Senior CDC Official Reassigned

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Health & Science

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@... [7].

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