Les Skramstad and Gayla Benefiled at a memorial for Libby asbestos victims. (c) Photo A. Schneider

According to the Associated Press, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus quietly inserted language in a package of last-minute amendments that will grant the asbestos victims of the tiny town in the Northwest corner of the state access to Medicare benefits.

Hundreds of people – miners, their families and other townsfolk who had no connection to the now-closed W.R. Grace vermiculite mine – have died from asbestos-related disease. An estimated 2,000 or more of the 10,000 people who live in the county surrounding Libby were diagnosed with signs of the disease.

I couldn’t reach any press people in Baucus’ office for details but the Montana democrat long fought for the people of Libby.

It would be great of there was another amendment slipped in that required the government to warn the millions of home and business owners across the country that the vermiculite insulation in their attics and walls is most likely made from the same asbestos-containing material from the Libby mine.

That would be a great holiday gift that could save lots of lives.

The 50,000-member American Public Health Association adopted a resolution at its annual meeting this week calling on Congress to pass legislation banning the manufacture, sale, export, or import of asbestos-containing products including products in which asbestos is a contaminant.

Asbestos, a known carcinogen, annually claims the lives of more than 10,000 Americans.

“With this new policy, APHA is joining the World Federation of Public Health Associations and other international organizations calling for a global ban on asbestos mining, and manufacturing, and the dangerous practice of exporting asbestos containing products,” said Dr. Celeste Monforton, chair of the organization’s Occupational Health and Safety section.

“As the World Health Organization noted in 2006, the most efficient way to eliminate asbestos related diseases is to stop using all types of asbestos.”

Asbestos was banned in the U.S. briefly in 1989, after the Environmental Protection Agency conducted a ten-year study, spent millions in research and accumulated 100,000 pages of justification. The agency announced that it would phase out and ban virtually all products containing asbestos

But the fledgling ban lasted less than two years. The well-funded Canadian Asbestos industry challenged the ban. The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court acknowledged that “asbestos is a potential carcinogen at all levels of exposure,” but nevertheless threw out the life-saving legislation over technical issues.

In 2007, after six years of effort, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray muscled a new asbestos ban into existence.

The original language of the precisely crafted legislation would have addressed almost all commercial sources of asbestos. However, between Murray signing off on a solid and important bill and the time it was passed unanimously by the Senate, the asbestos industry, primary the automotive and sand and gravel gangs, had Republicans gut it to almost total uselessness.

Almost 50 industrialized nations have banned the lethal fibers. The U.S. and Canada are the most notable exceptions.  Canada still mines and exports asbestos and too many U.S. lawmakers buckle to the power of industry lobbyists.

Yet like Murray, many continue the fight.

“APHA set a precedent with strong language aimed at preventing asbestos exposure to eliminate deadly diseases.  We can’t let history repeat itself – it is time to ban asbestos and fund educational and research programs,” says Linda Reinstein, Executive Director of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

“APHA renews our optimism that a federal asbestos ban is eminent,” added the head of the asbestos victim’s group.

No, really. Its official state rock is serpentine which usually contains asbestos, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Late last night, by unanimous vote, the city council of Manhattan Beach passed a resolution asking the state to find a different, non-lethal hunk of rock to memorialize.

Micro-image by EPA

In 1965, serpentine was designated as the state rock of California in order to promote the then-lucrative asbestos mining industry.  The last U.S. asbestos mines – in California and Vermont – were closed in 2002, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Manhattan Beach Mayor Portia Cohen thanked the council for its vote and added, “It is unthinkable to have serpentine as the State Rock of California when more than 7,000 people in our state alone have died from asbestos since 2007.”

The beach-front community is home to the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, a national asbestos education and victim’s rights group. ADAO launched a “Drop the Rock” campaign urges statewide action to remove serpentine as the official rock.

The Manhattan Beach resolution represents the first official request to the California legislature to remove the rock.

Today, asbestos still kills,

Thousands of homes, schools and businesses still have asbestos-wrapped pipes, boilers and furnaces. Millions more have asbestos-contaminated vermiculite insulation in their walls and attics.

And as unbelievable as is sounds, thousands of asbestos-containing products – from toys to building supplies and automotive parts – enter the U.S. marketplace every year.

The lethality of asbestos has been painfully documented for years yet, Congress still lacks the will to legislate an effective ban on the deadly fibers as 40 other industrialized countries have done.

The one hazard that cannot be legislated away is naturally occurring asbestos, outcroppings of which the USGS has mapped throughout the country.

California is plagued by the problem.

The asbestos contained in the serpentine rock can be released when the rock is broken by soil disturbing activities such as mining, construction, and other land grading activities.  Hundreds of new homes, schools and businesses have been built on this fiber-laced land.

“California has the dubious distinction of being the state with the highest recorded number of asbestos-related deaths and the death toll will continue until the United States Congress passes legislation banning asbestos,” said Linda Reinstein, ADAO’s executive director and co-founder.

Back in April, then-acting Surgeon General Steven Galson issued a statement about the deadly fiber and the illness it causes.

It wasn’t literature. Just 341 words explaining the most basic facts about asbestos — where it’s found, how it kills — and urging “every American to become aware of the public health issues of asbestos exposure and the steps they can take to protect their health.”

But did anyone notice?

I checked Google and media search sites and found only one reference to the statement, and that was on the surgeon general’s own Web site.

The most strident voice in the chorus to issue the warning was the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. Linda Reinstein,, the group’s Executive Director and Co-Founder said it has taken more than six years to get a surgeon general to embrace asbestos awareness.

Reinstein, whose husband died from an asbestos-caused illness, told me this morning that the warning “is a landmark step to preventing exposure and deaths.”

No one, including, I suspect, Dr. Galson, believed that Americans would read it and rush to see their physicians.

But because tens of thousands of new cases of asbestos-related diseases are being diagnosed every year, any help in informing the public of the potential hazard from the lethal fibers was coveted.

Over the years, letters requesting the warnings were signed by some of the top asbestos-treatment specialists in the country and leading patient advocacy groups.

But the responses during the Bush administrations were always the same – a form letter listing the more important things that the surgeon general was worrying about, such as obesity.

The reality was that the Bush White House – actually Dick Cheney himself – did his best to stifle any and all government discussion of asbestos or its risks.

For two years, at the repeated request of industry lobbyists, Bush’s team pulled every trick it could to ram asbestos tort reform through Congress.

The plan the White House pushed to limit asbestos lawsuits and put government panels in charge of determining who was or wasn’t sick, didn’t pass.

The new surgeon general to be  – Regina Benjamin – was named to the job in July and is awaiting confirmation.

I’ve checked the few public comments that the Alabama family physician has made since being appointed and can’t find anything on asbestos yet.

Even though former top doc Everett Koop didn’t always see it that way, the surgeon general is a largely ceremonial post traditionally used by most administrations to communicate health messages to the public. But the office holder can sometimes make his or her role more meaningful, and America’s nominated top doctor isn’t shy.

But a few lives might be saved if she weighed in now and then on asbestos dangers.  It is especially important because it looks like the chances of a meaningful asbestos ban ever getting passed by the gang on the Hill is way so remote.

Here is a link to the surgeon general’s statement.

Link to statement

The prosecutor told the Associated Press that Eternit closed its Italian operation in 1986, but people continue to become sick and die. He added that two men are charged with causing an environmental disaster and failing to take proper precautions.

According to the news agency, the two executives don’t deny that the deaths were caused by asbestos. However, they claim they did everything they could to limit the risks and inform the public.
In addition to the dead, the AP reported that some 800 residents and former workers are still suffering from illnesses including asbestosis and mesothelioma, a cancer of the lung lining.

For more details, here is a link to MSNBC’s story.

High Resolution Computed Tomography

A couple of months ago he told me that medicine is a puzzle and a challenge, which can be both astonishing and demanding, but it is finding the answers.

It appears that he and his colleague, Dr. Carmen Endress, have found the elusive answer to what causes the unrelenting pain that accompanies most asbestos-caused diseases.

Harbut, co-director of the Karmanos Cancer Institute’s National Center for Vermiculite and Asbestos-Related Cancers, credits the discovery to a new imaging approach developed by Endress, an associate professor of radiology, Wayne State University School of Medicine.

They were able to show that there was a documented erosion on the interior wall of the ribs caused by pleural plaques – a fibrous scarring which is the most common manifestation of asbestos exposure.

“This action of the pleural plaque against the covering of the bone and the bone itself is . . . an anatomically logical explanation of the unrelenting pain which some patients experience,” said Harbut, chief of the institute’s Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The ability to detect and track the progression of the disease earlier will allow physicians to develop treatment plans which will require far less of the heavy pain-killers patients often use for years.

In the study, Harbut was able to show the progression of the disease in a 55-year-old woman who was exposed as a child to the asbestos-like taconite dust on her father’s work clothes.

Harbut says he has treated far too many taconite miners with asbestos-like disease. For years he has fought to get federal regulatory agencies to realize the health danger from this mineral, which actually is a residual product from the region’s iron mines.

The efforts by Harbut and other occupational medicine specialists to get the government to act has been repeatedly blocked by lobbyists from the huge steel companies that own the mines and industries that want to use the taconite tailings to cover roads.

The work by the two physicians clearly documents the link between taconite and the asbestos-like diseases.

Harbut again urged the regulators to reevaluate the definition of asbestos. He says this is especially important within the context of legislative efforts to prohibit the use of asbestos, which is moving through Congress at a glacial pace.

Here is a link to the findings, which were featured in the current edition of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health.

Only now, 20 months later, after prodding from a judge presiding over a nationwide class action suit on the contaminated products, has CBS agreed to a settlement.

The agreement, which must be approved by the court, not only offers a refund but, more importantly, will effectively implement a nationwide recall of the toy science kits, based on the popular television drama series CSI, Arthur Bryant, executive director of Public Justice, told me today.

The suit was brought by Public Justice, a national public-interest law firm, and the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, the independent volunteer organization, dedicated to raising public awareness about the dangers of asbestos exposure. It has spent nearly $250,000 in testing the toys and other popular consumer products for asbestos.

The amount of asbestos that the lab tests uncovered stunned not only the analysts but also the public health advisors of the asbestos group that ordered repeated tests just to be sure.

“This was far too serious to not be absolutely sure of the accuracy of what we discovered,” said Linda Reinstein, co-founder and executive director of the organization. “We kept testing and still got the alarming results. We were aghast to find asbestos in a children’s toy.”

Her outrage was understandable. For asbestos fibers to sicken or kill, they must first be inhaled. The highly publicized, made-in-China toy containing white fingerprint powder loaded with asbestos included instructions that told children to get close and dust or blow the extremely fine powder away.

“The asbestos is almost certain to be inhaled and widely disseminated,” Public Justice said in the suit.

Reinstein, the chief analyst, and several leading national asbestos authorities announced their finding in a Washington news conference in December 2007. Immediately, copies of the lab results were delivered by courier to the Consumer Products Safety Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency.

(Here’s a link to the Seattle PI’s story on that announcement which talks about other popular consumer products with asbestos.)

The silence from the government watchdogs was deafening.

It was only after Public Justice joined with Reinstein’s group that CBS and Planet Toys, it’s licensee who made the lab kits, agreed to pull them off the market.

But CBS said it didn’t have the authority to order the recall of the estimated two million toys that had already been sold. Planet Toys refused, Bryant explained.

What was potentially more serious was that neither company would do a nationwide notification plan to warn consumers of the hazard contained in the holiday toys.

You’ve got to wonder how many children have sucked asbestos fibers into their lungs during the 20 months while CBS did nothing and CPSC ignored the issue.

“We urge everyone to get these products out of your homes and away from children, and to send in your claim form to get a refund,” said Public Justice’s Victoria Ni, co-counsel in the case.

Its testing was a gutsy and costly thing for the volunteer asbestos organization to undertake.

“We had no choice,” Reinstein said. “We heard rumors that many products contained asbestos and we tried to find out if it was true.”

The asbestos group is one of the most active players in getting the beleaguered, politically mired asbestos ban out of Congress.

“Even though the dangers of asbestos have been well-documented for more than 100 years, we’re still finding it in common household products. That’s simply unacceptable,” Reinstein said.

The settlement provides cash refunds to consumers throughout the U.S. who bought, or received as a gift, one or more CSI Exam Kits or Lab Kits sold by CBS, Toys “R” Us, Hammacher Schlemmer, Walgreens, Amazon.com, Buy.com, Sears, Kmart, and QVC.

Here is a link to more information on the recalls and for claim forms: www.csitoyssettlement.com

SPOKANE, Wash. – It was a strange sight. Two people dressed head-to-toe in protective Tyvek and full-face respirators, carrying a stainless steel bowl and a dirt scoop as they weaved through tomato plants, ducked under heavy, cherry-laden branches and crawled around a collection of gigantic plastic yard toys.

EPA chemists sampling yard at house in Spokane for asbestos. (c) photo a. schneider

Raymond Wu and Jennifer Crawford – the two quality assurance chemists sweltering in the protective gear – are from the Environmental Protection Agency. They are trying to determine if there is anything beneath the carefully mowed lawn that can sicken or kill the grandchildren or pets of the woman who owns the modest, but neat residence.

They collected 30 small samples of dirt, which will be analyzed to determine how much asbestos might have been deposited on the property over the years from the now-demolished W.R. Grace Vermiculite Northwest processing plant across the street. Corporate documents show that at least 43,045 tons of asbestos-contaminated vermiculite was shipped to the plant from the Grace mine in Libby, Mont.

The yard around this house was one of nine locations abutting the old plant site in Spokane that the EPA team from Seattle sampled this week.

I can’t get an official answer from EPA headquarters, but people in the agency’s Superfund division say that similar retesting is being done throughout the country. Or should be.

EPA emergency responders were ordered to Libby in November 1999, just two days after the now-deceased Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that hundreds had died and thousands were sickened from exposure to a particularly toxic type of asbestos called tremolite that contaminated the vermiculite ore.

This cleanup comes one month after the government, with much fanfare and hoopla, finally declared a long awaited Public Health Emergency for Libby and its people. Seven years earlier, the Bush White House thwarted EPA plans to do the same thing. Here’s a link to last month’s story.

Under the declaration, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, promised money for an extensive cleanup of the tremolite asbestos and medical care for those sickened.

The same tremolite contaminating this Spokane location could be found in hundreds of other Grace vermiculite processing plants across the country. Together they received tens of millions of tons of asbestos-contaminated ore between 1923 and 1993 from the vermiculite mine on Zonolite Mountain six miles outside Libby.

In 2001, EPA listed 266 Grace processing sites in 40 states where the Libby ore was exfoliated or popped into feather-weight pieces for use in insulation, fireproofing or lawn products. EPA headquarters, bowing to pressure from Congressional oversight committees, ordered that the processing plants and neighboring communities be evaluated for asbestos contamination.

But the quality of the site examinations varied dramatically depending on how seriously each EPA region took the assignment. For example, the Rocky Mountain, Pacific Northwest and Northern California regions went for broke and collected samples and tested to the extent of the available science. EPA regions 2 and 3, which go from Virginia through New Jersey and New York, pretty much blew the assignment off.

I remember being at a meeting in EPA headquarters when representatives from those mid-Atlantic regions boasted to each other about only doing windshield surveys, which meant they drove by the sites but never got out of the car.

I’m not sure how much that has changed, if any. I just received a copy of a May 29 memo from Region 3 about revisiting the Grace sites for additional testing. The note ended with this advice: “Windshield Survey’s or Drive-Bys should be referred to as ‘Site Reconnaissance.’”

Technologically, much has happened in the almost 10 years since the initial tests were done on the old Grace sites. There are new techniques for testing and analysis and the long-used trigger for a cleanup – the presence of 1 percent asbestos or more – no longer applies.

That number was used since the 1970s, but meant little in determining safety.

“EPA has never determined that materials containing less than 1 percent asbestos necessarily present an acceptable exposure level, and indeed, scientists have not been able to develop a safe level for exposure to airborne asbestos,” Government Accountability Office investigators said in a March report to Congress on the effectiveness of the EPA cleanup. Here is a link to a GAO database with information on many of the Grace operations.

Keven McDermott, who heads the team of EPA scientists investigating the Spokane site, and her senior investigator, Jed Januch, watched the chemists crawl across the lawn digging holes to collect soil from the yards of residences near the former Grace plant.

The pair led EPA’s initial evaluation of the plant.

Keven McDermott and Jed Januch decontaminate their team after the chemists completed gather soil samples from the lawn of a Spokane home. (c) Photo by a. schneider

“When we first investigated the old plant eight years ago, we were learning as we went along. We used common sense and the techniques available at the time to try and figure out whether people living near the old facility were at risk of being exposed to asbestos.

“Since then we’ve made real strides. We’ve developed new sampling methods and improved our analytical techniques.”

For example, samples collected from the Spokane site will be run through a unique device developed by Januch that will separate the microscopic asbestos fibers from the soil so scientists can determine the type and amount of asbestos.

“We owe it to the community to conduct a thorough assessment. After all, our mission is to protect human health and the environment,” said McDermott who retires from the EPA this week after 37 years of federal service.

EPA is not alone in its professed concern for people living near the old Grace sites.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has a bizarre name but is often masterful in determining the effect on public health of hazardous substances. It has been tracking the health implications of Libby’s vermiculite ore since 2000.

In October, ATSDR’s investigators recommended existing EPA data for the “Libby sisters” or Grace processing operations, be re-evaluated to determine whether the residual asbestos that may remain at the old sites and nearby homes constitutes a health threat to those living or working there.

“Our goals are to inform the public and reach out to workers and families who may have been exposed and have not yet sought out necessary medical screening,” the health agency said.Here is a link to the ATSDR report.,

Asbestos can cause pulmonary diseases including asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma. Traditionally, it was thought that asbestos was only a threat to workers exposed to high doses for years and that they symptoms took 15 to 30 years to develop.

Studies on victims in Libby showed that it wasn’t just the miners that got sick, or just their family members. Many people with no connection to the mine have had their lives destroyed by the fibers in the vermiculite and, physicians in Libby says that some of their younger victims began showing signs of illness in a few as 10 years.

After nearly a decade of fighting for and failing to get emergency help for the people poisoned by asbestos-contaminated vermiculite in Libby, Mont., the federal government finally came through Wednesday.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that Libby would get the first Public Health Emergency declaration in the history of Superfund.

“This is a tragic public health situation that has not received the recognition it deserves by the federal government for far too long,” said the EPA boss. She added that her agency will move aggressively on the cleanup efforts and to protect the health of the people.

Meanwhile, in a federal courthouse in Missoula, Mont.,  criminal charges were dropped against the only remaining defendant in the government’s prosecution of the W.R. Grace Co. for its role in the asbestos poisoning of Libby.

Federal prosecutors dismissed charges on Monday against O. Mario Favorito, Grace’s  in-house lawyer. The move was expected after last month’s acquittal of the worldwide chemical company and three of its top executives. Grace owned the vermiculite mine that spewed asbestos-laced dust across the small town.                          Seattle PI photo of the W.R. Grace mine and Libby.

On May 8, 2009, after 38 days of testimony spread over three months, a jury in Missoula found and company and its executives not guilty on all charges relating to a criminal conspiracy involving Clean Air Act violations and obstruction of justice. Because of potential conflicts of interest, the corporate lawyer was scheduled to stand trial alone in September.

(You can get more details on the trial than you’d ever want by going to last three months of this blog )

Let’s talk a bit about the best of times, or what passes for it in Libby.

Three EPA specialists – an emergency coordinator, a toxicologist and a physician – first asked for the emergency declaration for Libby more than seven years ago to help ensure medical care for the town’s citizens and a proper cleanup of the area.

The Bush White House, some in EPA headquarters and the asbestos lobby successfully battled against the trio to keep the emergency declaration from being declared.

But yesterday, Jackson and Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said Libby’s wait was over.

“For way too long, many here in Washington have turned a blind eye to the needs of the residents in Libby,” Sebelius said. “Those days are over.”

The declaration permits the cleanup coordinators to spend what money is required to do the extensive cleanup of the particularly toxic form of asbestos heavily contaminating the town.

HHS is giving $6 million to provide medical care for Libby’s asbestos victims. An agency health official familiar with the health needs of the community told me that HHS will “cover the full medical charges – oxygen, medication, hospitalization, what ever is needed” for those without insurance and wi

But many say they live in fear that the innocent verdict offered up by the jury will give the former owner of the asbestos-contaminated vermiculite mine the chutzpa to end the insurance coverage they’ve promised to provide to the hundreds of miners and townsfolk sickened by the lethal fibers the corporation pulled out of the ground.

Montana Sen. Max Baucus today passed some good news on to the tiny town in the state’s northwest corner. He says he got the Department of Health and Human Services to free up $6 million to provide health care for people with asbestos-related illness.

“It’s really great news, and we can use some of that up here,” said Dr. Brad Black, who runs the Center for Asbestos-Related Diseases clinic in town.

Dr. Brad Black. (c) Photo a. schneider

“Everyone was scared to death that Grace would stop paying the little it does pay of the medical expenses of the people here,” Black told me today.

With the high cost of medication, oxygen and hospitalization, the $6 million won’t go very far to provide screenings and health care services to the hundreds of people battling asbestos-related illnesses.

However, the senator says that major help may be on the way as he believes he can get a Public Health Emergency declared for Libby.

Battles had been fought throughout the Bush Administration, by OMB and EPA for years over those three little words.

Paul Peronard, Chris Weis and Aubrey Miller – the trio of EPA emergency response and public health specialists who were the first to arrive in Libby a decade ago –  had their careers threatened repeatedly because they saw the need to declare the emergency.

They fought for the designation because it would permit EPA to do the complex cleanup the unique tremolite asbestos demanded, the town needed and would make the government responsible for ensuring the delivery of adequate health care.

The Bush Administration fought the effort because it was trying to force an industry-sponsored asbestos litigation reform act through Congress and wanted no attention brought to the devastation asbestos could impart.

The Democratic lawmaker lambasted the decision to not declare a public health emergency at the time, calling it an “outrage.”

Baucus said a public health emergency would authorize cleanup work in homes and other structures as well as require the federal government to provide screenings and health care for Libby residents with asbestos-related disease.

The public health emergency would be declared by the Environmental Protection Administration.

“I’ve talked with the head of HHS, Kathleen Sebelius and the head of the EPA, Lisa Jackson, and they both know how important it is to help the folks in Libby,” Baucus said

“We all have been working for months together to figure out how to best help folks affected by this tragedy.”

Baucus holds senior positions on oversight committees for both HHS and EPA.

He described his action as a step to bring justice to folks in Libby “who were poisoned at the hands of Grace.

“We expect this Administration to make decisions based on sound science and to right the sins of the last Administration.”