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| Anniston residents came out Tuesday night for a public meeting on the PCBs health study. Photo: Bill Wilson/The Anniston Star |
He slurred slightly and stuttered over some words and phrases as he addressed a group of professors, doctors and fellow Anniston residents, but there was no confusion about his message or the pain behind it.
McRath said he once was a child who played in the ditches where water polluted by PCBs may have run off from the Monsanto plant, and he would think nothing of putting his hands in his mouth and sucking on his dirty thumb. He was a child, and didn’t know any better.
Now, at age 54, he said, he’s a child who can’t read.
“I have tried and tried and tried,” he said. “I have got down on my knees. That stuff has killed me. It has ruined my life. I’m a grown man. I can’t go no further.”
“What about me now?”
His question was directed at Shirley Baker of Community Against Pollution and members of the Anniston Environmental Health Research Consortium.
They said there may be nothing they can do for him at this point in his life, but through the PCB health study they hope to prevent the children being born and raised in Anniston now from sharing a similar fate.
“Just tell me one thing,” McRath asked. “Tell me what all do PCBs do.”
“We don’t know,” was their collective answer.
The consortium of scientists and health professionals leading the $3.2 million, federally funded PCB health study held a public meeting Tuesday to get residents’ input on specific study proposals and to encourage people to sign up for the health registry from which they will look for participants.
The consortium says part of the goal of Project Healthy Life is to educate the community – which has the highest PCB blood levels of any population in the world – about their exposure and the potential health effects.
“Our visibility and accessibility is important,” said Martha Lavender, dean of nursing at Jacksonville State University, and a principal investigator. “The way this study is being developed is really unprecedented. We’re taking the lead from the community concerns and trying to address those.”
The consortium has partnered with CAP to get the word out, but only about 20 people attended the meeting Tuesday night and about 100 have signed up for the registry.
Their target number is 10,000.
“It’s like they’re working with us and not working on us,” Baker said in support of the study’s leaders. “It gives us an ownership.”
Howard Frumkin of Emory University, also a principal investigator, explained that there are more questions about PCBs than answers and the consortium will have to choose which questions to investigate.
Eleven studies have been proposed by the science team, but only about three or four will be undertaken because of funding. He listed some of the general study proposals — such as the link between PCBs and diabetes and thyroid disease, the effects of PCBs on the immune system, neurodevelopment, hearing, and women’s health — and asked for input on what the community wanted studied.
Wanda Champion, who grew up in Coldwater and played in Choccolocco Creek as a child, wanted to know if she could be responsible for her grandsons’ learning and respiratory problems.
Could she have had PCBs in her body and passed it to her daughters when she was pregnant and nursing? Could her daughters have then passed the toxin down to their sons?
Phyllis Pearson suffers from a condition called sarcoidosis, an immune deficiency that affects the lungs. For years, she was treated for asthma and bronchitis and said she could have died had she not been properly diagnosed. She said her doctors have told her there is a high incidence of this rare condition in Anniston and Calhoun County, which is caused by coming in contact with “something toxic or viral”.
She hopes a study will include this disease and take some of the mystery out of what caused her to have it and lead to a better way to diagnose and treat it.
Allen Silverstone, a professor at SUNY Upstate Medical University, has studied how PCBs affect the immune system since 1987, and is now part of a study in Slovakia where the population had the second highest exposure behind Anniston. He said he would like to look at the effects PCBs have had on immune systems in Anniston.
He said there is already evidence that PCBs suppress immune responses. The question in his mind is what degree of exposure over what period of time would cause those effects.
The significance of the Anniston health study, he said, is that it has the potential to end the debate over the health effects of PCBs, which is why the consortium wants to be careful to do it right.
“I think the people of this town are owed something, a genuine study,” he said.
For the community, the study could also have an immediate impact because participants may learn information about their health that their doctors didn’t know.
The Anniston PCB Health Study is funded by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and being conducted by a consortium of 33 experts from across the country and led by the JSU College of Nursing and Health Sciences.
Lavender said the specific studies would be decided no later than July.
A health study office is located at 1200 Noble Street to provide community members with easy access to the project staff and educational resources. A library will be set up with literature on PCBs and scientific studies that people can take home with them. For more information, call 782-5960 or visit www.jsu.edu/depart/nursing/PCB.
