The News Manipulators by Reed Irvine & Joseph C. Goulden & Cliff Kincaid

Author:Reed Irvine & Joseph C. Goulden & Cliff Kincaid
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1992-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

63

How Media Have Misled America About PCB Danger

A dubious chemical scare trumped up by years of media hysteria is costing taxpayers of New York State at least half a million dollars and causing a weeks-long disruption of life at a college campus.

The public affairs woman at the State University of New York/New Paltz sighed deeply over the telephone in describing her school’s plight. ‘We got pretty paranoid around here when it happened,’ Karen L. Summerlin said of the PCB ‘contamination’ that is forcing closing of her campus for more than a month. ‘It’s getting to where you wonder if you should go outside and breathe in the morning.’

The financial sting and inconvenience began when a car struck a power pole on Dec. 29, causing electrical transformers to overheat and explode, exposing 29 persons and five buildings to smoke-carried particles of polychlorinated biphe-nyls (PCBs).

State Health Department bureaucrats promptly chased students off the campus and announced that the new semester won’t begin until February 3 at the earliest. Karen Summerlin said the cleanup would cost a minimum of $500,000. SUNY will also lose thousands of dollars in dorm and dining hall fees.

PCBs are a family of heat-resistant chemicals used for decades as coolants in electrical equipment. Their manufacture ended in 1978 when chemophobic bureaucrats put them on the carcinogenic suspect list. PCBs remain in place in older equipment such as that damaged at SUNY.

But was the SUNY scare necessary? As a front-page story in the January 7 New York Times by reporter Lisa W. Foder-aro pointed out, ‘Although PCBs are known to cause cancer in animals, studies have yet to prove a definitive link between PCBs and cancer in humans.’

Unfortunately, Foderaro’s careful – and accurate – assessment cannot offset media scare stories that constantly cite supposed dangers of PCBs. Typical was a story in The Wall Street Journal on March 12, 1991 by chronic chemophobe Frank Edward Allen, ‘PCBs have been linked to liver damages and cancers.’ A March 11, 1991 Associated Press story said PCBs are ‘suspected of causing cancer and birth defects.’

So what are the facts? Hundreds of industrial workers were exposed to high concentrations of PCBs on the job during the 1950s through 1970s. But, as Philip H. Abelson wrote in Science magazine last July 26, this exposure ‘led to no known cases of cancer.’ However, lab researchers were able to induce cancers in rats by subjecting them to massive doses of PCBs. On this basis, the Environmental Protection Agency halted the manufacture of PCBs and ordered a ‘cleanup’ that is expected to cost at least $100 billion.

Studies by the non-governmental Institute for Evaluating Health Risks (IEHR), with offices in Washington and Menlo Park, California, show that EPA’s blanket condemnation of PCBs was in error. IEHR reconstructed the five rat tests which led to the EPA ban. It found that the only PCBs that caused excess tumors in the rats were those that were most highly chlorinated, i.e., PCBs with 60% chlorination.

The IEHR found that PCBs with levels of chlorination below 60% showed no ‘statistically significant elevations of liver tumors’ in rats.

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