The CDC Great Lakes Report: A Lesson in Transparency

Influential people ranging from Nixon to Clinton (Bill, that is) to untold numbers of Republicans in the Bush administration habitually have been too puffed up with their own importance and perceived invulnerability to comprehend that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. A recent case has been the report regarding potential human exposures to hazardous waste sites around the Great Lakes, which has been in draft by staff of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) for the past several years.

The International Joint Commission (IJC) commissioned the report in 2001, according to a report published in the Detroit News and, as of 2004, was undergoing peer review. It was supposed to have been released in July 2008, but the CDC has held up publication. The author of the report, Chris DeRosa, senior toxicologist for ATSDR subsequently was demoted for reasons not specified by CDC.

The Center for Public Integrity has done a good job in bringing this matter to light, and particularly in disclosing portions of the report in question. Most of the liberal blogs and the mainstream media took this information to the wrong place, highlighting the supposed public health threat from contaminated sites around the Great Lakes, which suggests that most of them didn’t read the excerpts of the report all that carefully, if they read them at all. Others such as Revere, did identify a key issue associated with this news, which is another example of the Republican war on science, with Bush administration officials suppressing scientists who have identified environmental health problems that pose a threat to entrenched economic interests.

The House Energy and Commerce committee has gotten into the act, calling CDC into account with regard to this matter. So now the CDC, blithely not mentioning any of this back story, has issued the report in draft along with a statement “scientific concerns” which says that the report is not ready for release to the public. Senior management reviewed the report in 2007 and identified what was felt to be several deficiencies, which they were concerned would lead to misinterpretation of the report by the public. However, due to the inept handling of the review process, it’s a bit late to prevent misinterpretation. A revised draft is being prepared for a review by the Institute of Medicine, which presumably will occur sometime this year.

I must be missing something here. I’m curious about what was so troublesome about the report from a political perspective that it warranted being bottled up for the better part of three years, and demoting a senior toxicologist. According to the latest Detroit News article, the report cost $92,000. It’s hard for me to do more than speculate, not knowing anything about the schedule or the original scope (you can’t find a workplan or protocol or anything similar on IJC’s or ATSDR’s web sites), but for a report assessing potential adverse impacts associated with Superfund sites across multiple states in the Great Lakes region, $92K seems to be a fairly small budget. Awhile back, I took a peek at the draft version circulated on Public Integrity’s web site. It looks like what the authors did was to identify hazardous waste sites and other releases to air and water from publicly available databases, and lined these up with county-level disease burden statistics. This study scarcely produced smoking guns, and is most useful for identifying priorities for more definitive health assessments. And the authors of the study pretty much say these things in the report.

It’s good that CDC has now posted the draft study, along with the comments provided by various reviewers, though it’s a shame that the agency apparently had to be slapped around a bit by Congress before coughing it up. And, if they had simply posted the report without any fanfare, perhaps on a late Friday afternoon which a standard ploy for agencies who have to report unpleasant news, it might have been months before anyone in the press had found it (so when’s the last time you’ve visited ATSDR’s Great Lakes web page). Not in the spirit of transparency, but it would have represented much smarter bureaucratic maneuvering.

Beyond the tempest in a teapot story about suppressing a relatively routine health assessment report useful for identifying future research priorities, and folks who characterize it as anything more really need to get over themselves, there are much more important stories to explore. Revere points to one of them, which is the pattern of harassing scientists who are simply doing their jobs which is identifying public health problems for use in informing policy. Another story is the progressively growing limitations in EPA’s command and control tools (TRI, NPDES, Superfund) for understanding and managing big regional environmental health problems, such as the Great Lakes. Then, there’s the question about why this story didn’t stimulate broader interest in other environmental health research on the Great Lakes, which points to much better documented problems.