PUBLICATIONThe Standard (St. Catharines - Niagara)
DATE Tue 20 Jul 1999
EDITION FINAL
SECTION/CATEGORY Local News
PAGE NUMBERA5
STORY LENGTH 145
HEADLINE:
Firms will pay $7.1 million for Love Canal cleanup
BUFFALO, N.Y. - Two chemical companies agreed Monday to pay $7.1
million (U.S.) in cleanup costs for Love Canal, closing the book
on the last of four Superfund sites that became a symbol of
environmental peril in the late 1970s.
Occidental Chemical Corp., formerly Hooker Chemical, and Olin
Corp. will reimburse the U.S. government $6 million and New York
state $610,000 for the cleanup.
The companies also agreed to pay $500,000 for natural resource
damages and undertake two wetlands restoration projects, EPA
officials and a lawyer for Occidental said.
Some 900 families were uprooted from the neighbourhood because
thousands of tonnes of dioxin, PCBs and other chemicals were
buried at the site bordering the Niagara River.
The dumping ground was one of areas that led to the creation of
the Superfund Program, which provides federal funding for the
cleanup of the worst environmental sites nationwide.
PUBLICATIONThe Ottawa Citizen
DATE Tue 20 Jul 1999
EDITION FINAL
SECTION/CATEGORY News
PAGE NUMBERA1 / Front
BYLINETom Spears
STORY LENGTH 669
HEADLINE:
First proof: Pesticides, PCBs cause breast cancer:
Canadian researchers also find DDT speeds spread of
disease
Canadian cancer researchers have found the first firm evidence
that chemical PCBs and a banned pesticide called mirex cause
breast cancer, in a three-year study that's the largest of its
kind ever done.
And a parallel study, also Canadian, shows that exposure to DDT
appears to make breast cancer spread faster when it does occur.
The World Conference on Breast Cancer, held every two years, will
bring 1,000 delegates from 55 countries to Ottawa next week. The
two new papers are to be presented during the conference.
They confirm what many women have feared -- that trace amounts of
pollution can lie in the fatty tissue of the breast for a person's
lifetime, and cause cancer there.
``These two studies are beginning to say to us: maybe there are
things out there in the environment that are causing cancer,''
said Dr. Kristan Aronson of Queen's University, who led one of the
studies.
``That's what the women are dying to hear about,'' she said. ``In
one sense they're not wanting to hear it. (But) they want to
know.''
Previous studies of chemicals in the bodies of women with breast
cancer had failed to show a link between PCBs, an industrial oil
banned in Canada in 1977, and the cancer.
But Dr. Aronson, an epidemiologist, says most past studies have
looked at pollutants carried in the bloodstream.
And PCBs, being an oil, lodge for many years in the body fat of
humans and wildlife alike.
Her study analysed tissue samples taken from more than 400 women
during breast biopsies. Some were from women who had breast cancer
while the others had non-cancerous lumps and cysts.
Dr. Aronson's teams looked at 14 different kinds of PCBs and 10
other pollutants. All 24 are called organochlorines, because they
mix chlorine with organic chemicals, often petroleum-based.
Many organochlorines can last for decades in the environment
without breaking down.
The 24 in her study include several banned pesticides -- mirex,
hexachlorobenzene, DDT and the chemical that DDT forms when it
breaks down, DDE. Of those, only mirex was linked to higher breast
cancer rates -- and then only in women who have had babies but not
breast-fed them.
We all have PCBs in our bodies, she said, but people who eat sport
fish generally have higher levels of them.
(PCBs tend to wash into lakes and build up in the bodies of top
predators such as bass, salmon and lake trout.)
Still, because PCBs have spread so widely through spills and
dumping since their invention in the 1930s, ``it's difficult to
say how to avoid them.''
The subject ``needs to be looked at a lot more,'' Dr. Aronson
said.
``We're looking at 24 organochlorines and there are 15,000 of them
out there'' in the environment.
PCBs -- polychlorinated biphenyls -- are actually a family of many
similar oils once used in the electrical industry to keep water
out of transformers and other equipment. While only some of the
PCBs are associated with higher cancer risk, the whole range of
different PCBs tends to be mixed in the food chain, especially in
fish from contaminated areas.
Dr. Aronson's study used fatty breast tissue samples from 663
women in Toronto and Kingston hospitals between 1995 and 1997. Her
full results are waiting to be published in a U.S. medical
journal, Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.
She will discuss them at the conference next Wednesday. The
conference is also going to hear from Dr. Alain Demers of Quebec
City, whose study found that women with high DDT exposure have
breast cancer that is ``more aggressive'' -- i.e.,
faster-spreading.
Paradoxically, these pollutants aren't dangerous in the way many
women had feared.
Some chemicals, nicknamed ``gender-benders,'' mimic the action of
the hormone estrogen and trick the body's hormone system. It has
been suggested that this is the way pollution causes breast
cancer.
But Dr. Aronson says there's nothing so devious about these
chemicals because they don't act like estrogen on women's hormone
systems.
They just cause cancer, and that's that.
GLOBE AND MAIL
TUE JUL.20,1999
PAGE: A14
BYLINE:
CLASS: International News
SOURCE: REUTERS
DATELINE: Washington DC
WORDS: 124
HEAD:
WORLD REPORT
HEAD:
UNITED STATES: Love Canal firms to pay $7.1-million
WASHINGTON Occidental Chemical Corp. and Olin Corp. have reached a
$7.1-million settlement in the last of four cases in the Love Canal
area of Niagara Falls, N.Y., the site of one of the most famous U.S.
toxic-waste disasters. The companies will reimburse the federal
government $6-million in cleanup costs, repay $610,000 in cleanup
costs to the state of New York and pay $500,000 for damaging natural
resources, federal and state agencies said yesterday.
Occidental's corporate predecessor, the Hooker Chemical Corp., began
dumping toxic chemicals into the abandoned Love Canal in 1952.
Residents began complaining in 1977 that toxic chemicals were seeping
into their basements. More than 1,000 homes and an elementary school
were evacuated.
