Frumkin of ATSDR is reassigned.

[Guest guest]

" Rep. Brad (D-NC), the subcommittee' s chairman, said in a

statement to ProPublica regarding Frumkin's reassignment. " The nation needs

ATSDR

to do honest, scientifically rigorous work. There are many capable

professionals at ATSDR who are committed to doing just that. "

by Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica - January 22, 2010 5:56 pm EST

Dr. Frumkin, the embattled director of a little-known, but

important division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been

reassigned to a position with less authority, a smaller staff and a lower

budget.

Frumkin had led the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry

(ATSDR) and the National Center for Environmental Health since 2005. For

the past two years he had endured scathing criticism from Congress and the

media for ATSDR's poor handling of public health problems created by the

formaldehyde- contaminated trailers that the government provided to Hurricane

Katrina victims. The agency, which assesses public health risks posed by

environmental hazards, also was criticized for understating the health risks

of several other, less-publicized cases.

An internal CDC e-mail sent by Frumkin on Jan. 15 and obtained by

ProPublica said he was leaving his position that day and would become a special

assistant to the CDC's director of Climate Change and Public Health. His old

job will be temporarily filled by Henry Falk, who led ATSDR from 2003 to

2005.

In the e-mail, Frumkin praised his staff and described more than 20 ATSDR

accomplishments during his tenure. They include strengthening the agency's

tobacco laboratory and creating the Climate Change and Public Health

program.

A CDC spokesman said Frumkin's transfer shouldn't be considered a demotion

but rather a change of function and responsibilities that the CDC's

director, Dr. Frieden, said would benefit both the agency and Dr.

Frumkin,

who is a recognized expert on climate change. But Frumkin's authority has

been sharply reduced, even though his salary won't change. Previously, he

oversaw two departments with a combined budget of about $264 million and 746

full-time employees. Now he will be an assistant to the director of a new

program that has a budget of about $7.5 million, five full-time employees

and five contractors, two of whom are part time.

Through a CDC spokesman, Frumkin declined a request to be interviewed for

this story.

In 2008, ProPublica reported [1] that Frumkin and others failed to take

action after learning that ATSDR botched a study [2] on the trailers provided

to Katrina victims. The Federal Emergency Management Agency used the study

to assure trailer occupants that the formaldehyde levels weren't high

enough to harm them. ATSDR never corrected FEMA, even though De

, who led ATSDR's toxicology and environmental medicine division,

repeatedly warned Frumkin that the report didn't take into account the

long-term

health consequences of exposure to formaldehyde, like cancer risks.

Frumkin eventually reassigned De to the newly created position of

assistant director for toxicology and risk analysis. De went from leading

a staff of about 70 employees to having none. He has since left the agency

and is starting a nonprofit that will consult with communities close to

environmental hazards.

The involvement of Frumkin and ATSDR in the formaldehyde debacle was the

focus of an April 2008 Congressional hearing held by a subcommittee of the

House Science and Technology Committee. A report [3] by the subcommittee' s

Democratic majority, released that October, concluded that the failure of

ATSDR's leadership " kept Hurricane Katrina and Rita families living in

trailers with elevated levels of formaldehyde. ..for at least one year longer

than necessary. "

About six months after the report came out, the same panel, the

Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, held another hearing [4] that

touched

on other problems at ATSDR.

Before that hearing, the Democrats on the subcommittee released a report

[5] that revealed other cases in which the agency relied on scientifically

flawed data, causing other federal agencies to mislead communities about the

dangers of their exposure to hazardous substances.

For example, an ATSDR report about water contamination at Camp Lejeune, a

Marine Corps base in North Carolina, said the chemically-tainted drinking

water didn't pose an increased cancer risk to residents there. The report

was used to deny at least one veteran's medical benefits for ailments that

the veteran believed were related to the contamination.

A month after the subcommittee hearing, ATSDR, rescinded [6] some of its

findings, saying it didn't adequately consider the presence of benzene, a

carcinogen that it found in the water.

Eight months later, the agency said it would modify another report that

was criticized at the hearing, about a bomb testing site in Vieques, Puerto

Rico. For decades, the U.S. military used the site to test ammunition that

contained depleted uranium and other toxins. In a 2003 report, ATSDR said

that heavy metals and explosive compounds found on Vieques weren't harmful to

people living there. But Frumkin decided to take a fresh look at those

findings because ATSDR hadn't thoroughly investigated the site.

Subcommittee investigators acknowledged that Frumkin inherited many of the

problems in the report from previous ATSDR directors— the original Vieques

and Camp Lejeune reports were both done before Frumkin was named director

in 2005. But the investigators said he was aware of the agency's problems

and did little to fix them unless he was under political pressure. A CDC

spokesman said that Frumkin's reassignment had nothing to do with the

congressional inquiries.

" Americans should know when their government tells them that they have

nothing to worry about from environmental exposure that they really have

nothing to worry about, " Rep. Brad (D-NC), the subcommittee' s chairman,

said in a statement to ProPublica regarding Frumkin's reassignment. " The

nation needs ATSDR to do honest, scientifically rigorous work. There are many

capable professionals at ATSDR who are committed to doing just that. "

Write to Joaquin Sapien at _joaquin.sapien@ propublica. org_

(mailto:joaquin.sapien@...) [7].

_http://www.propublica.org/feature/senior-cdc-official-reassigned-howard-fru

mkin_

(http://www.propublica.org/feature/senior-cdc-official-reassigned-howard-frumkin\

)

Sharon Noonan Kramer