Suppress: 1. a) to put down by force; subdue; quell; crush. b) to abolish by authority.
2. to keep from appearing or being known, published, etc. (to suppress a news story,
a book, etc.)
~Webster’s New World Dictionary

In 1978, when Cate Thompson (a pseudonym) was 3 years old, she was diagnosed with Wilms Tumor, a non-genetic form of cancer of the kidney generally found in children under the age of 7.

Doctors told her parents two sources could have been the cause. One was X-ray radiation (her mother worked in a dental office while pregnant with her). The other was PBB—polybrominated biphenyls—accidentally mixed in Michigan cattle feed in the 1970s. PBB, a fire retardant stored in mother’s milk, has a bigger effect on children than the mothers who consumed contaminated cow’s milk or beef.

The doctor’s reference to PBB was interesting for two reasons: 1) Physicians were not inclined to consider the environmental causes of patient complaints; and
2) Michigan authorities had suppressed important information on PBB for quite a while at the time.

Back then, local health departments didn’t know how to address something as ambiguous as chemical effects on public health. Toxic chemicals found in drinking water and other areas affecting health was a new field. After all, the Environmental Protection Agency only designated certain highly contaminated sites as posing problems to public health and the environment in the 1980s.

Now, almost a quarter century later it appears that—in some cases—little has changed.
In September, a Washington, D.C.,-based group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) released a 130-page report called “The Story of Water Resources at Work,” claiming that it had been suppressed by the Ingham County (Michigan) Health Department.

The PEER report was a counterpoint to the Health Department’s official, 20-page, glossy brochure—published in December 2000—that sang the praises of what it termed “one of the most abundant and safest groundwater sources of drinking water supplies in all of Michigan.”

David Dempsey, who helped produce both reports, was pleased that the full PEER report came out. “It’s long overdue. It should’ve been issued by the (Health Department). The author of the PEER report did a great job of highlighting issues that hadn’t been focused on in the Health Department’s report.” Dempsey is the author of the recently released book “Ruin and Recovery” about Michigan’s largely unknown environmental history, and a veteran policy adviser of the Michigan Environmental Council.

The suppressed report’s author, Brian McKenna, agrees. (McKenna is a columnist for City Pulse, an alternative weekly in Lansing, Mich.) “I was directed to research a number of controversial water-related areas—like sewage sludge, pesticide pollution and old landfills. None of these topics appear in the Health Department’s glossy brochure. The Health Department subverted the community process, refusing to circulate the final version of Aug. 10, 2000, to the entire Roundtable.”

The Roundtable was a community group of 12 individuals given independent authority to conduct the environmental assessment. It included Michigan State University academics, a retired physician, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the Michigan Environmental Council and Public Sector Consultants, a Lansing policy group. The Health Department had three members on the Roundtable: Environmental Health Director Robert Godbold, Planning Director Robert Glandon, and McKenna, the environmental health study’s coordinator and lead researcher.

The first week of October, in an apparent attempt at damage control, the Health Department posted the first half of a July 2000 version of the Roundtable’s long water report. They chose not to post the final, higher quality, draft version — the version that PEER published. The department’s posting caused Eric Wingerter, the national field director of PEER, to assert: “The report was not posted on the Health Department’s Web site until after PEER had published its report. This fact is at the core of the suppression debate. If the full report had been available online, then we wouldn’t be doing this. The fact that county tax dollars were used to publish a report that is not completely factually true is unconscionable.”

Ingham County health officials refused to comment for this story. But this past August, county officials gave a presentation to the Michigan Association of Local Public Health members about the water study. Afterward, Glandon said in an interview, “The other report was just too long. Nobody would want to read it—people don’t have time to read hundreds of pages about their drinking water.”

The Health Department has given contradictory statements about publishing the study. One official told MSU’s student newspaper, The State News, that the full report would soon be available to the public, while another told Enviromich, a statewide environmental e-mail listserv, that Health Department officials had never seen the released version of the report.

McKenna, who left the Health Department in April partly because the entire report was not published, said he was still incredulous that “they simply buried 300 pages of environmental data we’d uncovered, on air pollution, wetland destruction, hearing loss, asthma rates, lead poisoning and on and on.

“We had all worked so hard on the assessment—putting in many 60- and 70- hour weeks—and citizens were not being given the information to decide for themselves. People have a right to know the facts about our environment, the good, bad and the ugly.”

Mike Garfield, director of the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, agrees. “I don’t have first-hand data, but the kinds of findings are not atypical—the sorts of issues that were identified in the report are types that all counties deal with on some level. They should be matters of concern for the public.”

Why were many of the findings suppressed? “I think what we’re finding makes health departments uncomfortable. I’m deeply concerned that the Ingham County Health Department would be reluctant to share the information of public health threats in the area with the public,” Garfield said. “A more appropriate response from the (Health Department) would be that we need more tools, better laws or more funding to address the environmental effects we now face—not suppress the information.”

Phil Shepard, a leader of the environmental group Sustainable Lansing, said, “Some very specific and serious hazards do not appear to have been adequately addressed by county health authorities.” The PEER report explains “what is good and safe about our water resources, and the risks and uncertainties we now face. It does an excellent job of empowering responsible citizens to work with the issues and problems at hand. (It) is better for all of us to get (it) out in the open and deal with it with respect for each other as Americans.”

Mark Grebner, chairman of the county Board of Commissioners, sees no problem. “I wouldn’t call the PEER report false. My impression was (it was) more additional.”
Making the information of the longer report “available in full form, as the county has now done, lets everybody decide for themselves.” The Health Department was trying “to create a more focused and readable package for the public and not trying to issue a technical and detailed report. As far as I know, they don’t plan to print it as a booklet.
Sorry if I give the appearance of not thinking that it’s a big deal—but I don’t.”

PEER’s Wingerter doesn’t buy the argument. “The fact is that that the county would not have released the full report if an outside group hadn’t done it for them. The short report doesn’t give Lansing citizens access to information that could protect their health, and that is a big deal.”

What’s chilling is, after more than 20 years after the PBB scandal, health departments still keep valuable information related to public’s health close to their chests.

---

This article has been reprinted with permission from City Pulse.