The News, Briefly	Feds suppress report on Great Lakes toxins

■ Feds suppress report on Great Lakes toxins: Two weeks ago the Center for Public Integrity obtained and released a suppressed federal report on public health conditions and exposure to toxic substances throughout the Great Lakes region. The report, titled “Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great Lakes Areas of Concern,” was intended to be released in July 2007 but was withheld at the last minute by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which produced the report. The 400-page document, an aggregation of existing studies requested by the International Joint Commission in 2001, identifies more than 15,000 instances in which contaminants of concern were found at higher than accepted levels; without positing a causal relationship, the report also identified numerous instances of elevated infant mortality rates, low birth weights and premature births, as well as elevated cancer and cancer mortality rates among populations living nearby these areas of concern.

A CDC scientist who pushed for the immediate release of the report in July, Dr. Christopher De Rosa, was subsequently demoted and banned from speaking to the media. De Rosa said the CDC’s failure to publish the report gave “the appearance of the censorship of science.”

The chapter on Lake Erie is the longest by far, even though the study skips over most of Buffalo, Tonawanda and Niagara Falls: There are no areas of concern, according to this study, between the poisoned housing development of Hickory Woods in South Buffalo and Eighteen Mile Creek, which empties into Lake Ontario at the sleepy hamlet of Olcott. This leaves out a number of areas that ought to be of concern to Western New Yorkers, from the former Buffalo Color site in Buffalo’s Seneca Babcock neighborhood to the scorched earth of Niagara Falls’ industrial corridors and landfills along Buffalo and Royal Avenues, among many others.

To read excerpts of the report, visit the Center for Public Integrity’s Web site: publicintegrity.org.