I Guess We’re On Our Own Now

By now, you should have heard about indictments issued by against W.R. Grace & Co. with regard to asbestos exposures of residents of Libby, Montana. The company and seven current and former executives have been indicted for environmental compliance violations along with conspiracy to cover up what happened in Libby. The indictment alleges that in the late 1970s the executives obtained knowledge of the toxic nature of tremolite asbestos in vermiculite mined at Libby through internal epidemiological, medical and toxicological studies, as well as through product testing. Despite legal requirements under the Toxic Substances Control Act to turn over to EPA the information they possessed, W.R. Grace and its officials failed to do so on numerous occasions. Grace and the officials deny the charges.

The EPA was prompted to act in 1999 after a report about the health crisis in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Andrew Schneider. In August of 2003, a federal court directed W.R. Grace to reimburse the EPA $54 million dollars for investigation and cleanup costs under Superfund. Grace is contesting the decision.

Because of the long latency period, the disease burden associated with asbestos will be with us for many years to come. A recent report in MMWR on occupationally-related pneumoconiosis mortality reported that most causes were trending downward, except for asbestosis, where the age-adjusted mortality nationally has increased from 0.54 in a million in 1968 to 6.88 in a million in 2000. The stats for this and other occupational lung diseases can be found at NIOSH’s Occupational Respiratory Disease Surveillance site, here. I used the web engine to check on mesothelioma incidence, the other scourge associated with asbestos exposure. Trend incidence for meso isn’t provided, because of changes in the ICD (International Classification of Diseases) classification, but the age-adjusted mortality is 11.63 in a million. It’s reasonable to assume that the mesothelioma trend mirrors asbestosis.

The product manufactured by Grace in Libby was the insulation Zonolite. Up to 35 million homes in the United States may be insulated with Zonolite. The EPA was set in 2002 to issue a public health emergency notice to the American public about potential hazards of asbestos in insulation and how to manage them. But in January 2003, the White House, through Office of Management and Budget squelched EPA’s proposal. The story broken in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (by Andrew Schneider again) is posted here.

I guess it’s official. We’re on our own. Under the current administration, we can count on the government agencies to not only be constrained in managing health risks, but to also actively prevented in limiting information that would allow us to make our own risk management decisions. There is ample information available on asbestos to allow us to be more active participants in managing our risks – which I’ll talk about more tomorrow (promise – I’ll also finish up on mercury, too). I’m sure we all have better things to do with our time, but taking reasonable steps to protect one’s health is an imperative, especially with this bankruptcy thing looming.