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THE SPREADING MENACE OF PCB New reports make it dear that the presence of this man-made chemical in food and water is a nationwide peri1 demanding quick action, not snappy-patter routines by some hesitant bureaucrats by ROBERT H. BOYLE There was ironic laughter in the cof isms, ranging from invertebrates to man fee shop of Chicago's Pick-Con (SI, Sept. I). In 1968 an estimated 1,200 gress Hotel last Friday when NathanielJapanese came down with Yttsho disease P. Reed, Assistant Secretary of the In after using rice oil heavily contaminated terior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, with PCBs. The clinical effects included glanced at the menu and said, '`Ah, fresh stillbirths, undersized infants, bone and salmon sandwich!" Only an hour before, joint deformities and various neurolog al the concluding session of the Nation ical disorders including loss of libido. al Conference on Polychlorinated Biphe In this country, in a recent experiment nyls (PCBs), Reed had delivered a blis on laboratory rats, PCBs caused liver tering speech on PCB contamination of cancer. Last week in Chicago the scien fish, including Great Lakes salmon. tist in charge of that experiment, Dr. "The problem is a national problem," Renate D. Kimbrough of the U.S. Pub Reed had emphasized to some 400 sci lic Health Service, delivered a paper in entists, bureaucrats and conservationists. which she warned, "Because of these "I am -deeply shocked by the pervasive findings in experimental animals, inges ness of PCBs; they arc literally every tion of PCBs in humans must be cur where. I am very troubled by the exceed tailed." The EPA estimates that about ingly high levels found in fish in all our half the American public now carries drainage systems, and 1 do not mean just around with it from one to three parts the Hudson and the entire Great Lakes per million of PCBs in its fatty (issues. system, but the Mcrrimacand Connect Another speaker at the Chicago meet icut rivers of the Atlantic Coast, the Mis ing was Dr. James R. Allen of the Uni sissippi and Ohio rivers of the Midwest, versity of Wisconsin Medical School, the Columbia River system in the north who fed eight female rhesus monkeys a west, the Sacramento in the West, the Rio diet that included 2.5 ppm of Aroclor Grande and other Gulf Coast streams 1248 (one of the nine trademarked PCB ... even the Yukon in Alaska." compounds made by the sole domes Reed called for the elimination of all tic manufacturer, Monsanto Industrial sources of PCBs in the U.S. environment Chemicals Company) for six months. within three years. With a candor unusu They were then bred to normally fed al for a federal official, he criticized the male rhesus monkeys. Two females rc- sponsor of the conference, the U.S. En sorbed their fetuses, one suffered a still vironmental Protection Agency, which birth, and the five infants born were all has done little protecting, and (he U.S. undersized. Two of the infants died while Food and Drug Administration, which nursing. The three survivors are now has established a "tolerance" level of five eight months old, and although (hey have parts per million of PCBs in fish for hu been on a PCB-free diet for four months, man consumption. preliminary observations by Dr. Diane "Quite frankly," Reed ended his H. Norback, a colleague of Dr. Allen, speech, "I am thoroughly disgusted by indicate that the youngsters are hyper- the gnashing oT teeth, wailing and rub ativc. bing of hands. To the agencies which The PCB problem, which has been have the enforcement responsibilities, a growing for years, began to receive na word on behalf of the bewildered but tionwide attention last summer when concerned American people--get on with Ogden R. Reid, commissioner of the it'." New York State Department of Environ PCBs arc chlorinated hydrocarbon mental Conservation, warned the public compounds used by industries through against eating striped bass from the Hud out the world because of their resistance son River or salmon from Lake Ontar to heat. More durable than DDT, PCBs io. Reid issued his warning after receiv are a proved menace to animal organ ing a report from EPA scientists who noted that two General Electric plants at Hudson Falls and Fort Edward were discharging at least 30 pounds of PCBs per day into the river. In September, Reid brought action against G.E. to force the company to reduce its discharge to two pounds a day by Dec. 31 and to zero by Sept. 30 of next year. The action is now before a state hearing officer, and G.E. is contesting it all the way. It is worth not ing, however, that in response to a state interrogatory before the hearing began, G.E. admitted, "During the past 15 years, 49 employees have reported to the , dispensaries complaining of allergic dcrmatitis, diagnosed as having been caused by contact with PCBs." No one really knew that PCBs were present in the world environment until 1966 when Sweden's Dr. Soren Jensen isolated and identified the compounds that had been battling researchers work ing on DDT residues. PCBs were then commonly u^ed in a wide variety of ev eryday products, such as paints, sealants and caulking compounds. In 1971 Mon santo announced it would restrict sales of PCBs to use in so-called "closed cy cle" systems, such as capacitors and transformers. U.S. industry turns out more than 100 million capacitors a year, including those for home air condition ers. When junked, such an item is commonly taken to a dump, where the chance exists that PCBs can leach through the soil to bodies of water. In western New York slate several companies have been draining PCBs from old transformers, mixing them with crankcase oil and sell ing the gunk to municipalities to pul on roads as a dust suppressor. There is also a report the PCBs have been spread on air port runways in Maryland to prevent skidding in wet weather. Beyond such practices, there is the danger that transformers can rupture or leak. According to EPA records available in Chicago, a transformer leak occurred on April 16,1974 on a railroad train running between Philadelphia and Paoli, Pa. From 10 to 100 pounds of PCBs were spilled. The same type of spillage oc- I I j I | I I | , , 1 j i [ \ j > ! n/i/'rS WATER PCB-00042858 currcd on July 5 of last year from a trans former leak in Stamford, Conn. On March 8, 1973, a truck developed a leak in Kingston, Term.,'and 630 gal lons of PCBs were spilled. The contam inated soils were recovered in 11,500 drums and sealed in concrete al a cost of SI.7 million. It was paid by G.E., which was shipping the chemical. Local resi dents also brought damage suits against G.E. and last October a judge awarded them a total of $120,000. The U.S. Department of Defense was involved in a Catch-22 1TB episode with other government agencies in Seattle. On Friday, March 13, 1974 an electrical transformer destined for an Air Force ra dar station in Slicmya, Alaska fell on a pier in Seattle and 26S gallons of PCBs bled into the Duwamish River. Defense refused responsibility; so did the U.S. Coast Guard, which has the primary ob ligation to clean up orl and other harbor spills. The Coast Guard said PCBs were not among the chemicals it was required to recover. The EPA had to hire divers who brought up 70 to 90 gallons of the compound, and in February of this year the Defense Department finally agreed to pay the cost, $148,000,. But recovery from the Duwamish spill is far from ended. EPA officials estimate 60 to 80 gallons remalin in the riverbed, and Defense lias assigned the job to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps is scheduled to begin dredging 30,000 cubic yards of river bottom some time around the first of the year. Esti mated cost of the project is between a quarter and half a million dollars. Although (he U.S. Food and Drug Ad ministration allows up to five parts per million of PCBs in fish, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regards the presence of a half part per million (.5 ppm) in a fish egg as a sure sign of trouble in a water way. According to Charles R. Walker, Senior Environmental Scientist with the Service, who delivered two papers in Chi cago, trouble spots oh the Atlantic Coast range from the Mcrrihiac River in Mass achusetts to the St. Johns in Florida. On the Gulf Coast afflicted rivers extend from the Rio Grande cast to the Apa lachicola in the Florida panhandle. The Mississippi-Missouri system has its hot spots. On the West Coast, the Sacramen to, Rogue, Columbia and Snake rivers have problems and they abound in the Great Lakes region and in the St. Law rence. Last week, Canadian officials an nounced they were dropping edible fish tolerance levels from 5 ppm to two ppm and might well close the eel fishery in the St. Lawrence. Obviously, some rivers are in worse shape than others. Here are some PCB values for fish sampled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: carp, Cincinnati, Ohio River, 133 ppm; two channel cat fish, Marietta, Ohio, Ohio River, 38-77 ppm; walleye pike, Natrona Heights, Pa., Allegheny River, 35 ppm; \yhite perch, Camden, N.J., Delaware River, 19 ppm; gizzard shad, Elizabethtown, N.C., Cape Fear River, 23 ppm; small-mouth buf falo, Redwood, Miss., Yazoo River, 73 ppm; yellow perch, Lowell, Mas$.,.Merrimac River, 98 ppm; goldfish, Pough keepsie, N.Y., Hudson River, 213 ppm. The Fish and Wildlife Service docs not sample every stream in the country--it extends itself to maintain even the 100 monitoring stations in existence--but re search by other agencies reveals other trouble spots. Half the lake trout ana lyzed from Lake George, N.Y. have more than 5 ppm. And eggs of striped bass tak en in 1972 from the Nanticoke and Choptank rivers on the supposedly unspoiled eastern shore of Maryland had PCB lev els (hat ranged from 2.8 to 20 ppm. For a number of years the Fish and Wildlife Service also has been monitoring birds. Every starling tested has contained PCBs. Examination ofmallard and black duck wings show the Atlantic Flyway has the most severe problems, at least for wa terfowl. The mean value for black duck wings is 1.36 ppm, while mallards aver aged 1.26 ppm. The values are slightly lower for the Mississippi Flyway, and lower still for the Central and Pacific. For ail (he damning data produced in Chicago, some bureaucrats acted in bi zarre fashion when their turns came to speak. Walter C. Barber, director of the Standards and Regulations Evaluation Division in the EPA, said, "I don't know what we're going to do." Dr. Albert C. Kolbyc, associate director for Sciences, Bureau of Foods, FDA, said, in all se riousness, "We are the straight men in a bad joke." Dr. Kolbyc is the FDA of- 1 ficial who sets the PCB tolerance levels for human foods. The weeks ahead doubtless will reveal even more grim news about PCBs. A hearing by the House Subcommittee on Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation and the Environment is scheduled to start this month in Washington; and in New York, Ogden Reid continues to push his state hearing. If there is any measufe of comfort in al) this, it is that Soviet bureaucrats must be more inefficient than most of ours. Just recently a delegation of Soviet sci entists visited one of the finest labs in this country. They were shown everything the lab had on PCBs and left loaded down with papers. Before returning home, they stopped at the Soviet embassy in Wash ington, where all the papers were taken away from them. nd 02*21*6 WATER PCB-00042859