Toms River (60 page)

So Bruce Molholt’s arrival in Cuker’s office in mid-1999 came at a propitious moment, just as the lawyers were trying to focus their case where the evidence for causation was strongest, in preparation for settlement negotiations. Cuker had spent the previous eighteen
months investigating all sorts of theories about what might have caused the childhood cancer cluster, including radiation from the Oyster Creek nuclear plant and leaks from Ciba’s ocean pipeline and the old town landfill. Now he and Molholt studied a map showing the home addresses of his sixty clients. There seemed to be a grouping near the Parkway well field, but it was not an obvious cluster; collectively, the sixty cases had just one exposure in common: They all got their drinking water from the Toms River Water Company and its successor, United Water of Toms River. Back in 1996, when he was designing the case-control study, Jerry Fagliano had concluded that if pollution were responsible for the cluster, the water network was the likeliest exposure route. Now, Cuker and Molholt were coming to the same conclusion, spurred by the knowledge that Ciba’s waste had tainted the Holly Street wells in the 1960s and that Union Carbide’s waste had done the same to the Parkway wells in the 1980s and 1990s.

Just a few weeks after Molholt’s arrival in Cuker’s office, the government gave the families’ case a powerful boost. The state health department and the ATSDR finished a new health study for Reich Farm, concluding it was “a public health hazard due to past exposures.” A few months later, they issued an identical finding in a report about Ciba. In both cases, the agencies concluded, dumped chemicals had traveled down a “completed exposure pathway” from the sites to backyard water wells and public wells—and then to the people of Toms River, who were also directly exposed to toxic air emissions from Ciba.
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There were still more steps to go in the government’s investigation, including the completion of Morris Maslia’s water model and its merging with all of Jerry Fagliano’s data on the study children. But the ATSDR’s declarations that toxic pollutants from Ciba and Union Carbide had definitely reached the people of Toms River suggested that the families and their lawyers might be able to wring a financial settlement out of the companies even if the government investigation ultimately did not uncover a strong correlation between cancer risk and exposure to contaminated air or water. Fagliano’s study results would be scientifically meaningful only if he could show that they were statistically significant and therefore very unlikely to be due to chance. If there were a lawsuit, however, the families’ attorneys
would not have to meet such a high standard. A circumstantial case tying the dumped chemicals to the sick children might be enough to convince a jury, which is why the ATSDR’s findings were so helpful to the families.

Mark Cuker set about trying to build a case that he could press no matter how the government investigation turned out. As a first step, he put Molholt to work going through stacks of chemical manifests and government reports to try to identify the specific ingredients of the chemical goulash that had been dumped at Reich Farm and Ciba. One old EPA document—Cuker called it the “purple sludge” report—described a six-foot-thick layer of waste beneath one of the sludge dumps at Ciba. The EPA tested the purple muck and did not detect any of the 130 organic chemicals on its agency’s “target compound” list for Superfund sites.
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The agency’s contractors could see the sludge and they could smell it, but under Superfund rules it did not exist. In fact, only a few of the 156 chemicals and six dyes Ciba was producing in the mid-1980s were on the Superfund target list.
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What that meant to Molholt was that the government’s by-the-book tests of the river water probably missed many Ciba contaminants—just as routine testing of the Parkway wells had missed styrene acrylonitrile trimer, another pollutant too arcane to appear on an EPA checklist.

It took a few months for Molholt to get his bearings amid the avalanche of paper, but he was encouraged by what he read. From a toxicological standpoint, he thought, the families had a pretty good case. There was solid, if indirect, evidence that many of the compounds dumped at Ciba and Reich Farm were capable of inducing cancer. Not one compound out of the hundreds Molholt identified in the wastes dumped at Ciba or Reich Farm had been conclusively shown to cause leukemia or nervous system cancer, the two categories of cancer that were most highly elevated in Toms River.
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But there was plenty of evidence that more than a dozen of those compounds
might
cause tumors in either category.
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The wild card was SAN trimer, which was now being scrutinized for the first time. Toxicity testing of this obscure waste product was supposed to have started in early 1997 but was delayed for more than
a year because Union Carbide had none on hand—indeed, it had not had any since the 1970s, when it stopped combining styrene and acrylonitrile to make plastics. Instead, the company had to synthesize a small amount of SAN trimer from material purchased from one of its competitors, Bayer. The families wanted the EPA to test this newly synthesized trimer, but Union Carbide wanted its contractors to conduct the tests, and the EPA did not insist on maintaining control. Despite being responsible for the safety of more than sixty thousand chemicals in commerce, the EPA almost never conducted its own toxicity tests—and still does not. Instead, it typically restricts its oversight to evaluating tests conducted by manufacturers or manufacturers’ contractors.

A contractor for Union Carbide finished the first toxicity tests on SAN trimer in mid-1999 and concluded that trimer was toxic to rats only at high doses and that it was probably not mutagenic. Actually, the very first round of tests suggested that trimer might damage bacterial DNA and induce chromosomal aberrations in hamsters. But the company had a different lab redo the tests, using a purer sample and rats instead of hamsters, and got the results it was hoping for: no evidence of mutagenicity.
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These were not the tests that mattered, however. Toms River was a cancer cluster; the key question was whether styrene acrylonitrile trimer was a carcinogen. Linda Gillick was determined not to allow Union Carbide to provide that answer, too. She convinced New Jersey’s congressional delegation to petition the federal National Toxicology Program to take over cancer testing of the trimer, and in 1999 the agency agreed.

The twenty-year-old NTP, based in North Carolina, was the most prominent exception to the leave-it-to-industry attitude toward chemical testing that prevailed elsewhere in government. It was a research program that tended to operate like a reform school, taking on the most troubled cases—the most toxic compounds in commerce. The agency specialized in a costly test known as the two-year bioassay, a distant descendant of the cancer induction tests Katsusaburo Yamagiwa had devised for his rabbits in 1913. The NTP’s standard bioassay called for rats or mice to be fed, injected, or gassed with a suspect
compound at one of four dose levels: high, medium, low, and none. After twenty-four months, the survivors were asphyxiated and autopsied to see if animals that received the highest doses had the most health problems, especially malignant tumors. The process was so complex and required so many steps before and after the two-year bioassay that it often took eight years or longer for the agency to render a final verdict. By 1999, the NTP had finished screening more than five hundred compounds, most of them chosen because they were already suspected to cause cancer.
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Slightly more than half of the time, the NTP concluded, a screened chemical was carcinogenic in rats or mice.
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The four hundred mice or rats in a typical two-year bioassay (fifty males and fifty females per dose level) were supposed to serve as surrogates for a much larger population of humans. But it was a highly imperfect surrogacy. The rodents had to be genetically identical to ensure that chemical exposure, not individual variation, was responsible for any detected tumors. Yet they were supposed to be stand-ins for a genetically diverse human population in which some individuals were much more susceptible than others. Just fifty animals were typically tested for each sex and dose, yet they were supposed to be an indicator of risk for a condition so rare that fewer than one in six thousand children were diagnosed with any type of cancer each year. The animals were kept in a carefully controlled environment in which they were exposed to just one hazardous chemical at a time, yet they were supposed to be a surrogate for a human population exposed to hundreds of potentially hazardous compounds every day, though almost always at very low levels.

The NTP resolved these contradictions by giving rodents much higher doses than humans would confront in a real-world environment, even in Toms River. The agency had no other choice; the process was already so complex that a typical two-year bioassay cost at least $2 million, with about half of the cost associated with handling the animals. An improved system, one based on real-world exposure levels, would require tens of thousands of rats or mice instead of a few hundred, at astronomical cost. The only practical choice was to
give very large doses to small groups of rodents, even if that would make the studies less realistic and more vulnerable to criticism from industry.

To Linda Gillick and the rest of the TEACH parents, it was obvious what the NTP should do: It should feed those four hundred rodents a more potent version of the same cocktail of hundreds of contaminants that the families of Toms River had unwittingly drunk via the Parkway wells. True, the contaminant concentrations in that mixture were low—their collective concentration was probably a few hundred parts per billion, though no one knew for sure—but tens of thousands of people, including pregnant women and children, had drunk that low-level mixture for many years. If four hundred genetically identical rodents over just two years were supposed to be surrogates for a much larger and more diverse human population exposed over a much longer period of time, then those animals should get higher doses of the same mixture the families had drunk, the parents thought.

But the NTP was not in the business of testing chemical mixtures. Its two-year bioassay was designed to look for the all-important dose-response relationship, but how could anyone establish three consistent, controlled doses of a mélange of more than 250 compounds, most of them unidentified? How could anyone tell which compounds were benign and which were dangerous? When Union Carbide objected to the families’ proposal to test the entire Parkway mixture, NTP managers quickly sided with the company. The agency had always conducted its toxicology tests one chemical at a time and it was not going to change now, not even for a very high-profile case like Toms River. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection had already given up trying to find out exactly what was in the Parkway water mixture, and now the National Toxicology Program would not even try to find out whether the mixture was carcinogenic.

Instead, everything would come down to styrene acrylonitrile trimer, a chemical that under normal circumstances would be too obscure even to be considered for testing by the NTP. But Toms River, of course, was anything but a typical case. An entire state congressional delegation had taken the very unusual step of asking for the tests, and
the NTP was not about to say no to the same lawmakers who set its budget every year. Besides, SAN trimer did have a disturbing lineage: Both of its key ingredients, styrene and acrylonitrile, had already been linked to cancer in factory studies or animal tests.
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The NTP did agree to one change that made the four hundred caged rats slightly closer surrogates for the families of Toms River. Normally, the agency’s two-year tests involved only adult rodents, which made sense when the program was looking at compounds that were mainly risks to factory workers. But in Toms River, the fear was that SAN trimer might be triggering cancer in children before they were even born. So for this study, the NTP decided to conduct a multigenerational test. Pregnant rats would be fed daily doses of trimer, and after birth the dosing would continue for three weeks while the mothers nursed. The pups would then be fed trimer-laced food every day for two years until they were euthanized and autopsied. The Toms River parents liked this idea: They had been dosed while pregnant, so the rats should be, too.

Still, there were many reasons to doubt whether the rat study would end in a meaningful result. A key concern was that so little SAN trimer was available for testing: only twenty-one kilograms of the smelly, brown gel. This was a major handicap because the most alarming kinds of cancers in Toms River—leukemias and brain tumors—were extremely difficult to find in rodents. Fischer 344 rats, the kind the NTP chose for the trimer tests, were especially poor models for human leukemia because they were naturally prone to a different type of leukemia almost never found in people.
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The NTP picked Fischer rats anyway because they were the best hope of finding brain tumors.
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With more money and more trimer, the NTP could have tested two kinds of rats, or rats and mice, and thus had a chance of finding leukemias, too. It could even have doubled the number of rodents tested and thus increased the tests’ ability to detect even rare brain tumors. But funds were scarce, and Union Carbide was not providing any more trimer.

What the families had envisioned as a broad inquiry into the carcinogenicity of the Parkway well water had narrowed drastically to just one group of cancers—brain and central nervous system
tumors—and just one compound: styrene acrylonitrile trimer. With each narrowing of the investigative lens, the chances of discovering a carcinogenic effect diminished. And now the families would have to wait eight years or longer for any results at all—almost certainly far too long to influence the outcome of the legal case. Floyd Genicola’s discovery of SAN trimer in Parkway water back in 1996 had been electrifying, but now the slow-grinding realities of contested science had set in. Linda Gillick and the TEACH families faced a very long wait for a very uncertain result. They would have to pin their hopes elsewhere.