Topic: Regulation
Regulations Mistakenly Hogtie Trichloroethylene Having a Superfund site less than 1 mile from your home may be a little disconcerting.by Kevin Roeten
(conservative)
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Trichloroethylene (TCE) has taken a bad rap as of late. But, is it justified knowing all the other hazardous chemicals used much more often? In the writer's immediate area--1 mile from a CTS electroplating sitewhich was shut down in 1986 (23 years ago). It has been labeled a Superfund RCRASite due to trichloroethylene groundwater contamination. Maybe our houses should be labeled Superfund Sites as well.
Most chemical sites receive the Superfund label if they have disposed of hazardous chemicals improperly. Those chemicals are also flammable, toxic, or corrosive. But if one takes a normal hairspray that usually contains dimethyl ether (DME) as a propellant, one must think about the typical breathing amounts inhaled.
A typical dose of DME usually exceeds breathing at least 500 parts per million (ppm) for the person applying the hairspraythat's 0.05 volume % for a short period of time. The Material Safety Data Sheet reveals that for a mouse, the lethal concentration for a 15 minute interval with DME is 386ppm. We also know the flash point of DME to be minus 41oCthe temperature at which it will ignite by having a small flame available. We just have to remember never to hairspray for longer than 15 minutes, or to have a small flame in the room.
Other typically used items around the house include gasoline, butane, paint thinner, other aerosols, antifreeze, pesticides, wood preservatives, mercury (lights, paint), spot remover, cyanide compounds (rat fumigants), ant traps, old fire extinguishers, pool chemicals, oven cleaners, battery acidyou name it. All either are flammable, toxic, corrosive, or a combination thereof. But there has yet a household to be labeled a Superfund Site.
Because TCE is listed on its MSDS as reasonably anticipated to be a possible human carcinogen', millions worried about carcinogenicity, and cancer flags were immediately raised. People living nearby the CTS site became scared for their lives. At a neighborhood meeting at the local fire station on 1/31/08, one fellow even claimed that TCE was responsible for 8 cancer occurrences in his family who lived within a mile of the CTS site.
Because TCE is relatively pervasive in the environment, many people are likely to become exposed by simply breathing, eating, and drinking. Inhalation is the main route of potential exposure, so various people were checked for TCE background levels. But no one tested showed any increase or accumulation of TCE.
EPA's Contract Laboratory Program Statistical Database reports that TCE supposedly occurs in 3% of surface water samples at an average level of 40.2 ppb, and in 19% of groundwater samples at a concentration of 27.3 ppb. Both are much higher than the Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL).
Locally, with the existing CTS electroplating site, the EPA sampled 66 wells within 1 mile of the CTS site. Only one well exceeded the MCL in that area. The MCL for TCE has been set at 5ppb in 1985, so it was made 2,000 times higher. The media always reports the new MCL, so a few analyses show up as wildly high.
The carcinogenicity of TCE was first evaluated in laboratory animals in 1970. TCE actually but had been used in inhalers 40 years ago as a gas anesthetic with favorable analgesic properties (1% vapor/ 10,000 ppm). Because of these properties, Trilene(TCE) inhalers were frequently used, especially by those about to give birth.
Millions of people have breathed high concentrations of TCE. So far, no human is known to have gotten cancer from TCE. One recent review of the epidemiology of kidney cancer rated cigarette smoking and obesity as more important risk factors for kidney cancer than exposure to solvents such as trichloroethylene.
It seems in the MSDS stating "reasonably anticipated to be a possible human carcinogen", anticipated could be defined as "expected, but never happened", and possible could mean "in all the millions of cases of high exposure, we haven't seen anything yet".
Several things we should all remember: 1) the concentration of ppm is 1000x more concentrated than ppb, and 2) drinking 10 liters of water over a course of a few minutes has resulted in death.
Other than that, just don't have your wife spray her hair in a closed room, or while smoking a lit cigarette. TCE is probably dangerous in some way. We know it's not flammable, radioactive, carcinogenic, toxic, or corrosive. It probably could be listed as #1862 on the most dangerous chemical list'. But where would water be on that list?
Yet someone had the wherewithal to put it on a SuperfundSite list and have the government (a.k.a., taxpayer) pay over $15 million to clean up a plant that really poses no risk.
Kevin Roeten has a BS in Chemical Engineering from Louisiana Tech University. He specialized in vapor degreasing and replacing cleaners such as trichloroethylene with "Freon 113" for electronic defluxing operations. "Freon" eventually had to be replaced due to its ozone depletion potential. He can be reached at roetenks@charter.net
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You are right, a superfund site is no different than hairspray. This is fundamentally the problem, the ability to "externalize" these costs, whether as the product is produced or later, when the profits are made and we are all left to mop up the toxins. It is socialism at its best.
You are also right, we have a choice, we can ignore the issue completely or we can deal with it at the fundamental level, the level of production. We can have at it with a sort of toxic anarchy or we can account costs where they actually occur and let the consumer decide if the real cost of the product is justified.
At present, we are taking the middle road, and it really doesn't satisfy either end.
As I inferred, superfund sites need to be assigned to those sites that are contaminated with something hazardous to the populace. It doesn't seem that most of America understands the potential hazards of TCE, if any.
We have many choices. Ignoring the issue completely is not a good choice. Putting things in the correct perspective and assigning the right priority can make all the difference.
But assigning CTS to be a superfund site doesn't sound like the 'middle' road to me.
I think we agree that ignoring toxins is one extreme?
The accounting of cost at production of "ALL" toxins is the other extreme and only real free market solution. A can of that hair spray you mentioned might cost fifty bucks, who knows. But it definately would cost more with real costs.
Superfunding is socialism, allowing the profit on toxins and letting the taxpayer clean it up. We have one site ten miles from here, portland harbor, there is an undetermined depth of toxic sludge from 100 years of heavy industry. I don't think they missed the boat on that one.
I am not debating CTS, i don't have the info. But, the government will go overboard at times, to "show" the public that it is on their side. Industries that produce toxins love this stuff, although they will never admit it. The public believes something is getting done and the toxic business goes on as usual.
The EPA is similar to the FDIC and the FDA, agencies that "insure" the public that things at getting taken care of, [albeit at great taxpayer expense] while Corporate Socialism marches on. They don't prevent what occurs, they enable it.
I never talked about ignoring toxins. I discussed how the regulations on perchloroethylene are way out of kilter with true priorities. As far as I can see, TCE is neither toxic, corrosive, or flammable. DME is flammable--highly!
I agree that superfunding is socialism. You never said what that toxic sludge was in Portland Harbor.
I addressed only TCE in my column. I am a chemical engineer that could tell you whether your 'toxic' sludge is hazardous or not. The EPA is a necessary evil, but they do many things that are completely overboard. Example--manmade global warming!
"Portland Harbor is contaminated with metals (such as mercury), pesticides, herbicides, polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), semi-volatile organics, and dioxin/furans."
The above is from the EPA webpage.
You are a chemist, so you have knowledge of products and toxins. The "cost" of the hairspray that you mention, and all the other household products you mention, need to reflect the "cost" of any harm and injury, including "clean up" at the point of manufacturer. The seller of the hairspray you mention is profiting from social costs. The seller of hairspray that uses a propellant that is non-toxic or less so, but maybe doesn't work quite as well, loses the priceing edge they would experience if all costs were accounted into the price.
I thought your article was very good, I am just noting that criticizing the EPA for overreacting to one chemical is like criticizing the Fed for printing ten dollars too many.
The EPA is a preemptive court. It exists to appease the public by assuring us that all is being taken care of, benefit industry [the segment that produces toxics] by transferring the clean up cost to the taxpayer and "allowing" new toxins to be used in place of old ones and overrule a non functioning court system with a tyrannical arm of government.
Thanks for your words about the column. Forgive me if I got the wrong first impression.
Your list of items in Portland Harbor seemed pretty complete, with the PCB's and dioxins being the worst. You have a right to be worried.
The cost of any harm or injury definitely needs to be included in the manufacturing cost of a chemical. My point in the column was that for TCE, there was no harm or injury, therefore the cost of labeling the user a Superfund Site was a manufactured and unnecessary cost added by the EPA. As a result, the taxpayer is being forced to fund regulations and clean up that does nothave to be performed.
The DME on the other hand, works well in the use of hairspray until someone decides to use it with an ignition source nearby, or in closed quarters.
I am just emphasizing that criticizing the EPA for reacting to one chemical with no evidence whatsoever, significantly lessens its impact with those chemicals that do need to be regulated.
The EPA cheapens its worth by handcuffing industry that does, for the most part, produce productive chemicals that are disposed of properly. Both the court system and the EPA can work. They just need to be reigned in significantly.
There is a difference between proving someone has a disease caused by TCE and whether it actually caused the disease. Since TCE doesn't leave a specific signature, it could be just a coincidence or it could be caused by TCE, its unproveable but not unlikely. As a biologist, I know that TCE exposure to tissue culture cells, mice and chicken embryos produces hundreds of gene expression changes at levels close to the current MCL. There is statistical evidence that low levels of TCE exposure will produce birth defects in exposed populations. The recent report by the National Research Council on TCE summarizes the evidence and makes a compelling case that EPA has not been stringent enough, that it is much more toxic than claimed. You've backed a very dead horse here.
Considering the millions upon millions that have come in contact with TCE with no evidence whatsoever that TCE is a carcinogenic culprit, the chances that it will cause cancer seem very small indeed.
If TCE showed carcinogenic properties, certainly some of the biological testing that was done to supposedly prove its carcinogenicty, especially with testing done on a 'blank' sample, would have sghown something.
I have worked with TCE directly, and the NRC evidently doesn't make a very compelling case at all. Remember, I never said one should be drinking TCE for breakfast, just that claiming a site is Superfund is quite a bit overblown.
I only back what I have experience with. What about your experience?
In regards to cancer, there is little way of identifying TCE as the culprit in specific cases. It is well established that it causes liver cancer in animals at low doses. There are a number of papers establishing this point. However, humans don't have the same inbred genetics and there is considerable variability between people in sensitivity. There were studies that implicated TCE in various cancer clusters around the country but once again, the limits of statistics preclude the identification of any particular case as caused by TCE. The strongest evidence for TCE toxicity is in heart development. TCE exposure correlated with a higher rate of heart defects in Milwaukee, Arizona and California and produces them in the lab as well. Recent papers show that exposures in the 8-10 ppb levels disrupt the normal calcium fluxes of cardiac cells and reduced heart function is known to be a cause of heart defects. Changes in intracellular calcium might also explain the recent link with Alzheimer's. One part of the problem is that lower doses of TCE appear to be more toxic than higher doses. Its not easily explained. It may relate to an ability to induce detoxifying mechanisms at higher doses but not at lower doses or some other protective mechanism. It may turn out that you want to drink TCE at breakfast if you already are getting a low exposure in your environment just to make sure you've induced your protective enzymes.
It sounds like you're having things both ways. First you say that it could not be identified that TCE was the cancer culprit in specific human cases, then you say it was well established it causes liver cancer in small animals.
There have been all kinds of studies that say TCE should, but so far none has. Why was it so easily explained in small animals, but so difficult in humans?
We've already documented that many get low exposure of TCE in their environment already. But I haven't heard about it possibly inducing ones' protective enzymes.
No, I don't agree with the premise. In animal studies you can control the exposure and genetics and directly show that TCE causes cancer. It is very clear that liver cancer is produced by TCE exposure in mice. Heart defects are harder to produce in mice or rats than chick embryos but can be produced in all three species. As a rule, mice share about 92% homology with human genes and all of the major signaling pathways and oncogenes behave very similarly. Thus, a cause of cancer in a mouse is a pretty good bet to cause cancer in humans. In human studies, we are not inbred and there are other exposures in the environment. No one is exposed to TCE exclusively and everyone working with TCE gets a unique level of exposure. TCE is likely causing cancer in humans but its easy to blame it on other exposures or on chance. We cannot prove that TCE is a cause of a specific case because there are other causes of cancer that may be in play. That doesn't mean that TCE is harmless. It may not cause cancer in you and you've won the lottery, it may happen to your co-worker and he lost. Environmental regulations are not there to protect the lottery winners but to reduce the number of lottery losers. Clearly, TCE is a significant component of the chemical cocktail that we are exposed to and produces real health problems in the population. There are aspects of TCE exposure that are baffling but that doesn't mean that we should give it a pass until its all sorted out.
In relation to enzymes, exposure to almost any hydrophobic or toxic substance induces enzymes known as Phase I and Phase II enzymes. The purpose of these enzymes is to but hydrophilic molecules onto the compound to make it water soluble so it can be excreted by the body. Sometimes the modified molecules are more toxic than the originals, sometimes they are less. When TCE is recognized by cells, it induces expression of enzymes such as cytochrome 2E1. While many believe that TCE is more toxic as an intermediate in the breakdown pathway, the evidence is not clear. We do know that the cytochromes are induced at very low levels of TCE. One possibility to explain the more toxic response at low levels of TCE is that more or different detoxifying enzymes are released at higher levels than at low levels and the threat is neutralized better at higher doses. If you happen to have a gene polymorphism that makes a critical cytochrome less efficient, you may be one of the lottery losers.
Clearly, TCE is an expensive and difficult solvent to clean up. Its the single most common contaminant at Superfund sites. Because of the cost of that cleanup, there is significant pressure to downplay the toxicity of the chemical and allow a higher MCL. Much of the statistical arguments about proving toxicity are very similar to the arguments advanced by the cigarette industry in the 1950s. The National Research Council convened a panel of scientists to study all of the available data and concluded that TCE was about 40 times more toxic than recognized by the EPA and identified many of the issues that need to be resolved. It may be that there are other chemicals that are over-regulated but TCE is not one of them.
I forgot to mention that your comparison molecule, DME, is much more water soluble. It would be less able to cross cell membranes and get into cells and the fraction that gets in would be excreted more rapidly. This property would make it much less likely to be toxic than TCE.
Mice share a 92% homology with humans. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that mean than 8% of homology they DON'T share with humans? After people have worked with TCE for years, have inhaled it for specific and long periods of time, and have ingested it at a known concentration for a specific and long period of time, I'd say it was a better bet that our history with PCE on humans is better known than on mice.
Certainly more humans have been exposed to PCE than any amount of mice that's ever been tested.
When did I ever say that TCE is harmless? I did say that even water can kill will the right dosage. Please get the info correct. Besides, no one ever said we should give TCE a 'pass', but there were many more chemicals we should be worried about rather than TCE. Especially with the concentrations at CTS.
Clearly, TCE is not that difficult to clean up, or else the primary mode of clean-up wouln't be to allow direct evaporation to the atmosphere. So far, with so many possibilities and possible iterations and evolved occurences, we've seen nothing that produces carcer in humans.
It might be the single largest contaminant in many Superfund Sites, but is it the most dangerous? Previous experience has stated, not by a long shot!
Concluding the TCE is 40x more toxic than the original PEL of 100ppm puts it much higher than the existing MCL. Not everyone agrees with that asessment anyway.
Smoking actually gave exposures of hundreds of ppm, which is nowhere close to existing TCE exposures. There are many chemicals that are overregulated. TCE IS one of them.
It's time to stop saying the 'sky is falling'. It's time to get real. It's time to stop wasting taxpayer funds on unecessary regulation. It's time to commit funds to those things that really warrant our attention.
It's interesting that you talk about DME's increased water solubility as compared to TCE, but you completely ignored the fact that DME is much more FLAMMABLE that TCE. In fact, TCE is not flammable at all.
True scientists don't tell a story with only some of the facts.
There are a couple of flaws in your arguments. First, as a point of biology, a 92% homology in molecules between species translates into essentially a 100% identity in the business parts of molecules where they function. Most differences are found in regions where change in protein structure doesn't affect the business part of the molecule. While the mechanism of TCE toxicity is being debated, it is improbable that its working on regions of molecules that are found in mice and not men. Most of the time you can replace a gene in a human cell with the fly version and see the same activity. Betting on differences between organisms is a safety mechanism is not particularly prudent.
Second, since you are basing your argument on an economic cost benefit ratio for the taxpayers, you should base it on the real costs of TCE contamination. Cancer is only one of the health effects of TCE. There is evidence that TCE effects the immune system (producing Lupus) and that workers who used vats of the stuff get Alzheimer's earlier so there are costs associated with these diseases too. The strongest evidence concerns heart defects. TCE produces an Odds Ratio of 3 for congenital heart disease in humans. That means that heart defects are 3 fold higher in areas of TCE contamination than in similar areas without contamination. One highly contaminated area is Camp Lejuene in NC and they have very high numbers of kids born with heart defects. Currently, in my state, one third of all pediatric care dollars for low income health care assistance are spent on the care and treatment of kids with congenital heart disease. I would suspect that the ratio is close to the same for all pediatric health insurance in the country. Imagine how this would jump if we got rid of those unnecessary regulations and heart defects went up by 2-3 fold everywhere. These costs are already substantial and you are paying for it with your tax dollars and your health insurance dollars. Those kids for the most part will live into their fifties while requiring constant medical care. So even if you are willing to bet that TCE doesn't cause a substantial amount of cancer, the evidence is clear that you are already paying for the costs of heart defects produced by TCE. Relaxing the regulations on TCE will magnify the costs substantially.
Cleanup to 5ppb is expensive. I know of one site that has been pumping for about 20 years and the end is not in sight. It will cost many millions more before remediation is complete and more if the standard is changed to reflect the biology. It would have been a whole lot cheaper to prevent the dumping in the first place. Relaxing regulation of TCE will lead to more dumping and more costs for cleanup. Are they are really air striping TCE in your area? It's hard to imagine that it is legal. I hope that you aren't downwind of the facility.
Clearly, as a Conservative, you value your pocketbook and the taxpayer's pocketbook. Don't let the dogma of "unecessary regulation" blind you to the real costs of letting TCE get dumped on the ground by every metalworking company and machine shop in the country.
Kevin- I missed that last comment you made before I replied.
Flammability may be a concern for health when you are working with sparks or flames but it has no bearing on toxicity in an organism. I've never heard of anyone getting cancer by spontaneous combustion.
To my knowledge, Superfund sites are not picked because they might blow up or burn, they are picked because they are contaminating the environment.
I thought we were having a reasonable discussion from two different perspectives. Your previous response started to get a bit snarky but the last ad hominem attack on my science suggests that you are not particularly interested in hearing any other side and that you're out of substance. I'm done.
I hate to tell you, but there are more than a couple of flaws in your arguments.
First, as a biologist, you should know this. A 92% homology in molecules means almost nothing in the animal kingdom. It's likely that a blue whale has almost (if not more) of a homology in molecules to a homo sapien.
Absolutely, that difference effects the business part of a molecule. I'm only a chemical engineer and I know that. Even mammals of the same species (humans) have difficulty donating parts of their body to others for fear of rejection.
The difference the the RNA and DNA molecules in a mouse and a man are light-years apart, despite the similarities that exist. That, along with many other reasons, is why mixing of species during procreation is not allowed. At least not yet.
You take many risks getting into an argument with me on economic cost/benefit ratios, because I doubt you delved into much of that before. Suffice it to say, we'll leave it at that.
Cancer may be one of the predicted health effects of TCE, but it's without a doubt, the worst. Your predictions of health effects from long-term exposure of TCE is presumptuous at best. I haven't heard any hard data yet, more specifically certainly not about Camp LeJeune, and kids born with heart defects. Notice how easily you assume that TCE must be the culprit, if that's even true?
Are you speculating again about what you think 'might' happen if the unneecessary regs were lifted on some of the chemicals? More speculation about lifting regs on TCE and what our costs might be? It seems as if $50 million might be very conservative when you talk about all the costs associated with the cleanup of this assigned Superfund Site at CTS.
You bet cleanup to 5ppb is expensive. In many cases, that amount is so small it's even below the limit of detectability. They only set it at that amount because there was nothing that could possibly detect a lower concentration.
Dumping is not a good practice at all. Our plant in Michigan got in trouble for letting too much Freon get into the ground 30 years ago, but that's another story.
As someone who knows that 'dumping' rarely occurs anymore, and certainly not on purpose, I am cognizant of the cost requirements of any cleanup jobs. And I am certainly aware over overzealous regulators that might overcompensate with no realization of what actual health effects there might be, or how dangerous they actually are.
Just a comment to your last comment. For something to be considered a Superfund Site, the incorrectly disposed of material must either be considered toxic, corrosive, or flammable.
TCE for all practical purposes, is considered only moderately toxic at best. DME is known to be highly flammable with an extremely low flash point.
If you die, or get burned severely, because of a spark given off by a cigarette, curling iron, hair dryer, wall socket, you name it... I doubt you'll be worried at all about something's long-term toxicity.
Oh, I forgot to tell you. Please remember not to close the bathroom door or allow the concentration of DME to build up to 500ppm over 15 minutes. Mice didn't fare too well when that happened.
So I’m not done. You may be a Chemical Engineer but you’ve clearly exceeded your expertise when you talk about biology.
Let’s summarize your argument: You provide annecdotal evidence that you’ve worked with vats of TCE and you are normal so TCE couldn’t possibly cause cancer. If it doesn’t give you cancer, then it can’t give anybody cancer. Since nobody gets cancer from TCE, its ridiculus to worry about it and you resent that anybody wants to clean it up.
Since cancer is known to take decades to show up, I’d say the jury is still out on that. If we rely on anecdotal evidence, I know of one group of engineers who worked with TCE in the early days of printed circuit boards and they all died in their 40s and 50s of various cancers. Was it TCE, who knows?
I conceed that epidemiological studies of cancer and TCE are equivocal and not tremendously convincing. However, TCE doesn’t have a good dose relationship and those who have been most heavily exposed were the ones that were studied. They may not be the best examples. So the studies may not have been done right. Recent studies in several cell types and organisms have shown greater toxicity at lower doses. The basis for this is not clear but there are possible explanations why higher levels of exposure are not as toxic. Alcohol has some of the same characteristics. We all know people that are less sensitive to high levels of alcohol and they are usually the ones who are most exposed. There is a widespread distribution of TCE at this point and even snow in the arctic is positive for TCE. Since cancer is so widespread and has been increasing over the last 50 years it is statisitically imposible to distinguish to establish whether a person’s cancer is due to TCE exposure. In your view, the current epidemiological evidence is sufficient to forget TCE as a carcinogen. In my view, the answer is maybe but I suspect that the studies were not done right.
What is abolutely clear is that low doses of TCE reliably produce liver cancer in mice. That’s the basis for the EPA designation as “possibly causing cancer”. We know that there is variation in sensitivity to environmental substances, that is why any group of people will have mixed responses to a toxin. Your survival doesn’t mean everyone else will. While cancer is a group of diseases, 30 years of research has identified a lot of mechanisms and there are no mechanisms that are unique to mice. Every current treatment for cancer and those currently being developed have used the mouse as a model organism for testing. It is unlikely that TCE produces cancer in a mouse by a mechanism that doesn’t or can’t work in a human.
No we get to the fuzzy part of your understanding of biology. Lets begin with the estimate that a mouse has about 92% identity with human genes. For comparison, I’ll tell you that a chicken has about 70% and a fish is around 60%. You brought up the blue whale as being close to 92%, perhaps that’s right as it is a mammal but it is irrelevant to the discusion as there is no evidence relating to TCE and blue whales. The importance of the 92% is that we have a good understanding of molecular function and we can tell a kinase because it has a ATP binding site and we can recognize most molecules because they have characteristic sequence motifs. The differences between mouse and human molecules are in areas where there was no evolutionary pressure topreserve function. So my point was that TCE effects, and the mechanism is unknown, are unlikely to work only on the portions of the mouse genome that are different from man.
If I got your reply right, there are lots of functional differences between mice and men because otherwise mice and men would be able to procreate together. As I try to get rid of that image out of my mind, I would point out that procreation is based on the pairing of chromosomes and that mouse and man are not synteneic, the genes are not in the same order along the chromosomes and we have different numbers of chromosomes. Thus, even if a stretch of genes on one chromosome could pair up, there would be no way to pair up enough genes in order to accomplish anything. You mixed into your discussion immune rejection as well, but immune rejection is based upon the recognition of molecules as self or non-self and most of those differences are based on post-translational modification. You don’t reject someone else's tissues because their enzymes didn’t bind the same substrates or their ion channels don’t function the same way.
So at this point, you are more worried about water poisoning than the TCE in the water. Say you are right, TCE doesn’t cause cancer. We should worry more about DME because its flammable. This is where the switch got me off track, is there enough DME at the CTS site to worry about fire? I mentioned that it is unlikely to be toxic but apparently you’d rather setup a Superfund site in the Drugstore where the hairsprays are kept. Lets get back to TCE.
You are concerned by the waste of money that is required to clean up TCE. So am I, but you apparently think it benign enough to just leave the plume to migrate into the neighborhood. I mentioned that TCE is reported to cause Lupus and other immune problems as well as Alzheimer’s. I don’t know know how good the evidence for that is yet. These and other health effects were reviewed by the the National Research Council with an independent group of toxicologists and pharmacologists who do not work on TCE themselves and it was their collective opinion that there was something to it and it should continue to be studied. It’s clear that you dismiss the review and you haven’t read it.
So the best evidence that TCE causes health effects in humans and animals is in heart development. Several studies show that heart defects in TCE contaminated areas are elevated. Depending on the study, the odds ration for defects is 2.5-3 in humans. Heart defects have been produced in the lab in a number of species including doses as low as 10 ppb. The National Research Council concluded the same thing. I mentioned Camp Lejuene. This military installation is heavily contaminated with TCE as you can find in a large number of marine websites. I’ve seen the DOD statistics for birth defects on military bases and there are a much higher number of heart defects on this base. If we go back to anectodal evidence, I was told that the neonatal intensive care unit there is filled with kids with heart defects.
So putting aside the fact that when challenged, you resort to snark and ad hominem attacks because you have no other response, lets agree to disagree. You are perfectly willing to drink TCE contaminated water and breath TCE fumes because restrictions on the use of TCE are unwarranted. Hopefully, you don’t force TCE-contaminated water on your family. I on the other hand, have concerns that current TCE exposures have already produced human disease and economic loss. I think experimentation and exploration trump anecdotal stories and ambiguous data and I don’t want to be subjected to TCE exposure against my will.
So let me clarify, I’m done this time because you have little understanding of the problem and you have no interest in acquiring any new knowledge. The concept of Superfund is so antithetical to you that you’d be willing to compromise the health and safety of your community in support of the ability to pollute.
My, are we getting a little sensitive today!? Your inaccuracies and assumptions have befuddled even me. You also seemed to have skipped over much of what I've said.
Let's recapture some of those moments. Do you work for the EPA or not? What exactly is your title? Let's summarize your assumptions. 1) You assume that I said TCE could never cause cancer. I said it hasn't caused any known carcers yet. 2)You assumed that many engineers have worked with TCE in the past will possibly die of cancer. 3) You assume there are no mechanisms unique to mice. When mice procreate, they produce mice--not humans. That's pretty unique. 4) Lower doses of TCE will cause more cancer than higher doses. . If that's the case, We should have seen thousands of cases of cancer from lower doses.
You seemed to have proved my point about blue whales with their close identity to human genomes. They, in water, are in contact with low levels of TCE. Please let me know if you ever hear of a whale getting cancer.
You've refused to believe that immune rejection has anything to do with reactions to low doses of TCE. Where did I ever say that I'm more worried aboutn water poisoning than TCE in the water? You assume that I'd rather set up a Superfund Site in a drugstore?? There is absolutely NO DME at the CTS site. My point was that DME poses a much higher risk to the populace than low level TCE contamination. You'll pick thatn up next time, I'm sure.
It seems clear that you believe TCE is directly responsible for Lupus. I'm still waiting for that data. TCE causes heart defects? Evidently, some evidence pointing that way has convinced you. If you jump out of a car going 60mph, your likely to sustain injury. Should we ban cars then?
I like the fact that you accuse me of 'snark' and 'ad hominem' attacks. It seems a little evidence puts you in a position of coming to some pretty stark conclusions. I tend to wantt to wait for a little more convincing data.
How can you agree to disagree with someone who will not believe data presented in front of their face. You seem to have an agenda. I'll bet I know which way you voted in the last presidential election.
Why do you assume that I would drink TCE contaminated water? Why do you assume that I would be willing to breath TCE fumes, when I've had to do that for parts of the last 30 years? I will not be responsible for rash judgments about the cataclysm of TCE contamination. And, you've made the assumption that I'd be willing to comprimise the health and safety of my community to pollute. Did I get all those right?
If you get any new info at all, any at all, please let me know. One last question--do you work for the EPA?
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