CONTAMINATING MICHIGAN'S FOOD CHAIN
Fox, Thomas C.
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...But his offer was not taken up by state officials...
...In May, 1974, the State Legislature gutted a bill that would have permitted the state Agriculture Department to order the destruction of PBB-contaminated animals and pay farmers for those animals...
...never systematically warned farmers of the contamination...
...Due to 1977 state legislation, Michigan PBB standards are much stricter now than federal standards...
...The State Legislature also refused to lower the level, and Milliken failed to further pressure the issue...
...more than 30,000 cattle were shot...
...Louis, a town of 4200...
...history...
...By a remarkable coincidence, Fries had experimented with PBB two years earlier...
...PBB has not only entered the Michigan food chain...
...Some calves lived only days after birth...
...This has caused many mothers to wonder if the advantages of breast-feeding their infants still outweigh health risks involved...
...At the same time, he appointed a "blue-ribbon" scientific panel tc study PBB, then failed to push vigorously for any of its recommendations, chief among them that the PBB in food be as low as possible...
...Others mixed molasses with the feed to make it more attractive to the cows...
...In January, 1976, Milliken vetoed a bill to provide low-interest loans for farmers hit by PBB...
...Even before Fries did any tests, he told Halbert by phone that his feed appeared to contain PBB...
...And he called for help—as other farmers did...
...Within months, in the summer of 1973, farmers began to notice their cows did not want to eat and that milk production was falling off dramatically...
...The meat went to the market and to grocery stores...
...A year-and-a-half later, the company also began manufacturing magnesium oxide, a cattle thomas c. pox is on the staff of the Detroit Free Press...
...He called the company, he recalls, only to be told that the feed was good and that no other farmers were complaining...
...still others suffered stomach and intestinal-'disorders...
...In 1977, the U.S...
...PBB had the trade name "Firemaster...
...Six months later, the state Agriculture Commission refused the governor's eventual request to make some PBB reductions in food...
...The FDA still refuses to lower the level of PBB it will permit in food, despite mounting clinical and laboratory evidence that PBB is dangerous to people...
...Shortly after the contamination problem became public in 1974, Dr...
...But PBB continued to show up—even in feeds that did not include magnesium oxide...
...Environmental Protection Agency found PBB in the air, water, fish, soil and human hair in parts of New York and New Jersey, and in catfish in the Ohio river...
...The bottom line was money...
...The result was many farmers never learned they had received tainted feed...
...He knew that the only company in the world to make PBB was Michigan Chemical...
...Meanwhile, Michigan Chemical, plagued by lawsuits, has not only stopped making PBB, but is shutting down its plant in St...
...the toxic chemical has spread beyond the state too...
...The food poisoning can be traced to actions in October, 1971 when the Michigan Chemical Company of St...
...The bags were sent to the Michigan Farm Bureau Services in Battle Creek, a subsidiary of the Michigan Farm Bureau, a huge statewide farmers organization...
...Soon it was learned that PBB residuals were being passed through plant equipment, from the mills that mixed the PBB with the cattle feed...
...No one knows yet, for example, possibly how much PBB has entered the bodies of those living in Michigan...
...most of the rest sick...
...He found none...
...And the list goes on...
...Nearly two years later, the offer was discovered by an aide to a Michigan representative, House Speaker Bobby D. Crim...
...Some began aborting their calves or delivering stillborn...
...And he couldn't get researchers interested in his problems...
...It was about the same time, incidentally, that state Democrats began rumbling that the governor's handling of the contamination would ba a serious issue in the 1978 election...
...Irving J. Selikoff, a specialist on the human health effects of industrial contaminants, offered to come to Michigan to check out the damage...
...He wanted an explanation...
...Cows throughout the state got sick...
...Their skins thickened...
...Such were the results when samples of breast milk were measured for traces of PBB...
...Instead of banning the chemical from food until it could be determined if the food was safe, it allowed tainted products to be sold to the public...
...He can test the same as we can if he's concerned," he told reporters...
...Tests have shown most Michigan residents—as many as 96 percent—carry PBB in their body tissues...
...Again, anything more than spot checks cost additional money...
...Others, meanwhile, suspecting their own herds had been contaminated, frantically sold their sick cattle, swine and chickens...
...Over a third of those tested showed abnormalities such as memory loss, excessive fatigue, diminished sex drive, and lack of coordination...
...Even tested meat samples were not kept off meat counters...
...Michigan Chemical stopped marketing PBB in November, 1974...
...It was not until January, 1974—a half-year after the poison entered the Michigan food chain—that a Michigan Department of Agriculture scientist confirmed the feed's toxicity...
...5000 swine and sheep, 1.5 million chickens, 2600 pounds of butter, 34,000 pounds of milk products, 5 million eggs had to be destroyed...
...Meanwhile, sick cattle were being sold and state officials were making no extraordinary efforts to stop the practice...
...George Fries about his herd and the symptoms they had been showing...
...Instead, they were permitted to be sold mostly as hamburger even before the tests were completed...
...Because many herds were not found and quarantined, some farmers, unaware their herds had been poisoned, consumed contaminated milk and meat and sold their produce to the public...
...Some farmers purchased the PBB bags directly, mixing it with their own grain and feeding it to their herds...
...Their hooves Commonweal: 239 turned upward...
...It is moving to Arkansas because it cannot meet Michigan water pollution standards...
...The announcement of the findings prompted a public outcry for PBB food chain reductions...
...Because of Ball's reluctance to act decisively Michigan consumers are still eating PBB...
...They soon died...
...Department of Agriculture's National Pesticide Degradation Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland...
...It was only in early 1977, after the Selikoff report became public, that Milliken began to work to lower PBB levels in the state...
...It is feared, as well, that PBB will eventually increase cancer risks...
...PBB, it is known, catches in bodily fats, leaving in large amounts only through mothers' breast milk...
...Rick Halbert was one of those farmers...
...Within a month, the first Michigan farm quarantines began...
...But it was clear to state legislators and the Republican governor that lowering PBB tolerance levels meant greater financial losses to the state's farmers...
...half his herd was dead...
...Three days later, on April 29, 1974, Fries told Halbert the suspicion was confirmed...
...The research teams, funded belatedly with $2.25 million by the State Legislature, will try to determine how a little-known but extremely toxic chemical called polybrominated biphenyl, or simply PBB, is affecting peoples' health...
...Others developed serious infections...
...But the control group, used in the study, had also been widely exposed to, and contaminated by, PBB...
...That product sold under the name "Nutrimaster...
...The company has changed its name, and operating as Velsicol Chemical, will go on trial in a Grand Rapids federal court sometime this year, along with Farm Bureau Services, for causing the disaster...
...Milliken now concedes he did not move fast enough in the early critical months after the PBB contamination, explaining he did not regard PBB as a crisis until 1976...
...This contaminated animals on farms that had not previously been exposed to PBB and it widened the poison's reach in the food chain to staggering degrees...
...As for the Michigan Department of Public Health, it organized a short-term study of the PBB contamination shortly after it became public and quickly found that no human health problems could be attributed to the chemical...
...One farmer reported one of his cows dropped dead after eating the feed...
...one-fifth had unusual skin sores and acne...
...Eight farmers, the first of an eventual 500, were told they couldn't move their animals off their farms or sell their products...
...His cows began to lose their hair...
...Degrees that no one then suspected...
...Selikoff studied 1,029 Michigan farmers, their families, and employees of Michigan Chemical...
...Even if convicted, however, the companies will only have to pay fines of $1,000 because the charges are misdemeanors...
...In May, 1973, Michigan Chemical reportedly ran short of bags and placed the normally color-coded chemicals into the same brown paper bags...
...nor is it known exactly how much people can tolerate before they take ill...
...The Agriculture Dept...
...In the Fall of 1973, he watched milk production in his 800-head herd fall off...
...By the Spring of 1974, Halbert had lost $80,000 in production alone...
...He saw his cows develop abscesses...
...At best, the recalls were spotty...
...In some cases, farmers, seeing their cattle grow ill, sold them to rescue their investments...
...Still, tests taken by state officials and scientists at Michigan State University found nothing unusual about the feed...
...Michigan Agriculture Department Director B. Dale Ball never saw the need to warn state farmers or to keep all tainted products off grocery store shelves...
...So, when the bag shortage occurred the only visible difference between the two chemicals was the prefix of their trade names, stenciled on the 50-pound bags in black...
...t opportunities a new orgy of leashed a new :d States which jmerate expanael Blumenthal s incentives for people out of >, like General sico are spend; choice subsig to get in on " according to U.S...
...He finally arrived in November, 1976— three-and-a-half years after the original accident...
...Farmers began to go bankrupt...
...The state did not begin the regular testing of meat being sold to the public until January, 1975—seven months after the contamination had been discovered...
...The Farm Bureau mixed the PBB with livestock feed and then delivered the poisoned feed to dairy farmers throughout Michigan...
...The secondary contamination was further compounded as farmers, selling their ill cattle, sometimes had them ground up to be recycled as livestock feed...
...Much remains to be learned about Michigan's food contamination disaster which began in 1973...
...Suspecting poisoned feed, he traced his feed back through the Farm Bureau Services to Michfgan Chemical...
...Louis, Michigan began marketing PBB as a fireretardant...
...In desperation, he ate some of the feed himself to determine any unusual characteristics...
...Beginning in 1976, the local press, slow at first to pick up the initial significance of the poisoning, began following the PBB problem more carefully...
...feed additive supposed to increase milk production...
...Halbert found two other farmers whose herds were showing similar illnesses...
...From the beginning, the attitudes of Michigan officials, particulary the Michigan Agriculture Department, was to downplay the disaster, to minimize the harmful effects it would have on the environment, on health...
...Finally, his crusade led him to a toxicologist at the U.S...
...It was becoming a political issue...
...At the same time, the Michigan Farm Bureau, besieged by complaining farmers, issued a recall for the feed mix—Dairy 402...
...Halbert immediately notified the Farm Bureau Services...
...Many farmers unknowingly sold and ate highly contaminated meat and milk...
...State officials showed little inclination to bail the farmers out or to even loan them money at low interest rates to save their herds...
...State officials lacked vision, seemingly even concern...
...And farmers became desperate, unable to explain their herds' illnesses...
...But he could not make a diagnosis and suggested, after several visits, that the farmers were unintentionally poisoning their own cows by giving them moldy food...
...His preliminary results issued in January, 1977, revealed neurological abnormalities, unusual skin conditions and gastrointestinal ailments among the farmers and Michigan Chemical employees...
...Researchers will spend most of the year trying to gather information that will have implications for the future health of Michigan residents, and that of the nation as ¦well...
...The three men went to ths Michigan Agriculture Department to make a report and to ask for help...
...A 31-year-old former chemical engineer, Halbert began conducting his own experiments...
...Others even say they got letters in May, 1974, assuring them the feed was safe...
...Within six weeks, half of them died...
...The PBB experience has already taken a devastating toll: Hundreds of Michigan farms were contaminated...
...He fed 12 18-month-old heifers and bulls the contaminated feed...
...Some farmers forced their cattle to eat the poisoned-feed by making certain they went hungry until they did...
...14 April 1978: 240 The FDA's allowable guidelines were one part PBB per million in meat and milk, .1 part per million in eggs...
...FDA tolerance levels run 15 times higher than those allowed in Michigan now, but it took the state nearly three years to do what FDA refused to do, and that is lowering the level enough to keep food tainted with all but minute levels of PBB off the market...
...The aide pressed for Selikoff to come to study PBB...
...In 1975, the state legislature and Milliken turned down a request from state health officials for funding a long-term study on PBB's effect on people...
...Halbert told Dr...
...Ordinarily, the two chemicals do not look alike: magnesium oxide is a fine white powder and PBB comes in pinkish chunks...
...Selikoff touched off demands himself when he told a press conference: "I urge people in Michigan to prod Governor (William) Milliken to lower the levels to as low as he possibly can...
...The record of the U.S...
...He continued to push for an explanation...
...But bureau's efforts were halfhearted...
...Michigan Chemical does not discuss the incident, but it is believed that between ten and 48 50-pound bags of PBB were mistaken for magnesium oxide and were sent out as cattle feed additives...
...Halbert grew furious...
...others abort their calves...
...The story was taking a focus...
...to invest conomy before lucrative such agements, they >wth, on which tern ultimately rooted conflicts irs to extreme ivoid this kind :ooperation beU.S., Western , the Trilateral ut there is still twar economic basis for the as come to an Asians nor the lal analysis, we never learned employment at Mid trade wars CONTAMINATING MICHIGAN'S FOOD CHAIN THOMAS C. FOX Polybrominated biphenyl out of control Sometime in late February, health researchers began to fan out across Michigan to interview and draw blood from 6,000 state residents in an effort to measure for the first time the scope of one of the worst food contaminations m U.S...
...And coupled with that idea was the nagging question of how the state should compensate those losses...
...To date, the best clues to these open-questions come from tests taken in 1976 on 1,029 Michigan farmers who ate large amounts of PBB-contaminated meat and drank tainted milk...
...I can't mail something to every farmer in the state...
...But the situation was getting worse...
...It became widely used in thermal plastics such as television casings...
...Some farmers claim the Farm Bureau never contacted them...
...In 1976, alone, Michigan residents ate an estimated five million to seven million pounds of hamburger contaminated with PBB...
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...The state sent out a vet to the men's farms...
...And it wasn't coming...
...We assume farmers can read and read the paper...
...He even went to an Indiana vet who gave mice the tainted feed to eat...
...Food and Drug Administration is not much better...
...But in late 1971 or early 1972, the company ground the PBB into fine white powder...
...But he could not identify the poisonous agent...
...It won't be until next Fall that researchers will hope to learn just how much damage has been caused to the health of those living in Michigan...
...But after animals within the "safe" limits continued to show symptoms of toxicity, the FDA lowered the level for meat and milk to .3 part per million...
...And Selikoff said he would not come unless invited by them...
Vol. 105 • April 1978 • No. 8
