HUFFINGTON
08.12.12
IT’S A REALLY NASTY,
COMPLICATED MIXTURE OF
CHEMICALS THAT ARE
PRETTY WELL RECOGNIZED
TO BE HAZARDOUS.
Had the school been following the consent order, Graham
adds, they would have been filing progress reports to the DEC,
which might have raised parents’
awareness as well. In effect, he
says, the school made it harder
for the community to know about
the order by virtue of not following through on it.
Max Costa, chair of environmental medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center,
says tying cancers to environmental factors is notoriously difficult.
“There’s all these things that
have to be met to prove causation,” Costa explains, “It has to be
the exposure was high enough, the
agent can cause the disease, the
time element has to be right.”
PAHs have typically been associated with cancers of the lungs,
skin and bladder, but existing
research has yet to show ties to
several of those found in Briarcliff. The time it takes for chemical exposures to cause cancerous
growths in the body is estimated
to be 20 to 30 years, though
Costa says leukemia can take less
time to develop.
The Briarcliff cases don’t conform with these timeframes because the children’s diagnoses
surfaced relatively early after
their use of the fields. However,
Costa notes that children are
developmentally different from
adults and says that most of the
studies on cancer and chemical
exposure focus on the occupational hazards adult men face.
“This is not a good thing to do,
use a waste dump site to build
a ball field for kids to play on,”
Costa says. “Whoever did this is
an idiot. I don’t care how much
the levels are or what could have
happened: it’s playing with a time
bomb and you don’t know.”
But Logan Spector, a pediat-
SUDDEN
DEATH