CDC report ‘marred by … flaws’

The Centers for Disease Control study sounded reassuring when it was made public in 2007. Hurricane Katrina survivors didn’t have to worry about reports that there were harmful levels of formaldehyde in their trailers. The air was safe to breathe and the contamination would not reach a “level of concern” as long they kept the windows open.

Today, senior CDC officials acknowledge that the study was based on a fundamental scientific error and that it failed to mention that formaldehyde can cause cancer.

An agency standard says that people exposed to as little as .03 parts of formaldehyde per million parts of air for more than two weeks can suffer constricted airways, headaches and rashes. The trailers all measured well above that level.

But the scientists who conducted the study used a much different agency standard to evaluate the formaldehyde present in the trailers: Instead of .03 parts per million, they said health dangers wouldn’t occur until the substance reached .3 ppm, 10 times greater than the long-term standard.

According to the CDC, exposure to that amount for just a few hours can trigger respiratory problems and other ailments.

The story of how Katrina survivors suffered in their government-provided trailers has been told many times in congressional hearings and in the media. But it has been unclear until now why government officials continued reassuring residents that the trailers were safe at least a year after they should have been warning them to get out.

ProPublica, an investigative journalism organization based in New York, reconstructed how CDC and other government agencies handled the formaldehyde problem by examining hundreds of pages of documents, interviewing former and current CDC officials and obtaining an advance copy of a congressional report.

The documents and interviews show that government officials began to worry about lawsuits and legal liability soon after trailer occupants began complaining about the strange smells in their temporary homes.

(On Friday, a federal judge in New Orleans ruled that there is evidence that FEMA delayed its response to the concerns about formaldehyde because the agency was worried about lawsuits, The Associated Press reported. U.S. District Court Judge Kurt Englehardt, who is hearing cases brought by about 800 storm evacuees, also ruled that the government is not immune to such lawsuits. The AP report said that attorneys representing the plaintiffs are asking the judge to certify a class action on behalf of thousands of people.)

The 40-page congressional report, scheduled to be released this week by Democrats on the Science and Technology Committee’s subcommittee on investigations and oversight for the U.S. House, concludes that the CDC’s reaction to the formaldehyde problem was “marred by scientific flaws, ineffective leadership, a sluggish response to inform trailer residents of the potential risk they faced and an abysmal lack of urgency to actually remove them from harm’s way.”

The report also chronicles the efforts of Christopher De Rosa, a senior CDC toxicologist, to warn top officials that the report was flawed.

Joe Little, one of the CDC scientists who conducted the study, said they chose the higher .3 parts per million standard because it is the lowest level that is likely to cause a health “effect.” The .03 level, he said, is a “risk” level, meaning that illness is less certain. “Risk and having an effect are two different things,” he said.

The first warning that the study was flawed came from De Rosa —- who at the time headed the Division of Toxicology and Environmental Medicine within the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) —- on Feb. 27, 2007.

As soon as De Rosa saw the report, he sent an e-mail to Howard Frumkin, director of ATSDR, and his deputy, Tom Sinks, warning that the report downplayed health risks because it didn’t mention the long-term and potentially cancer-causing effects of formaldehyde exposure. He attached a letter to the e-mail, suggesting they send it to Rick Preston, the FEMA lawyer who had asked ATSDR for the report. It said that “failure to communicate this issue is possibly misleading, and a threat to public health.”

De Rosa told congressional investigators he was so alarmed by the report’s omissions that he didn’t see the bigger error: That it used the wrong safety standard.

Eventually De Rosa’s warning made its way to Preston, who said he put it in his file and “never shared it with anyone.”

FEMA continued telling the public that the formaldehyde would not harm people as long as they kept their windows open. And ATSDR never corrected those misstatements. “I was not aware of how FEMA was using the information in our report until the middle of ‘07,” Frumkin said. “We really don’t and can’t routinely monitor what other agencies and organizations say or do with our information.”

De Rosa sent more e-mails to Frumkin and other CDC officials, urging them to do more to warn trailer residents of the dangers. In October 2007, De Rosa was removed from his job and reassigned. He is contesting that reassignment in ongoing mediation hearings.

When questioned about De Rosa’s status, Frumkin told Congress that “the reassignment of Dr. De Rosa was not in any way retaliation for his actions in this case. His reassignment was a result of personnel actions that are best not discussed in a public forum like this.”

Throughout his 27-year CDC career, De Rosa had received positive performance evaluations. But in 2007, his bosses criticized his work on two controversial projects, one on industrial waste in Michigan’s great lakes and the other on a cancer-causing chemical found in some cosmetics.

Although Little and the other scientist who conducted the formaldehyde study normally reported to De Rosa, they told the subcommittee investigators that Frumkin had instructed them to send all their Katrina-related studies directly to his office in order to get them out faster. But Frumkin told Congress that the scientists still should have sent the report to De Rosa and that De Rosa missed opportunities to play a stronger role in the process.

Sinks told Congress that he should have noticed that the report used the wrong standard to evaluate the risk to the trailer occupants. “I believe everybody who reviewed that document had the opportunity to see that, and we missed that,” he said.

In February of this year, the CDC revealed preliminary results of new tests showing that formaldehyde levels in many of the trailers were high enough to increase the risk of cancer and could cause respiratory illnesses. The final results showed levels surpassing .1 ppm —- more than three times the .03 ppm standard for yearlong exposure —- in 41 percent of the trailers tested.

FEMA began moving people out of the units in February. Today more than 100,000 of the trailers sit unused at sites across the country.

ABOUT PROPUBLICA

> ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. For a more detailed explanation of how the flawed CDC report came to be written, go to www.propublica.org.