Ohio’s U.S. senators Sherrod Brown and J.D. Vance – one a Democrat, the other a Republican – found another moment for bipartisan agreement: to require officials to begin screening residents of East Palestine after the Feb. 3 train derailment that released toxic chemicals in community.
Ohio’s senators asked that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) begin voluntary screening “as soon as possible” so that officials can “establish a medical baseline against which to track any future adverse health effects” that may result from exposure to chemicals released by the Norfolk Southern derailment.
In a joint letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, the senators explain that “many constituents” have tried to mandate such basic testing from primary care physicians in their community but have found that “their local physicians lack capacity.”
If such studies cannot be conducted to establish baseline values, doctors warn that it will be more challenging to identify potential long-term negative health effects for East Palestinian residents.
Both Brown and Vance spent time in East Palestine meeting with their constituents and reported what they saw and heard:
Our visits to East Palestine left us with the anxiety and distrust we experienced community. From the fumes lingering in their homes, to the dead fish in the streams and… chemical substances from subsurface soils entering surface waters, the reasons for this concern are obvious. We witnessed chemicals leaking from underwater soil; it’s understandable why residents are concerned. The only way to address these concerns is to take them seriously and respond in an open and limpid manner.
Brown and Vance acknowledge in their letter that most of the state and federal agencies involved “have focused – by design – on emergency cleanup activities and the associated acute exposure risks immediately following a derailment,” but say they “want to ensure that Efforts Forward also anticipates and addresses our constituents’ concerns about potential long-term impacts “resulting from exposures to pollutants that have occurred or will occur.”
Ohio’s U.S. senators note that they have “sought the professional opinion” of Professor Kyle Walsh of Duke University School of Medicine and Professor Glenn Talaska of the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine. “Their Professional opinion recommends immediately commencing an examination of the health of the residents of the street affected region,” Brown and Vance said in their report letter: :
As Professors Walsh and Talaska note: “In the coming months and years, additional Epidemiological assessments will be necessary to identify potential long-term adverse health outcomes effects on exposed residents.” However, “[r]rigorously and empirically determining long-term health consequences will be complicated by the lack of appropriate comparison populations.
Professors Walsh and Talaska claim that “[c]conducting pre/post comparisons of subclinical studies Biomarkers will play a pivotal role in assessing emerging immunological and genetic consequences exposure. …As the effects of exposure continue to escalate, acquiring this data and samples require immediate action.”
Professors Walsh and Talaska recommend voluntary collection of health indicators from: a broad spectrum of inhabitants of the East Palestine region to enable these inhabitants to establish themselves a medical reference point against which any future negative health effects arising from their exploit can be tracked exposure. This effort should begin as soon as possible while having the opportunity to receive a valid one the baseline remains.
Stressing that those who call East Palestine home “deserve to know whether this disaster has threatened their health now and in the years to come,” Brown and Vance are calling on officials “across the federal government to allocate the resources and expertise needed to “starting the study and assessing” the current condition of residents.
Senators Brown and Vance teamed up back in February to send a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its state counterpart Ohio, asking for plans to “monitor East Palestine and surrounding areas for dioxin,” a highly toxic substance pollutant from the combustion of vinyl chloride – which occurred after the derailment and are known to accumulate in animals and humans and cause cancer, reproductive problems and damage to the immune system.
