Important Book Excerpts from Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer

Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer

Chapter 1: Enter the Experts
“Lazar was particularly interested in “dissocial” youths who had fallen afoul with the law. He felt it important to differentiate what he called endogenous and exogenous causes—between children whose disociability stemmed from internal factors (physical or psychiatric) versus external factors (illness or milieu).In endogenous cases, Lazar boasted that his Curative Education Clinic was “the first attempt” to distinguish between “the mental and physical defects of the wayward and criminal.” Committed to physiological detail, for example, Lazar would examine the genitals of a child “right away,” and send boys whose testicles had not dropped to a surgeon….

For all his purported idealism, Lazar could be damning in his judgements. As his coworkers put it, “He was not sentimental,” and would pronounce children “morally” damaged, “degenerate,” or even “waste.”….

Chapter 5: Fatal Theories
Jekelius wrote to her parents that he had done them a service: “you and the child will be spared much suffering.” Because Paula had “Mongolian idiocy” (Down syndrome), she “would never have walked or learned to speak, and would have been a constant burden for you.”

However, the true intent of the child euthanasia program was not to make life easier for parents, but to purge the Reich of undesirable citizens. And child killers were holding very different conversations among themselves.

*(Should note that the author is not educated in endocrine disruption science nor fetal development or she would have understood the significance of an epidemic of boys born with undescended testicles and children born with Down Syndrome. Their munition technology causes have been known since the 1950s. Since IG Farben had market expansion plans it would have been in their best interest to destroy any evidence that their products caused harm.)

 

Chapter 6: Asperger and the Killing System
While Asperger effectively worked down the hall. Hamburger who supervised numerous medical experiments on children at the Children’s Hospital. One medical student exposed children and infants to extreme temperature changes and measured the effects. Elmar Turk, one of Asperger’s associates as a postdoctoral student under Hamburger, used premature infants to study the effect of vitamin D on rickets; knowing that premature babies were particularly susceptible to the condition, Turk withheld prophylaxis, allowing thirteen of the fifteen infants in his control group to develop rickets.

Hamburger took special interest in Turk’s lethal tuberculosis experiments on children. Turk selected babies as his test subjects who he considered to be “severely damaged from birth trauma, unviable, and idiotic.” He administered a tuberculosis vaccine, Calmette-Guerin (BCG), to two of them, and then infected all three babies with “virulent tuberculosis bacillus.” He sent them to Speigelgrund for observation and, eventually, autopsies. The two vaccinated babies died within a month—not of tuberculosis, but reportedly of pneumonia, the main official cause of death at Spiegelgrund. The unvaccinated child overcame the tuberculosis after a painful four-month ordeal but still died.

Turk repeated his tuberculosis experiment one year later on an “idiotic, syphilitic” three-and-a-half-year-old, Adolf Guttmann, whom he did not. As he transferred little Adolf to Spiegelgrund for observation, Turk sent a macabre so-called “wish list” to the director for the boy’s death and postmortem study: “I would request that you inform me in the event of the child’s death so that I may be present at the autopsy, as I intend to conduct various histological examinations.” While the child still lived, Spiegelgrund staff were to take specialized notes on Adolf’s condition and conduct x-rays at regular intervals. Turk added, “I hope you are not burdened by this.” After Adolf arrived at Spiegelgrund, staff reported that the boy “was quiet and peaceful, laughs occasionally when one strokes him on the cheek.” Adolf was killed two and a half months after his arrival…

Hamburger’s postdoctoral student Heribert Goll, with whom Asperger had copublished in 1939, also conducted experiments on babies at the Children’s Hospital. Overseen by Hamburger, Goll explained that he selected “only infants unfit to live.” For his 1941 publication in the Munich Medical Weekly, Goll deprived babies of Vitamin A in order to measure the vitamin’s effects on the development of keratomalacia, a common cause of blindness. The condition dried the cornea and membrane that covers the white of the eye, resulting potentially, over time, in frothy patches called Bitot spots, ulceration, infection, and rupture of the eye. After Goll, withheld vitamin A from the infants for months, a number of them did, indeed, develop preliminary keratomalacia. Then, in a second experiment, Goll sought to infect babies with keratomalacia by placing secretions from the eye of one girl with the disease onto the eyes of four healthy children. When the method failed, he tried again by localizing the bacteria, which again failed.

Goll raised the stakes of his research in his 1942 publication for the Munich Medical Weekly, depriving twenty babies of fats and vitamin A in periods of up to three hundred days. After the infants died—perhaps forcibly killed, perhaps perishing from their maltreatment—Goll examined their livers from autopsies. Six-month-old Anna Mick was selected for the study; her health had been “robust” despite her hydrocephalus and bed sores on her head. She wasted away on Goll’s diet, lying in the Children’s Hospital while staff prodded her eyes and body for fluid and tissue samples. In less than four months, Anna died from “increasing feebleness.”

Asperger worked in the midst of his colleagues’ human experiments at the Children’s Hospital and would have known about their deadly methods, which they touted in prominent journals. He walked past babies in daily life who were injected, infected, and starved… Asperger—in cofounding the Vienna Society for Curative Education with Franz Hamburger, Erwin Jekelius, and Max Gundel in 1941—was collaborating with three top perpetrators of child killing in Vienna…

Asperger then brought up “eugenic issues” before the Vienna Society, pointing out that “proper assessment” of children was “already a good portion of their ‘treatment.’” Again, one could take these words at face value, as advocating careful care of children. But “treatment,” or Behandlung, was a euphemism that euthanasia personnel used for killing a child. It is curious that Asperger used quotation marks around the word, which suggests he might, indeed, be signaling a veiled meaning for “‘treatment’” —especially on the heels of recommending “prolonged and stationary observation” at Spiegelgrund. After all, the Vienna Society was run by notorious Spiegelgrund leaders, and Jekelius’s inaugural address had already set the stage with his reference to children unworthy of care. Given widespread knowledge of the euthanasia program in Vienna, it is likely that many in the audience were aware of the potential consequences of sending “difficult cases” to Spiegelgrund, as well as the regime’s desire to eliminate children deemed to be defective…..

Heirich Gross, one of the most notorious figures, came to work at Spiegelgrund in mid-November 1940 as child killing were gaining momentum. He was barely twenty-six, having graduated from the University of Vienna Medical School just the year before and worked for a short time at the psychiatric institution Ybbs an der Donau. At Spiegelgrund, Gross served under medical director Jekelius, ten years his senior. Like Jekelius, Gross had been a Nazi enthusiast when the party was still a fringe terrorist organization in Austria; he joined the Hitler Youth in 1932 and the SA in 1933, gaining successive promotions to SA squad leader by 1938.

Seven months after Gross came to work at Spiegelgrund, in June 1941, he went to Germany to train for six weeks under curative education proponent Hans Heinze, who taught killing methods to spiring euthanasia doctors, one of the top three figures in child euthanasia in the entire Reich.

When Gross returned to Vienna after his training with Heinze, the death rate at Spiegelgrund more than tripled… Gross also emulated Heinze in harvesting and preserving victims’ brains. Heinze was distributing many hundreds of adult and child brains to German physicians for research as Gross began his collection of children’s brains at Spiegelgrund for his own work. Children at Spiegelgrund called Gross, who practiced medicine in military uniform, “scythe” or the “Grim Reaper.” (The preservation and research of victim brains is evidence that they would have been able to examine and see the morphological changes to the brain from their organochlorine munition technologies.)

The second director of Spiegelgrund, Ernst Illing, also trained with Heinze. Like Heinze, Illing had spent his early career at the University of Leipzig, and Illing then followed Heinze to Gorden in 1935. Illing worked under Heinze for seven years, conducting some fo the Reich’s first child killings. Illing was highly trained, then, when Heinze and Vienna’s Public Health Office tapped him, at age thirty-eight, to succeed Jekelius as medical director of Spiegelgrund, where he served from July 1, 1942, until April 1945….

And child euthanasia came to pervade Vienna’s medical community at large, reaching far beyond just curative education, as many doctors acquiesced and even welcomed the measures. Illing described in his October 1945 deposition how Viennese physicians readily ridded their wards of children they deemed disabled. He singled out Hamburger and Asperger’s Children’s Hospital by name:

My clinic was always overcrowded since the other clinics, the Welfare Clinic, the Children’s Hospital Glanzing, and the University Children’s Hospital handed over, or wanted to hand over, these hopeless cases—obviously in the belief that euthanasia was legally possible at my clinic due to the aforementioned directive [euthanasia order], while they themselves were not allowed to conduct euthanasia. I am completely confident that the leaders of these institutions were in the know about euthanasia and the aforementioned directives.

Asperger had publicly encouraged his colleagues to transfer “difficult cases” of children to Spiegelgrund—and he followed his own recommendation…

Austrian scholar Herwig Czech has uncovered that Asperger’s panel reviewed the files of 210 children in a single day, slotting them into special schools supposedly appropriate to their level of disability. The commission deemed 35 of the 210 children, 9 girls and 26 boys, “incapable of educational and developmental engagement.” These youths were sent to Spiegelgrund, as the written committee instructions required, to be “dispatched for Jekelius Action.”

“Jekelius Action” was an instruction to kill. All of the 35 youths transferred by Asperger’s commission died. …

At Spiegelgrund, Herta’s photograph showed her crying, her dark hair shaved, and staring straight into the camera. Herta’s mother reportedly beseeched doctor Margarethe Hubsch, in tears: “If the child could not be helped, perhaps it would be better if she would die, as she would have nothing in this world anyway, she would be a laughing stock of the others.” Hubsch explained that, “as a mother of so many other children, she would not wish that on her, so it would be better if she died.” Herta’s mother conveyed at least some of her sentiments to Asperger, too, as he noted in his Spiegelgrund transfer order that “when at home, this child must present an unbearable burden to the mother.” On August 8, Jekelius sent Herta’s records to the Reich Committee in Berlin for authorization to kill the girl. Herta died soon thereafter, two months after Asperger’s transfer. Pneumonia was Herta’s official cause of death. (Herta was only two-years-old)

Chapter 7: The Daily Life of Death
Spiegelgrund’s second director, Ernst Illing, inflicted diagnostic practices on children that could be deadly. Pneumatic encephalography, for example, was an excruciating procedure that injected air into children’s brains after the removal of spinal fluid in order to conduct X-rays showing the cerebral ventricles. Spiegelgrund doctors also collected children’s body parts for research. Most notorious was Dr. Heinrich Gross, who preserved the brains of over four hundred children in jars meticulously stacked and labeled on shelves in the basement, which he used in his research through the 1980s. Indeed, the body parts of children killed at Spiegelgrund were disseminated among a number of research facilities, providing the basis of research long after the war….

Deaths also became part of the daily routine. Marianne Turk and Heinrich Gross even resided on the Spiegelgrund grounds, with Ernst Illing choosing to live with his family in Pavilion 15, the death ward. After the war, Turk reflected on just how habituated she had become to the life of murder, ordering overdoses of Luminal, Veronal, and morphine in injections and in pulverized tablets added to cocoa powder or other foods that children would gladly eat. “With the cases that we had by the dozens in the institution, putting an end to this human wretchedness was an automatic thought.” Turk outlined how the implementation of death orders was quotidian, too:

“The nurses—who undertook the actual execution since they added the sleeping pills to the food—had access to the medicine cabinet. They would be told by Dr. Illing or me that the decisions about child X or Y had arrived, and the nurses knew what they had to do.”…

The mother of Herta Gschwandtner, Luise, openly confronted Spiegelgrund staff about the killings. Herta was born “mongoloid,” and transferred to Spiegelgrund in 1943 at one-and-half years old. She died just eleven days after her transfer, ostensibly of pneumonia. Luise Gschwandnter was incredulous at the speed of her daughter’s death. She wrote to Ernst Illing and Spiegelgrund nurses, “I still can’t grasp why my dear little Herta had to leave me so fast, to die so quickly. […] We still can not believe that our child Herthi was not curable.” Gschwandtner went on, “I am completely heartbroken. I would gladly sacrifice my life for my child…. Please excuse me for my bad writing, which I wrote with very tearful eyes.” In her letter, Gschwandtner went so far as to suggest that Herta was murdered. “Now I have to bear twice the pain because people are saying straight to my face that she was simply poisoned, so to speak, eliminated.” Illing wrote back that nothing was amiss with her daughter’s death. He warned Gschwandtner that he would launch police action if the deaths at Spiegelgrund continued to be questioned: “I would also ask you to vigorously oppose rumors of that kind; if necessary, I will lodge a complaint against such rumormongers.”

But rumors about the killings were rife in Vienna, and exacerbated families’ anguish over the deaths of their children. The parents of two-month-old Hermann Dockl were devastated when their daughter, diagnosed as “mongoloid,” perished five weeks after her admission to Spiegelgrund, reportedly of pneumonia. The Dockl’s family doctor, Hans Geyer, asked Illing to give him a medical accounting of Hermine’s death in order to alleviate the relatives’ torment; he said a proper explanation would bring the family “peace and dispel all the hushed rumors and conjectures.” Hermine’s mother, Geyer warned, was “expressing suicidal intentions and cannot be left alone.” Illing replied simply that the infant had “severe weakness of life” and that the good doctor should surely know that “mongoloid” children had shorter life expectancies.”

The majority of parents’ letters in the case files of children killed at Spiegelgrund are heart wrenching. They voice sorrow, disbelief, anger—and frequently demand more information about how their children died. There was, nevertheless, a wide range of responses. A number of families expressed acceptance, even approval of their child’s untimely death. After all, many in the Reich even sought their child’s admission to killing wards in the hopes their child might perish. They might complain about the burden of caring for their child, perhaps while struggling to make ends meet, with other children at home or a husband away at war. Yet discussions of child-killing was not just limited to to the strains of the Third Reich. The idea of ending “life unworthy of life” had circulated long before the Nazis came to power. In 1925, Ewald Meltzer, the head of the asylum in Saxony, grew so concerned about the ethics of the issue that he asked the parents of children at his institution: “Would you agree to the painless curtailment of the life of your child if experts had established that it was suffering from incurable idiocy?” To his dismay, 73 percent of the parents who participated in the survey answered “yes.”

Spiegelgrund staff said that some parents held explicit conversations about death wishes for their children. The mother of a toddler who Asperger transferred to Spiegelgrund, Herta Schreiber, allegedly told doctor Margarethe Hubsch, “It would be better if she died.” Marianne Turk noted that one mother of a child with epilepsy “thought it would be a comfort and a reassurance to her if the child could close her eyes forever.” Both children were, indeed, killed…

Survivor Leopoldine Maier, contemplating her experience at Spiegelgrund, suggested that complicity in the cruelty—and in the Nazis system as a whole—was pervasive and inescapable. She said people’s potential for depravity would torment her throughout her life.

“Each person raises the question in me: Are you for me or against me? It was always a question of survival. And that question still lingers with me somehow when I meet somebody: With whom is he siding now and with whom was he siding then. And would he have helped you had he known or would he not have helped you at all. […] I am not angry with anybody for how can you be mad with somebody when the evil has no name, when the evil is just part of life, like it was the case there. But the evil belonged there, it was everyday life, and nobody questioned it.”

Chapter 9: In Service to the Volk
The mission of eliminated undesirable children mirrored the Reich’s ambition to eliminate undesirable populations. While Nazi psychiatrists killed youths at home, sequestered behind the walls of hospitals and sanatoria, the Reich wreaked Armageddon across the continent…

The Nazi state aimed to establish a new order in Europe. From 1939 until 1942, its goal appeared to be in sight. The Reich occupied territories, created satellite states, and forged alliances across eastern and western Europe, from Bulgaria to Estonia to Norway to France. Germany even had aspirations in North Africa, too, waging war in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.

In Vienna, most people, including Asperger, supported the Reich. Many were pleased that the Nazi state invested in rebuilding the Austrian economy; Germany coordinated Austria into its war machine, unemployment dropped, large firms boomed, commerce modernized….. The former nation became seven Reich districts, or Reichsgaue, that were collectively called the Ostmark and, after 1942, the “Danubian and Alpine Districts.” The new boundaries tripled the size of greater Vienna, making it the second-largest city in the Reich—yet the regime reduced Vienna’s power from a capital to a provincial city and kept Austria peripheral to the Reich overall…

For Asperger and his associates in Vienna, quality of life remained relatively high throughout the war. Reich citizens fared well compared to the populations they subjugated, typically better fed, housed, and spared the ravages of the battlefield.

*(This author clearly never read the book, The Last Train From Berlin, by Howard K. Smith, 1942. Independent journalists tell a far different story about the state of “Reich citizens.” )

Vienna was also spared the worst of Allied bombing. The Allies unleashed explosives on sixty-one Reich cities during the war, destroying one in five homes and killing around six hundred thousand civilians; the fire-bombing of Hamburg and Dresden raised street temperatures over 1,500 degrees Celsius that turned people into ash in seconds. But Vienna, known as the “Reich’s air raid shelter,” was out of reach until the Allies established bombing flotillas in Italy in the spring of 1944. Missions then aimed for tactical targets in the city rather than carpet bombing, and killed twenty-four thousand civilians.

As Europe collapsed, Germans and Austrians continued to sustain the Reich. Asperger and his colleagues worked through the destruction, publishing, debating, and delivering lectures to one another. Nazi child psychiatry was only a small pocket of activity within the regime’s efforts to remake Europe. But practitioners took their task seriously, and continued to work in earnest even as the continent descended into mass slaughter.
The Third Reich harnessed a curious juxtaposition of efforts, of total war versus erudite debates, of genocide versus journal articles. But the task to mold the mind mattered, as psychiatrists discussed the finer points of Nazi philosophy while carnage raged around them…

Later in life, Asperger emphasized what he had gained from his time in Yugoslavia, highlighting his fortitude and heroism. Echoing longstanding masculine ideals of proving one’s mettle in battle, Asperger recalled, “I was in Croatia, deployed in the partisan war. I wouldn’t want to have missed any of these experiences. It is good to know how you behave when facing danger, as the bullets whistle by—it is also a place where you are tested.”

Apparently Asperger found fulfillment amid the carnage and the Wehrmacht’s notoriously vicious conduct in Yugoslavia. Reich reprisal policy, for example, meant killing one hundred citizens for every German soldier killed….

Chapter 10: Reckoning.
Spiegelgrund survivors continued to suffer after their release. For Franz Pulkert, life did not improve much. “The violence, that was commonplace at the time, I mean, with my parents this wasn’t different either, because my mother wasn’t any better.” Friedrich Zawrel recalled, “My father continued drinking. At home, it was as bad as before.” Karl Hamedler, who was in his mid-teens, was bitter. “At that age you just don’t know what to do with yourself. There you are in the world, and nobody gives a shit about you, to put it bluntly. Even Leopoldine Maier, whose mother had journeyed to Spiegelgrund every week and rescued her, was troubled. She confessed, “I also very often ran away from my mother. I always had my bag with leftover food so I would not starve.”….

For Leopoldine Maier, legal recognition was cold comfort. She was still “crippled by these childhood memories,” she explained. “When I do not watch myself, I always pull my neck in as if I were in constant fear of being hit in the neck with a stick or something else. […] Whenever I wake up in the morning, I tell myself that I am old and it is over and that to me it will never happen again. This is my ritual each and every morning. I tell myself it is over and I survived it.”

Maier dedicated her life to sustaining life. She became a nurse in Vienna and, she said, “I would have loved to have a child just to spare the child what I had to go through.” But Maier found her fallopian tubes were blocked. Although there is no record of it in her files, she suspects she was sterilized during the Third Reich. Haunted by Spiegelgrund’s physical and mental abuse, Maier confided, “The term ‘unworthy of life’ is still ringing in my ears. There is still a sign above my life that says: strictly speaking, you have no right to live.”….

Even top Reich-level euthanasia figures, Hans Heinze and Werner Villinger, had flourishing postwar careers as Germany’s leading psychiatrists. Franz Hamburger, who had become emeritus in 1944, never faced trial. The enormous role Hamburger’s Children Hospital played in the killing system also went unrecognized. Hamburger’s student, Elmar Turk, who conducted tuberculosis experiments on children with Hamburger, practiced through the 1990s and drew on his human experiments from the Third Reich. The body parts of children killed at Spiegelgrund continued to circulate among Vienna’s research laboratories, the basis of its physicians’ publications for decades.

Spiegelgrund doctor Heinrich Gross published thirty-eight articles over twenty-five years—several based on the preserved brains of over four hundred children that he had harvested at Spiegelgrund during the Third Reich, collaborating with associates (such as Andreas Rest, who named Rett syndrome). Gross became a preeminent physical in Austria and was awarded the government’s Honorary Cross for Science and Art in 1975. Despite court proceedings against him in 1948 and 1981, Gross managed to evade conviction for murder. A rock solid case against Gross finally headed to court in 2000, but Gross was deemed unfit to stand trial due to advanced dementia—a condition many observers disputed. Gross died in 2005 at age ninety….

In 2002, the remains of Spiegelgrund’s victims were buried and memorialized—including the brains Gross had collected, which were discovered in Spiegelgrund’s basement, in neatly stacked glass jars. *(Thus they buried the evidence of the morphological and structural damages from IG Farben’s munition technologies branched from their ethylene tree)

Asperger was cleared of wrongdoing after the war… Asperger benefited from the vacuum and was appointed interim director of the University of Vienna Children’s Hospital from 1946 to 1949… He enjoyed a long career. In 1957, Asperger was named director of the University of Innsbruck Children’s Hospital; in 1962, Asperger followed in Hamburger’s footsteps as permanent director of the University of Vienna Children’s Hospital. Asperger wrote a textbook, Heilpadagogik, which found success in several editions—and his field of “curative education” expanded and shifted toward mainstream “special education.”

The Curative Education Clinic sent children to Spiegelgrund’s successor institution, Wilhelminenberg…. Anna Theresa Kimmel, seen in Asperger’s clinic, later described her encounter with Asperger. “I stood facing a tall, tall man in a white coat. Light-haired. The size difference was enormous. And I only know that he greeted my mother, and then looked at me and punched me in the stomach with full force. Yes? My reaction was: no howling, nothing, but I probably looked at him angrily. And so he told me, he told my mother that I had aggression.” Kimmel said she was institutionalized, held in a cage bed for a month. Afterward, Kimmel reflected, “I never heard from Asperger again. I don’t know, was I a test subject? Was I a person? Was I a piece of wood? A guinea pig? I have no idea.”…

Asperger held that the souls of the terminally ill youths “were always very different from the ‘normal’” As he put it, “Their fine spiritual differentiation results from a weakening in their primitive vitality through the existing disease—a consequence of the disease. In other words, illness changed children’s souls and permanently aged them, completing their development. It was appropriate that they perished earlier than others. In his 1975 article, “The Dying Child,” Asperger invoked scripture to conclude the point, citing the Wisdom of Solomon: children who die young “live a long life in a short span of time.”…

In Asperger’s view, the doctor’s role was to guide the child and his or her parents, particularly the grieving mother, down the path of death—to “fulfill his noble duty as guide into the realm of the natural.”

In his 1975 article, “The Dying Child,” Asperger also wrote that the doctor should “serve in death.” It is unclear exactly what Asperger meant by the phrase, but juxtaposed it with what he called “active euthanasia.” – Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer

The IG Farben employees, Vienna doctors, destroyed the evidence of the harm of their employer’s munition technology products. Theo Colborn called their benzene technology products, womb terrorists. They didn’t destroy the technologies causing all the harm. They expanded their ethylene tree based munition markets and exterminated the infants and children destroyed by them.

The Last Train From Berlin by Howard K. Smith

“Other vegetables came to count as luxuries. Tomatoes were rationed too for a while, then disappeared altogether to canning factories where they could be preserved and sent to the Eastern front. Two-vegetable meals became virtually extinct. Scarcities were made more severe by the prudence of the food ministry which, having its palms slapped once, began to play it safe by preparing more and more canned goods for the troops in the event that the war should last through the winter….

Ersatz foods flourished. Icing for the few remaining pastries tasted like a mixture of saccharine, sand and cheap perfume. White bread was issued after the third month of the campaign only on the ration cards formerly for pastry. A red coloured paste called Lachs Galantine, resembling salmon in color and soggy sawdust in taste, appeared in restaurants on meatless days. Several strange bottled sauces made of incredible combinations of acid-tasting chemicals made their appearance in shops to answer the public’s growing demand for something to put a taste of some kind in their unattractive and scanty meals…

Cigarettes suffered the most rapid decline in quality… My tobacconist told me “Johnnies” were made of the same dry, powdery, inferior tobacco as other cigarettes, but the leaves were sprayed with a chemical to give them a distinctive flavour and kill their original one. The chemical, he said, was severely damaging to the lungs, which I can believe…

It caused visible pain to the old bar-tender to answer an order for a cocktail saying he was dreadfully sorry but today, precisely today, he had run out of all the ingredients. But perhaps tomorrow. Actually, all he had was some raw liquor the management had been able to squeeze out of a farm-house outside Berlin, Himbeergeist, or a fake Vodka that took the roof off your mouth, or wood alcohol with perfume in it which was served under the name of Sclibovitz, two fingers to a customer and no more…

Civilian hospitals are overcrowded and doctors overworked. Environment, which has a great deal to do with mental health and well-being has grown seedy and ugly. Hours are longer and real wages immeasurably lower than they were before the Russian war. Families are losing their youngest and strongest members, or seeing them some home legless and armless. The horizon of the average German is desolate….

Today, also after two years of war, there are only two meat dishes on the menu, one of which is struck through with a pencil mark along the strategy of the Kaiserhof Hotel. The other is generally two little sausages of uncertain contents, each about the size of a cigar butt. Before the meat they give you a chalky, red, warm liquid called tomato soup, but which a good-natured waiter-friend of mine always called: Ee-gay Farben Nummer zwei nulleex! all of which means, “Dye trust formula number 20-X.” With the meat you get four or five yellow potatoes with black blotches on them…

Hitler’s solution to the crisis was not by making useful goods but by producing the greatest aggregation of arms, which nobody can eat, or wear, in all history…”
Portions from pages 120 – 149)*(You can actually consume munitions, Americans consume so much splenda that it’s the number 1 artificial sweetener. It’s an organochlorine and you can guarantee that it destroys your brain like all the rest of those sulfur chlorine carbon creations…)

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Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Excerpt Regarding Benzene and Organochlorine Technologies and Chromosome Damage)

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Excerpt From Chapter 13: Through a Narrow Window 

Plants treated with benzene hexachloride (BHC) or lindane became monstrously deformed with tumorlike swellings on their roots. Their cells grew in size, being swollen with chromosomes which doubled in number. The doubling continued in future divisions until further cell division became mechanically impossible.

The herbicide 2,4-D has also produced tumor like swellings in treated plants. Chromosomes become short, thick, clumped together. Cell division is seriously retarded. The general effect is said to parallel closely that produced by X-rays.

These are but a few illustrations; many more could be cited. As yet there has been no comprehensive study aimed at testing the mutagenic effects of pesticides as such. The facts cited above are by-products of research in cell physiology or genetics. What is urgently needed is a direct attack on the problem.

Some scientists who are willing to concede the potent effect of environmental radiation on man nevertheless question whether mutagenic chemicals can, as a practical proposition, have the same effect. They cite the great penetrating power of radiation, but doubt that chemicals could reach germ cells. Once again we are hampered by the fact that there has been little direct investigation of the problem in man. However, the finding of large residues of DDT in the gonads and germ cells of birds and mammals is strong evidence that the chlorinated hydrocarbons, at least, not only become widely distributed throughout the body but come into contact with genetic materials. Professor David E. Davis at Pennsylvania State University has recently discovered that a potent chemical which prevents cells from dividing and has had limited use in cancer therapy can also be used to cause sterility in birds. Sublethal levels of the chemical halt cell division in the gonads. Professor Davis has had some success in field trials. Obviously, then, there is little basis for the hope or belief that the gonads of any organism are shielded from chemicals in the environment.

Recent medical findings in the field of chromosome abnormalities are of extreme interest and significance. In 1959 several British and French research teams found their independent studies pointing to a common conclusion—that some of humanity’s ills are caused by a disturbance of the normal chromosome number. In certain diseases and abnormalities studied by these investigators the number differed from the normal. To illustrate: it is now known that all mongoloids have one extra chromosome. Occasionally this is attached to another so that the chromosome number remains the normal 46. As a rule, however, the extra is a separate chromosome, making the number 47. In such individuals, the original cause of the defect must have occurred in the generation preceding its appearance.

A different mechanism seems to operate in a number of patients, both in America and Great Britain, who are suffering from a chronic form of leukemia. These have been found to have a consistent chromosome abnormality in some of the blood cells. The abnormality consists of the loss of part of a chromosome. In these patients the skin cells have a normal complement of chromosomes. This indicates that the chromosome defect did not occur in the germ cells that gave rise to these individuals, but represents damage to particular cells (in this case, the precursors of blood cells) that occurred during the life of the individual. The loss of part of a chromosome has perhaps deprived these cells of their “instructions” for normal behavior.

The list of defects linked to chromosome disturbances has grown with surprising speed since the opening of this territory, hitherto beyond the boundaries of medical research. One, known only as Klinefelter’s syndrome, involves a duplication of one of the sex chromosomes. The resulting individual is a male, but because he carries two of the X chromosomes (becoming XXY instead of XY, the normal male complement) he is somewhat abnormal. Excessive height and mental defects often accompany the sterility caused by the condition. In contrast, an individual who receives only one sex chromosome (becoming XO instead of either XX or XY) is actually female but lacks many of the secondary sexual characteristics. The condition is accompanied by various physical (and sometimes mental) defects, for of course the X chromosome carries genes for a variety of characteristics. This is known as Turner’s syndrome…

An immense amount of work on the subject of chromosome abnormalities is being done by workers in many countries. A group at the University of Wisconsin, headed by Dr. Klaus Patau, has been concentrating on a variety of congenital abnormalities, usually including mental retardation, that seem to result from the duplication of only part of a chromosome, as if somewhere in the formation of one of the germ cells a chromosome had broken and the pieces had not been properly redistributed. Such a mishap is likely to interfere with the normal development of the embryo.

According to present knowledge, the occurrence of an entire extra body chromosome is usually lethal, preventing survival of the embryo. Only three such conditions are known to be viable; one of them, of course, is mongolism. The presence of an extra attached fragment, on the other hand, although seriously damaging is not necessarily fatal, and according to the Wisconsin investigators this situation may well account for a substantial part of the so far unexplained cases in which a child is born with multiple defects, usually including mental retardation.

This is so new a field of study that as yet scientists have been more concerned with identifying the chromosome abnormalities associated with disease and defective development than with speculating about the causes. It would be foolish to assume that any single agent is responsible for damaging the chromosomes or causing their erratic behavior during cell division. But can we afford to ignore the fact that we are now filling the environment with chemicals that have the power to strike directly at the chromosomes, affecting them in the precise ways that would cause such conditions? Is this not too high a price to pay for a sproutless potato or a mosquitoes patio?

We can, if we wish, reduce this threat to our genetic heritage, a possession that has come down to us through some two billion years of evolution and selection of living protoplasm, a possession that is ours for the moment only, until we must pass it on to the generations to come. We are doing little now to preserve its integrity. Although chemical manufacturers are required by law to test their materials for toxicity, they are not required to make the tests that would reliably demonstrate genetic effect, and they do not do so.

(That’s because manufacturers were already well aware of the biological impacts of the technologies they were expanding. Make certain to read my excerpts from the book, “Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna,” by Edith Sheffer)

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New battlefront for petrochemical industry: benzene and childhood leukemia

New battlefront for petrochemical industry: benzene and childhood leukemia by Kristen Lombardi for The Center For Public Integrity

ATHENS, Georgia — It was December 29, 1998, six years after Jill McElheney and her family had moved next to a cluster of 12 petroleum storage tanks. Jill was escorting her son Jarrett, then 4, to the doctor again. He had spent the day slumped in a stroller, looking so pale and fatigued that a stranger stopped her to ask if he was all right.

It was an encounter Jill couldn’t shake. For the previous three months, she had noticed her once-energetic preschooler deteriorating. He complained of pain in his knee, which grew excruciating. It migrated to his shoulder and then his leg. His shins swelled, as did his temples. At night, Jarrett awoke drenched in sweat, screaming from spasms. Jill took him to a pediatrician and an infectious-disease specialist. A rheumatologist diagnosed him with anemia.

Now, as Jarrett lay listless, Jill found herself back at the pediatrician’s office. Tests confirmed a blood count so low that she was instructed to get him to an emergency room immediately. Within hours she was at a hospital in Atlanta, some 65 miles from her home in Athens, watching nurses rush in and out of Jarrett’s room. Doctors identified a common form of childhood leukemia. “I heard the words,” Jill recalled, “and I only knew the bald heads and the sadness.”

In the waiting room, family members heard more unsettling news: A neighbor’s child also had developed leukemia.

Days later, Jarrett’s doctor penned a letter to federal environmental regulators about the two cancer patients, highlighting their “close proximity” to Southeast Terminals, a group of 10,000-gallon tanks containing gasoline, diesel and fuel oil.

“Could you please investigate,” the doctor wrote, “whether high levels of chemicals could have contaminated the water, possibly contributing … to the development of leukemia?”

Only then did the McElheneys consider the possibility that living beside one of the nation’s 1,500 bulk-oil terminals — known sources of cancer-causing benzene — had triggered their son’s leukemia.

“It was one of those light-bulb moments for us,” said Jeff McElheney, Jarrett’s father. “You never get over it.”

New battlefront for industry

Jarrett McElheney does not represent the standard benzene plaintiff. He’s not among the hundreds of thousands of people who toil in American oil refineries or other workplaces contaminated with the chemical and run the risk of developing leukemia. In the rancorous world of toxic-tort litigation, he stands virtually alone. A lawsuit filed by his parents in 2011 against Southeast Terminals owners BP and TransMontaigne is among a relatively few alleging leukemia caused by environmental benzene exposure. Among these, the McElheney case is rarer still: Most have hinged on adult leukemia.

Yet the case may signal an emerging quandary for the petrochemical industry, according to tens of thousands of pages of previously secret documents that have come to light in lawsuits filed against benzene manufacturers and suppliers on behalf of those who suffered from leukemia and other blood diseases, including Jarrett McElheney.

Internal memorandums, emails, letters and meeting minutes obtained by the Center for Public Integrity over the past year suggest that BP and four other major petrochemical companies, coordinated by their trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, spent at least $36 million on research “designed to protect member company interests,” as one 2000 API summary put it. Many of the documents chronicle a systematic attempt by the petrochemical industry to influence the science linking benzene to cancer. Others attest to the industry’s longstanding interest in topics such as childhood leukemia.

“A number of publications in the last few years have attempted to link increased risks of childhood leukemia with proximity to both petroleum facilities and local traffic density,” another 2000 API memo warns. “Although these publications have had little impact to date, the emphasis on ‘Children’s Health’ may cause these concerns to resurface.”

“This is indeed a battlefront for the oil industry,” said Peter Infante, a former director of the office that reviews health standards at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, who has studied benzene for 40 years and now testifies for plaintiffs in benzene litigation. He has worked on a handful of cases involving children sickened by leukemia.

“It’s in the industry’s economic interests to refuse to acknowledge the relationship between benzene and childhood leukemia,” Infante said.

In May, in a sign of the chemical’s continuing threat, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 5 million Americans — excluding workers — face heightened cancer risks from benzene and 68 other carcinogens spewed into the air by the nation’s 149 oil refineries. The EPA has proposed a rule that would require refinery operators to monitor for benzene, in particular, along their fence lines.

Aimed at curbing “fugitive” emissions from equipment leaks and similar releases, the proposal would set a fence line limit for benzene of 3 parts per billion — a fraction of the 10 ppb the agency recommends as the maximum chronic exposure level for the chemical.

Industry groups are pushing back. In written comments, the API’s Matthew Todd called the proposal “a major and significant Agency action [that] will dramatically increase the paperwork and recordkeeping burden on refineries. It includes several precedent-setting proposals, will cost our industry hundreds of millions of dollars per year, increase safety risk [and] may impact fuels production and cost …. Production outages will likely occur.”

The EPA also heard from the people the rule is designed to protect. “We live near a refinery, and as a result my son can’t breathe,” a woman from Fontana, California, wrote in Spanish. “My cousin had respiratory problems while living near a refinery for more than 10 years,” a woman from Houston wrote, also in Spanish. “Unfortunately, he died 2 years ago from bone cancer. We believe this was a result of the ambient air where he lived.”

In June, California officials lowered the long-term exposure level for benzene from 20 ppb to 1 ppb — among the lowest in the country — setting the stage for further emissions cuts at refineries and bulk-oil terminals in that state. Officials say such regulatory actions aim to protect children, who are more susceptible to benzene’s toxic effects than adults because their cells aren’t as developed. California is considering classifying benzene not just as a human carcinogen, but as a “toxic air contaminant which may disproportionately impact children.”

“The fact that benzene impacts the blood-forming organs when you’re a developing child is a big deal,” said Melanie Marty of the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

Hidden menace

ill McElheney agrees. A warm, garrulous mother of five who has schooled herself in the health effects of pollution, she has spent the past 16 years seeking the cause of her son’s leukemia. She has filed open-records requests and contacted state and federal agencies, piecing together a history of gasoline spills and diesel-fuel leaks at Southeast Terminals. She can cite endless details about lingering benzene contamination on terminal property — extensively catalogued in state enforcement files — located “a stone’s throw away” from the trailer park where her family lived for seven years.

Jeff, Jarrett and Jill McElheney stand in the former site of the Oakwood Mobile Home Park, where the family was living when Jarrett was diagnosed with a form of childhood leukemia. Phil Skinner for the Center for Public Integrity
Now vacant and overgrown with brush, the former site of the Oakwood Mobile Home Park lies across a residential street from Southeast Terminals, its tanks rising above a thicket of pines and oaks. All day, every day, trucks drive in and out of the facility’s gates, filling tankers with gasoline and other products.

What can’t be seen is the plume of benzene that has worked its way into the groundwater beneath the tanks. “It’s not like Cancer Alley, with smokestacks belching crap in your face,” Jill said. “It’s hidden — literally.”

When she and Jeff moved to Oakwood in 1992, they saw the 14-trailer community as something of an oasis — quiet, tight-knit. Nestled under shady trees, near churches and schools, it seemed like the perfect location. Even the park’s water supply, drawn from an unpermitted well dating back decades, appeared idyllic: Its pump house served as a beacon on park property, visible for all to see — including, court depositions later confirmed, terminal employees.

“We saw Oakwood as an opportunity,” recalled Jeff, a mustachioed, genial man who operates a roofing company and managed the park for his father, its previous owner.

Jarrett McElheney, center, with 3 of his 4 siblings. Courtesy of the McElheney family
Jarrett arrived two years later and, by his fourth birthday, had grown into an adventurous boy with an abiding love of water. His parents remember him splashing in the tub for hours. Often, he swam in an inflatable pool in their yard, dressed in what he called his “little blue [wet] suit.” He slurped on Kool Aid and popsicles made from well water whose purity his parents never questioned — until his 1998 diagnosis of acute lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL, a form of the blood cancer found overwhelmingly in children.

Within days of hearing the news, Jarrett’s parents tested their water. Samples from the Oakwood well revealed a brew of such chemicals as carbon tetrachloride and 1,2-dichloroethane, sparking a state investigation. The Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) found benzene in the water of Oakwood’s well at levels up to 13 ppb — 26 times higher than the federal safety standard. In response, the agency shuttered the well and connected residents to public water.

Over the next year, state geologists worked to identify the contamination’s source. They dug monitoring wells and collected soil samples. Their initial investigation linked at least one pollutant in the park well — not benzene — to nearby abandoned grain silos. Geologists eventually eyed Southeast Terminals as a likely source of the benzene contamination, records show.

“The terminals are certainly suspects for the benzene detected in the [Oakwood] well,” one posited in a 2000 email. “The probable path is deep ground water.”

Another noted the presence of “a possible plume (with benzene) moving by Oakwood … and within a few hundred feet of the [park]’s former well, [thus] too close for comfort for a public-water supply well.”

Two years later, EPD investigators were still documenting high levels of benzene, ranging from 8,000 to 12,000 ppb, on terminal property — as well as the likelihood that, one 2002 EPD memorandum states, “the benzene contamination found in the trailer park well came from the Southeast Terminals.”

Ultimately, though, the state’s two-year, nearly $200,000 investigation yielded few answers. By 2008, groundwater monitoring results revealed only trace amounts of benzene at Oakwood. Today, EPD officials say they lack definitive proof tying the well’s benzene pollution to any source.

For Jill McElheney, the outcome of the inquiry was anything but satisfying. “It just seems to me that when you’ve got benzene in a well and a major source of it next door, you’d make the connection,” she said.

In fact, Jill already had been seeking answers elsewhere. In 2000, she turned to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or ATSDR, petitioning it for a public health assessment. Instead, the agency launched a less-thorough public health consultation, meant to ascertain the risk to human health posed by the contaminated well water at Oakwood.

The results brought little clarity. In a 2001 report, the ATSDR determined that “the groundwater contaminant plume” initially sampled in the Oakwood well “is a public health hazard.” At the same time, it singled out a pollutant other than benzene as the threat. For benzene, the agency found that “the likelihood someone would get cancer as a result of their exposure is very low.”

In a 2000 draft filed with the state, however, the ATSDR concluded that the highest concentrations of benzene in the water were of concern. “This risk DOES exceed an acceptable risk level,” the draft states, “and may result in an elevated risk of cancer for exposed individuals.”

An ASTDR spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.

Mounting evidence on benzene and leukemia

The science linking benzene to cancer — particularly leukemia, in all its forms — has preoccupied the petrochemical industry for more than half a century. As far back as 1948, the API’s toxicological profile of the chemical discussed “reasonably well documented instances of the development of leukemia as a result of chronic benzene exposure,” cautioning that “the only absolutely safe concentration … is zero.”

Later, as scientific evidence of benzene’s hazards accumulated and regulatory limits on workplace and environmental levels tightened, the industry took a different stance. By 1990, the API and member companies such as BP, Chevron, Mobil and Shell had launched a research program meant to keep further restrictions at bay — or, minutes from an API meeting in 1992 state, research “that will be most useful in improving risk assessment and influencing regulation.”

Within months, the API task force overseeing the program was enumerating “developing issues.” Topping its list, according to minutes from a meeting in 1993, was this notation: “link to childhood leukemia?”

That possible link appeared on the industry’s radar again in 2000, documents show. At the time, API representatives were drumming up financial support for an unparalleled study of workers exposed to benzene in Shanghai, China, delivering what amounted to a sales pitch for the project. They touted what one 2000 API overview described as its “tremendous economic benefit to the petroleum industry” — helping to combat “onerous regulations” and “litigation costs due to perceptions about the risks of even very low exposures to benzene.” Childhood leukemia was mentioned explicitly.

Five years later, industry representatives grew concerned enough to bankroll their own research. Documents show the API task force approved funding for what minutes of one meeting in 2005 dubbed a “benzene regulatory response,” comprising a “childhood leukemia review” and “child-to-adult sensitivity to benzene” analysis, for a total of $30,000.

By then, the scientific evidence on benzene and leukemia in adults was well-established. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, studies of Italian shoe and leather workers indicated a relationship between the chemical and the cancer. Then, in 1977, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, launched a seminal study of two Goodyear plants in Ohio that made Pliofilm, a thin rubber wrap. The research quantified for the first time the leukemia risk for workers exposed to benzene, prompting OSHA to work on a stricter standard that took effect in 1987.

In years since, the science has solidified. Recent research has shown lower and lower levels of the chemical — less than the OSHA limit of 1 part per million — can cause leukemia as well as other blood and bone marrow disorders.

By contrast, experts say, the research on benzene and childhood leukemia isn’t as conclusive. Multiple studies have indicated that children whose mothers were exposed to benzene-containing solvents during pregnancy experience elevated risks of developing the disease. Others have shown that children living near gas stations or highways — breathing in benzene in the air — face heightened risks. One 2008 study reported a significant spike in the rate of the disease in Houston neighborhoods with the highest benzene emissions.

Taken together, the nearly four dozen publications on the topic strongly suggest the carcinogen can cause leukemia as much in children as adults, experts say.

“Children aren’t another species,” said Infante, the former OSHA official who has reviewed the scientific literature for medical associations and governmental agencies. “If benzene causes leukemia in adults, why wouldn’t it cause leukemia in children?”

The scientist behind the API-commissioned analysis would likely disagree. In 2009, David Pyatt, a Colorado toxicologist with long-standing ties to the petrochemical industry, published a journal article about his review, in which he reported examining 236 studies on the relationship between benzene and childhood leukemia. Many of the studies suggesting a link “suffer from the same limitations,” he concluded, such as poorly quantified exposure estimates.

“At this point,” Pyatt wrote, “there is insufficient epidemiologic support for an association or causal connection between environmental benzene exposure … and the development of childhood [leukemia].”

Some say the review reflects a common industry tactic: Compile studies on a subject, and then shed doubt on each one by claiming the data aren’t good enough.

Pyatt did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls from the Center seeking comment; nor did the API.

In depositions, Pyatt acknowledged that he has never testified for a plaintiff in a benzene exposure case. He has worked as a consultant and defense expert for such petrochemical giants as BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell, he has said; the API has financed additional work of his on benzene, as has the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s main lobby.

In a deposition taken last year, Pyatt said he wouldn’t discount benzene’s link to childhood leukemia — at least, not to acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, a type rarely found in children.

“There is no reason to think that [children] are going to be protected,” he testified. “So I would certainly think that a child can develop AML if they are exposed to enough benzene.”

In other depositions, Pyatt has conceded no link between benzene and ALL, the type that attacked Jarrett McElheney.

‘They have to stop this practice’

For the McElheneys, the extent of the benzene contamination from Southeast Terminals only came to light years after Jarrett’s chemotherapy regimen had beaten back his leukemia. Yet state and federal enforcement records pinpoint on-site releases of the chemical in 1991, a year before the family moved to the area. At the time, managers of the terminal — jointly owned and operated by BP and Unocal Corp. — discovered a leak of diesel fuel seeping through soil where an underground pipeline was buried.

Terminal employees removed 40 cubic yards of “petroleum contaminated soils,” according to a report filed by BP with the state, and recorded benzene on site at levels as high as 81 ppb. Groundwater samples showed even higher concentrations: 12,000 ppb.

State regulators found such pollution “exceeds our ‘trigger’ levels,” a 1991 letter to the company states, and requested further action.

Under Georgia law, the company was required to develop what the EPD calls a “corrective action plan,” which, among other things, would have delineated the terminal’s benzene plume, as well as identified nearby public water wells.

In a 1991 reply, BP promised the EPD it would file its plan in four months.

Nine years later — after the McElheneys had tested their well water and the EPD had issued a 2000 citation against BP for failing to submit a “timely” corrective action plan — the company finally carried out that requirement, records show.

BP, in charge of the terminal’s daily operations, declined to comment for this article. At different times, Unocal, Louis Dreyfus Energy and TransMontaigne have been BP’s partners at the site. TransMontaigne, its current partner, did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls. TransMontaigne purchased Louis Dreyfus Energy in 1998. Chevron, which merged with Unocal in 2005, declined to comment.

Today, state regulators attribute their own delay in cracking down on the diesel leak to an internal debate over which EPD division had authority over the terminal’s benzene contamination — its underground storage tank program, which has purview over the pipeline; or, its hazardous waste branch. For years, compliance officers in that branch, along with their counterparts at the EPA, had been monitoring the facility’s practice of dumping benzene-laced wastewater on site — a practice later confirmed by terminal employees in court depositions.

In 1990, the EPA issued new rules classifying benzene as hazardous waste and requiring bulk-oil terminals to have permits for discharging the “bottoms water” in petroleum tanks. This wastewater can become tainted by the chemical when mixed with gasoline. Rather than treat the water, Southeast Terminals funneled it through an “oil/water separator” to skim off fuel, and then dumped it into a ditch on the ground.

Company records at the time show that terminal supervisors admitted they drained the wastewater “direct into streams” or “a dike area which eventually drains offsite into a stream.”

“I remember thinking, ‘They have to stop this practice,’” said John Williams, an EPD environmental specialist who inspected the terminal in 1993 and documented the dumping.

Three months later, the EPD issued a notice of violation against Southeast Terminals, forcing supervisors to test the bottoms water. Regulators found benzene at levels four times greater than the legal limit of 0.5 ppb, prompting the EPA to take action.

“We saw an issue there,” said Darryl Hines, of the EPA’s regional office in Atlanta, explaining why officials initiated a 1997 civil enforcement action against the facility.

In its complaint, the EPA accused BP and then-partner Louis Dreyfus Energy of violating federal hazardous-waste law — disposing waste without a permit, and failing to categorize it as hazardous. The agency ordered the companies to shut down the oil/water separator, and implement a plan addressing “any groundwater contamination.”

By the time Jarrett developed leukemia a year later, the EPA had negotiated a settlement with the companies and laid out a series of requirements for cleaning up the benzene. Without admitting fault, BP and Louis Dreyfus agreed to spend at least $100,000 to remove leaking underground pipelines and install above-ground infrastructure. They also paid a penalty of $15,000.

When BP finally filed its long-delayed action plan, it revealed the presence of what EPD project officer Calvin Jones described as a “dissolved hydrocarbon” plume containing benzene — “a bigger problem than we had thought.” The chemical, concentrated at 500 ppb and counting, had spread beyond the immediate spill areas. Of greater concern to regulators, the plan identified “free product” in groundwater.

“There was actually gasoline floating on the water,” explained Jones, of the EPD’s underground storage tank program, who oversaw the facility’s protracted cleanup. Referring to gasoline’s ability to dissolve in water, he said, “You can’t get higher concentrations of benzene … than free product.”

Despite a decade-long cleanup — 35.2 million gallons of contaminated groundwater and 1,009 pounds of benzene were collected — the chemical still saturates much of the nearly 19-acre Southeast Terminals site, records show. Last year, the EPD issued a letter declaring “no further action required,” which released the companies from remediation. At the time, the state-sanctioned benzene count remained at 1,440 ppb.

Over the years, enforcement records show, company consultants and regulators alike have tried to trace the path of the wastewater at the terminal. One company analysis details a trail beginning at the property line and then spilling into adjacent woods before hitting a tributary. Another document, produced by the EPA, depicts the discharge as moving offsite through woods and into a resident’s backyard.

“It’s where the drainage flows,” said Jeffrey Pallas, deputy director of the agency’s hazardous waste division in Atlanta, who oversaw the case against BP and Louis Dreyfus, explaining that the document, complete with photographs, was only intended to verify the hazardous-waste law violations.

“We cannot substantiate from the documentation we have that the benzene left the site,” he said.

Seeking accountability

The McElheneys have seen the evidence they need to connect Southeast Terminals to the benzene in the Oakwood well — and Jarrett’s suffering. They believe all the state and federal enforcement actions have yielded few consequences for the facility’s owners. If Jarrett hadn’t gotten sick, they say, they might never have known about the benzene hazard. “The companies would have paid off their small fines,” Jill said, “and nobody would have been the wiser.”

Seeking some accountability, the family filed a lawsuit three years ago against BP, TransMontaigne and seven other previous owners, alleging that the “illegal discharge and release of toxic chemicals” at Southeast Terminals contaminated the surrounding environment and caused Jarrett to develop leukemia.

In court filings, the companies denied the allegations and dismissed any link between benzene and childhood leukemia. Last year, defense lawyers invoked a familiar tactic: They cited the Pyatt review to support their claims that the chemical couldn’t have caused Jarrett’s illness. The family recently has agreed on a settlement in principle and is working toward resolving the litigation.

“I thought, ‘This is par for the course,’” said Jill, who has read some of the industry documents uncovered by the lawsuit. “The oil industry has fought regulations and lawsuits for workers and adults. Now they’re going to do it with children.”

Jarrett is now a slight, reserved 20-year-old in remission. He remembers his bout with leukemia through a child’s eyes — the “really cool” ambulance rides, the nurses with coloring books, swinging golf clubs in hospital hallways. “I remember being stuck over and over again by needles” while getting a bone-marrow aspiration or a chest catheter or countless blood draws, he said. “But it wasn’t until much later I realized what happened to me didn’t happen to other kids.”

Today, he has had to grapple with cancer’s lasting effects — the feebleness, and the fatigue — as well as its lingering fears. As a leukemia survivor, he is at risk for developing osteoporosis, cataracts, or even another cancer. Sitting in an Olive Garden in Athens, sandwiched between his parents, Jarrett came across as exceedingly shy, uncomfortable in the limelight. Often, his parents did the speaking for him.

Moments earlier, Jill had explained how leukemia had changed her son, taken an emotional toll.

“He had a really loud voice as a toddler but that voice has mellowed,” she said. “I’ll take that voice over anything.”

Maryam Jameel contributed to this story.

Click on the link below to access the original article at the Center for Public Integrity

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/12/08/16356/new-battlefront-petrochemical-industry-benzene-and-childhood-leukemia

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A dozen dirty documents Twelve documents that stand out from the Center’s new oil and chemical industry archive

A dozen dirty documents
Twelve documents that stand out from the Center’s new oil and chemical industry archive

By Kristen Lombardi for The Center for Public Integrity

The Center for Public Integrity, along with researchers from Columbia University and the City University of New York, on Thursday posted some 20,000 pages of internal oil and chemical industry documents on the carcinogen benzene.

This archive, which will grow substantially in 2015 and beyond, offers users a chance to see what corporate officials were saying behind the scenes about poisons in the workplace and the environment.

Here are 12 examples of what the petrochemical industry knew about benzene; the impetus behind industry-sponsored science; and the corporate spin that often occurs when damning evidence against a chemical threatens companies’ bottom lines.

What the industry knew:

The industry knew the dangers of benzene exposure at both high and low concentrations, as illustrated by this 1943 report for Shell Development Company by a University of California researcher.

“Inasmuch as the body develops no tolerance to benzene, and as there is a wide variation in individual susceptibility, it is generally considered that the only absolutely safe concentration for benzene is zero.” That was a conclusion reached in a 1948 toxicological review of benzene prepared for the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association.

Benzene’s dangers known in 1943 (pg 2)
This 1943 report, prepared for Shell, is among the earliest to suggest that any prolonged exposure to benzene may be harmful.

No safe exposure level (pg 4) This 1948 review, prepared for the oil industry’s main trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, continues to torment the industry in litigation alleging benzene can cause various types of leukemia and other diseases of the blood-forming organs. In essence, it says the chemical is so potent that there is no safe exposure level.

A 1950 consultant’s memo to Shell lists benzene as having “established carcinogenic qualities.”

Benzene recognized as a well-known carcinogen (pg 1)

This 1950 memorandum from a consultant for Shell Development Company notes that benzol — an obsolete name for benzene — is a well-known carcinogen. As the author states, the memo was prompted by “an increased concern about the incidence of cancer” among Shell workers.

Motivations for industry involvement in research:

In 1995, a benzene study by the National Cancer Institute caught the attention of Exxon scientists, who closely monitored it.

Industry interest in cancer research (pg 1)
An Exxon scientist, B.F. Friedlander, explains that he and industry colleagues are “monitoring” a series of studies by the National Cancer Institute because of their focus on “health risks at low benzene exposures.” The memo shows the petrochemical industry’s early interest in the work of the NCI, which has examined the effects on Chinese workers exposed to benzene at levels below the legal occupational limit in the United States.

While attempting to gain support for a proposed study of benzene toxicity in Shanghai, China, the American Petroleum Institute cites “a tremendous economic benefit” to companies, which could gain data to combat “onerous regulations.” A project overview explains that publications linking benzene to childhood leukemia may cause concerns about the chemical to “resurface.”

‘Tremendous economic benefit’ from the industry study (pg 1)
The six-page overview touts the proposed Shanghai research as a way for the petrochemical industry to gain an “accurate understanding” of benzene’s health effects, which, in turn, would bring “tremendous economic benefit.”

A 2000 summary of the API’s research strategy, drafted by the group’s Benzene Task Force, explains that the research program “is designed to protect member company interests.” The anticipated results could “significantly ameliorate further regulatory initiatives” to curb benzene emissions.

Protecting industry interests (pg 2)

The summary describes the intent of the API’s research program as being “designed to protect member company interests.”

An email exchange explains how “HSE [health, safety and environment] issues surrounding benzene as well as the litigation claims” against the industry compel companies to participate in the industry-sponsored study.

Motivations for research (pg 2)
An email from one Shell executive argues that the “litigation claims we continue to see” are prime reasons for the company to spend millions of dollars on the proposed Shanghai research.

A PowerPoint presentation from 2001 lists “significant issues of concern” to encourage financial support for the API’s research on benzene-exposed workers in China. Among them is “litigation alleging induction of various forms of leukemias and other hematopoietic diseases.” The study, according to the presentation, could provide “strong scientific support for the lack of a risk of leukemia or other hematological diseases at current ambient benzene concentrations to the general population.”

Significant issues of concern (pg 3)
This PowerPoint slide suggests “significant issues of concern” that the proposed Shanghai research might help combat, which would save the petrochemical industry “millions of dollars in expenses.” The issues include more stringent regulations and litigation from benzene exposure.

“Litigation support” and “risk communication” are listed as goals in this 2007 memorandum describing an API risk management program. Further objectives are to establish current regulations as “protective” and avoid additional action.

Oil lobby’s risk management program (pg 1)
The memorandum details the oil lobby’s benzene “risk management” program, intended to “develop scientific data” for it and its member companies to use for “science advocacy” and “litigation support.”

Corporate spin

An undated litigation defense guide written by a senior Shell attorney acknowledges the 1948 report on leukemia and offers a “comprehensive strategy” on how to respond to litigation, including releasing benzene-related documents only on court order.

Acknowledgement of the science showing no safe levels of benzene (pg 4)

Here the author, Richard O. Faulk of Shell Oil’s legal department, references a 1948 Toxicological Review prepared for the American Petroleum Institute. The review found that “the only absolutely safe concentration for benzene is zero.”

After a draft of an API recruitment brief reminds potential study sponsors of “personal injury claims,” an email exchange among members of the Benzene Health Research Consortium urges deletion of “the reference to legal liabilities.”

Don’t mention the legal liabilities (pg 3)

This email from a Shell executive responds to an attached draft of a 2002 recruitment brief that reminds prospective donors about benzene liability costs. In the email, the executive urges colleagues to delete “the reference to legal liabilities” and emphasizes that “the only reason we are doing this is in support of protecting workers.”

A 2001 email from the consortium’s communications committee explains that the perception of the study “needs to be that this is not being done to protect against litigation”

Controlling the message on benzene (pg 1)

The email shows the companies behind the Benzene Health Research Consortium working hard to control their message. It lays out the “scope of public affairs” for the consortium’s communications committee, which includes countering any “perception” that the Shanghai study was “done to protect against litigation.”

Click on the link below to access original article and archival documents.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/12/05/16361/dozen-dirty-documents

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“Internal documents reveal industry ‘pattern of behavior’ on toxic chemicals” by David Heath

Internal documents reveal industry ‘pattern of behavior’ on toxic chemicals by David Heath for The Center for Public Integrity

Sixty-six years ago, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health wrote a report linking leukemia to benzene, a common solvent and an ingredient in gasoline. “It is generally considered,” he wrote, “that the only absolutely safe concentration for benzene is zero.”

The report is remarkable not only because of its age and candor, but also because it was prepared for and published by the oil industry’s main lobby group, the American Petroleum Institute.

This document and others like it bedevil oil and chemical industry executives and their lawyers, who to this day maintain that benzene causes only rare types of cancer and only at high doses.

Decades after its release, a lawyer for Shell Oil Company flagged the 1948 report as being potentially damaging in lawsuits and gave out instructions to “avoid unnecessary disclosure of sensitive documents or information” and “disclose sensitive benzene documents only on court order.”

Plaintiff’s lawyers like Herschel Hobson, of Beaumont, Texas, wield such documents in worker exposure cases to demonstrate early industry knowledge of benzene’s carcinogenic properties.

“It shows a pattern of behavior,” Hobson said. “It shows how industry didn’t want to share bad news with their employees. None of this information was made available to the average worker … Most of this stuff kind of gets lost in the weeds.”

No more. Today, the Center for Public Integrity; Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and its Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health; and The Graduate Center at the City University of New York are making public some 20,000 pages of benzene documents — the inaugural collection in Exposed, a searchable online archive of previously secret oil and chemical industry memoranda, emails, letters, PowerPoints and meeting minutes that will grow over time.

The aim is to make such materials — most of which were produced during discovery in toxic tort litigation and have been locked away in file cabinets and hard drives — accessible to workers, journalists, academic researchers and others.

Some are decades old, composed on manual typewriters; others are contemporary. Combined with journalism from the Center — such as today’s story on a $36 million benzene research program undertaken by the petrochemical industry — and articles and papers from Columbia and CUNY faculty and students, the archives will shed light on toxic substances that continue to threaten public health.

Exposed: Decades of denial on poisons

The benzene documents are just the start. In coming months, we’ll be posting hundreds of thousands of pages of discovery material from lawsuits involving lead, asbestos, silica, hexavalent chromium and PCBs, among other dangerous substances. And we’ll be on the lookout for other documents.

The inspiration for the project came when we realized that in CPI’s reporting on environmental and workplace issues, we routinely obtained reams of court documents. Often, these documents hold secrets found nowhere else.

Last year we reached out to William Baggett Jr., a lawyer in Lake Charles, Louisiana, who had acquired more than 400,000 pages of documents from a decade-long case against manufacturers of vinyl chloride, a cancer-causing chemical used in plastics. Baggett agreed to give us all of them.

At the same time, public health historians Merlin Chowkwanyun, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz were collecting court documents to create a public database and had approached Baggett. We decided to collaborate. Chowkwanyun is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and will be an assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia next year. Rosner is Ronald Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and History at Columbia. Markowitz is a professor of history at the City University of New York. Both Rosner and Markowitz have served as expert witnesses in a number of major cases related to these documents and have written Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution and other books and articles based on them.

This is not the first database of its ilk. The University of California, San Francisco, maintains a massive collection of documents from tobacco-related lawsuits called the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, which exceeds 80 million pages.

How to search the documents

Our database allows you to search for a word, combination of words or an exact phrase in any of the documents. You can also:

Do a search that excludes a word by putting a ‘-‘ sign in front of the word.
Do a fuzzy search that includes variations of a word by putting a tilde ‘~’ at the end of a word with the numbers of characters that don’t have to match exactly. For example, ‘planit~2’ will match ‘planet.’
Do a search that optionally contains a word by putting a ‘|’ between the words.
Do a search with a phrase by putting double quotes around the phrase.
Each document will include the court case from which it came, including the case title, case number, court as well as date filed and date terminated. The original complaint for each lawsuit is also part of the database.

Soon, we will make available a robust set of text-mining tools that will allow researchers to construct chronologies of documents; generate lists of common words, phrases and names; and sort documents in a number of ways. Qualified researchers will also have access to an even larger set of documents that will eventually contain millions of pages.

Robert Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, has used the UCSF tobacco archive extensively to do research for several books. He called it “an unparalleled treasure” that gives researchers the ability “to look through the keyhole of the mansion of this hidden world and see [corporate officials’] private thoughts, their intent, their ruminations, their jokes, their plans, how they treat their workers, how they treat the public…”

Proctor said he sees value in a similar archive on toxic chemicals. “The internal records of the chemical industry are known only to a tiny group of lawyers and journalists,” he said. “This is going to create a new kind of democracy of knowledge. It also will set the stage for whistleblowers to come forward with documents.”

That’s our hope. The search interface includes options to send us documents or contact us. The ultimate goal, to borrow Proctor’s phrasing, will be to give users “a strong magnet to pull rhetorical needles out of archival haystacks.”

Click on the link below to access the original article at The Center for Public Integrity

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/12/04/16330/internal-documents-reveal-industry-pattern-behavior-toxic-chemicals

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Liver Functioning & Chemical Synergies – An Excerpt – Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Liver Functioning & Chemical Synergies

An Excerpt from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

One of the most significant facts about the chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides is their effect on the liver. Of all the organs in the body the liver is most extraordinary. In its versatility and in the indispensable nature of its functions it has no equal. It presides over so many vital activities that even the slightest damage is fraught with serious consequences. Not only does it provide bile for the digestion of fats, but because of its location and the special circulatory pathways that converge upon it the liver receives blood directly from the digestive tract and is deeply involved in the metabolism of all the principal foodstuffs. It stores sugar in the form of glycogen and releases it as glucose in carefully measured quantities to keep the blood sugar at a normal level. It builds body proteins, including some essential elements of blood plasma concerned with blood-clotting. It maintains cholesterol at its proper level in the blood plasma, and inactivates the male and female hormones when they reach excessive levels. It is a storehouse of many vitamins, some of which in turn contribute to its own proper functioning.

Without a normally functioning liver the body would be disarmed–defenseless against the great variety of poisons that continually invade it. Some of these are normal by-products of metabolism, which the liver swiftly and efficiently makes harmless by withdrawing their nitrogen. But poisons that have no normal place in the body may also be detoxified. The “harmless” insecticides malathion and methoxychlor are less poisonous than their relatives only because a liver enzyme deals with them, altering their molecules in such a way that their capacity for harm is lessened. In similar ways the liver deals with the majority of the toxic materials to which we are exposed.

Our line of defense against invading poisons or poisons from within is now weakened and crumbling. A liver damaged by pesticides is not only incapable of protecting us from poisons, the whole range of its activities may be interfered with. Not only are the consequences far-reaching, but because of their variety and the fact that they may not immediately appear they may not be attributed to their true cause.

In connection with the nearly universal use of insecticides that are liver poisons, it is interesting to note the sharp rise in hepatitis that began during the 1950’s and is continuing a fluctuating climb. Cirrhosis also is said to be increasing. While it is admittedly difficult, in dealing with human beings rather than laboratory animals, to “prove” that cause A produces effect B, plain common sense suggests that the relation between a soaring rate of liver disease and the prevalence of liver poisons in the environment is no coincidence. Whether or not the chlorinated hydrocarbons are the primary cause, it seems hardly sensible under the circumstances to expose ourselves to poisons that have a proven ability to damage the liver and so presumably to make it less resistant to disease.

Both major types of insecticides, the chlorinated hydrocarbons and the organic phosphates, directly affect the nervous system, although in somewhat different ways. This has been made clear by an infinite number of experiments on animals and by observations on human subjects as well. As for DDT, the first of the new organic insecticides to be widely used, its action is primarily on the central nervous system of man; the cerebellum and the higher motor cortex are thought to be the areas chiefly affected. Abnormal sensations as of prickling, burning, or itching, as well as tremors or even convulsions may follow exposure to appreciable amounts, according to a standard textbook of toxicology.

There is interaction even between the two major groups of insecticides usually thought to be completely distinct in their action. The power of the organic phosphates, those poisoners of the nerve-protective enzyme cholinesterase, may become greater if the body has first been exposed to a chlorinated hydrocarbon which injures the liver. This is because, when liver function is disturbed, the cholinesterase level drops below normal. The added depressive effect of the organic phosphate may then be enough to precipitate acute symptoms. And as we have seen, pairs of the organic phosphates themselves may interact in such a way as to increase their toxicity a hundredfold. Or the organic phosphates may interact with various drugs, or with synthetic materials, food additives–who can say what else of the infinite number of man-made substances that now pervade our world.

The effect of a chemical of supposedly innocuous nature can be drastically changed by the action of another; one of the best examples is a close relative of DDT called methoxychlor (Actually, methoxychlor may not be as free from dangerous qualities as it is generally said to be, for recent work on experimental animals shows a direct action on the uterus and a blocking effect on some of the powerful pituitary hormones–reminding us again that these are chemicals with enormous biological effect. Other work shows that methoxychlor has a potential ability to damage the kidneys.) Because it is not stored to any great extent when given alone, we are told that methoxychlor is a safe chemical. But this is not necessarily true. If the liver has been damaged by another agent, methoxychlor is stored in the body at 100 times its normal rate, and will then imitate the effects of DDT with long-lasting effects on the nervous system. Yet the liver damage that brings this about might be so slight as to pass unnoticed. It might have been the result of any number of commonplace situations–using another insecticide, using a cleaning fluid containing carbon tetrachloride, or taking one of the so-called tranquilizing drugs, a number (but not all) of which are chlorinated hydrocarbons and possess power to damage the liver.

Damage to the central nervous system is not confined to acute poisoning; there may also be delayed effects from exposure. Long-lasting damage to brain or nerves has been reported for methoxychlor and others. Dieldrin, besides its immediate consequences, can have long delayed effects ranging from “loss of memory, insomnia, and nightmares to mania.” Lindane, according to medical findings is stored in significant amounts in the brain and functioning liver tissue may induce “profound and long lasting effects on the central nervous system.” Yet this chemical, a form of benzene hexachloride, is much used in vaporizers, devices that pour a stream of volatilized insecticide into homes, offices, restaurants.

The organic phosphates, usually considered only in relation to their more violent manifestations in acute poisoning, also have the power to produce lasting physical damage to nerve tissues and, according to recent findings, to induce mental disorders. Various cases of delayed paralysis have followed use of one or another of these insecticides. A bizarre happening in the United States during the prohibition era about 1930 was an omen of things to come. It was caused not by an insecticide but by a substance belonging chemically to the same group as the organic phosphate insecticides. During that period some medicinal substances were being pressed into service as substitutes for liquor, being exempt from the prohibition law. One of these was Jamaica ginger. But the United States Pharmacopia product was expensive, and bootleggers conceived the idea of making a substitute Jamaica ginger. They succeeded so well that their spurious product responded to the appropriate chemical tests and deceived the government chemists. To give their false ginger the necessary tang they introduced a chemical known as triorthocresyl phosphate. This chemical, like parathion and its relatives, destroys the protective enzyme cholinesterase. As a consequence of drinking the bootleggers’ product some 15,000 people developed a permanently crippling type of paralysis of the leg muscles, a condition now called “ginger paralysis.” The paralysis was accompanied by destruction of nerve sheaths and by degeneration of the cells of the anterior horns of the spinal chord.

About two decades later various other organic phosphates came into use as insecticides, as we have seen, and soon cases reminiscent of the ginger paralysis episode began to occur. One was a greenhouse worker in Germany who became paralyzed several months after experiencing mild symptoms of poisoning on a few occasions after using parathion. Then a group of three chemical plant workers developed acute poisoning from exposure to other insecticides in this group. They recovered under treatment, but ten days later two of them developed muscular weakness in the legs. This persisted for 10 months in one; the other, a young woman chemist, was more severely affected, with paralysis in both legs and some involvement of the hands and arms. Two years later when her case was reported in a medical journal she was still unable to walk.

The insecticide responsible for these cases has been withdrawn from the market, but some of those now in use may be capable of harm. Malathion (beloved by gardeners) has induced severe muscular weakness in experiments on chickens. This was attended (as in ginger paralysis) by destruction of the sheaths of the sciatic and spinal nerves.

All these consequences of organic phosphate poisoning, if survived, may be a prelude to worse. In view of the severe damage they inflict upon the nervous system, it was perhaps inevitable that these insecticides would eventually be linked with mental disease. That link has recently been supplied by investigators at the University of Melbourne and Prince Henry’s Hospital in Melbourne, who reported on 16 cases of mental disease. All had a history of prolonged exposure to organic phosphorus insecticides. Three were scientists checking the efficacy of sprays; 8 worked in greenhouses; 5 were farm workers. Their symptoms ranged from impairment of memory to schizophrenic and depressive reactions. All had normal medical histories before the chemicals they were using boomeranged and struck them down.

Echoes of this sort of thing are to be found, as we have seen, widely scattered throughout medical literature, sometimes involving chlorinated hydrocarbons, sometimes the organic phosphates. Confusion, delusions, loss of memory, mania–a heavy price to pay for the temporary destruction of a few insects, but a price that will continue to be exacted as long as we insist upon using chemicals that strike directly at the nervous system.

Portions taken from pages 191 – 198

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