Airborne Toxic Chemicals
Exceed EPA Standards by Ten Times

SETH BORNSTIEN / Knight Ridder 19apr02

Washington - Americans have a cancer risk from toxic chemicals in the air that's 10 times the EPA's acceptable level, and 12 million people experience risks 100 times higher, according to an unreleased EPA study.

"Millions of people live in areas where air toxics may pose potentially significant health concerns," says the report, portions of which were obtained by Knight Ridder. "Although air quality continues to improve, we feel that more needs to be done to reduce the potential for harm from exposures to these chemicals."

The Environmental Protection Agency's study, whose release is nearly a year overdue, modeled the effects of such chemicals as benzene, formaldehyde, arsenic and chromium. These chemicals are produced mainly by vehicles and industry and cause an estimated 150 cancer cases yearly. An additional 350 cases a year are thought to be caused by chemicals in diesel exhaust.

Overall, the added cancer risk from toxic chemicals in the air - most of them lung cancer cases, experts think - is small, on the order of one case per 10,000. By comparison, smokers have a one-in-nine lifetime lung cancer rate, according to the American Cancer Society.

The EPA considers acceptable an added lifetime cancer risk of one in 1 million. For diesel exhaust, the added risk of getting cancer is between 10 and 1,000 times higher. For the other chemicals, the national average risk is 45 times higher.

Release of the report is being slowed to allow EPA Administrator Christie Whitman to review it, air quality officials said. EPA spokesman Dave Ryan declined to comment on the study, which is based on data taken across the country in 1996.

Localized figures for exposure to toxic chemicals were not available in the materials provided to Knight Ridder, but will be contained in the final report. Based on a one-page map of the United States that depicts the risks, they appear to be concentrated in metropolitan areas.

The Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes coastline, much of the Gulf Coast and Florida's central and southern coasts appear to have high risks. So do central and northern Minnesota, central and western North and South Carolina and southern California.

Other hotspots are around San Francisco, Atlanta, Phoenix, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Little Rock, Ark., St. Louis and Kansas City.

While the entire nation has a risk at least 10 times above the EPA acceptable level, 12 million people experience risk 100 times higher.

Because they've gone unnoticed, compared to soot and smog, toxic chemicals in air are "the sleeping horror," said private atmospheric chemist Paulette Middleton who reviewed the data as part of the EPA's Scientific Advisory Board.

"Some of the impacts of these hazardous air pollutants could be a lot worse than some of the things we tend to worry about, like ozone," she said.

Several states already are curbing air toxic chemicals. California is switching its public vehicle fleets from diesel to other fuels. Connecticut banned vehicles with diesel engines from idling near school children.

Diesel-powered school buses make risks to children especially high, said David R. Brown, a toxicology consultant on the EPA study.

"Air toxins is no longer a mystery," Brown said. "We know where it's coming from....We know what it's doing to us. Now all we have to do is fix it."

While the Bush administration's position is not known, its top regulatory policymaker, John Graham, founded the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis to assess environmental risks and has brought its way of thinking to the White House.

According to David Ropeik, the Harvard Center's director of risk communications, risk from airborne toxic chemicals is minimal. "The likelihood of that happening to you is practically zero."

But environmental risks concern people more than smoking, for example, because they "are imposed on us and not chosen; they are man-made and not natural," Ropeik said.

Environmental groups put it differently: People can stop smoking, but they can't stop breathing.

Officials of industries that face regulation questioned the validity of the science behind the EPA's findings.

"After many, many years of research, the EPA has still not been able to classify diesel exhaust and diesel particulates as a known carcinogen," said Joe Suchecki, spokesman for the Engine Manufacturers Association, a Chicago-based group representing diesel engine makers.

The National Institutes of Health in May 2000 declared that diesel exhaust belonged on the government's cancer list because it was "reasonably anticipated to be human carcinogen." The finding was based on occupational exposures of railroad workers, mine workers, bus garage workers and trucking company workers.

"The bottom line here is there is an air toxics concern out there and there's a need for states and the EPA regulations to begin addressing them," said Henry Anderson, chief of environmental and occupational health for Wisconsin's Department of Health and an EPA Science Advisory Board member.

An EPA regulation to reduce sulfur in diesel fuel and reduce other toxic emissions from on-road diesel vehicles will go into effect in 2007. Off-road diesel engines - such as farm and construction equipment - are a major contributor of toxic chemicals, according to the EPA, but are not yet regulated.