Neighbors of Vast Hog Farms Say Foul Air Endangers Their Health - NY

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New York Times

 

Neighbors of Vast Hog Farms Say Foul Air Endangers Their Health

 

May 11, 2003

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

 

 

 

PAULDING, Ohio, May 8 - Robert Thornell says that five

years ago an invisible swirling poison invaded his family

farm and the house he had built with his hands. It robbed

him of his memory, his balance and his ability to work. It

left him with mood swings, a stutter and fistfuls of pills.

He went from doctor to doctor, unable to understand what

was happening to him.

 

 

The 14th doctor finally said he knew the source of the

maladies: cesspools the size of football fields belonging

to the industrial hog farm a half-mile from the Thornell

home.

 

 

"I never related it to the hogs at all," said Mr. Thornell,

who is now 55.

 

 

A growing number of scientists and public health officials

around the country say they have traced a variety of health

problems faced by neighbors of huge industrial farms to

vast amounts of concentrated animal waste, which emit toxic

gases while collecting in open-air cesspools or evaporating

through sprays. The gases, hydrogen sulfide and ammonia,

are poisonous.

 

 

The waste is collected in pools because the concentration

of hogs is so high that it must be treated before it can be

used as fertilizer.

 

 

Livestock trade officials and Bush administration

regulators say more study is needed before any cause and

effect can be proved. But Dr. Kaye H. Kilburn, a professor

at the University of Southern California who studies the

effects of toxic chemicals on the brain, said evidence

strongly supported a link between the farms and the

illnesses.

 

 

In Iowa, one of the country's two biggest pork-producing

states (North Carolina is the other), state environment

officials started conducting air quality tests for hydrogen

sulfide and ammonia at six neighborhood locations around

hog farms last month. Brian Button, an air information

specialist with the state, said preliminary data showed

that 22 times in April, the gases exceeded the state's

recommended air standards of 15 parts per billion of

hydrogen sulfide and 150 parts per billion of ammonia,

averaged over an hour. The highest level recorded for

hydrogen sulfide was 70 parts per billion, a level that

would have exceeded the air standards for at least six

other states.

 

 

Dr. Kilburn, who runs a business diagnosing neurological

disorders, said that over the last three years he had seen

about 50 patients, including Mr. Thornell and his wife,

Diane, who had suffered neurological damage he judged to be

a result of hydrogen sulfide poisoning from industrial

farms. The Thornells are considering a lawsuit based on his

work.

 

 

"The coincidence of people showing a pattern of impairment

and being exposed to hydrogen sulfide arising from lagoons

where hog manure is stored and then sprayed on fields or

sprayed into the air" makes a connection "practically

undeniable," Dr. Kilburn said in an interview.

 

 

Industrial farms often house thousands, if not tens of

thousands, of hogs, which generate millions of gallons of

waste each year. Runoff and water pollution have been the

focus of many of the government and academic studies of

such farms' environmental impact.

 

 

In comparison, little has been done by federal or state

environmental officials to monitor or limit air pollution

from these farms. The Agriculture Department and the

Environmental Protection Agency have formed a joint

committee to look at farm air pollution.

 

 

Around industrial hog farms across the country, people say

their sickness rolls in with the wind. It brings headaches

that do not go away and trips to the emergency room for

children whose lungs suddenly close up. People young and

old have become familiar with inhalers, nebulizers and

oxygen tanks. They complain of diarrhea, nosebleeds,

earaches and lung burns.

 

 

Paul Isbell of Houston, Miss., started experiencing

seizures after a hog farm moved in down the road. Jeremiah

Burns of Hubbardston, Mich., now carries a six-pound oxygen

tank with him. Kevin Pearson of Meservey, Iowa, carried a

towel in his car because he vomited five or six times a

week on his way to work. Julie Jansen's six children

suffered flulike symptoms and diarrhea when farms moved

into their neighborhood in Renville, Minn. One of Ms.

Jansen's daughters was found by Dr. Kilburn to have

neurological damage. She has problems with balance and has

lost some feeling in her fingers.

 

 

Public health officials have been cautious in drawing a

clear link from hydrogen sulfide to neurological damage,

though they say low-level exposure has been connected to

fatigue, loss of appetite, headaches, poor memory,

dizziness and other health problems.

 

 

"In community exposures, when they are exposed to a mixture

of chemicals - hydrogen sulfide included - there have been

neurological effects reported as well," said Selene Chou,

who manages the hydrogen sulfide toxicological profile for

the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a

sister agency of the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention.

 

 

"Based on what I see, there could be neurological effects,

but we don't know at what low level of chronic exposure,"

Ms. Chou said. "That information is badly needed, because

communities have experienced these effects."

 

 

The agricultural industry, backed by some government

officials, contends that these health effects are at best

poorly documented. They say that scientific studies have

relied too much on the testimony of the people with medical

problems, and that there is no way to prove that those

problems are directly attributable to the farms.

 

 

"The health concern issues raised by the residents are

totally unfounded," said Ron Prestage, an owner of Prestage

Farms, the target of two suits filed by Mississippi

residents. "There has never been a neighbor of a farm who

has come forward with any documentation of a health problem

of any kind."

 

 

Ohio pork producers agree.

 

 

"I do not think there is any way that it can be proven that

that hog farm, which is a half-mile away, has any effect,"

said Dick Isler, the executive vice president of the Ohio

Pork Producers Council, who said he knew about Mr.

Thornell's case. Mr. Isler said studies showed that "any

time you are more than a hundred feet away it is not a

problem."

 

 

Residents say they do not have difficulty proving that they

are ill - their medications and oxygen tanks demonstrate

that. They acknowledge that for many symptoms, the link to

the farms is circumstantial. But in the most extreme cases,

they say the evidence of a link is clear.

 

 

Bush administration officials are negotiating with

lobbyists for the large farms to establish voluntary

monitoring of air pollution, which will give farm operators

amnesty for any Clean Air Act violations while generating

data that will enable regulators to track the type and

source of pollutants more accurately.

 

 

"We are negotiating with industry to work on capturing

better information as to what emissions factors are in

play," said J. P. Suarez, who is in charge of enforcement

for the environmental agency.

 

 

Growing layers of lawsuits, government reports and

regulatory tussles on the state and federal levels are

signs of increasing tensions. Some 1,800 residents of

Mississippi have filed class-action lawsuits against

factory farms, and the state health agency has put a

moratorium on new ones. In response to citizen complaints,

a few states, including Texas and Minnesota, have set

pollution standards aimed at the farms. Iowa's state

environmental agency recently announced that it would

institute new pollution regulations affecting the farms.

But the state legislature, under industry pressure,

nullified those regulations last week, saying they were

overreaching.

 

 

State and federal efforts to regulate the water pollution

from factory farms may actually cause the farms to divert

chemicals into the air, the National Academy of Sciences

says. Farms have adopted the practice of spraying liquid

manure into the air when cesspool levels get too high, a

practice that creates mists that are easily carried by the

wind.

 

 

When Mr. Thornell first became ill, he said, he thought he

had suffered a nervous breakdown. Unable to go back to work

as a schoolteacher, he retired on disability at 53. For two

years, he had no idea what was happening. Then he learned

about Dr. Kilburn's research while watching television. He

sent an e-mail message to Dr. Kilburn, who told him to come

to Pasadena for a diagnosis.

 

 

The Thornells, who had never been to California, drove all

the way, with a stop at the Grand Canyon. The diagnosis for

both Mr. Thornell and his wife was irreversible brain

injuries from the hydrogen sulfide gas.

 

 

Mrs. Thornell said her husband had lost his energetic

smile. Now he speaks slowly and often loses his train of

thought. He does not drive far from the house by himself,

because he often gets lost.

 

 

"It's like I have a 2.1 gigahertz body with a 75 megahertz

mind," Mr. Thornell said. "I feel like collateral damage."

 

 

Mrs. Thornell added, "It's the price we pay for cheap

food."

 

 

Over the last 20 years, the industrialization of

agriculture, especially the emergence of large-scale

livestock farms, has raised concerns about pollution in

rural areas.

 

 

"It is no longer the mom-and-pop operation it used to be,"

said Viney Aneja, a professor of marine, earth and

atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University who

has studied factory farms' air pollution. "This is a

factory. Treat it as one. It should be under the same

constraints as a chemical operation."

 

 

Some former government employees said industry pressure had

limited their ability to study and combat the problem.

 

 

Former Environmental Protection Agency prosecutors said

they started looking at air pollution from factory farms in

1998, but political appointees issued a directive in early

2002 that effectively stymied new cases. "You had decisions

about enforcement that were being made on the political

level without any input from the enforcement," said Michele

Merkel, a prosecutor who resigned from the agency in

protest.

 

 

Eric Schaeffer, the former director of civil enforcement at

the environmental agency, said Agriculture Department

officials tried to exert influence to protect the

industrial farms. "They essentially wanted veto power," he

said.

 

 

Lisa Harrison, a spokeswoman for the environmental agency,

said, "Given the sensitivity of air emissions issues,

headquarters is directly involved in the decision-making

process." She said enforcement decisions were made within

the agency, and enforcement was continuing.

 

 

At the Agriculture Department, officials have reclassified

research topics relating to industrial farms and health,

including antibiotic-resistant pathogens, as "sensitive."

As a result, at least one scientist, James Zahn, has left

the department. "It was a choke hold on objective

research," said Dr. Zahn, who had studied swine and

bacteria until he left last fall. "Originally we were

praised for the work we were doing. All of a sudden we were

told, no more antibiotic resistance work."

 

 

Internal department e-mail messages made available by the

Natural Resources News Service show that Dr. Zahn's

superiors barred him from presenting research at a

conference in Iowa in 2002. A message from a supervisor

advised Dr. Zahn that "politically sensitive and

controversial issues require discretion."

 

 

Julie Quick, an Agriculture Department spokeswoman, said

that Dr. Zahn was discouraged from speaking about his

research because he is not an expert on how the compounds

in swine manure affect human health.

 

 

Disputes within regulatory agencies seem distant concerns

to the Thornells, who have been advised by Dr. Kilburn to

move out of their home. Their neurological damage is

irreversible, but they can prevent it from getting worse,

he told them.

 

 

"If I could sell the house, I would move in a second, but I

don't know where to go," Mr. Thornell said. "I've lived

here for 44 years. This is home to me."

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/health/11HOGS.html?ex=1053614351&ei=1&en=4d2c

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