http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,351181,00.html
BALTIMORE — Scientists using federal grants spread fertilizer made from
human and industrial wastes on yards in poor, black neighborhoods to test
whether it might protect children from lead poisoning in the soil.
Families
were assured the sludge was safe and were never told about any harmful
ingredients.
Nine low-income families in Baltimore row houses agreed to let researchers
till the sewage sludge into their yards and plant new grass. In exchange,
they were given food coupons as well as the free lawns as part of a study
published in 2005 and funded by the Housing and Urban Development
Department.
The Associated Press reviewed grant do***ents obtained under the Freedom
of
Information Act and interviewed researchers. No one involved with the
$446,231 grant for the two-year study would identify the participants,
citing privacy concerns. There is no evidence there was ever any medical
follow-up.
Comparable research was conducted by the Agriculture Department and
Environmental Protection Agency in a similarly poor, black neighborhood in
East St. Louis, Ill.
The sludge, researchers said, put the children at less risk of brain or
nerve damage from lead, a highly toxic element once widely used in
gasoline
and paint. Other studies have shown brain damage among children, often in
poor neighborhoods, who ate paint lead-based based that had flaked off
their
homes.
The idea that sludge — the leftover semisolid wastes filtered from water
pollution at 16,500 treatment plants — can be turned into something
harmless, even if swallowed, has been a tenet of federal policy for three
decades.
In a 1978 memo, the EPA said sludge "contains nutrients and organic matter
which have considerable benefit for land and crops" despite the presence
of
"low levels of toxic substances."
But in the late 1990s the government began underwriting studies such as
those in Baltimore and East St. Louis using poor neighborhoods as
laboratories to make a case that sludge may also directly benefit human
health.
Meanwhile, there has been a paucity of research into the possible harmful
effects of heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, other chemicals and
disease-causing microorganisms often found in sludge.
A series of re****ts by the EPA's inspector general and the National
Academy
of Sciences between 1996 and 2002 faulted the adequacy of the science
behind
the EPA's 1993 regulations on sludge.
The chairman of the 2002 academy panel, Thomas Burke, a professor at the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says epidemiological
studies have never been done to show whether spreading sludge on land is
safe.
"There are potential pathogens and chemicals that are not in the realm of
safe," Burke told the AP. "What's needed are more studies on what's going
on
with the pathogens in sludge — are we actually removing them? The
commitment
to connecting the dots hasn't been there."
That's not what the subjects of the Baltimore and East St. Louis research
were told.
Rufus Chaney, an Agriculture Department research agronomist who co-wrote
the
Baltimore study, said the researchers provided the families with brochures
about lead hazards, tested the soil in their yards and gave assurances
that
the Orgro fertilizer was store-bought and perfectly safe.
"They were told that their lawn, as it stood, before it was treated, was a
lead danger to their children," said Chaney. "So that even if they ate
some
of the soil, there would not be as much of a risk as there was before. And
that's what the science shows."
Chaney said the Baltimore neighborhoods were chosen because they were
within
an economically depressed area qualifying for tax incentives. He
acknowledged the families were not told there have been some safety
disputes
and health complaints over sludge.
"They were told that it was composted biosolids that are available for
sale
commercially in the state of Maryland. I don't think there's any other
further disclosure required," Chaney said. "There was danger before. There
wasn't danger because of the biosolids compost. Composting, of course,
kills
pathogens."
The Baltimore study concluded that phosphate and iron in sludge can
increase
the ability of soil to trap more harmful metals including lead, cadmium
and
zinc, causing the combination to pass safely through a child's body if
eaten.
It called the fertilizer "a simple low-cost" technology for parents and
communities "to reduce risk to their children" who are in danger of lead
contamination. The results were published in Science of the Total
Environment, an international research journal, in 2005.
Another study investigating whether sludge might inhibit the
"bioavailability" of lead — the rate it enters the bloodstream and
circulates to organs and tissues — was conducted on a vacant lot in East
St.
Louis next to an elementary school, all of whose 300 students were black
and
almost entirely from low-income families.
In a newsletter, the EPA-funded Community Environmental Resource Program
assured local residents it was all safe.
"Though the lot will be closed off to the public, if people — particularly
children — get some of the lead contaminated dirt in their mouths, the
lead
will just pass through their bodies and not be absorbed," the newsletter
said. "Without this iron-phosphorus mix, lead poisoning would occur."
Soil chemist Murray McBride, director of the Cornell Waste Management
Institute, said he doesn't doubt that sludge can bind lead in soil.
But when eaten, "it's not at all clear that the sludge binding the lead
will
be preserved in the acidity of the stomach," he said. "Actually thinking
about a child ingesting this, there's a very good chance that it's not
safe."
McBride and others also questioned the choice of neighborhoods for the
studies and why residents were not told about other, possibly harmful
ingredients in sludge.
"If you're not telling them what kinds of chemicals could be in there, how
could they even make an informed decision. If you're telling them it's
absolutely safe, then it's not ethical," McBride said. "In many relatively
wealthy people's neighborhoods, I would think that people would research
this a little and see a problem and raise a red flag."
The Baltimore study used a compost of sludge mixed with sawdust and wood
chips packaged as "biosolids," the term for sludge preferred by government
and the waste industry.
"What we did was make the yards greener," said Pat Tracey, a Johns Hopkins
University community relations coordinator who recalled helping with the
lawn work. "They were bald, bad yards. It was considered sterile
fertilizer."
Baltimore environmental activist Glenn Ross says choosing poor
neighborhoods
destined for demolition makes it hard to track a study's participants. "If
you wanted to do something very questionable, you would do it in a
neighborhood that's not going to be there in a few years," he said.
HUD do***ents show the study's lead author, Mark Farfel, has pursued
several
other studies of lead contamination including the risks of exposure from
urban housing demolitions and the vacant lots left behind.
Farfel has since moved to New York, where he directs the World Trade
Center
Health Registry surveying tens of thousands of victims of the Sept. 11
attacks. He denied repeated requests for interviews and referred questions
to Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute, the children's research facility
that was the recipient of HUD grants with Farfel as project manager.
The institute referred questions to Joann Rodgers, a spokeswoman for Johns
Hopkins. She said a review board within its medical school approved the
study and the consent forms provided to families that participated. "The
study did not test children or other family members living in the homes,"
she said.
Some of Farfel's previous research has been controversial.
In 2001, Maryland's highest court chastised him, Kennedy Krieger and Johns
Hopkins over a study bankrolled by EPA in which researchers testing
low-cost
ways to control lead hazards exposed more than 75 poor children to
lead-based paint in partially renovated houses.
Families of two children alleged to have suffered elevated blood-lead
levels
and brain damage sued the institute and later settled for an undisclosed
amount.
The Maryland Court of Appeals likened the study to Nazi medical research
on
concentration camp prisoners, the U.S. government's 40-year Tuskegee study
that denied treatment for syphilis to black men in order to study the
illness and Japan's use of "plague bombs" in World War II to infect and
study entire villages.
"These programs were somewhat alike in the vulnerability of the subjects:
uneducated African-American men, debilitated patients in a charity
hospital,
prisoners of war, inmates of concentration camps and others falling within
the custody and control of the agencies conducting or approving the
experiments," the court said.
THE MORE YOU CAN GET CAUCASOIDS TO READ, THE SOONER THEY FIND OUT THAT
THEY
ARE JUST CONSPICUOUSLY EXPLOITED CAUCASOIDS WHICH ARE WHITE NIGGERS.
What Is a "White Nigger" ?
By Andrew D. Todd
http://hnn.us/articles/1220.html
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