It was refreshing to read this article in The Salem News last week describing how Superintendent Herb Levine and school committee board member Beverley Anne Griffin Dunne were taking a rational approach to evaluating risks from PCBs in schools. It’s too bad that their approach has been the exception and not the rule. Levine and Dunne deserve credit for taking a courageous stance at a time when leaders from other communities have fallen prey to bad science, and as a result, have exposed their communities to millions of dollars in unnecessary expenses.
PCBs grip public attention and cause fear well out of proportion with the actual risk posed. Some of this fear is caused by misunderstandings about PCBs, some is caused by poor guidance from regulatory agencies and some comes from the way people think about the concept of risk.
The most important thing to understand about PCBs is that they became widely used because they are chemically and biologically inert; that is they do not easily undergo chemical reactions. PCBs are like a liquid form of Teflon (TM); they do not degrade or decompose readily. Some types of PCBs are more biologically active than others (this group includes the so-called “coplanar PCBs”), but these particular PCBs are rarely ever found in people or the environment. When you think about PCBs, think of them as an oily form of Teflon (TM). Also, try thinking about Teflon (TM) as a chemical product that can be found in every home and environmental setting – and it lasts forever.
As to bad guidance from regulatory agencies, consider that in 1976 Congress passed the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA) and instructed the USEPA to develop the PCB regulations as a reaction to the Yusho poisoning incident in Japan, originally thought to have been caused by PCBs. By the time Japanese scientists discovered that the Yusho disease was actually caused by polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs) and not by PCBs, it was too late to stop the TSCA regulatory freight train. To this day there is no evidence that PCBs cause chronic disease in people, but that fact has not stopped or slowed EPA’s PCB enforcement efforts.
Understanding and managing risk is not something most people are taught in school, but it should be. The goal of risk management is to identify those possible hazards that are probable enough that taking countermeasures to avoid them is worthwhile. Here is a simple example to illustrate the importance of understanding relative health risks: a comparison of the relative risks between radon, automobiles and PCBs.
Radon is an odorless colorless gas that is produced by the natural radioactive decay of uranium. Radon is itself radioactive, and when it decays it emits a high energy alpha particle and a gamma ray, two forms of “ionizing radiation”. Exposure to ionizing radiation from radon is known to significantly increase lung cancer risk and is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking. Radon is found in indoor air because the uranium present in underground minerals and rocks is always undergoing decay and releasing radon gas. This radon gas migrates to the ground surface and can accumulate in structures resulting in exposures to building occupants and a greater risk of lung cancer. The USEPA estimates that between 20,000 and 40,000 lung cancer deaths per year are caused by these radon exposures. This would represent approximately 1.2% of total US deaths for 2009.
Driving is an activity most of us take for granted, but even though cars are built safer than ever, automobile accidents caused approximately 33,000 fatalities in 2009 (most recent available data). This fatality rate amounted to approximately 1.4% of total 2009 US deaths. These figures do not include the number of non-fatal injuries, a number greater than the fatality rate.
What was the US rate of fatalities from PCBs in 2009? There were no reports of death, disease or injury caused by PCBs in 2009 or any other year since 1980. Note that when PCBs were in active use prior to 1980, there were reports of disease arising from high level occupational PCB exposures. Symptoms from these exposures were reported to reverse shortly after the exposures stopped. Chronic disease symptoms were not observed at the time and have not been found in long-term followup studies.
So putting myself in the role of a school committee member (a role I have been in), I would use any budget available for risk reduction in a way that produced the greatest health benefit. That might be in the area of more driver’s education – there is a huge potential upside in reducing teen driving accidents. If I were more concerned about environmental exposures in the schools, going after radon in indoor air would be an obvious target. If more than one of every 100 students will contract lung cancer from radon, I would want to make sure that I knew what the radon levels were in my schools and I would want to reduce them as much as possible. Here again, the potential benefit would be large.
Could I justify spending hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars reducing PCB levels in schools? No, because there is no documented health benefit that would come from taking this action. Not until I knew that other more serious risks were addressed, and not until the school’s academic performance could not benefit from additional spending would I consider spending money on removing PCBs.
Final note. I hear people say that the reason there are no reported deaths, or disease incidents from PCBs is that the correlation between PCBs and disease has not been studied carefully enough; that if scientists only looked harder, they would find a link. My response is that this is a faulty argument. Scientists have been conducting rigorous human health studies on PCBs for over 40 years and a link between PCBs and chronic disease remains undetected. Over this same period links between other far less common toxic materials and disease have been clearly demonstrated. The absence of a link between PCBs and chronic disease is not due to a lack of looking. PCBs are a boogeyman in the environmental closet; its time to recognize this and move on to more serious matters.
