his job as a truck driver at the Piketon plant, Estep hauled radioactive waste to a plant landfill. On March 7, 1978, he was handed a respirator and a pair of paper coveralls and told to dump snow on a leaking cylinder full of radioactive uranium hexafluoride, the material used to enrich uranium.
He died of a rare form of liver cancer seven years later at the age of 42.
"He had a job to do and he was told to do it, so he did it," said Estep's widow, Barbara Barker, 62, of Piketon.
Barker received compensation for her husband's death, but it didn't come until after the federal government admitted for the first time in 1999 that it harmed its atomic workers.
The environmental damage at Piketon was harder to hide. The same hazards that sickened workers also poisoned the environment and continue to threaten future generations.
Along with the Mound Laboratory in Miamisburg, the plants at Fernald and Piketon once played indispensable roles in the manufacture of Cold War nuclear weapons. But the environmental footprint each of them left behind will never fully be erased, even after the billions of dollars spent cleaning contaminated groundwater, soil, waterways and buildings.
The end-date for monitoring the pollution at Piketon: never.
William E. Murphie, manager of the Energy Department office overseeing cleanup at Piketon and a sister plant in Paducah, Ky., declined to address Piketon's history of mishandling hazardous materials.
"We take a lot of lumps for the past processes and, face it, mistakes that were made," he said. "We've learned from the past. We're all smarter than we were in the past."
Murphie said the department remains committed to the cleanup and trying new solutions if those now in place don't work.
"DOE is very proud of the cleanup program here," he said. "We believe we have accomplished a lot."
Worker safety a low priority
From 1954-2001, the Piketon plant provided a ticket to the middle class for some 10,000 residents in Appalachian Ohio. A series of government contractors enriched uranium there, first for nuclear weapons and later to power nuclear reactors.
"The focus back then was to win the Cold War. Handling the waste and avoiding contamination was pretty low on the list," said Brian Blair, an Ohio EPA supervisor who participated in the state's first inspection of the site in 1986. "They were not managed even according to the best technology available at that time. That's why we have many of the contaminants out there."
The now-defunct Goodyear Atomic Corp. operated the Piketon plant for its first 32 years. A subsidiary of Martin Marietta took over management in 1986, followed by Lockheed Martin in 1995. The government privatized its enrichment operations in 1998, turning them over to USEC Inc. of Bethesda, Md.
In the early years, few environmental regulations existed across the United States and the hazards of chemical and radioactive materials weren't fully understood. By the 1970s, the government began regulating the handling and disposal of hazardous materials, and took action against companies that didn't follow the rules.
But unlike private companies, the Energy Department was allowed to set its own environmental standards, at least when it came to nuclear facilities such as Piketon. Energy officials, in effect, said, "trust us." Until the late 1980s, environmental regulators had no jurisdiction — or access — to the Piketon plant, and even now secrecy cloaks many plant practices.
All nuclear facilities must keep some practices confidential for reasons of national security. But the secrecy and self-regulation at Piketon veiled an astounding level of environmental destruction.
In 2000, the Energy Department secretary launched a massive investigation that documented the plant's grim environmental record: mishandling of hazardous and radioactive material, failure to properly monitor environmental emissions or workers' exposure to radiation, ignoring safety rules. The investigators identified 400 accidental releases of uranium gas or toxic fluorine since the 1950s, although they said the true total was unknown due to poor record keeping.
The worst of what the investigators found occurred in the plant's first 25 years, but careless and harmful practices continued even as the plant changed operators. For example:
• Two separate incidents — in 1982 and 1993 — resulted in the airborne release of 19 curies of radioactive technetium, a cancer-causing product of nuclear fission that escaped as workers cleaned equipment. "That's a significant amount, and it's certainly not desirable to have those kinds of releases in the air," Blair said.
• Uranium-contaminated solvents were burned in an incinerator designed for solids until 1986, when the Ohio EPA ordered it shut down. Maria Galanti, the agency's on-site coordinator, said soil around the incinerator site is radioactive at least 12 feet deep.
• The Energy Department didn't stop pumping waste into the plant's worst source of off-site and groundwater contamination until 1988. That unlined pond held everything from PCBs and the solvent trichloroethylene to radioactive uranium, technetium and plutonium — toxins that leached into groundwater and the Little Beaver Creek, a tributary of the Scioto River.
People who live near the plant say they had no idea all this was going on. Children swam in the creeks, and churches held baptisms in Big Run Creek. That same creek runs past two unlined landfills and near a polluted groundwater plume as it passes through the plant grounds on its way to the Scioto River.
Clyde Blanton has lived next to the plant's southern border since 1970. Not until the late 1980s, when residents near the Fernald plant began fighting for a cleanup there, did Blanton and others start asking questions about Piketon.
He said plant officials assured people it was safe.
"Now they've spent a billion bucks cleaning up," said Blanton, 64. "That tells you it's not safe. Somebody lied."
Inspectors react with shock
The cover over Piketon's secrets began to lift in 1986, when Ohio EPA inspectors were allowed inside the plant for the first time. What they saw shocked them.
In one of the plant's more egregious practices dating to the 1980s, plant operators tilled highly radioactive oils into soil, figuring the solvents would degrade over time. They didn't take into account that radiation takes millions, even billions of years to decay.
Those plots, now capped, are one of several sources of contaminants in the plant's second-largest groundwater plume.
"You had some of the best minds in the U.S. government working on enriching uranium and this is the best they could do with their waste?" Galanti said.
Plant operators dumped radioactive materials, toxic chemicals and dangerous solvents into unlined landfills and even discharged radioactive and chemical wastes into ditches leading to the Little Beaver Creek. Galanti described the ditches as "screaming hot" and said they were one of the Ohio EPA's top cleanup priorities.
The solvent trichloroethylene, a suspected carcinogen, remains the site's most pervasive groundwater contaminant.
"They'd go dump solvents out the back door," Galanti said. "And taking drums of degreasers and volatile organics and dumping them in a big pit."
Even after they were allowed to visit the plant, Ohio EPA officials were frustrated in their effort to force a cleanup. Officials at federal nuclear facilities had long argued that they were exempt from environmental rules concerning the handling and disposal of all hazardous materials, including any radioactive material.
"They thought they were above the law," said Jack Van Kley, the lead attorney in a federal court case that the state of Ohio filed in 1989 against the Energy Department.
As a result of that case, state regulators won limited authority over the department's operations at Piketon. A consent decree issued by the court required the Energy Department to follow state and federal rules for hazardous materials. But the department retained oversight of its handling of purely radioactive material.
A separate agreement was reached with the U.S. EPA, and cleanup began the same year.
Taxpayers are footing the cleanup bill because government contracts protected the contractors who ran the plant against damages, said Energy Department spokeswoman Laura Schachter. Four of those companies are defunct but their parent companies, Goodyear Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp., are still in business. Goodyear spokesman Keith Price had no comment for this story. Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Gail E. Rymer said environmental investigations were already underway when the company's subsidiaries managed the site and those companies also assisted with cleanup.
"Since we took over the plant we have had an exemplary safety and environmental record," said USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle.
So far, the government has spent $1 billion to dig up soil, empty ponds, cap unlined toxic landfills, treat groundwater and haul contaminants away — more than 43,000 containers of hazardous, radioactive and other waste and 8,400 tons of radioactive scrap metal.
Each year, the plant treats 28.5 million gallons of contaminated groundwater, said Sandra Childers, spokeswoman for LATA/Parallax Portsmouth, which last year replaced Bechtel Jacobs Co. as the Energy Department's cleanup contractor.
The 20,000 cylinders of depleted uranium hexafluoride — enrichment waste that piled up on the site over 50 years — will sit until they can be converted to a more stable form and shipped away. A conversion plant now under construction would eliminate the backlog by 2026, but more waste could be coming. USEC wants to replace the old gaseous diffusion plant with the American Centrifuge Plant, a high-tech uranium enrichment facility that would annually generate about 1,300 cylinders of waste.
Piketon is one of more than 100 polluted Energy Department sites across the United States. The department is the government's worst polluter, with a cleanup bill estimated at $35 billion, according to a 2004 U.S. EPA study.
But although the Piketon site is far from the Energy Department's worst offender, the sheer size of three massive enrichment buildings complicates cleanup and inflates the cost. Inside those buildings, giant machines heated uranium hexafluoride and forced it through filters to boost the concentration of the uranium isotope needed for reactor fuel and weapons.
Some of the most dangerous cleanup work is occurring in those structures. Under tight security, workers are removing uranium deposits that cling to surfaces inside equipment and 600 miles of piping. They must use extreme care because mishandling the radioactive deposits could cause a small nuclear reaction — a "criticality" — that could kill workers and spread radiation through the area.
"We've never had a criticality event, and I have no reason to believe that we ever will have a criticality event," Murphie said.
Groundwater contamination
a sore subject
The Piketon cleanup hasn't ended disputes between the Energy Department and its regulators. The Ohio EPA has fought Energy officials over everything from what to do with the thousands of contaminated cylinders at the site to the department's efforts to ease groundwater standards.
Memos obtained by the Dayton Daily News outline Ohio EPA officials' complaints about disputes over cleanup methods, wasteful spending by Energy Department contractors and botched cleanup jobs — in one instance allowing polluted groundwater to spread because of poor construction of a barrier wall.
Murphie declined to comment on the memos.
Groundwater contamination has been a flashpoint. In 1999, the Ohio EPA rejected an Energy Department attempt to cut disposal costs by loosening rules for the suspected carcinogen trichloroethylene, which permeates groundwater and has proven difficult to remove.
More recently, the department pushed for a reduced groundwater cleanup standard, arguing that the lesser standard is appropriate because no one drinks the water underneath the plant site.
"We represent the taxpayers. Our goal here is to make sure we are doing cost-effective, smart cleanup," Murphie said. "The regulators represent the taxpayers but also the regulators represent the regulations."
Ohio EPA officials are firm: There will be no reduced groundwater standard.
"We can't allow unlimited groundwater contamination just because they say it won't be used. That is a resource, and it does migrate and move," said Ken Dewey, the agency's southeast district assistant chief.
The latest point of friction between the Energy Department and its watchdogs involves the three enrichment buildings. The debate over what to do with them involves questions of money, jurisdiction and, ultimately, jobs.
Ohio EPA officials want the buildings — and the equipment inside of them — to be cleaned and demolished. It's unclear yet whether they can be safely buried at Piketon or must be shipped at great cost to disposal sites in Utah or Nevada.
Murphie has suggested still another possibility, that the contaminated buildings stay in place indefinitely under a long-term surveillance plan. But Dewey argues that leaving the structures in place will make cleanup more expensive in the long run because "we'll have to drill under and around buildings" to investigate and clean contaminated soil and groundwater.
"I hope the federal government doesn't make that choice," he said.
Even if Energy officials decide to demolish the buildings, there is one major obstacle: money.
A fund for cleaning enrichment plants in Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky will fall as much as $5.7 billion short of what is needed to clean all three sites, according to a 2004 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The Energy Department's five-year cleanup plan shows a decline in funding for the Piketon cleanup and no money for demolition of the enrichment buildings.
Local officials, who have watched jobs disappear through the years, worry that a stalled cleanup plan will reduce current employment and derail efforts to redevelop the site.
"Now we're threatened," said Blaine Beekman, executive director of the Pike County Chamber of Commerce. "It's like every day there's a new chapter, a new battle to fight."
Concerned neighbors
take cancer survey
After denying for years that its nuclear operations harmed anyone, the federal government in 2000 launched a program to compensate atomic workers sickened by workplace exposures. So far, more than 2,900 Piketon workers or their survivors have applied for the money.
But if people inside the plant got sick, what about those outside?
In 1994, a local residents group went door-to-door and identified 247 cancer cases within a six-mile radius of the plant. The data, however, was incomplete. The volunteers did not collect information on important risk factors, such as smoking status and occupational exposures, and failed to confirm the diagnoses with medical records.
"These limitations make it difficult to generate meaningful cancer rates from these data," a federal health assessment concluded two years later. That assessment, done by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in response to residents' concerns, found that the plant posed "no off-site threat to public health."
Critics were quick to point out inaccuracies in the government report, and continue to dispute the overall finding.
"I think they're wrong with the risk," said Vina Colley, president of a local watchdog group and a former Piketon employee fighting for compensation for illnesses she believes were caused by workplace exposures.
Ohio EPA officials say the worst of the plant's contamination is confined to the federal land, in part because thick bedrock slows the spread of the poisoned groundwater. They also say the plant's environmental record improved in recent years as operators adopted modern waste-handling practices and began following rules governing discharges to air and waterways.
Still, evidence of off-site contamination remained even after enrichment operations shut down in 2001. According to its most recent environmental reports, the Energy Department in 2003 and 2004 found small amounts of radioactive contamination outside the plant.
Tests on two area deer killed by cars showed traces of uranium isotopes in the livers of both and in the muscle of one. Traces of uranium were also found in milk and egg samples from area farms, and in three vegetables taken from the gardens of plant neighbors. Air, water and sediment tests also revealed small amounts of radioactive uranium, plutonium or technetium. And three fish from area waterways had traces of uranium or plutonium. Because plutonium rarely occurs naturally, there would appear to be only one possible source: the plant.
Energy officials say none of the amounts are large enough to pose a health threat.
Activists accuse the department of minimizing the threat of off-site radioactive contamination. Noting that a fish from the Little Beaver Creek contained trace amounts of plutonium, Elisa Young of the Sierra Club's Appalachian Group asked, "Would you eat that fish?"
Although the radiation amounts detected in recent years are small, Galanti said it's impossible to know how many contaminants were carried off by the wind or waterways over the years.
"It went somewhere," she said. "We all live downstream in one aspect or another."
With polluted government nuclear facilities dotting the map from coast to coast, Galanti said the abysmal environmental record has left a legacy of phenomenal costs and immense responsibilities for future generations.
"How do we monitor this stuff in perpetuity?" she said. "That's a relic of the Cold War and our thirst for energy."
By M.J.Kraft
November 20, 2006 06:28 PM Link to this
I hired on at Mound 1980 entry level ,{labor gang].Assignments ranging from ,office moves,,assisting skilled trades in and out of contaminated areas, yards and grounds,and digging lots of holes.In 1986 I moved up to Firefighter classification. Fire prevention was top priority.For the 13 years myself, and 8 other firefighters perforfmed ispections over every inch of every building. Hot or cold. In 1990 I was diagnosed with COPD,1994Moderate Emphysema,Lung Cancer 2006.Do yourself A favor
By Mary M.
November 19, 2006 08:14 PM Link to this
Investigative reporting at it finest (and most expensive) so it isn’t often seen in daily newspapers. I am a Mound widow and also a Mound survivor as I worked on the “cool” side. At age 81 I consider myself very, very lucky.
By Paige Gibson
November 16, 2006 08:19 AM Link to this
I worked at Mound as did my father. I became aware of the occpational exposure and got involved. I now work for Mound Workers Health Protection Program. We offer Mound workers a free medical screening. Since July we have diagnosed 6 people with lung cancer or asbestosis. We are also helping people with their claims. What a mess! So Mound people if you have questions or comments call us at 937-866-6802.
By Carolyn
November 14, 2006 09:39 PM Link to this
Excellent series. Your series and others in papers near other sites where atomic workers worked and became ill should be circulated in each community so readers know the situation in the local plant was repeated over and over all over the country.
These plants, not to mention the bombs they helped create, were the American weapons of mass destruction of several generations of workers.
By WALT
November 14, 2006 09:15 PM Link to this
I WORKED AT MOUND FOR 36 YEARS IN SOME OF THE MOST HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS. I AM NOW PAYING THE PRICE WITH CHRONIC INCURABLE LUNG DISEASE. I AM TRYING TO WORK MY WAY THRU THE PAPER WORKMILL WHICH STARTED OVER 2 YEARS AGO.
By Bill Bankes
November 14, 2006 12:17 PM Link to this
I worked at Mound and my Grandfather worked at Fernald, Waverly, and GE Evendale. He died in 1963 of Cancer caused by exposure.
His claim was denied because they would not accept his time at GE and a site to be included although there were large amounts of radioactive materials there.
By Jodi Hingtgen
November 13, 2006 09:48 PM Link to this
Is anyone keeping a central repository or database of people who worked at the Mound and have since died of unnatural causes? Anyone other than the government? My mother (Doris Hill) worked there between 1956 and 1963 and died of various cancers when she was only 42 and I was 16. NIOSH has so far denied my claims. Any information on people who worked there in the late 50’ s and early 60’s would be be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Jodi
http://www.daytondailynews.com/n/content/oh/story/news/special-reports/piketon/2006/11/11/ddn111206pkcleanup.html
LETTER ABOUT MOUND PLANT'S DEADLY LEGACY
Publication: Dayton Daily News Publish date: October 30, 2010
How was Mound Laboratory allowed to do so much harm?
I'd like to provide some first-hand information regarding the "environmental devastation" created by the Mound Laboratory during the years that my family lived on Mound Road.
In 1956, my parents bought a new home in a lovely neighborhood for their growing family. I lived there until 1966.
Beginning in 1960, the Mound released radioactive tritium into the air and contaminated the soil with plutonium-238. Our city water supply was piped up Mound hill; we played at the Adena Indian mound, spent countless hours at the Miamisburg public pool and fished in the pond.
My father worked at Presto Adhesive Paper, below Mound Lab, on Mound Avenue. He died at the age of 53 of a rare cancer multiple myeloma.
Our mother had already undergone radical mastectomy and radiation for breast cancer prior to age 50; she would later die of mesothelioma.
Our older brother died in his early sixties of bladder cancer, and my daughter had her cancerous left kidney removed while in her mid-thirties.
My family's experiences are only a small part of our neighborhood cancer history. Beginning with Mound Road, spreading back Marsha Drive and all along Meadowview Drive, one - and in most households, both - parent experienced different types of malignant disease, i.e.: multiple breast and colon cancers, parotid tumor, bladder, prostate, lung, skin, mesothelioma, brain, aplastic anemia and a child with leukemia.
I estimate that cancer occurred in 90% of the households in that neighborhood.
How did city officials allow this to happen? Where were our environmental watchdogs from the 1970s until 1989, when the Mound plant was placed on the EPA priorities list? My family and our neighbors deserve answers to those questions.
Sally Nunery Dunn
West Carrollton
A MOUND OF NUCLEAR LIES AND DEATH COMING TO TEXAS thanks to Governor Perry $$$
The Mound faclity reportedly sent 458 boxes of plant records to Los Alamos in 1993. these records were found to be contaminated with radiation and buried at Los Alamos as a health hazard. One cannot but guess what these records contained. The most significant fact being that these records were considered a health threat from uptake of radioactive particulate. This does not speak well for the historical hygiene at the facility
snip...
A bldg was administration, B was biology, C was cafeteria, D was decontamination a hot bldg. -lots of water that they tried to wash the facility with and contaminated the regional aquifer, had -to remove tons of dirt. R building was radioactive and hot. A young man got so exposed to -radiation in the T building that he died in the medical facility. The T building was far underground.
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/ocas/pdfs/sec/mound/mound2pet.pdf
Over time, contamination leaked from these drums into the surrounding soils ...... Mound Plant OU 1 Site. Location:. Miamisburg, OH. Period of Operation: ...
http://www.frtr.gov/pdf/abstractsvol5.pdf
Air Sparging and Soil Vapor Extraction at the Mound Plant OU 1 Site, Miamisburg, Ohio 73 Costs: • The total cost for AS/SVE was $1,439,039, consisting of $116,773 for pilot testing, $221,591 for design, $398,000 for construction, $517,958 for operations, and $184,717 for sampling and analysis • As of May 2000, the overall unit cost was $420 per pound of contaminant removed Description: The Mound Plant is a government-owned and contractor-operated facility occupying a 306-acre site within the city of Miamisburg, Ohio. The OU 1 site occupies three acres on the western edge of the developed portion of the facility. The historic landfill in OU 1 was used between 1948 and 1974 for disposal of general trash and liquid wastes from Mound Plant operations. The sanitary landfill in OU 1 was constructed partially within and adjacent to the location of the historic landfill. Both disposal sites have been used for dumping, burning, moving, reworking, and burying various plant wastes. A periodic water sampling program and a Phase 1 investigation indicated that VOCS were present in the soil and groundwater at OU 1. An air sparging and soil vapor extraction (AS/SVE) system began operating at OU 1 in December 1997. The system was intended to remove chlorinated VOCs from the soil and groundwater at the site. After 2 ½ years of operation, 3,433 lbs of VOCs had been removed, and the total VOC concentrations in the unsaturated zone decreased from 618.1 to 4.54 mg/kg. If system performance is maintained, the site was projected to meet cleanup goals by December 2002. The total cost for AS/SVE at this site was $1,439,039.
http://www.frtr.gov/pdf/abstractsvol5.pdf
COMING TO TEXAS, at a nuclear dump site near somebody, thanks to the good governor perry of Texas and a lot of $$$
Thanks Gov. ...
P.S. Suggestion; I say if it must come to Texas, send all toxic nuclear waste material to Bush Ranch, Crawford, Texas USA.
Terry S. Singeltary Sr. P.O. Box 42 Bacliff, Texas USA 77518
From: Terry S. Singeltary Sr. [mailto:flounder9@verizon.net]
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2008 5:01 PM To: janet.elliott@chron.com Cc: viewpoints@chron.com; tbeyerlein@DaytonDailyNews.com
Subject: re-Company wins license to bury nuclear waste
re-Company wins license to bury nuclear waste Houston Chronicle May 22, 2008
AUSTIN — State environmental regulators voted 2-1 Wednesday to grant a Dallas company a license to dispose of waste from nuclear weapons processing and uranium mining in Andrews County in West Texas.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Buddy Garcia and Commissioner Bryan Shaw voted to issue the "by-products" license to Waste Control Specialists. The company is owned by Harold Simmons, a top donor to Gov. Rick Perry, who appoints members to the TCEQ.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5795238.html
http://www.chron.com/disp/commnts.mpl/metropolitan/5795238.html?plckCurrentPage=2
IT seems a more correct headlines would have read ''Company bribes Governor Perry to bury nuclear waste and contaminate Texas''. Waste Control Specialists. The company is owned by Harold Simmons, a ''TOP DONOR TO GOV. RICK PERRY, WHO APPOINTS MEMBERS TO THE TCEQ.'' The good governor has sold out to the citizens of Texas for train car, after train car of nuclear waste from 'the mound' Monsanto plant in Miamisburg Ohio. It just so happens, my father-in-law, who is down visiting now with us, has pictures of those railroad cars just sitting and waiting to come down to Texas. Odd how I was watching the news today, about this small plane that had crashed, it had showed pictures of where it had crashed right up near a bunch of tractor-trailer cargo container boxes in a parking lot. What would keep this from happening with those radioactive toxic containers in Ohio, at 'the mound', and or in route to Texas? You see, it's been killing my father-in-law, he has been on oxygen for years, but his breathing is getting more and more labored now, even with the oxygen. He worked at 'the mound' for years and years, and he is now dying a slow death from asbestosis, among other ailments caused by working at 'the mound'. NOW here is what I just cannot understand. This material is so toxic, in trying to gain further medical assistance from the DOE, the evidence that was needed to show that indeed my father-in-law worked their i.e. work records, paperwork records, payment records etc., they told my father-in-law, that they could not dig those records up, that they were buried due to high nuclear contamination, it was just too toxic, and that he had to prove that he had worked there. In which he did finally prove, and did gain further assistance. Also, ''Soward said a contested hearing could either rebut or support allegations that the agency ignored it's own scientific evidence that the site is geologically unsuitable to store material that will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years.'' This is typical of the Bush Administration, and it happens all the time. The only science that the Bush administration knows, is junk science, bought and paid for by industry scientist. This has been proven time and time again ;
Reports and Research
Interference at the EPA
Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
The results of these investigations show an agency under siege from political pressures. On numerous issues—ranging from mercury pollution to groundwater contamination to climate change—political appointees have edited scientific documents, manipulated scientific assessments, and generally sought to undermine the science behind dozens of EPA regulations.
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/a-to-z-alphabetical.html
Executive Summary
snip...
The Bush administration’s direct abuse of science—combined with systemic changes to the regulatory system that threaten the integrity of EPA science—highlight the need for strong action by the next president and Con- gress to restore scientific integrity to the agency’s decision making. Only then can the EPA fully mobilize to serve the public good and ensure the nation’s health.
Report: Federal Science and the Public Good
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/interference-at-the-epa.html
posted February 19, 2004 (March 8, 2004 issue) The Junk Science of George W. Bush
The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall. Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, "If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster." .....
February 18, 2004
Preeminent Scientists Protest Bush Administration's Misuse of Science Nobel Laureates, National Medal of Science Recipients, and Other Leading Researchers Call for End to Scientific Abuses .....
snip...
* National Medal of Science † Nobel laureate
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/preeminent-scientists-protest-bush-administrations-misuse-of-science.html
full text ;
http://sciencebushwhacked.blogspot.com/
http://sciencebushwhacked.blogspot.com/2008/05/junk-science-of-george-w-bush.html
My point is this, why in the world would the Governor of Texas make a sound decision on accepting this nuclear waste$ It's simply amazing what enough money can buy, even the Governor of Texas. ''TCEQ's executive director rejected their request, saying there is not sufficient public interest because no Texas residents sought a review.'' Well, I am one Texan that does not want any more Toxic waste in Texas, nuclear or not. Why should we take other states nuclear waste? Texas is NOT a nuclear dump for the highest bidder, the good Governor may think so, but myself and many others here in Texas just cannot accept this. This is insane, or just business as usual, make your choice. Governor Perry sold us all out, and he must be held accountable. ...
PART 1
Piketon: A troubled past Cold War factory created secret dump, set own rules By Lynn Hulsey, Tom Beyerlein
Staff Writer
Sunday, November 12, 2006
PIKETON — Inside the closely guarded confines of this 3,714-acre federal complex, deer lope along roadways, chubby groundhogs munch clover and wild turkeys gather during breeding season.
But this is no nature preserve.
Thousands of metal cylinders of corrosive radioactive waste — most weighing 14 tons and many heavily etched with rust — stretch across industrial yards.
Five plumes of poisoned groundwater lie beneath the surface, one of them so close to private land that traces of contamination were found in a monitoring well on a nearby farm.
Access is restricted inside three buildings that sprawl for more than a mile and are contaminated with radiation, beryllium, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and asbestos.
What dangers lie beneath the thick concrete floors of those buildings is anybody's guess.
Welcome to the old Piketon atomic plant 100 miles southeast of Dayton, once a proud monument to Ohio's nuclear legacy.
Today that legacy is one of mounting bills for U.S. taxpayers, an environmental cleanup that has no end in sight, and thousands of former workers or their survivors who sought compensation, claiming work-related cancers and other illnesses.
Government investigators blame problems at the now-closed Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant on decades of slipshod safety practices, accidental toxic releases and routine mishandling of chemical and radioactive material.
The cleanup cost at the uranium enrichment plant, estimated at $3 billion, could eventually top the $4.5 billion spent at the U.S. Department of Energy's former Feed Materials Production Center in Fernald, according to Ohio Environmental Protection Agency officials. That would make the Piketon cleanup the most expensive environmental reclamation project in Ohio history.
For decades, operators of the government-owned plant created a secret dump, spraying PCBs and uranium-contaminated oils on dusty roads, burying hazardous waste in unlined landfills, pouring toxins into waterways, allowing radioactive incinerator ash to scatter in the wind — even tilling radioactive oils into the ground.
Former workers told the Dayton Daily News chilling tales of a workplace in which managers downplayed risks, enforced a code of silence, and failed to protect employees against some of the most dangerous substances on earth.
Gary Sexton, 56, said he didn't know hazardous levels of the metal beryllium were in the plant when he started work as a chemical operator in 1974. He now has trouble breathing because of a potentially fatal and incurable ailment known as chronic beryllium disease that afflicted about 38 Piketon workers.
"Of the ones that have chronic beryllium disease, there are more dead than living," said Sexton, a safety representative for United Steelworkers Local 5689.
Donald Cruse, 65, said he was often sent to dismantle radiation-contaminated equipment and handle PCBs and asbestos without protective gear. He recently underwent surgery for melanoma, and breathes through a tube in his neck after losing part of his larynx to cancer.
"All the hottest places on the plant site, I worked," said Cruse, who was employed there from 1975 to 1996. "They said none of that would hurt us. There wasn't enough there to bother us."
Kenny Estep coached peewee football, was an auxiliary police officer and headed the local Moose Lodge. But in his job as a truck driver at the Piketon plant, Estep hauled radioactive waste to a plant landfill. On March 7, 1978, he was handed a respirator and a pair of paper coveralls and told to dump snow on a leaking cylinder full of radioactive uranium hexafluoride, the material used to enrich uranium.
He died of a rare form of liver cancer seven years later at the age of 42.
"He had a job to do and he was told to do it, so he did it," said Estep's widow, Barbara Barker, 62, of Piketon.
Barker received compensation for her husband's death, but it didn't come until after the federal government admitted for the first time in 1999 that it harmed its atomic workers.
The environmental damage at Piketon was harder to hide. The same hazards that sickened workers also poisoned the environment and continue to threaten future generations.
Along with the Mound Laboratory in Miamisburg, the plants at Fernald and Piketon once played indispensable roles in the manufacture of Cold War nuclear weapons. But the environmental footprint each of them left behind will never fully be erased, even after the billions of dollars spent cleaning contaminated groundwater, soil, waterways and buildings.
The end-date for monitoring the pollution at Piketon: never.
William E. Murphie, manager of the Energy Department office overseeing cleanup at Piketon and a sister plant in Paducah, Ky., declined to address Piketon's history of mishandling hazardous materials.
"We take a lot of lumps for the past processes and, face it, mistakes that were made," he said. "We've learned from the past. We're all smarter than we were in the past."
Murphie said the department remains committed to the cleanup and trying new solutions if those now in place don't work.
"DOE is very proud of the cleanup program here," he said. "We believe we have accomplished a lot."
Worker safety a low priority
From 1954-2001, the Piketon plant provided a ticket to the middle class for some 10,000 residents in Appalachian Ohio. A series of government contractors enriched uranium there, first for nuclear weapons and later to power nuclear reactors.
"The focus back then was to win the Cold War. Handling the waste and avoiding contamination was pretty low on the list," said Brian Blair, an Ohio EPA supervisor who participated in the state's first inspection of the site in 1986. "They were not managed even according to the best technology available at that time. That's why we have many of the contaminants out there."
The now-defunct Goodyear Atomic Corp. operated the Piketon plant for its first 32 years. A subsidiary of Martin Marietta took over management in 1986, followed by Lockheed Martin in 1995. The government privatized its enrichment operations in 1998, turning them over to USEC Inc. of Bethesda, Md.
In the early years, few environmental regulations existed across the United States and the hazards of chemical and radioactive materials weren't fully understood. By the 1970s, the government began regulating the handling and disposal of hazardous materials, and took action against companies that didn't follow the rules.
But unlike private companies, the Energy Department was allowed to set its own environmental standards, at least when it came to nuclear facilities such as Piketon. Energy officials, in effect, said, "trust us." Until the late 1980s, environmental regulators had no jurisdiction — or access — to the Piketon plant, and even now secrecy cloaks many plant practices.
All nuclear facilities must keep some practices confidential for reasons of national security. But the secrecy and self-regulation at Piketon veiled an astounding level of environmental destruction.
In 2000, the Energy Department secretary launched a massive investigation that documented the plant's grim environmental record: mishandling of hazardous and radioactive material, failure to properly monitor environmental emissions or workers' exposure to radiation, ignoring safety rules. The investigators identified 400 accidental releases of uranium gas or toxic fluorine since the 1950s, although they said the true total was unknown due to poor record keeping.
The worst of what the investigators found occurred in the plant's first 25 years, but careless and harmful practices continued even as the plant changed operators. For example:
• Two separate incidents — in 1982 and 1993 — resulted in the airborne release of 19 curies of radioactive technetium, a cancer-causing product of nuclear fission that escaped as workers cleaned equipment. "That's a significant amount, and it's certainly not desirable to have those kinds of releases in the air," Blair said.
• Uranium-contaminated solvents were burned in an incinerator designed for solids until 1986, when the Ohio EPA ordered it shut down. Maria Galanti, the agency's on-site coordinator, said soil around the incinerator site is radioactive at least 12 feet deep.
• The Energy Department didn't stop pumping waste into the plant's worst source of off-site and groundwater contamination until 1988. That unlined pond held everything from PCBs and the solvent trichloroethylene to radioactive uranium, technetium and plutonium — toxins that leached into groundwater and the Little Beaver Creek, a tributary of the Scioto River.
People who live near the plant say they had no idea all this was going on. Children swam in the creeks, and churches held baptisms in Big Run Creek. That same creek runs past two unlined landfills and near a polluted groundwater plume as it passes through the plant grounds on its way to the Scioto River.
Clyde Blanton has lived next to the plant's southern border since 1970. Not until the late 1980s, when residents near the Fernald plant began fighting for a cleanup there, did Blanton and others start asking questions about Piketon.
He said plant officials assured people it was safe.
"Now they've spent a billion bucks cleaning up," said Blanton, 64. "That tells you it's not safe. Somebody lied."
Inspectors react with shock
The cover over Piketon's secrets began to lift in 1986, when Ohio EPA inspectors were allowed inside the plant for the first time. What they saw shocked them.
In one of the plant's more egregious practices dating to the 1980s, plant operators tilled highly radioactive oils into soil, figuring the solvents would degrade over time. They didn't take into account that radiation takes millions, even billions of years to decay.
Those plots, now capped, are one of several sources of contaminants in the plant's second-largest groundwater plume.
"You had some of the best minds in the U.S. government working on enriching uranium and this is the best they could do with their waste?" Galanti said.
Plant operators dumped radioactive materials, toxic chemicals and dangerous solvents into unlined landfills and even discharged radioactive and chemical wastes into ditches leading to the Little Beaver Creek. Galanti described the ditches as "screaming hot" and said they were one of the Ohio EPA's top cleanup priorities.
The solvent trichloroethylene, a suspected carcinogen, remains the site's most pervasive groundwater contaminant.
"They'd go dump solvents out the back door," Galanti said. "And taking drums of degreasers and volatile organics and dumping them in a big pit."
Even after they were allowed to visit the plant, Ohio EPA officials were frustrated in their effort to force a cleanup. Officials at federal nuclear facilities had long argued that they were exempt from environmental rules concerning the handling and disposal of all hazardous materials, including any radioactive material.
"They thought they were above the law," said Jack Van Kley, the lead attorney in a federal court case that the state of Ohio filed in 1989 against the Energy Department.
As a result of that case, state regulators won limited authority over the department's operations at Piketon. A consent decree issued by the court required the Energy Department to follow state and federal rules for hazardous materials. But the department retained oversight of its handling of purely radioactive material.
A separate agreement was reached with the U.S. EPA, and cleanup began the same year.
Taxpayers are footing the cleanup bill because government contracts protected the contractors who ran the plant against damages, said Energy Department spokeswoman Laura Schachter. Four of those companies are defunct but their parent companies, Goodyear Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp., are still in business. Goodyear spokesman Keith Price had no comment for this story. Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Gail E. Rymer said environmental investigations were already underway when the company's subsidiaries managed the site and those companies also assisted with cleanup.
"Since we took over the plant we have had an exemplary safety and environmental record," said USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle.
So far, the government has spent $1 billion to dig up soil, empty ponds, cap unlined toxic landfills, treat groundwater and haul contaminants away — more than 43,000 containers of hazardous, radioactive and other waste and 8,400 tons of radioactive scrap metal.
Each year, the plant treats 28.5 million gallons of contaminated groundwater, said Sandra Childers, spokeswoman for LATA/Parallax Portsmouth, which last year replaced Bechtel Jacobs Co. as the Energy Department's cleanup contractor.
The 20,000 cylinders of depleted uranium hexafluoride — enrichment waste that piled up on the site over 50 years — will sit until they can be converted to a more stable form and shipped away. A conversion plant now under construction would eliminate the backlog by 2026, but more waste could be coming. USEC wants to replace the old gaseous diffusion plant with the American Centrifuge Plant, a high-tech uranium enrichment facility that would annually generate about 1,300 cylinders of waste.
Piketon is one of more than 100 polluted Energy Department sites across the United States. The department is the government's worst polluter, with a cleanup bill estimated at $35 billion, according to a 2004 U.S. EPA study.
But although the Piketon site is far from the Energy Department's worst offender, the sheer size of three massive enrichment buildings complicates cleanup and inflates the cost. Inside those buildings, giant machines heated uranium hexafluoride and forced it through filters to boost the concentration of the uranium isotope needed for reactor fuel and weapons.
Some of the most dangerous cleanup work is occurring in those structures. Under tight security, workers are removing uranium deposits that cling to surfaces inside equipment and 600 miles of piping. They must use extreme care because mishandling the radioactive deposits could cause a small nuclear reaction — a "criticality" — that could kill workers and spread radiation through the area.
"We've never had a criticality event, and I have no reason to believe that we ever will have a criticality event," Murphie said.
Groundwater contamination
a sore subject
The Piketon cleanup hasn't ended disputes between the Energy Department and its regulators. The Ohio EPA has fought Energy officials over everything from what to do with the thousands of contaminated cylinders at the site to the department's efforts to ease groundwater standards.
Memos obtained by the Dayton Daily News outline Ohio EPA officials' complaints about disputes over cleanup methods, wasteful spending by Energy Department contractors and botched cleanup jobs — in one instance allowing polluted groundwater to spread because of poor construction of a barrier wall.
Murphie declined to comment on the memos.
Groundwater contamination has been a flashpoint. In 1999, the Ohio EPA rejected an Energy Department attempt to cut disposal costs by loosening rules for the suspected carcinogen trichloroethylene, which permeates groundwater and has proven difficult to remove.
More recently, the department pushed for a reduced groundwater cleanup standard, arguing that the lesser standard is appropriate because no one drinks the water underneath the plant site.
"We represent the taxpayers. Our goal here is to make sure we are doing cost-effective, smart cleanup," Murphie said. "The regulators represent the taxpayers but also the regulators represent the regulations."
Ohio EPA officials are firm: There will be no reduced groundwater standard.
"We can't allow unlimited groundwater contamination just because they say it won't be used. That is a resource, and it does migrate and move," said Ken Dewey, the agency's southeast district assistant chief.
The latest point of friction between the Energy Department and its watchdogs involves the three enrichment buildings. The debate over what to do with them involves questions of money, jurisdiction and, ultimately, jobs.
Ohio EPA officials want the buildings — and the equipment inside of them — to be cleaned and demolished. It's unclear yet whether they can be safely buried at Piketon or must be shipped at great cost to disposal sites in Utah or Nevada.
Murphie has suggested still another possibility, that the contaminated buildings stay in place indefinitely under a long-term surveillance plan. But Dewey argues that leaving the structures in place will make cleanup more expensive in the long run because "we'll have to drill under and around buildings" to investigate and clean contaminated soil and groundwater.
"I hope the federal government doesn't make that choice," he said.
Even if Energy officials decide to demolish the buildings, there is one major obstacle: money.
A fund for cleaning enrichment plants in Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky will fall as much as $5.7 billion short of what is needed to clean all three sites, according to a 2004 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The Energy Department's five-year cleanup plan shows a decline in funding for the Piketon cleanup and no money for demolition of the enrichment buildings.
Local officials, who have watched jobs disappear through the years, worry that a stalled cleanup plan will reduce current employment and derail efforts to redevelop the site.
"Now we're threatened," said Blaine Beekman, executive director of the Pike County Chamber of Commerce. "It's like every day there's a new chapter, a new battle to fight."
Concerned neighbors
take cancer survey
After denying for years that its nuclear operations harmed anyone, the federal government in 2000 launched a program to compensate atomic workers sickened by workplace exposures. So far, more than 2,900 Piketon workers or their survivors have applied for the money.
But if people inside the plant got sick, what about those outside?
In 1994, a local residents group went door-to-door and identified 247 cancer cases within a six-mile radius of the plant. The data, however, was incomplete. The volunteers did not collect information on important risk factors, such as smoking status and occupational exposures, and failed to confirm the diagnoses with medical records.
"These limitations make it difficult to generate meaningful cancer rates from these data," a federal health assessment concluded two years later. That assessment, done by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in response to residents' concerns, found that the plant posed "no off-site threat to public health."
Critics were quick to point out inaccuracies in the government report, and continue to dispute the overall finding.
"I think they're wrong with the risk," said Vina Colley, president of a local watchdog group and a former Piketon employee fighting for compensation for illnesses she believes were caused by workplace exposures.
Ohio EPA officials say the worst of the plant's contamination is confined to the federal land, in part because thick bedrock slows the spread of the poisoned groundwater. They also say the plant's environmental record improved in recent years as operators adopted modern waste-handling practices and began following rules governing discharges to air and waterways.
Still, evidence of off-site contamination remained even after enrichment operations shut down in 2001. According to its most recent environmental reports, the Energy Department in 2003 and 2004 found small amounts of radioactive contamination outside the plant.
Tests on two area deer killed by cars showed traces of uranium isotopes in the livers of both and in the muscle of one. Traces of uranium were also found in milk and egg samples from area farms, and in three vegetables taken from the gardens of plant neighbors. Air, water and sediment tests also revealed small amounts of radioactive uranium, plutonium or technetium. And three fish from area waterways had traces of uranium or plutonium. Because plutonium rarely occurs naturally, there would appear to be only one possible source: the plant.
Energy officials say none of the amounts are large enough to pose a health threat.
Activists accuse the department of minimizing the threat of off-site radioactive contamination. Noting that a fish from the Little Beaver Creek contained trace amounts of plutonium, Elisa Young of the Sierra Club's Appalachian Group asked, "Would you eat that fish?"
Although the radiation amounts detected in recent years are small, Galanti said it's impossible to know how many contaminants were carried off by the wind or waterways over the years.
"It went somewhere," she said. "We all live downstream in one aspect or another."
With polluted government nuclear facilities dotting the map from coast to coast, Galanti said the abysmal environmental record has left a legacy of phenomenal costs and immense responsibilities for future generations.
"How do we monitor this stuff in perpetuity?" she said. "That's a relic of the Cold War and our thirst for energy."
By M.J.Kraft
November 20, 2006 06:28 PM Link to this
I hired on at Mound 1980 entry level ,{labor gang].Assignments ranging from ,office moves,,assisting skilled trades in and out of contaminated areas, yards and grounds,and digging lots of holes.In 1986 I moved up to Firefighter classification. Fire prevention was top priority.For the 13 years myself, and 8 other firefighters perforfmed ispections over every inch of every building. Hot or cold. In 1990 I was diagnosed with COPD,1994Moderate Emphysema,Lung Cancer 2006.Do yourself A favor
By Mary M.
November 19, 2006 08:14 PM Link to this
Investigative reporting at it finest (and most expensive) so it isn’t often seen in daily newspapers. I am a Mound widow and also a Mound survivor as I worked on the “cool” side. At age 81 I consider myself very, very lucky.
By Paige Gibson
November 16, 2006 08:19 AM Link to this
I worked at Mound as did my father. I became aware of the occpational exposure and got involved. I now work for Mound Workers Health Protection Program. We offer Mound workers a free medical screening. Since July we have diagnosed 6 people with lung cancer or asbestosis. We are also helping people with their claims. What a mess! So Mound people if you have questions or comments call us at 937-866-6802.
By Carolyn
November 14, 2006 09:39 PM Link to this
Excellent series. Your series and others in papers near other sites where atomic workers worked and became ill should be circulated in each community so readers know the situation in the local plant was repeated over and over all over the country.
These plants, not to mention the bombs they helped create, were the American weapons of mass destruction of several generations of workers.
By WALT
November 14, 2006 09:15 PM Link to this
I WORKED AT MOUND FOR 36 YEARS IN SOME OF THE MOST HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS. I AM NOW PAYING THE PRICE WITH CHRONIC INCURABLE LUNG DISEASE. I AM TRYING TO WORK MY WAY THRU THE PAPER WORKMILL WHICH STARTED OVER 2 YEARS AGO.
By Bill Bankes
November 14, 2006 12:17 PM Link to this
I worked at Mound and my Grandfather worked at Fernald, Waverly, and GE Evendale. He died in 1963 of Cancer caused by exposure.
His claim was denied because they would not accept his time at GE and a site to be included although there were large amounts of radioactive materials there.
By Jodi Hingtgen
November 13, 2006 09:48 PM Link to this
Is anyone keeping a central repository or database of people who worked at the Mound and have since died of unnatural causes? Anyone other than the government? My mother (Doris Hill) worked there between 1956 and 1963 and died of various cancers when she was only 42 and I was 16. NIOSH has so far denied my claims. Any information on people who worked there in the late 50’ s and early 60’s would be be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Jodi
http://www.daytondailynews.com/n/content/oh/story/news/special-reports/piketon/2006/11/11/ddn111206pkcleanup.html
LETTER ABOUT MOUND PLANT'S DEADLY LEGACY
Publication: Dayton Daily News Publish date: October 30, 2010
How was Mound Laboratory allowed to do so much harm?
I'd like to provide some first-hand information regarding the "environmental devastation" created by the Mound Laboratory during the years that my family lived on Mound Road.
In 1956, my parents bought a new home in a lovely neighborhood for their growing family. I lived there until 1966.
Beginning in 1960, the Mound released radioactive tritium into the air and contaminated the soil with plutonium-238. Our city water supply was piped up Mound hill; we played at the Adena Indian mound, spent countless hours at the Miamisburg public pool and fished in the pond.
My father worked at Presto Adhesive Paper, below Mound Lab, on Mound Avenue. He died at the age of 53 of a rare cancer multiple myeloma.
Our mother had already undergone radical mastectomy and radiation for breast cancer prior to age 50; she would later die of mesothelioma.
Our older brother died in his early sixties of bladder cancer, and my daughter had her cancerous left kidney removed while in her mid-thirties.
My family's experiences are only a small part of our neighborhood cancer history. Beginning with Mound Road, spreading back Marsha Drive and all along Meadowview Drive, one - and in most households, both - parent experienced different types of malignant disease, i.e.: multiple breast and colon cancers, parotid tumor, bladder, prostate, lung, skin, mesothelioma, brain, aplastic anemia and a child with leukemia.
I estimate that cancer occurred in 90% of the households in that neighborhood.
How did city officials allow this to happen? Where were our environmental watchdogs from the 1970s until 1989, when the Mound plant was placed on the EPA priorities list? My family and our neighbors deserve answers to those questions.
Sally Nunery Dunn
West Carrollton
A MOUND OF NUCLEAR LIES AND DEATH COMING TO TEXAS thanks to Governor Perry $$$
The Mound faclity reportedly sent 458 boxes of plant records to Los Alamos in 1993. these records were found to be contaminated with radiation and buried at Los Alamos as a health hazard. One cannot but guess what these records contained. The most significant fact being that these records were considered a health threat from uptake of radioactive particulate. This does not speak well for the historical hygiene at the facility
snip...
A bldg was administration, B was biology, C was cafeteria, D was decontamination a hot bldg. -lots of water that they tried to wash the facility with and contaminated the regional aquifer, had -to remove tons of dirt. R building was radioactive and hot. A young man got so exposed to -radiation in the T building that he died in the medical facility. The T building was far underground.
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/ocas/pdfs/sec/mound/mound2pet.pdf
Over time, contamination leaked from these drums into the surrounding soils ...... Mound Plant OU 1 Site. Location:. Miamisburg, OH. Period of Operation: ...
http://www.frtr.gov/pdf/abstractsvol5.pdf
Air Sparging and Soil Vapor Extraction at the Mound Plant OU 1 Site, Miamisburg, Ohio 73 Costs: • The total cost for AS/SVE was $1,439,039, consisting of $116,773 for pilot testing, $221,591 for design, $398,000 for construction, $517,958 for operations, and $184,717 for sampling and analysis • As of May 2000, the overall unit cost was $420 per pound of contaminant removed Description: The Mound Plant is a government-owned and contractor-operated facility occupying a 306-acre site within the city of Miamisburg, Ohio. The OU 1 site occupies three acres on the western edge of the developed portion of the facility. The historic landfill in OU 1 was used between 1948 and 1974 for disposal of general trash and liquid wastes from Mound Plant operations. The sanitary landfill in OU 1 was constructed partially within and adjacent to the location of the historic landfill. Both disposal sites have been used for dumping, burning, moving, reworking, and burying various plant wastes. A periodic water sampling program and a Phase 1 investigation indicated that VOCS were present in the soil and groundwater at OU 1. An air sparging and soil vapor extraction (AS/SVE) system began operating at OU 1 in December 1997. The system was intended to remove chlorinated VOCs from the soil and groundwater at the site. After 2 ½ years of operation, 3,433 lbs of VOCs had been removed, and the total VOC concentrations in the unsaturated zone decreased from 618.1 to 4.54 mg/kg. If system performance is maintained, the site was projected to meet cleanup goals by December 2002. The total cost for AS/SVE at this site was $1,439,039.
http://www.frtr.gov/pdf/abstractsvol5.pdf
COMING TO TEXAS, at a nuclear dump site near somebody, thanks to the good governor perry of Texas and a lot of $$$
Thanks Gov. ...
P.S. Suggestion; I say if it must come to Texas, send all toxic nuclear waste material to Bush Ranch, Crawford, Texas USA.
Terry S. Singeltary Sr. P.O. Box 42 Bacliff, Texas USA 77518
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Ex-official: Cheney wanted climate change report altered
July 8, 2008, 1:56PM
Ex-official: Cheney wanted climate change report altered
By H. JOSEF HEBERT Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases, a former EPA official maintains.
When six pages were cut from testimony on climate change and public health by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October, the White House insisted the changes were made because of reservations raised by White House advisers about the accuracy of the science.
But Jason K. Burnett, until last month the senior adviser on climate change to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson, says that Cheney's office was deeply involved in getting nearly half of the CDC's original draft testimony removed.
"The Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the vice president were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony (concerning) ... any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change," Burnett has told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. ...SNIP...END...TSS
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hotstories/5876800.html
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Interference at the EPA - Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
please see full text ;
http://sciencebushwhacked.blogspot.com/
TSS
Ex-official: Cheney wanted climate change report altered
By H. JOSEF HEBERT Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases, a former EPA official maintains.
When six pages were cut from testimony on climate change and public health by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October, the White House insisted the changes were made because of reservations raised by White House advisers about the accuracy of the science.
But Jason K. Burnett, until last month the senior adviser on climate change to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson, says that Cheney's office was deeply involved in getting nearly half of the CDC's original draft testimony removed.
"The Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the vice president were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony (concerning) ... any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change," Burnett has told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. ...SNIP...END...TSS
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hotstories/5876800.html
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Interference at the EPA - Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
please see full text ;
http://sciencebushwhacked.blogspot.com/
TSS
Saturday, June 21, 2008
White House invokes executive privilege in EPA inquiry
White House invokes executive privilege in EPA inquiry
The Bush administration refuses to turn over subpoenaed documents related to the agency's decision to prevent California from enacting stricter emissions standards than the federal government.
By Richard Simon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 21, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Escalating a fight with Democrats on Capitol Hill, the White House on Friday invoked executive privilege in refusing to turn over documents to a congressional committee investigating the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to deny California permission to implement its own vehicle emission standards.
The Bush administration asserted executive privilege hours before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was to vote on whether to bring contempt-of-Congress proceedings against EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson and Susan Dudley, administrator of regulatory affairs in the White House Office of Management and Budget, for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents.
Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) put off a vote on the contempt resolutions while he considers his options.
"I don't think we've had a situation like this since Richard Nixon was president," he said, appearing determined to press ahead, even if it leads to a court fight. "We don't know whether this privilege that's being asserted is valid or not."
Presidents since George Washington have claimed rights to executive branch confidentiality, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. The Bush White House invoked executive privilege to prevent officials from testifying about the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. President Clinton cited presidential privilege during investigations into the Monica Lewinsky scandal and on other issues.
House and Senate committees have been investigating what role the White House played in EPA decisions preventing California and other states from enacting tougher emissions rules than the federal government and in the EPA's approval of new ozone pollution standards.
The administration's claim of executive privilege is the latest twist in the escalating legal and political battle over California's efforts to implement its own law combating global warming. Critics of the EPA decision contend that it was based on politics, not science or the law.
As Waxman considered his next move in his fight with the White House, another House committee in the room next door grilled former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who wrote a revealing book about his days in the White House. The hearings were a sign of determination by Democrats not to ease up on their oversight activities, even in the final months of the Bush administration.
In asserting executive privilege in the EPA inquiry, the administration made public a copy of a letter sent to the president by Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey saying that releasing internal documents "could inhibit the candor of future deliberations among the president's staff."
EPA spokesman Tim Lyons said the agency had provided the committee with more than 7,000 documents and devoted 2,200 hours of staff time to responding to requests for information, and he called it "disappointing" that the committee had decided to "politicize environmental regulations."
Jim Nussle, director of the Office of Management and Budget, took issue with Waxman's "sudden and unwarranted" move to consider contempt proceedings, noting that Dudley had appeared before Waxman's committee last month and was asked "only four questions" -- and only one by the panel chairman.
"There is no valid reason for moving from mutual cooperation to unilateral confrontation," Nussle wrote Waxman.
Waxman said: "I am very disappointed and disturbed that the administration is keeping this information from us, and I think we have a right to it."
richard.simon@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-epa21-2008jun21,0,1939720.story
snip...please see full text ;
http://sciencebushwhacked.blogspot.com/
TSS
The Bush administration refuses to turn over subpoenaed documents related to the agency's decision to prevent California from enacting stricter emissions standards than the federal government.
By Richard Simon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 21, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Escalating a fight with Democrats on Capitol Hill, the White House on Friday invoked executive privilege in refusing to turn over documents to a congressional committee investigating the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to deny California permission to implement its own vehicle emission standards.
The Bush administration asserted executive privilege hours before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was to vote on whether to bring contempt-of-Congress proceedings against EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson and Susan Dudley, administrator of regulatory affairs in the White House Office of Management and Budget, for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents.
Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) put off a vote on the contempt resolutions while he considers his options.
"I don't think we've had a situation like this since Richard Nixon was president," he said, appearing determined to press ahead, even if it leads to a court fight. "We don't know whether this privilege that's being asserted is valid or not."
Presidents since George Washington have claimed rights to executive branch confidentiality, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. The Bush White House invoked executive privilege to prevent officials from testifying about the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. President Clinton cited presidential privilege during investigations into the Monica Lewinsky scandal and on other issues.
House and Senate committees have been investigating what role the White House played in EPA decisions preventing California and other states from enacting tougher emissions rules than the federal government and in the EPA's approval of new ozone pollution standards.
The administration's claim of executive privilege is the latest twist in the escalating legal and political battle over California's efforts to implement its own law combating global warming. Critics of the EPA decision contend that it was based on politics, not science or the law.
As Waxman considered his next move in his fight with the White House, another House committee in the room next door grilled former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who wrote a revealing book about his days in the White House. The hearings were a sign of determination by Democrats not to ease up on their oversight activities, even in the final months of the Bush administration.
In asserting executive privilege in the EPA inquiry, the administration made public a copy of a letter sent to the president by Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey saying that releasing internal documents "could inhibit the candor of future deliberations among the president's staff."
EPA spokesman Tim Lyons said the agency had provided the committee with more than 7,000 documents and devoted 2,200 hours of staff time to responding to requests for information, and he called it "disappointing" that the committee had decided to "politicize environmental regulations."
Jim Nussle, director of the Office of Management and Budget, took issue with Waxman's "sudden and unwarranted" move to consider contempt proceedings, noting that Dudley had appeared before Waxman's committee last month and was asked "only four questions" -- and only one by the panel chairman.
"There is no valid reason for moving from mutual cooperation to unilateral confrontation," Nussle wrote Waxman.
Waxman said: "I am very disappointed and disturbed that the administration is keeping this information from us, and I think we have a right to it."
richard.simon@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-epa21-2008jun21,0,1939720.story
snip...please see full text ;
http://sciencebushwhacked.blogspot.com/
TSS
Thursday, May 22, 2008
The Junk Science of George W. Bush
posted February 19, 2004 (March 8, 2004 issue)
The Junk Science of George W. Bush
The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall. Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, "If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040308/kennedy
http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord/science/rfk.asp
Moreover, the UCS report is neither the first of its kind nor comprehensive. Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman released a similar report last August with many overlapping charges as well as some that go entirely unmentioned by the UCS. The most significant difference between the two reports, however, may be that the Bush administration is actually bothering to respond to the UCS document. When The New York Times reported on Waxman's document last August 8th, by contrast, White House press secretary Scott McClellan simply stated, "The only one who is playing politics about science is Congressman Waxman. His report is riddled with distortion, inaccuracies, and omissions." McClellan didn't provide any specific rebuttal at the time, however, and according to Waxman's office, the administration hasn't bothered to do so since then either. This lackluster response in and of itself suggests that the White House cares little about protecting the integrity of science.
And besides the Waxman and UCS reports, there are still other analyses documenting the Bush administration's abuses of science. For example, consider www.scienceinpolicy.org, a Web site that focuses exclusively on the environmental arena. The site details distortions and misrepresentations on issues ranging from climate change to debates on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Along with policy analyses, it contains the following statement:
The Bush administration justifies environmental policies by misusing and misrepresenting science. The administration's harmful positions on climate change, pollution, forest management, and resource extraction ignore widely accepted scientific evidence. When the administration invokes science, it relies on research at odds with the scientific consensus, and contradicts, undermines, or suppresses the research of its own scientists. Furthermore, the administration cloaks environmentally damaging policies under misleading program names like "clear skies" and "healthy forests." As a result, the public and the media often wrongly believe that this administration uses sound science to help promote a healthy environment. In reality, the best available science indicates that President Bush's policies will cause and exacerbate damage to the natural systems on which we all depend.
This statement has been signed, when last I checked, by 1,225 scientists, ranging from graduate students to distinguished professors.
http://www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/sciencewars/
February 18, 2004
Preeminent Scientists Protest Bush Administration's Misuse of Science
Nobel Laureates, National Medal of Science Recipients, and Other Leading Researchers Call for End to Scientific Abuses
Call (2MB mp3)
Washington, D.C.—Today, more than 60 leading scientists—including Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, former federal agency directors and university chairs and presidents—issued a statement calling for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking. According to the scientists, the Bush administration has, among other abuses, suppressed and distorted scientific analysis from federal agencies, and taken actions that have undermined the quality of scientific advisory panels.
“Across a broad range of issues, the administration has undermined the quality of the scientific advisory system and the morale of the government’s outstanding scientific personnel,” said Dr. Kurt Gottfried, emeritus professor of physics at Cornell University and Chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Whether the issue is lead paint, clean air or climate change, this behavior has serious consequences for all Americans.”
“Science, to quote President Bush's father, the former president, relies on freedom of inquiry and objectivity,” said Russell Train, head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Nixon and Ford, who joined the scientists in calling for action. “But this administration has obstructed that freedom and distorted that objectivity in ways that were unheard of in any previous administration.”
The statement notes that while scientific input to the government is rarely the only factor in public policy decisions, this input should be weighed from an objective and impartial perspective. However, the administration of George W. Bush has disregarded this principle.
“The Earth system follows laws which scientists strive to understand,” said Dr. F. Sherwood Rowland a Nobel laureate in chemistry. “The public deserves rational decisionmaking based on the best scientific advice about what is likely to happen, not what political entities might wish to happen.”
“We are not simply raising warning flags about an academic subject of interest only to scientists and doctors,” said Dr. Neal Lane, a former director of the National Science Foundation and a former Presidential Science Advisor. “In case after case, scientific input to policymaking is being censored and distorted. This will have serious consequences for public health.”
In conjunction with the statement, the Union of Concerned Scientists today released a report Scientific Integrity in Policymaking that investigates numerous allegations in the scientists’ statement involving censorship and political interference with independent scientific inquiry at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Interior and Defense.
One example cited in the statement and report involves the suppression of an EPA study that found the bipartisan Senate Clear Air bill would do more to reduce mercury contamination in fish and prevent more deaths than the administration's proposed Clear Skies Act. “This is akin to the White House directing the National Weather Service to alter a hurricane forecast because they want everyone to think we have clear skies ahead,” said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists “The hurricane is still coming, but without factual information no one will be ready for it.”
Comparing President Bush with his father, George H.W. Bush and former president Richard M. Nixon, the statement warned that had these former presidents similarly dismissed science in favor of political ends, over 200,000 deaths and millions of respiratory and cardiovascular disease cases would not have been prevented with the signing of the original Clean Air Act and the 1990 amendments to that Act.
The statement demands that the Bush administration’s “distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease” and calls for Congressional oversight hearings, guaranteed public access to government scientific studies and other measures to prevent such abuses in the future. The statement further calls on the scientific, engineering and medical communities to work together to reestablish scientific integrity in the policymaking process.
# # #
Among the statement signers are:
Philip W. Anderson*†
David Baltimore*†
Paul Berg*†
Lewis Branscomb
Thomas Eisner*
Jerome Friedman†
Richard Garwin*
Walter Kohn*†
Neal Lane
Leon Lederman*†
Mario Molina†
W.H.K. Panofsky*
F. Sherwood Rowland†
J. Robert Schrieffer*†
Richard Smalley†
Harold E. Varmus†
Steven Weinberg*†
E.O Wilson*
* National Medal of Science
† Nobel laureate
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/preeminent-scientists-protest-bush-administrations-misuse-of-science.html
TSS
The Junk Science of George W. Bush
The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall. Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, "If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040308/kennedy
http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord/science/rfk.asp
Moreover, the UCS report is neither the first of its kind nor comprehensive. Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman released a similar report last August with many overlapping charges as well as some that go entirely unmentioned by the UCS. The most significant difference between the two reports, however, may be that the Bush administration is actually bothering to respond to the UCS document. When The New York Times reported on Waxman's document last August 8th, by contrast, White House press secretary Scott McClellan simply stated, "The only one who is playing politics about science is Congressman Waxman. His report is riddled with distortion, inaccuracies, and omissions." McClellan didn't provide any specific rebuttal at the time, however, and according to Waxman's office, the administration hasn't bothered to do so since then either. This lackluster response in and of itself suggests that the White House cares little about protecting the integrity of science.
And besides the Waxman and UCS reports, there are still other analyses documenting the Bush administration's abuses of science. For example, consider www.scienceinpolicy.org, a Web site that focuses exclusively on the environmental arena. The site details distortions and misrepresentations on issues ranging from climate change to debates on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Along with policy analyses, it contains the following statement:
The Bush administration justifies environmental policies by misusing and misrepresenting science. The administration's harmful positions on climate change, pollution, forest management, and resource extraction ignore widely accepted scientific evidence. When the administration invokes science, it relies on research at odds with the scientific consensus, and contradicts, undermines, or suppresses the research of its own scientists. Furthermore, the administration cloaks environmentally damaging policies under misleading program names like "clear skies" and "healthy forests." As a result, the public and the media often wrongly believe that this administration uses sound science to help promote a healthy environment. In reality, the best available science indicates that President Bush's policies will cause and exacerbate damage to the natural systems on which we all depend.
This statement has been signed, when last I checked, by 1,225 scientists, ranging from graduate students to distinguished professors.
http://www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/sciencewars/
February 18, 2004
Preeminent Scientists Protest Bush Administration's Misuse of Science
Nobel Laureates, National Medal of Science Recipients, and Other Leading Researchers Call for End to Scientific Abuses
Call (2MB mp3)
Washington, D.C.—Today, more than 60 leading scientists—including Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, former federal agency directors and university chairs and presidents—issued a statement calling for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking. According to the scientists, the Bush administration has, among other abuses, suppressed and distorted scientific analysis from federal agencies, and taken actions that have undermined the quality of scientific advisory panels.
“Across a broad range of issues, the administration has undermined the quality of the scientific advisory system and the morale of the government’s outstanding scientific personnel,” said Dr. Kurt Gottfried, emeritus professor of physics at Cornell University and Chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Whether the issue is lead paint, clean air or climate change, this behavior has serious consequences for all Americans.”
“Science, to quote President Bush's father, the former president, relies on freedom of inquiry and objectivity,” said Russell Train, head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Nixon and Ford, who joined the scientists in calling for action. “But this administration has obstructed that freedom and distorted that objectivity in ways that were unheard of in any previous administration.”
The statement notes that while scientific input to the government is rarely the only factor in public policy decisions, this input should be weighed from an objective and impartial perspective. However, the administration of George W. Bush has disregarded this principle.
“The Earth system follows laws which scientists strive to understand,” said Dr. F. Sherwood Rowland a Nobel laureate in chemistry. “The public deserves rational decisionmaking based on the best scientific advice about what is likely to happen, not what political entities might wish to happen.”
“We are not simply raising warning flags about an academic subject of interest only to scientists and doctors,” said Dr. Neal Lane, a former director of the National Science Foundation and a former Presidential Science Advisor. “In case after case, scientific input to policymaking is being censored and distorted. This will have serious consequences for public health.”
In conjunction with the statement, the Union of Concerned Scientists today released a report Scientific Integrity in Policymaking that investigates numerous allegations in the scientists’ statement involving censorship and political interference with independent scientific inquiry at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Interior and Defense.
One example cited in the statement and report involves the suppression of an EPA study that found the bipartisan Senate Clear Air bill would do more to reduce mercury contamination in fish and prevent more deaths than the administration's proposed Clear Skies Act. “This is akin to the White House directing the National Weather Service to alter a hurricane forecast because they want everyone to think we have clear skies ahead,” said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists “The hurricane is still coming, but without factual information no one will be ready for it.”
Comparing President Bush with his father, George H.W. Bush and former president Richard M. Nixon, the statement warned that had these former presidents similarly dismissed science in favor of political ends, over 200,000 deaths and millions of respiratory and cardiovascular disease cases would not have been prevented with the signing of the original Clean Air Act and the 1990 amendments to that Act.
The statement demands that the Bush administration’s “distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease” and calls for Congressional oversight hearings, guaranteed public access to government scientific studies and other measures to prevent such abuses in the future. The statement further calls on the scientific, engineering and medical communities to work together to reestablish scientific integrity in the policymaking process.
# # #
Among the statement signers are:
Philip W. Anderson*†
David Baltimore*†
Paul Berg*†
Lewis Branscomb
Thomas Eisner*
Jerome Friedman†
Richard Garwin*
Walter Kohn*†
Neal Lane
Leon Lederman*†
Mario Molina†
W.H.K. Panofsky*
F. Sherwood Rowland†
J. Robert Schrieffer*†
Richard Smalley†
Harold E. Varmus†
Steven Weinberg*†
E.O Wilson*
* National Medal of Science
† Nobel laureate
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/preeminent-scientists-protest-bush-administrations-misuse-of-science.html
TSS
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Interference at the EPA - Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
----- Original Message -----
From: "Terry S. Singeltary Sr." flounder9@verizon.net
To: "Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy" BSE-L@aegee.org
Cc: heggem.daniel@epa.gov; sibert.christopher@epa.gov; denne.jane@epa.gov; hazen.susan@epa.gov; mcrosby@ucsusa.org; erobinson@ucsusa.org; enegin@ucsusa.org; cjdvoice@yahoogroups.com; madcow@lists.iatp.org
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 9:48 PM
Subject: Interference at the EPA Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Reports and Research
Interference at the EPA
Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the simple yet profound charge "to protect human health and the environment." EPA scientists apply their expertise to protect the public from air and water pollution, clean up hazardous waste, and study emerging threats such as global warming. Because each year brings new and potentially toxic chemicals into our homes and workplaces, because air pollution still threatens our public health, and because environmental challenges are becoming more complex and global, a strong and capable EPA is more important than ever.
Yet challenges from industry lobbyists and some political leaders to the agency's decisions have too often led to the suppression and distortion of the scientific findings underlying those decisions—to the detriment of both science and the health of our nation. While every regulatory agency must balance scientific findings with other considerations, policy makers need access to the highest-quality scientific information to make fully informed decisions.
Concern over this problem led the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to investigate political interference in science at the EPA. The investigation combines dozens of interviews with current and former EPA staff, analysis of government documents, more than 1,600 responses to a survey sent to current EPA scientists, and written comments from EPA scientists.
The results of these investigations show an agency under siege from political pressures. On numerous issues—ranging from mercury pollution to groundwater contamination to climate change—political appointees have edited scientific documents, manipulated scientific assessments, and generally sought to undermine the science behind dozens of EPA regulations.
These findings highlight the need for strong reforms to protect EPA scientists, make agency decision making more transparent, and reduce politicization of the regulatory process. Congress, the next president, and the next EPA Administrator must restore independence and scientific integrity to the EPA by:
Protecting EPA Scientists: Scientists should be free to report the distortion, manipulation, and suppression of their work without fear of retribution. Congress should pass a whistleblower law that includes protection for scientists. The EPA should adopt a communications policy that lets scientists speak freely to the press about their findings. Making the EPA More Transparent: Too many decisions are made behind closed doors with little accountability. The EPA’s scientific findings should be freely available to the public. The EPA should open up its decision-making process to congressional and public scrutiny to help reveal misuses of science Reforming the Regulatory Process: The White House should not change scientific findings in order to weaken, delay, or prevent new public protections. Ensuring Robust Scientific Input to EPA's Decision Making: The EPA should review and strengthen how it uses the scientific expertise of its staff and external advisory committees to create policies—especially when scientific input is critical or required by law. Depoliticizing Funding, Monitoring, and Enforcement: Problems with funding, monitoring and enforcement also need to be addressed by Congress and the next President to ensure that the EPA is the robust environmental agency that our country needs. Political interference is not unique to the EPA. Use the links on this page to explore surveys of scientists at other federal agencies and scores of examples of the abuse of science on issues ranging from prescription drugs to endangered species.
Program Overview Political Interference in Science Restoring Scientific Integrity Stay Informed
Sign up for our online action networks or electronic newsletters. Enter your email address for a list of options.
Contents Scientist Statement on Scientific Integrity 2008 Statement: Scientific Freedom and the Public Good Evidence of Political Interference Report: Interference at the EPA Report: Federal Science and the Public Good Examples of Political Interference in Science Surveys of Scientists at Federal Agencies Focus on Climate Science Focus on Endangered Species Science more... News & Views Scientific Integrity Update--01/2008 Scientific Integrity in the News Editorials on the Misuse of Science Poll: The Public's Belief in Independent Science Science, Evolution, and Intelligent Design Resources & Information Info for the Media Info For Congressional Staff Scientific Integrity Curriculum Guide Other Groups Addressing Scientific Integrity Science Idol: The Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest
The Report Press Release Executive Summary (PDF) Interference at the EPA: Full Report (PDF) FAQ's about the Report (PDF) Essay Responses From Scientists Select Quotes (PDF) All Essays (PDF) Survey of EPA Scientists Survey Summary and Supporting Documents Congress Reacts Letter to EPA from Rep. Waxman (CA) Statement by Senator Whitehouse (RI) Statement by Rep. Holt (NJ) Other Resources EPA and the White House (PDF) Air Pollution and the EPA (PDF) Climate Change and the EPA (PDF) Toxics and the EPA (PDF) Focus on Region 4 (PDF) Focus on Region 9 (PDF) Related Information Take Action A-to-Z Guide to Political Interference
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/a-to-z-alphabetical.html
Executive Summary
snip...
The Bush administration’s direct abuse of science—combined with systemic changes to the regulatory system that threaten the in- tegrity of EPA science—highlight the need for strong action by the next president and Con- gress to restore scientific integrity to the agen- cy’s decision making. Only then can the EPA fully mobilize to serve the public good and ensure the nation’s health.
Report: Federal Science and the Public Good
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/interference-at-the-epa.html
*************************************************************
April 29, 2004 (Supercedes March 2, 2004 memorandum) Consideration of Prions as a Pest under FIFRA
http://www.epa.gov/oppad001/records_of_decision_on_prions.pdf
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILLIAM L. KOVACS 1615 H S TREET , N.W. VICE PRESIDENT WASHINGTON , D.C. 20062 ENVIRONMENT , TECHNOLOGY & (202) 463 5457 REGULATORY AFFAIRS December 22, 2005
Likewise, some agency records of decision, as well as internal memoranda, establish precedent for regulatory policy making that at times extend the regulatory reach of federal agencies far beyond the statutorily mandated powers given by Congress. A recent example of a record of decision with regulatory impact would be the EPA’s decision to regulate prions.4 Prions are protein structures which, when infectious, are suspected of causing transmissible spongiform encephalopathy diseases, such as mad cow disease in cattle.5 EPA’s decision to classify prions as “pests” under FIFRA stems from an internal agency memorandum asserting jurisdiction over prions,6 even though prions are not living things (a prerequisite for EPA jurisdiction under FIFRA).7 Moreover, acting under the authority granted to itself in this memorandum, EPA issued emergency exemptions to several states to authorize the use of pesticides not registered under FIFRA to treat prioninfected surfaces. Therefore, EPA is treating this memorandum as though it is the issuance of a rule, without providing notice to the public or the opportunity to comment on the agency’s interpretation of its authoritative scope.8 The U.S. Chamber specifically requested EPA publish its prior discussion in the Federal Register for notice and comment, but EPA did not respond to that request. 3 Letter from Robert P. Murphy, General Counsel, General Accounting Office, to The Honorable David M. McIntosh, U.S. House of Representatives, January 20, 1999. 4 S.B. Hazen, Memorandum “Consideration of Prions as a Pest under FIFRA” to the Record, April 29, 2004; accessed at: http://www.epa.gov/oppad001/records_of_decision_on_prions.pdf. 5 See definition of prion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion. 6 Memorandum from Susan B. Hazen, Principle Deputy Assistant Administrator, to the record, dated April 29, 2004. The memorandum is available on EPA’s Web site at: http://www.epa.gov/oppad001/records_of_decision_on_prions.pdf. 7 7 U.S.C. 136(t). 8 The Administrative Procedure Act defines a “rule” as … an agency statement of general or particular applicability and future effect designed to implement, interpret, or proscribe law or policy…5 U.S.C. 551(4).
snip...full text ;
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/inforeg/good_guid/c-commerce.pdf
Rulemaking to Establish Criteria for the Importation of Designated Ruminants and Ruminant Products From Canada into the United States Final Environmental Assessment, December 2004
While FSIS recommends the use of disinfectants, EPA regulates disinfectants under FIFRA. Prior to 2003, prions were not considered pests, and therefore their treatment with disinfectants was not regulated. In September of 2003, EPA classified prions as a pest (Hazen, 2004) and, therefore, the agency was required to regulate the “microorganisms” under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/newsroom/hot_issues/bse/background/documents/03-080-3%20environmental%20assessment.pdf
BSE; MRR; IMPORTATION OF LIVE BOVINES AND PRODUCTS DERIVED FROM BOVINES [Docket No. APHIS-2006-0041] RIN 0579-AC01
[Federal Register: January 9, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 5)] [Proposed Rules] [Page 1101-1129] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr09ja07-21]
http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=09000064801f8152
BSE; MRR; IMPORTATION OF LIVE BOVINES AND PRODUCTS DERIVED FROM BOVINES [Docket No. APHIS-2006-0041] RIN 0579-AC01 Date: January 9, 2007 at 9:08 am PST
http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=09000064801f3412
PLEASE NOTE, THESE EPA DOCKET URLS ON MY SUBMISSION TO Importation of Whole Cuts of Boneless Beef from Japan [Docket No. 05-004-1] RIN 0579-AB93 ARE NO LONGER GOOD ???
Importation of Whole Cuts of Boneless Beef from Japan [Docket No. 05-004-1] RIN 0579-AB93 TSS SUBMISSION
http://docket.epa.gov/edkfed/do/EDKStaffItemDetailView?objectId=090007d480993808
http://docket.epa.gov/edkfed/do/EDKStaffAttachDownloadPDF?objectId=090007d480993808
http://docket.epa.gov/edkfed/do/EDKStaffCollectionDetailView?objectId=0b0007d48096b40d
Docket No. 03-080-1 -- USDA ISSUES PROPOSED RULE TO ALLOW LIVE ANIMAL IMPORTS FROM CANADA
https://web01.aphis.usda.gov/BSEcom.nsf/0/b78ba677e2b0c12185256dd300649f9d?OpenDocument&AutoFramed
Sent: Monday, July 24, 2006 1:09 PM
To: FSIS RegulationsComments
Subject: [Docket No. FSIS-2006-0011] FSIS Harvard Risk Assessment of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/Comments/2006-0011/2006-0011-1.pdf
IN A NUT SHELL ;
(Adopted by the International Committee of the OIE on 23 May 2006)
11. Information published by the OIE is derived from appropriate declarations made by the official Veterinary Services of Member Countries. The OIE is not responsible for inaccurate publication of country disease status based on inaccurate information or changes in epidemiological status or other significant events that were not promptly reported to the Central Bureau,
http://www.oie.int/eng/Session2007/RF2006.pdf
$$$ Science abused at the EPA $$$
Greetings,
I will be taking part in this action. Please be on the lookout for my letter to an EPA scientist. I would further like to add to the ;
A-to-Z Guide to Political Interference
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/a-to-z-alphabetical.html
BOVINE SPONGIFORM ENCEPHALOPATHY TYPICAL AND ATYPICAL BOTH OF WHICH HAVE BEEN FOUND IN NORTH AMERICA.
The FDA/USDA et al have failed the public terribly in surveillance, testing, and mad cow feed ban. all of which were/are fraught with errors, time and time again, to a point of great suspicion $
and to add insult to injury, they have blatantly lied and covered up mad cow disease and other TSEs, to a point of finally after 5 years of request after request, they have officially denied my F.O.I.A. request for the final time. They tell me if i want that info on those mad sheep of mad river valley in Vermont, they tell me ;
"As FOIA requires an agency only to produce responsive non-exempt records to a requester, OIG is not obligated to answer questions regarding the TSE occurrence as you requested. Therefore, I am denying your appeal with respect to your questions."
Mr. Terry S. Singeltary, Sr. Page 3
"For these reasons, I am denying your FOIA appeal. This is the final agency decision. You may seek judicial review of this decision in the United States district court for the judicial district in which you reside or have your principal place of business or in the District of Columbia, pursuant to 5 U.S.C. & 552(a)(4)(B)."
please see full text ;
Thursday, April 24, 2008
RE-FOIA OF DECLARATION OF EXTRAORDINARY EMERGENCY BECAUSE OF AN ATYPICAL T.S.E. OF FOREIGN ORIGIN IN THE UNITED STATES [Docket No. 00-072-1]
http://foiamadsheepmadrivervalley.blogspot.com/2008/04/re-foia-of-declaration-of-extraordinary.html
NOR-98 ATYPICAL SCRAPIE 5 cases documented in USA in 5 different states USA 2007
http://nor-98.blogspot.com/
Friday, April 25, 2008
Substances Prohibited From Use in Animal Food or Feed [Docket No. 2002N-0273] (Formerly Docket No. 02N-0273) RIN 0910-AF46
http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2008/04/substances-prohibited-from-use-in.html
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
REPORT ON THE INVESTIGATION OF THE ELEVENTH CASE OF BOVINE SPONGIFORM ENCEPHALOPATHY (BSE) IN CANADA
http://madcowtesting.blogspot.com/2008/04/report-on-investigation-of-eleventh.html
BSE BASE MAD COW TESTING TEXAS, USA, AND CANADA
http://madcowtesting.blogspot.com/
Sunday, March 16, 2008
MAD COW DISEASE terminology UK c-BSE (typical), atypical BSE H or L, and or Italian L-BASE (please note the last two mad cows documented in the USA, in Texas and Alabama were both atypical BSE. please note, atypical BSE is more virlent than typical BSE.
http://bse-atypical.blogspot.com/2008/03/mad-cow-disease-terminology-uk-c-bse.html
PLEASE SEE THE LARGEST EVER LONG TERM LIVE CASE STUDY WITH OUR CHILDREN BEING EXPOSED TO MAD COW DISEASE IN THE NATIONS SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM, but does anyone in the USDA/FDA et al even care to follow them $$$
DOWNER COW SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM
http://downercattle.blogspot.com/
http://downercattle.blogspot.com/2008/02/transcript-technical-briefing.html
[Docket No. 03-025IFA] FSIS Prohibition of the Use of Specified Risk Materials for Human Food and Requirement for the Disposition of Non-Ambulatory Disabled Cattle
9/13/2005
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/Comments/03-025IFA/03-025IFA-2.pdf
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (Variant) and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Prion Diseases) Description Since 1996, strong evidence has accumulated for a causal relationship between ongoing outbreaks, primarily in Europe, of a disease in cattle called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or “mad cow disease”) and a disease in humans called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). Both disorders, which are caused by an unconventional transmissible agent, are invariably fatal brain diseases with incubation periods typically measured in years (1). Transmission of the BSE agent to humans, leading to vCJD, is believed to occur via ingestion of cattle products contaminated with the BSE agent; the specific foods associated with this transmission are unknown. However, a recently published case-control study involving 132 vCJD cases in the United Kingdom (UK) showed evidence of an increased risk for vCJD associated with the frequency of consuming beef products likely to contain mechanically recovered meat and head meat (such as burgers, meat pies, and sausages) (2). Bioassays and molecular tests have enabled identification of what World Health Organization consultants have classified as “high-infectivity” and “lower infectivity” tissues of cattle with BSE (3). The high-infectivity tissues include the brain, spinal cord, retina, optic nerve, and dorsal root and trigeminal ganglia, suggesting that these tissues can pose a relatively high risk of transmission. The lower infectivity tissues include peripheral nerves (e.g., sciatic and facial nerves), tonsils, nictitating membrane (third eye lid), distal ileum, bone marrow, and possibly thigh muscle. The latter tissue from one cow with BSE transmitted disease to highly BSE-sensitive transgenic mice at a rate indicative of trace levels of infectivity.
http://wwwn.cdc.gov/travel/yellowBookCh4-VariantPrions.aspx
Progress Report from the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center April 3, 2008
Progress Report from the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center
An Update from Stephen M. Sergay, MB, BCh & Pierluigi Gambetti, MD
April 3, 2008
Dear Member:
Once again we are writing to thank you for your continued support in enhancing surveillance of prion diseases in the United States and to bring you up to date on the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center (NPDPSC).
In large part because of your support, the number of cases examined by biopsy, autopsy and 14-3-3 protein determination has increased significantly over the years (see Tables 1 and 2). We are now able to establish a definitive diagnosis of prion disease in an estimated 60-70% of the cases in the United States, a percentage which exceeds that in even some major surveillance centers. In addition, we receive from you cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) for 14-3-3 determination, a surrogate protein which is helpful in the diagnosis of prion disease, probably in most if not all cases of suspected Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). We are making constant efforts to reach our goal of at least 80% definitively diagnosed cases.
The major obstacle to our further increasing the autopsy rate remains the inadequate reporting of suspected cases of CJD to the NPDPSC or to the State Health Department, which in turn would notify us. Since you are the one likely to request the 14-3-3 test on these cases, please include in your request the information needed to contact you, which we will do if the test proves positive. If your institution uses a referral laboratory to send us the CSF, please provide your name, phone, and fax numbers to the lab, which will in turn submit it to us along with the sample. If this information is missing in the request accompanying the CSF sample (as it happens in about 30% of the cases), we will be unable to contact the caregiving physician. Having your contact information would also allow us to send results directly to you, thus reducing turnaround times. ...
snip...
Prion surveillance in cattle has been reduced by 90% (from about 470,000 to 40,000 in the U.S. in 2007 out of about 35 million cattle slaughtered). Termination of human prion surveillance would therefore remove the second line of surveillance, thereby eliminating prion surveillance in the U.S. entirely. This development would be extremely worrisome in view of recent reports that precautions to limit the spread of the prion infectious agent may not have been followed in some slaughter houses in the U.S. Cattle affected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) continue to be discovered in Canada, which has more rigorous BSE surveillance than the U.S. At the same time, Canada imposes few limitations in the trade of potentially prion-infectious cattle with the U.S.
snip...
Atypical forms of BSE have emerged which, although rare, appear to be more virulent than the classical BSE that causes vCJD.
please see full text with additional comments and links @ ;
http://prionunitusaupdate2008.blogspot.com/
CJD USA
*Acquired in UK ** Acquired in Saudi Arabia *** Includes 17 inconclusive and 9 pending (1 from 2006, 8 from 2007. **** Includes 17 non-vCJD type unknown (2 from 1996, 2 from 1997, 1 from 2001, 1 from 2003, 4 from 2004, 3 from 2005, 4 from 2006) and 36 type pending (2 from 2005, 8 from 2006, 26 from 2007).
Notes:
-- Cases are listed based on the year of death when available. If the year of death is not available, the year of sample receipt is used.
-- Referrals: Cases with possible or probable prion disease from which brain tissue or blood in the case of familial disease were submitted.
-- Inconclusive: Cases in which the samples were not sufficient to make a diagnosis.
-- Non-vCJD type unknown are cases in which the tissue submitted was adequate to establish the presence but not the type; in all cases, vCJD could be excluded.
-- Communicated by: Terry S. Singeltary Sr.
[In submitting these data, Terry S. Singeltary Sr. draws attention to the steady increase in the "type unknown" category, which, according to their definition, comprises cases in which vCJD could be excluded. The total of 26 cases for the current year (2007) is disturbing, possibly symptomatic of the circulation of novel agents. Characterization of these agents should be given a high priority. - Mod.CP]
http://www.promedmail.org/pls/askus/f?p=2400:1001:6833194127530602005::NO::F2400_P1001_BACK_PAGE,F2400_P1001_PUB_MAIL_ID:1010,39963
There is a growing number of human CJD cases, and they were presented last week in San Francisco by Luigi Gambatti(?) from his CJD surveillance collection.
He estimates that it may be up to 14 or 15 persons which display selectively SPRPSC and practically no detected RPRPSC proteins.
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/06/transcripts/1006-4240t1.htm
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/06/transcripts/2006-4240t1.pdf
JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY
MARCH 26, 2003
RE-Monitoring the occurrence of emerging forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease in the United States
Email Terry S. Singeltary:
flounder@wt.net
I lost my mother to hvCJD (Heidenhain Variant CJD). I would like to
comment on the CDC's attempts to monitor the occurrence of emerging
forms of CJD. Asante, Collinge et al [1] have reported that BSE
transmission to the 129-methionine genotype can lead to an alternate
phenotype that is indistinguishable from type 2 PrPSc, the commonest
sporadic CJD. However, CJD and all human TSEs are not reportable
nationally. CJD and all human TSEs must be made reportable in every
state and internationally. I hope that the CDC does not continue to
expect us to still believe that the 85%+ of all CJD cases which are
sporadic are all spontaneous, without route/source. We have many TSEs in
the USA in both animal and man. CWD in deer/elk is spreading rapidly and
CWD does transmit to mink, ferret, cattle, and squirrel monkey by
intracerebral inoculation. With the known incubation periods in other
TSEs, oral transmission studies of CWD may take much longer. Every
victim/family of CJD/TSEs should be asked about route and source of this
agent. To prolong this will only spread the agent and needlessly expose
others. In light of the findings of Asante and Collinge et al, there
should be drastic measures to safeguard the medical and surgical arena
from sporadic CJDs and all human TSEs. I only ponder how many sporadic
CJDs in the USA are type 2 PrPSc?
http://www.neurology.org/cgi/eletters/60/2/176#535
THE PATHOLOGICAL PROTEIN Hardcover, 304 pages plus photos and illustrations. ISBN 0-387-95508-9
June 2003
BY Philip Yam
CHAPTER 14 LAYING ODDS
Answering critics like Terry Singeltary, who feels that the U.S. under- counts CJD, Schonberger conceded that the current surveillance system has errors but stated that most of the errors will be confined to the older population.
http://www.thepathologicalprotein.com/
SRM MAD COW RECALL 406 THOUSAND POUNDS CATTLE HEADS WITH TONSILS KANSAS
http://cjdmadcowbaseoct2007.blogspot.com/2008/04/srm-mad-cow-recall-406-thousand-pounds.html
SPECIFIED RISK MATERIALS
http://madcowspontaneousnot.blogspot.com/2008/02/specified-risk-materials-srm.html
10 Million Baby Boomers to have Alzheimer's in the coming decades 2008 Alzheimer’s disease facts and figures
http://betaamyloidcjd.blogspot.com/2008/03/association-between-deposition-of-beta.html
re-Association between Deposition of Beta-Amyloid and Pathological Prion Protein in Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
http://betaamyloidcjd.blogspot.com/2008/04/re-association-between-deposition-of.html
Alzheimer's and CJD
http://betaamyloidcjd.blogspot.com/
Terry S. Singeltary Sr. P.O. Box 42 Baycliff, Texas USA 77518
From: "Terry S. Singeltary Sr." flounder9@verizon.net
To: "Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy" BSE-L@aegee.org
Cc: heggem.daniel@epa.gov; sibert.christopher@epa.gov; denne.jane@epa.gov; hazen.susan@epa.gov; mcrosby@ucsusa.org; erobinson@ucsusa.org; enegin@ucsusa.org; cjdvoice@yahoogroups.com; madcow@lists.iatp.org
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 9:48 PM
Subject: Interference at the EPA Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Reports and Research
Interference at the EPA
Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the simple yet profound charge "to protect human health and the environment." EPA scientists apply their expertise to protect the public from air and water pollution, clean up hazardous waste, and study emerging threats such as global warming. Because each year brings new and potentially toxic chemicals into our homes and workplaces, because air pollution still threatens our public health, and because environmental challenges are becoming more complex and global, a strong and capable EPA is more important than ever.
Yet challenges from industry lobbyists and some political leaders to the agency's decisions have too often led to the suppression and distortion of the scientific findings underlying those decisions—to the detriment of both science and the health of our nation. While every regulatory agency must balance scientific findings with other considerations, policy makers need access to the highest-quality scientific information to make fully informed decisions.
Concern over this problem led the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to investigate political interference in science at the EPA. The investigation combines dozens of interviews with current and former EPA staff, analysis of government documents, more than 1,600 responses to a survey sent to current EPA scientists, and written comments from EPA scientists.
The results of these investigations show an agency under siege from political pressures. On numerous issues—ranging from mercury pollution to groundwater contamination to climate change—political appointees have edited scientific documents, manipulated scientific assessments, and generally sought to undermine the science behind dozens of EPA regulations.
These findings highlight the need for strong reforms to protect EPA scientists, make agency decision making more transparent, and reduce politicization of the regulatory process. Congress, the next president, and the next EPA Administrator must restore independence and scientific integrity to the EPA by:
Protecting EPA Scientists: Scientists should be free to report the distortion, manipulation, and suppression of their work without fear of retribution. Congress should pass a whistleblower law that includes protection for scientists. The EPA should adopt a communications policy that lets scientists speak freely to the press about their findings. Making the EPA More Transparent: Too many decisions are made behind closed doors with little accountability. The EPA’s scientific findings should be freely available to the public. The EPA should open up its decision-making process to congressional and public scrutiny to help reveal misuses of science Reforming the Regulatory Process: The White House should not change scientific findings in order to weaken, delay, or prevent new public protections. Ensuring Robust Scientific Input to EPA's Decision Making: The EPA should review and strengthen how it uses the scientific expertise of its staff and external advisory committees to create policies—especially when scientific input is critical or required by law. Depoliticizing Funding, Monitoring, and Enforcement: Problems with funding, monitoring and enforcement also need to be addressed by Congress and the next President to ensure that the EPA is the robust environmental agency that our country needs. Political interference is not unique to the EPA. Use the links on this page to explore surveys of scientists at other federal agencies and scores of examples of the abuse of science on issues ranging from prescription drugs to endangered species.
Program Overview Political Interference in Science Restoring Scientific Integrity Stay Informed
Sign up for our online action networks or electronic newsletters. Enter your email address for a list of options.
Contents Scientist Statement on Scientific Integrity 2008 Statement: Scientific Freedom and the Public Good Evidence of Political Interference Report: Interference at the EPA Report: Federal Science and the Public Good Examples of Political Interference in Science Surveys of Scientists at Federal Agencies Focus on Climate Science Focus on Endangered Species Science more... News & Views Scientific Integrity Update--01/2008 Scientific Integrity in the News Editorials on the Misuse of Science Poll: The Public's Belief in Independent Science Science, Evolution, and Intelligent Design Resources & Information Info for the Media Info For Congressional Staff Scientific Integrity Curriculum Guide Other Groups Addressing Scientific Integrity Science Idol: The Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest
The Report Press Release Executive Summary (PDF) Interference at the EPA: Full Report (PDF) FAQ's about the Report (PDF) Essay Responses From Scientists Select Quotes (PDF) All Essays (PDF) Survey of EPA Scientists Survey Summary and Supporting Documents Congress Reacts Letter to EPA from Rep. Waxman (CA) Statement by Senator Whitehouse (RI) Statement by Rep. Holt (NJ) Other Resources EPA and the White House (PDF) Air Pollution and the EPA (PDF) Climate Change and the EPA (PDF) Toxics and the EPA (PDF) Focus on Region 4 (PDF) Focus on Region 9 (PDF) Related Information Take Action A-to-Z Guide to Political Interference
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/a-to-z-alphabetical.html
Executive Summary
snip...
The Bush administration’s direct abuse of science—combined with systemic changes to the regulatory system that threaten the in- tegrity of EPA science—highlight the need for strong action by the next president and Con- gress to restore scientific integrity to the agen- cy’s decision making. Only then can the EPA fully mobilize to serve the public good and ensure the nation’s health.
Report: Federal Science and the Public Good
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/interference-at-the-epa.html
*************************************************************
April 29, 2004 (Supercedes March 2, 2004 memorandum) Consideration of Prions as a Pest under FIFRA
http://www.epa.gov/oppad001/records_of_decision_on_prions.pdf
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILLIAM L. KOVACS 1615 H S TREET , N.W. VICE PRESIDENT WASHINGTON , D.C. 20062 ENVIRONMENT , TECHNOLOGY & (202) 463 5457 REGULATORY AFFAIRS December 22, 2005
Likewise, some agency records of decision, as well as internal memoranda, establish precedent for regulatory policy making that at times extend the regulatory reach of federal agencies far beyond the statutorily mandated powers given by Congress. A recent example of a record of decision with regulatory impact would be the EPA’s decision to regulate prions.4 Prions are protein structures which, when infectious, are suspected of causing transmissible spongiform encephalopathy diseases, such as mad cow disease in cattle.5 EPA’s decision to classify prions as “pests” under FIFRA stems from an internal agency memorandum asserting jurisdiction over prions,6 even though prions are not living things (a prerequisite for EPA jurisdiction under FIFRA).7 Moreover, acting under the authority granted to itself in this memorandum, EPA issued emergency exemptions to several states to authorize the use of pesticides not registered under FIFRA to treat prioninfected surfaces. Therefore, EPA is treating this memorandum as though it is the issuance of a rule, without providing notice to the public or the opportunity to comment on the agency’s interpretation of its authoritative scope.8 The U.S. Chamber specifically requested EPA publish its prior discussion in the Federal Register for notice and comment, but EPA did not respond to that request. 3 Letter from Robert P. Murphy, General Counsel, General Accounting Office, to The Honorable David M. McIntosh, U.S. House of Representatives, January 20, 1999. 4 S.B. Hazen, Memorandum “Consideration of Prions as a Pest under FIFRA” to the Record, April 29, 2004; accessed at: http://www.epa.gov/oppad001/records_of_decision_on_prions.pdf. 5 See definition of prion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion. 6 Memorandum from Susan B. Hazen, Principle Deputy Assistant Administrator, to the record, dated April 29, 2004. The memorandum is available on EPA’s Web site at: http://www.epa.gov/oppad001/records_of_decision_on_prions.pdf. 7 7 U.S.C. 136(t). 8 The Administrative Procedure Act defines a “rule” as … an agency statement of general or particular applicability and future effect designed to implement, interpret, or proscribe law or policy…5 U.S.C. 551(4).
snip...full text ;
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/inforeg/good_guid/c-commerce.pdf
Rulemaking to Establish Criteria for the Importation of Designated Ruminants and Ruminant Products From Canada into the United States Final Environmental Assessment, December 2004
While FSIS recommends the use of disinfectants, EPA regulates disinfectants under FIFRA. Prior to 2003, prions were not considered pests, and therefore their treatment with disinfectants was not regulated. In September of 2003, EPA classified prions as a pest (Hazen, 2004) and, therefore, the agency was required to regulate the “microorganisms” under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/newsroom/hot_issues/bse/background/documents/03-080-3%20environmental%20assessment.pdf
BSE; MRR; IMPORTATION OF LIVE BOVINES AND PRODUCTS DERIVED FROM BOVINES [Docket No. APHIS-2006-0041] RIN 0579-AC01
[Federal Register: January 9, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 5)] [Proposed Rules] [Page 1101-1129] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr09ja07-21]
http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=09000064801f8152
BSE; MRR; IMPORTATION OF LIVE BOVINES AND PRODUCTS DERIVED FROM BOVINES [Docket No. APHIS-2006-0041] RIN 0579-AC01 Date: January 9, 2007 at 9:08 am PST
http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=09000064801f3412
PLEASE NOTE, THESE EPA DOCKET URLS ON MY SUBMISSION TO Importation of Whole Cuts of Boneless Beef from Japan [Docket No. 05-004-1] RIN 0579-AB93 ARE NO LONGER GOOD ???
Importation of Whole Cuts of Boneless Beef from Japan [Docket No. 05-004-1] RIN 0579-AB93 TSS SUBMISSION
http://docket.epa.gov/edkfed/do/EDKStaffItemDetailView?objectId=090007d480993808
http://docket.epa.gov/edkfed/do/EDKStaffAttachDownloadPDF?objectId=090007d480993808
http://docket.epa.gov/edkfed/do/EDKStaffCollectionDetailView?objectId=0b0007d48096b40d
Docket No. 03-080-1 -- USDA ISSUES PROPOSED RULE TO ALLOW LIVE ANIMAL IMPORTS FROM CANADA
https://web01.aphis.usda.gov/BSEcom.nsf/0/b78ba677e2b0c12185256dd300649f9d?OpenDocument&AutoFramed
Sent: Monday, July 24, 2006 1:09 PM
To: FSIS RegulationsComments
Subject: [Docket No. FSIS-2006-0011] FSIS Harvard Risk Assessment of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/Comments/2006-0011/2006-0011-1.pdf
IN A NUT SHELL ;
(Adopted by the International Committee of the OIE on 23 May 2006)
11. Information published by the OIE is derived from appropriate declarations made by the official Veterinary Services of Member Countries. The OIE is not responsible for inaccurate publication of country disease status based on inaccurate information or changes in epidemiological status or other significant events that were not promptly reported to the Central Bureau,
http://www.oie.int/eng/Session2007/RF2006.pdf
$$$ Science abused at the EPA $$$
Greetings,
I will be taking part in this action. Please be on the lookout for my letter to an EPA scientist. I would further like to add to the ;
A-to-Z Guide to Political Interference
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/a-to-z-alphabetical.html
BOVINE SPONGIFORM ENCEPHALOPATHY TYPICAL AND ATYPICAL BOTH OF WHICH HAVE BEEN FOUND IN NORTH AMERICA.
The FDA/USDA et al have failed the public terribly in surveillance, testing, and mad cow feed ban. all of which were/are fraught with errors, time and time again, to a point of great suspicion $
and to add insult to injury, they have blatantly lied and covered up mad cow disease and other TSEs, to a point of finally after 5 years of request after request, they have officially denied my F.O.I.A. request for the final time. They tell me if i want that info on those mad sheep of mad river valley in Vermont, they tell me ;
"As FOIA requires an agency only to produce responsive non-exempt records to a requester, OIG is not obligated to answer questions regarding the TSE occurrence as you requested. Therefore, I am denying your appeal with respect to your questions."
Mr. Terry S. Singeltary, Sr. Page 3
"For these reasons, I am denying your FOIA appeal. This is the final agency decision. You may seek judicial review of this decision in the United States district court for the judicial district in which you reside or have your principal place of business or in the District of Columbia, pursuant to 5 U.S.C. & 552(a)(4)(B)."
please see full text ;
Thursday, April 24, 2008
RE-FOIA OF DECLARATION OF EXTRAORDINARY EMERGENCY BECAUSE OF AN ATYPICAL T.S.E. OF FOREIGN ORIGIN IN THE UNITED STATES [Docket No. 00-072-1]
http://foiamadsheepmadrivervalley.blogspot.com/2008/04/re-foia-of-declaration-of-extraordinary.html
NOR-98 ATYPICAL SCRAPIE 5 cases documented in USA in 5 different states USA 2007
http://nor-98.blogspot.com/
Friday, April 25, 2008
Substances Prohibited From Use in Animal Food or Feed [Docket No. 2002N-0273] (Formerly Docket No. 02N-0273) RIN 0910-AF46
http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2008/04/substances-prohibited-from-use-in.html
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
REPORT ON THE INVESTIGATION OF THE ELEVENTH CASE OF BOVINE SPONGIFORM ENCEPHALOPATHY (BSE) IN CANADA
http://madcowtesting.blogspot.com/2008/04/report-on-investigation-of-eleventh.html
BSE BASE MAD COW TESTING TEXAS, USA, AND CANADA
http://madcowtesting.blogspot.com/
Sunday, March 16, 2008
MAD COW DISEASE terminology UK c-BSE (typical), atypical BSE H or L, and or Italian L-BASE (please note the last two mad cows documented in the USA, in Texas and Alabama were both atypical BSE. please note, atypical BSE is more virlent than typical BSE.
http://bse-atypical.blogspot.com/2008/03/mad-cow-disease-terminology-uk-c-bse.html
PLEASE SEE THE LARGEST EVER LONG TERM LIVE CASE STUDY WITH OUR CHILDREN BEING EXPOSED TO MAD COW DISEASE IN THE NATIONS SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM, but does anyone in the USDA/FDA et al even care to follow them $$$
DOWNER COW SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM
http://downercattle.blogspot.com/
http://downercattle.blogspot.com/2008/02/transcript-technical-briefing.html
[Docket No. 03-025IFA] FSIS Prohibition of the Use of Specified Risk Materials for Human Food and Requirement for the Disposition of Non-Ambulatory Disabled Cattle
9/13/2005
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/Comments/03-025IFA/03-025IFA-2.pdf
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (Variant) and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Prion Diseases) Description Since 1996, strong evidence has accumulated for a causal relationship between ongoing outbreaks, primarily in Europe, of a disease in cattle called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or “mad cow disease”) and a disease in humans called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). Both disorders, which are caused by an unconventional transmissible agent, are invariably fatal brain diseases with incubation periods typically measured in years (1). Transmission of the BSE agent to humans, leading to vCJD, is believed to occur via ingestion of cattle products contaminated with the BSE agent; the specific foods associated with this transmission are unknown. However, a recently published case-control study involving 132 vCJD cases in the United Kingdom (UK) showed evidence of an increased risk for vCJD associated with the frequency of consuming beef products likely to contain mechanically recovered meat and head meat (such as burgers, meat pies, and sausages) (2). Bioassays and molecular tests have enabled identification of what World Health Organization consultants have classified as “high-infectivity” and “lower infectivity” tissues of cattle with BSE (3). The high-infectivity tissues include the brain, spinal cord, retina, optic nerve, and dorsal root and trigeminal ganglia, suggesting that these tissues can pose a relatively high risk of transmission. The lower infectivity tissues include peripheral nerves (e.g., sciatic and facial nerves), tonsils, nictitating membrane (third eye lid), distal ileum, bone marrow, and possibly thigh muscle. The latter tissue from one cow with BSE transmitted disease to highly BSE-sensitive transgenic mice at a rate indicative of trace levels of infectivity.
http://wwwn.cdc.gov/travel/yellowBookCh4-VariantPrions.aspx
Progress Report from the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center April 3, 2008
Progress Report from the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center
An Update from Stephen M. Sergay, MB, BCh & Pierluigi Gambetti, MD
April 3, 2008
Dear Member:
Once again we are writing to thank you for your continued support in enhancing surveillance of prion diseases in the United States and to bring you up to date on the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center (NPDPSC).
In large part because of your support, the number of cases examined by biopsy, autopsy and 14-3-3 protein determination has increased significantly over the years (see Tables 1 and 2). We are now able to establish a definitive diagnosis of prion disease in an estimated 60-70% of the cases in the United States, a percentage which exceeds that in even some major surveillance centers. In addition, we receive from you cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) for 14-3-3 determination, a surrogate protein which is helpful in the diagnosis of prion disease, probably in most if not all cases of suspected Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). We are making constant efforts to reach our goal of at least 80% definitively diagnosed cases.
The major obstacle to our further increasing the autopsy rate remains the inadequate reporting of suspected cases of CJD to the NPDPSC or to the State Health Department, which in turn would notify us. Since you are the one likely to request the 14-3-3 test on these cases, please include in your request the information needed to contact you, which we will do if the test proves positive. If your institution uses a referral laboratory to send us the CSF, please provide your name, phone, and fax numbers to the lab, which will in turn submit it to us along with the sample. If this information is missing in the request accompanying the CSF sample (as it happens in about 30% of the cases), we will be unable to contact the caregiving physician. Having your contact information would also allow us to send results directly to you, thus reducing turnaround times. ...
snip...
Prion surveillance in cattle has been reduced by 90% (from about 470,000 to 40,000 in the U.S. in 2007 out of about 35 million cattle slaughtered). Termination of human prion surveillance would therefore remove the second line of surveillance, thereby eliminating prion surveillance in the U.S. entirely. This development would be extremely worrisome in view of recent reports that precautions to limit the spread of the prion infectious agent may not have been followed in some slaughter houses in the U.S. Cattle affected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) continue to be discovered in Canada, which has more rigorous BSE surveillance than the U.S. At the same time, Canada imposes few limitations in the trade of potentially prion-infectious cattle with the U.S.
snip...
Atypical forms of BSE have emerged which, although rare, appear to be more virulent than the classical BSE that causes vCJD.
please see full text with additional comments and links @ ;
http://prionunitusaupdate2008.blogspot.com/
CJD USA
*Acquired in UK ** Acquired in Saudi Arabia *** Includes 17 inconclusive and 9 pending (1 from 2006, 8 from 2007. **** Includes 17 non-vCJD type unknown (2 from 1996, 2 from 1997, 1 from 2001, 1 from 2003, 4 from 2004, 3 from 2005, 4 from 2006) and 36 type pending (2 from 2005, 8 from 2006, 26 from 2007).
Notes:
-- Cases are listed based on the year of death when available. If the year of death is not available, the year of sample receipt is used.
-- Referrals: Cases with possible or probable prion disease from which brain tissue or blood in the case of familial disease were submitted.
-- Inconclusive: Cases in which the samples were not sufficient to make a diagnosis.
-- Non-vCJD type unknown are cases in which the tissue submitted was adequate to establish the presence but not the type; in all cases, vCJD could be excluded.
-- Communicated by: Terry S. Singeltary Sr.
[In submitting these data, Terry S. Singeltary Sr. draws attention to the steady increase in the "type unknown" category, which, according to their definition, comprises cases in which vCJD could be excluded. The total of 26 cases for the current year (2007) is disturbing, possibly symptomatic of the circulation of novel agents. Characterization of these agents should be given a high priority. - Mod.CP]
http://www.promedmail.org/pls/askus/f?p=2400:1001:6833194127530602005::NO::F2400_P1001_BACK_PAGE,F2400_P1001_PUB_MAIL_ID:1010,39963
There is a growing number of human CJD cases, and they were presented last week in San Francisco by Luigi Gambatti(?) from his CJD surveillance collection.
He estimates that it may be up to 14 or 15 persons which display selectively SPRPSC and practically no detected RPRPSC proteins.
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/06/transcripts/1006-4240t1.htm
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/06/transcripts/2006-4240t1.pdf
JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY
MARCH 26, 2003
RE-Monitoring the occurrence of emerging forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease in the United States
Email Terry S. Singeltary:
flounder@wt.net
I lost my mother to hvCJD (Heidenhain Variant CJD). I would like to
comment on the CDC's attempts to monitor the occurrence of emerging
forms of CJD. Asante, Collinge et al [1] have reported that BSE
transmission to the 129-methionine genotype can lead to an alternate
phenotype that is indistinguishable from type 2 PrPSc, the commonest
sporadic CJD. However, CJD and all human TSEs are not reportable
nationally. CJD and all human TSEs must be made reportable in every
state and internationally. I hope that the CDC does not continue to
expect us to still believe that the 85%+ of all CJD cases which are
sporadic are all spontaneous, without route/source. We have many TSEs in
the USA in both animal and man. CWD in deer/elk is spreading rapidly and
CWD does transmit to mink, ferret, cattle, and squirrel monkey by
intracerebral inoculation. With the known incubation periods in other
TSEs, oral transmission studies of CWD may take much longer. Every
victim/family of CJD/TSEs should be asked about route and source of this
agent. To prolong this will only spread the agent and needlessly expose
others. In light of the findings of Asante and Collinge et al, there
should be drastic measures to safeguard the medical and surgical arena
from sporadic CJDs and all human TSEs. I only ponder how many sporadic
CJDs in the USA are type 2 PrPSc?
http://www.neurology.org/cgi/eletters/60/2/176#535
THE PATHOLOGICAL PROTEIN Hardcover, 304 pages plus photos and illustrations. ISBN 0-387-95508-9
June 2003
BY Philip Yam
CHAPTER 14 LAYING ODDS
Answering critics like Terry Singeltary, who feels that the U.S. under- counts CJD, Schonberger conceded that the current surveillance system has errors but stated that most of the errors will be confined to the older population.
http://www.thepathologicalprotein.com/
SRM MAD COW RECALL 406 THOUSAND POUNDS CATTLE HEADS WITH TONSILS KANSAS
http://cjdmadcowbaseoct2007.blogspot.com/2008/04/srm-mad-cow-recall-406-thousand-pounds.html
SPECIFIED RISK MATERIALS
http://madcowspontaneousnot.blogspot.com/2008/02/specified-risk-materials-srm.html
10 Million Baby Boomers to have Alzheimer's in the coming decades 2008 Alzheimer’s disease facts and figures
http://betaamyloidcjd.blogspot.com/2008/03/association-between-deposition-of-beta.html
re-Association between Deposition of Beta-Amyloid and Pathological Prion Protein in Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
http://betaamyloidcjd.blogspot.com/2008/04/re-association-between-deposition-of.html
Alzheimer's and CJD
http://betaamyloidcjd.blogspot.com/
Terry S. Singeltary Sr. P.O. Box 42 Baycliff, Texas USA 77518
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