CDC Work drags on formaldehyde study

[Guest guest]

ajc.com > Nation/World

Click-2-Listen

Work drags on formaldehyde study

Post-Katrina: Location of many children who lived in FEMA trailers,

their health now unknown.

http://www.ajc.com/services/content/news/stories/2008/11/02/formaldeh

yde.html

By Joaquin Sapien

ProPublica

Sunday, November 02, 2008

A government study to track the health of children who lived in FEMA

trailers after Hurricane Katrina is still stuck in the planning

stages, three years after families first began complaining about

health problems related to formaldehyde in their temporary homes.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn't figured out

how it will find the children, many of whom moved out of the

trailers months or even years ago. It also hasn't settled on a

scientific methodology or obtained funding or the necessary White

House approval. It does not plan to publish results until 2015,

according to interviews and documents obtained by ProPublica, a

nonprofit investigative newsroom.

The agency began discussing the study a year ago, and

McGeehin, the CDC scientist who is leading the study, said the

agency hopes to award a contract in the spring. " It's a long process

to get this going, " he said.

Families moved into 140,000 FEMA trailers after Hurricane Katrina

hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005. In February 2008, the CDC urged

people to move out of the trailers because formaldehyde, which is

found in the plywood and particleboard in most trailers, was at

levels high enough to cause health problems. Today about 10,000

trailers remain occupied. Children and the elderly are particularly

vulnerable to the harmful effects of formaldehyde, which can

increase the risk of cancer and asthma attacks and can cause severe

skin, ear, nose and throat irritations.

Heidi Sinclair, a Baton Rouge, La.-based pediatrician who treated

dozens of children for symptoms she believes are related to

formaldehyde exposure, said many of her patients have moved to

different parts of the country.

" CDC should have started doing this a year before they wanted to

start the study, " said Sinclair, who got an e-mail from the CDC in

October asking her to join a panel that will help find the

children. " These people are going to be impossible to track down.

Most of them have pay-as-you-go cellphones and have already moved. "

The CDC hopes to enroll 6,000 children and monitor their health for

as long as six years; McGeehin said " there are methods " to track

down the children and " we will do the best we can. " U.S. Rep. Brad

(D-N.C.), chairman of a House subcommittee that has issued

several reports slamming the CDC's handling of the formaldehyde

problem, said the agency's approach to the children's health study

is " unconscionable. "

" The longer it takes to launch this study, the more difficult it

will be to locate participants and characterize their exposures

accurately, " said in a statement to ProPublica.

" CDC is responsible for protecting health, and we try to never take

that responsibility lightly, " agency spokeswoman Bernadette Burden

said in a statement. " The individuals who lived in the Gulf region

in trailers are concerned and understandably so. They want more

answers, and we're moving ahead with our plans for additional

research, which will hopefully provide those answers. "

To begin the study, the CDC must get funding from the Federal

Emergency Management Agency and approval from the White House's

Office of Management and Budget. The costs could reach $87 million,

McGeehin said.

on, the CDC official in charge of developing a

registry of the trailer occupants, said FEMA has their names and

their pre-Katrina addresses but no information about where they live

now. He said the CDC asked FEMA for its data in June, but he doesn't

know when it will be delivered.

" There is a set of procedures to keep people's information

confidential and secure, and we are going through that with FEMA

now, " on said.

Huckabee, whose five children experienced frequent

nosebleeds and other respiratory problems while they lived in a FEMA

trailer, isn't surprised by the study's slow pace. During her

family's year in a FEMA trailer, Huckabee said her daughter

developed asthma so severe that she was often hospitalized.

The health of all her children has improved since they moved,

Huckabee said, but she's worried they might have problems in the

future.

" It's frustrating not knowing what to expect, " Huckabee said. " Some

people say that the formaldehyde could cause problems for life.

Others say my kids should be fine now that they are out of the

trailer. "

Dr. Needle, who was running a clinic in Bay St. Louis, Miss.,

when Katrina hit, said many of the children he treated developed

cold and flu symptoms that never seemed to subside when they moved

into FEMA trailers. He asked state health officials to investigate

but was told they didn't have the money.

Needle went to the CDC and prompted a 2007 study of 144 children who

had respiratory problems before they moved into the trailers. These

children, the study found, were not significantly sicker than kids

with comparable problems who did not live in the trailers.

Needle said the agency was asking the wrong question and should have

quickly assembled a registry of all children who lived in the

trailers, so that the CDC could do a long-term study of their

health.

" If the study had been done earlier, maybe we could have teased out

some answers, " Needle said. " Now, I don't know if there would be any

way to know. "

> ON THE WEB: ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that

produces investigative journalism in the public interest. For a more

detailed explanation of how the flawed CDC report came to be

written, go to www.propublica.org.