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By Andrew Schneider
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
November 6, 2007
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/338420_asbestos06.html
Just a month after the Senate with great fanfare passed the first
legislation to ban disease-causing asbestos, public health
officials, government regulators and advocates for asbestos victims
are increasingly speaking out in opposition to the bill they once
supported.
The bill originally imposed a total ban on asbestos, and that's
the version that the public health experts testified in support of.
But between the hearing in June and the Senate vote last month, ban
supporters say the legislation was watered down to appease powerful
lobbyists and industry. Many asbestos-containing products now
aren't covered by the ban at all.
Nonetheless, says Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the ban is "a
major step forward, and I passionately wish it covered all asbestos
products." "If I was just Patty Murray and I didn't
have to worry about getting other votes or a Republican president
or that I have a one-vote majority in the United States Senate,
I'd have a 100 percent ban," Murray said last week.
Staffers for Murray and Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, who
co-sponsored the legislation, insist that the Environmental
Protection Agency "fully supports the bill as passed" and
the agency's personnel were closely involved throughout the
process.
Not so, say agency scientists and the EPA's legislative office.
While the EPA said it had "no public position on the
legislation," documents obtained by the Seattle P-I show the
agency has "significant concern" that the ban doesn't
go far enough.
In a draft of a letter prepared for the House Committee on Energy
and Commerce, which will hold the hearings on the Senate-passed
bill, the EPA quickly went to the issue that is concerning much of
the public health community: "To protect public health and the
environment from asbestos hazards, the ban should target any
products in which asbestos is intentionally added or knowingly
present as a contaminant," read the evaluation, which was to
be signed by EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.
But last month, the White House Office of Management and Budget
rejected the entire document and told the EPA it could not submit
it. Government scientists charged that the OMB action was another
example of the White House putting politics over science.
But the EPA did not buckle.
In comments prepared this week for Congress, the EPA scientists
repeated that the ban should apply to "any product to which
asbestos is deliberately added or used, or in which asbestos is
otherwise present in any concentration."
This definition is precisely what businesses, road builders, the
owners of mines and pits where asbestos-contaminated sand, stone
and ore is still dug, managed to get deleted.
The lobbyists also wanted to control how the research the
legislation demanded would be done.
The bill says that a study would be done to collect scientific
evidence to determine the cancer-causing hazard to health from
products not covered by the ban.
"I've got to tell you, (industry lobbyists) tried to back
me off the study more times then you can know," Murray said.
"The Stone, Sand and Gravel Association demanded their own
scientists do the study, be at the table. No way," Murray
said. "If you put that in here, I'm walking away from
it."
What the bill won't do
Here are some of the effects of the last-minute changes in the
Senate bill:
# An epidemiologist with the Connecticut health department told the
Consumer Product Safety Commission earlier this year that asbestos
was found in modeling clay that children were using in art classes.
The art clay, the health official wrote, contained
asbestos-contaminated talc from the R.T. Vanderbilt talc mines in
upstate New York. Though federal health investigators documented
the presence of asbestos in that mine decades earlier and scores of
workers have been sickened or killed from exposure to asbestos in
the talc, the Senate ban would not prevent the tainted powder from
being sold.
# Along the Iron Range in northern Michigan and Minnesota, waste
from the taconite iron mines is contaminated with asbestos. Miners
with asbestosis and the fast-killing mesothelioma are never far
from tanks of oxygen. Elaborate marketing plans obtained by the P-I
show how the taconite industry plans to sell the mining waste
across the Midwest for construction of roads, airports, bridges and
other public products and to claim that the product is free of
asbestos. The current legislation will do nothing to prevent that.
# Millions of homes and businesses have insulation in their walls
and attics made from asbestos-contaminated vermiculite ore.
Hundreds of miners and their family members have died and thousands
more are ill from this Libby, Mont., vermiculite ore. Nothing in
the law would keep the mine from being reopened and the tainted ore
again sold in scores of products. Nor will the Senate effort
restrict or even demand monitoring of other mines that are today
producing vermiculite.
Murray says the education provision of the bill will tell people of
these risks, but some of the witnesses who testified for the ban
say that isn't enough.
"The government knows that asbestos products not covered by
the legislation can cause harm and would allow, and probably
encourage, companies to continue selling contaminated products
because they are exempt from the ban," said Dr. Aubrey Miller,
senior medical officer and toxicologist for the EPA.
Dr. Michael Harbut, who has diagnosed and treated thousands of
asbestos victims, also testified for the bill and is now worried
about the language.
"We need to be truthful with the public. This should be called
the limited asbestos ban act," said Harbut, who is co-director
of the National Center for Vermiculite and Asbestos-Related Cancers
at the Karmanos Cancer Institute.
Linda Reinstein, a mesothelioma widow and executive director of the
Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, said: "After all the
years of effort by the physicians, scientists, victims and Senators
Murray and Boxer, we cannot wind up with a ban that doesn't
include all asbestos. ... We all knew that compromises had to be
made to get this legislation passed but I didn't anticipate
that industry would successfully intervene at the last
minute."
Sausage making
The axiom that crafting legislation is like making sausage does
little to convey the meticulous, high-pressure choreography between
what lawmakers want their legislation to do and what industry
lobbyists will permit. Murray and Boxer had to live with that
reality.
For six years, Murray fought to get her colleagues in the Senate to
ban asbestos. It made sense. People were dying by the thousands and
the deaths of a new generation might be prevented. But industry and
the Bush White House didn't want the U.S. to follow 40 other
countries and ban the importation, use and sale of the
cancer-causing fibers. Lobbyists for America's largest
industries swarmed over Capitol Hill, called in IOUs and dumped
millions of dollars to fight the ban.
But on Oct. 4, every U.S. senator voted to ban asbestos. That day,
widows and friends toasted loved ones killed by asbestos.
Scientists and physicians who had helped educate the senator and
her staff members called one another, many not believing that the
ban finally was just House passage away from becoming law. But when
the euphoria of winning waned and people actually read the bill,
many of them realized that the legislation no longer contained the
same protection they had testified about, and they started speaking
out.
Bill Kamela, who is Murray's senior staff person in the fight
for the ban, left a voice mail message last week on the home phone
of the EPA's Miller.
Kamela questioned the accuracy of Miller's views and ended the
message with: "This disinformation campaign is not helpful to
anybody and certainly not folks who want to stick around this
administration and try to do the right thing at the end of the
day."
Murray blamed her aide's action on "the frustration of
having the bill mischaracterized ... "
As the staff continues to defend the quality of the bill, they say
the "real threat" will come from Rep. John Dingle, who
heads the House committee that will hold hearings on the bill early
next month. They say the Michigan Democrat will bow to the auto
industry to exclude asbestos-containing brake material from the
ban. Dingle did meet with auto industry representatives last month,
"but will do nothing to damage the bill," a member of the
committee staff said.
Almost all of the witnesses who had worked earlier to get the bill
passed or to testify on its need were contacted repeatedly last
week by Kamela, Bettina Poirier, staff director and chief counsel
for Boxer's committee on Environment and Public Works and other
staff members.
"These people, especially Poirier, kept calling. She ordered
me not to talk to anyone about my views on the bill. She told me
that I was spreading disinformation, that the bill was not
flawed," Miller said.
Richard Lemen, a retired U.S. assistant surgeon general and former
acting director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety
and Health, has long fought for the ban and what Murray was trying
to do.
Lemen and several of Murray's other witnesses joined in a
two-hour conference call with the Senate staff one evening last
week. Three of the participants said Poirier screamed at Lemen for
much of that time, trying to get him to change his mind.
"It was not pleasant," Lemen said. "They were trying
to get me to change my opinion, which I'm not going to do. This
is a bad bill."
Poirier said she wasn't screaming at him.
"Maybe that's how they interpreted it. I have a cold so my
voice doesn't sound exactly normal," the senior aide
explained.
"We were trying to help him ... because they misunderstood
what happened and we were trying to clear the air and support
them."
Lemen saw it differently.
"These staff people are the same ones who asked us to testify
and now they're the same people who are trying to shut us up.
I'm not going to be quiet," he said.
"The public will be given a false sense of hope and that, to
me, is an outrage, As a result there are going to be thousands of
people at risk of developing asbestos-related diseases. No one
knows how many will die."
P-I senior correspondent Andrew Schneider can be reached at
206-448-8218 or andrewschneider@seattlepi.com.
Copyright 1998-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
*** POSTED NOVEMER 6, 2007
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