It took me a moment before I realized what she meant.

*

In our town, Labor Day is marked by the placement of American flags all around the town, a patriotic gesture provided by the local Rotary Club. It’s a nice nod to all the workers out there — the people who stock our grocery shelves, the workers who pave our streets, the teachers who guide our children, the doctors and nurses who tend to our health. All those working people who make the American engine run.

It’s been over a decade now since I left my career as an environmental scientist. It almost hurts to write that down. I remember feeling panicked when I hit the 5-year mark — like I had fallen from the train and would never find my way back in. You can infer from that how I’ve been feeling about it lately.

Sure, I’m a writer now, and sometimes I even earn a little money. But most of the work I do — writing, volunteering, caregiving — is work exchanged in the gift economy, which is not to say that it’s unimportant or unfulfilling work, but rather un-accounted, or at least un-celebrated.

So I’ve been missing my old career. I miss the science, the urgency. I miss the intellectual and political stimulation. I miss the people I used to serve.

Sometimes, when I’m away from my children and allow my mind to wander the pastures of what might-have-been, I question the decision I made years ago to leave my career and stay at home to raise them. I had tried my hand at being a working mother, but found it too burdensome in the context of my husband’s demanding cardiology career. The ultra-marathon days, the call. That mother-fucking pager. I didn’t want to hire it out, so instead I gave my employer notice.

When I told some of the people whose wells I’d been monitoring for the state that I was leaving my job, they asked, “Who will make sure our water is safe?”

I told them that someone else would fill that role. But I couldn’t tell them that because our regulations reflect our cultural value of profit over health, that even if someone is doing the work of monitoring their wells, things can (and sometimes do) slip through the cracks.

*

I miss my former work enough that I’ve been following the environmental stories of my newly adopted state. For the past year or so, I’ve been obsessing about perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in drinking water wells in the southwestern corner of Vermont, caused by the former activities of Teflon-related industry. I have written about this before.

I think a lot about the people impacted by this issue: the families now struggling in the face of an uncertain future, the parents laboring to cook their family meals with bottled water. These are exactly the kind of people I used to serve.

Back in the late 19th Century, when manufacturing laborers were gathering strength to organize and fight for worker protections against unsafe working conditions —and back when the federal Labor Day holiday was first officially sanctioned— this area of Vermont was a hub of industrial activity. The Walloomsac and Hoosic Rivers provided ample hydropower to run dozens of factories and textile mills, several of which were known to have used child labor.

In 1910, photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine documented these practices in the factories of Bennington and Pownal, Vermont:

Now, over a century later, children of the same ages as those who worked in the mills are laboring to metabolize PFOA from their bodies. Mothers have unknowingly nourished their babies with the chemicals from their spouse’s or neighbor’s former employer.

*

Happy Labor Day, she said. As in, Happy Anniversary of the day you delivered this child safely into the world. Who will he or she become? What will he or she do for a living?

*

What little we do know about the health impacts of unregulated chemicals like PFOA we owe completely to the industrial workers of the past — men and women who have been acutely and chronically exposed to toxins over the duration of their careers. Occupational exposures provide the very foundation of our epidemiological knowledge of toxic substances in the marketplace, from coal miners to the Radium Girls to the more recent cases of DuPont workers injured from the manufacturing of Teflon.

Consider the story of Sue Bailey, a former DuPont worker at the Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia — who was repeatedly exposed to PFOA while pregnant and then delivered a baby boy with severe facial deformities.

Upon her return to work, Sue discovered a company memo in the women’s locker room, which cited a study that had been conducted by 3M (the company that supplied PFOA to DuPont for the manufacturing of its Teflon product), detailing the occurrence of eye deformities in the offspring of lab rats who were fed PFOA during gestation.

Sue confronted the Washington Works facility’s medical doctor and asked if her exposure to PFOA had caused her son’s condition. The doctor denied any causation, but within a year, the company prohibited any women of child-bearing age to work around PFOA, per the expert opinion of DuPont’s chief medical director.

Sue continued to work for DuPont until her son, Bucky, was five years old. He would undergo dozens of surgeries to address his medical problems, and Sue needed the income to cover the expense. She didn’t file a lawsuit against DuPont at the time, because she couldn’t find an attorney who was willing to take her case. Everyone was afraid to confront one of the region’s most important employers.

*

According to the United States Department of Labor, Labor Day “…is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.”

I interpret that concept broadly, the well-being of our country.

*

To this day, DuPont denies any connection between Sue Bailey’s prenatal PFOA exposure and her son’s facial abnormalities. And just like the United States Radium Company did with the Radium Girls, DuPont has spent decades and millions of dollars downplaying the toxicity of the key ingredient in its market centerpiece.

It should come as no surprise then, that Michael Dourson —founder of the consulting firm that DuPont hired to evaluate the toxicity of PFOA, and a DuPont-paid expert witness in the first of 3,500 lawsuits brought against the company for PFOA-related injury — has been nominated by Donald Trump to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical safety office.

Indeed the very same division charged with determining federal drinking water standards for PFOA and other emerging contaminants. The standards that are supposed to protect us and our children, the workers of the future generation.

*

 Happy Labor Day, she said. It took me a moment to realize what she meant.

*

Ready yourselves, fellow mothers. The work has just begun.

Photo & Art credits:

Cover Image: The New Yorker, cover by Art Spiegelman, May 11, 1998

Vermont Child Laborers: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress

Photo of Newborn Bucky Bailey: Bailey Family, from Delaware Online, “C8 Suspected in Birth Defects: One Woman’s Story”

Photo of Masked Bucky Bailey: Bailey Family, from Delaware Online, “C8 Suspected in Birth Defects: One Woman’s Story”

Photo of Bucky Bailey & News Article: Maddie McGarvey for The Intercept/Investigative Fund

The post Labor Day appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Blood testing results ranged from 0.3 micrograms/liter (or ppb, parts per billion) to 1,125.6 micrograms/liter or ppb, and the geometric mean of PFOA in blood among the sampled residents was 10 ppb — five times higher than the geometric mean of PFOA believed to be present in the blood of most Americans (which is 2.1 ppb, a figure likely resulting from our ubiquitous exposure to Teflon chemicals that were present in everyday consumer products: nonstick coated cookware, stain-resistant carpets and upholstery, water-resistant clothing, paper and cardboard food packaging, and fire-fighting foam). The health advisory went on to list the known health effects reported with exposure to PFOA, and requested of my husband: “If you have a patient that you think is experiencing health effects due to PFOA exposure, please call us at 1-800-439-8550.”

In general, the higher the PFOA concentrations in drinking water, the higher the PFOA concentration in blood. Some studies have even shown that PFOA levels in blood serum can be up to 100 times higher than the levels found in drinking water — meaning that if someone has 2,000 ppt (parts per trillion) in their drinking water, the anticipated level of PFOA in their blood might be as high as 200,000 ppt (or 200 ppb), an order of magnitude difference.

Why? Because PFOA is like, well, Teflon… resistant, persistent, hard-to-break-down. The half-life of PFOA is between 2-4 years, which means it takes up residence in the body and accumulates faster than the body can expel it — doing what exactly, we’re still not sure, except perhaps, as suggested by the limited epidemiological evidence compiled so far, wreaking havoc on the thyroid, the kidneys, the intestines, the liver. In other words, a baby born with PFOA in its blood has essentially become a chemical harbor until it grows up to be a toddler, or even a preschooler, before PFOA can be completely evicted from its system. Assuming, of course, that the exposure has been removed.

When my husband was first studying to become a physician, he was required to take a class on the history of medicine. I can remember him showing me a graph of total fatalities mapped over time, and pointing to a distinct drop in the curve — a place where something had caused some miraculous reduction in deaths from infectious disease. What was it? Antibiotics? Vaccines? Nope. It was sanitation. Removal of waste from drinking water resources. According to an article on longevity published in Slate.com, “Clean water may be the biggest lifesaver in history. Some historians attribute one-half of the overall reduction in mortality, two-thirds of the reduction in child mortality, and three-fourths of the reduction in infant mortality to clean water.” The discovery of penicillin appeared to yield but a relative blip on the graph my husband showed me, as did the proliferation of vaccines (not to diminish the importance of either to the improvement of public health), but nothing impacted public health with such magnitude as the removal of waste from water. “The garbage man does more to save lives than I ever will,” my husband said.

In Parkersburg, West Virginia, a place considered by many to be ground zero for PFOA-related contamination and injury, DuPont dumped thousands of tons of PFOA into the Ohio River, unlined ponds and beyond, causing widespread contamination of surface and drinking water resources in Parkersburg and surrounding communities. In Hoosick Falls, New York, mishandling of PFOA at the Saint-Gobain plastics facility around the corner from the water supply well on Water Works Road has resulted in contamination of the community water supply. Investigation of the former ChemFab facility will do doubt yield similar findings about disposal of PFOA materials, and during my latest trip to Pownal, Vermont, I was shocked to see that the proximity of the former Mack Molding plastics site to one of the community’s water supply wells was a mere 1,000 feet.

Contamination of drinking water from industrial waste is not a new issue, but these latest developments with PFOA raise the issue yet again, that in this day of modern medicine and sophisticated cancer treatment technologies, we continue to ignore the basic, most fundamental premise of medicine: that the most significant positive impact on human health is the separation of waste from water.

Of course, the implementation of Superfund laws and clean-up programs, and the cradle-to-grave hazardous waste regulations provide some measure of protection, but the exemptions are plenty and the funding is not. Too many waste disposal sites are left festering due to insufficient funds and political commitment for investigation and remediation, and too many water supplies remain in harm’s way.  I keep wondering, after each new discovery of contaminated drinking water wells, of impacted populations whose ailments will likely be traced back to what they drank — I keep wondering if we are ever going to wake up to this fundamental premise of public health.

The post Public Health Advisory: On Water and Waste appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Photo credit: Nathaniel Brooks for the New York Times

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I guess that’s what makes the recent drinking water catastrophes in Flint, Michigan, and Hoosick Falls, New York so upsetting — because technically, both of those systems appeared to be in compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act. Technically, water sampled from the City of Flint’s water treatment plant met drinking water standards for lead, even though that same water was corrosive enough to erode lead-bearing private and municipal infrastructure and produce (in some homes) tap water samples high enough in lead to be qualified as hazardous waste. Technically, the Village of Hoosick Falls Water Department appeared to have a flawless performance record, producing water of such quality that the Hoosick Falls Water Treatment Plant was once honored by the New York Rural Water Association as Rural Water Treatment Plant of the Year. In fact, Hoosick Falls’ water was named the best-tasting water in Rensselaer County in 2013, and did well enough in regional competitions to make it to the finals at the New York State Fair. And yet, until recently, water distributed from that perfectly compliant, award-winning plant contained alarming concentrations of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), exposing thousands of unsuspecting residents to a chemical whose toxic health effects are just beginning to be understood.

I’m neither a resident of Flint nor Hoosick Falls, but I can imagine that the betrayal cuts deep, the violation of trust like a swift punch to the gut. It’s as if you asked a trusted friend to babysit your children, but when you got home, you found a stranger with a history of violent criminal behavior watching them instead. How did this even happen? How long has this been going on? What does this mean for the future of my family’s health and well-being?

When water hurts, your understanding of the world gets turned upside-down. The very essence of your cells and those of your children have been violated, their walls trespassed against by chemicals that may or may not hold your bodies hostage, that may or may not, at some time in the coming years ahead, commit some type of unspeakable harm. The anxiety is both tangible and intangible, acute and everlasting. When water hurts, the harm is real — even if the physiologic manifestation of that harm is not diagnosed for many years.

As a former environmental regulator, I have had the unfortunate experience of informing someone that their water has become contaminated — that their private well intersected a petroleum or solvent plume and their water was no longer safe to drink. There is little to say to dull the blow, little that can be offered to calm the fears of what might happen later on. So we focused on the solution. Our course of action always included bottled water as a temporary fix, in-situ treatment systems and monitoring plans as an acceptable long-term solution, but the holy grail for solving a potable water problem in our line of work was to connect them to  public water. Public water was the life boat, the safety net, the thing that delivered you unscathed to the other side.  It was the solution to the problem, not the problem itself.

But it seems this is no longer the case. Or rather, perhaps it never was. The unsettling discovery from the past few months is that the systems designed to safeguard and monitor our public drinking water systems are un-protective, incomplete.  We are vulnerable to a national crisis of antiquated water infrastructure, and we are limited by the narrow scope of authority that our regulatory agencies have.

To that point: the most contaminated public well in the Village of Hoosick Falls is reportedly located a mere 500 yards from the Saint-Gobain facility — a facility that has handled PFOA in the manufacturing of Teflon products since at least the 1960s. Though a clear hazard to a public source of drinking water, plant operators were never required to report releases of PFOA to the EPA, because the chemical wasn’t regulated, and the Village was never required to look for it because it wasn’t on the list. Why? Under existing chemical policy, compounds are considered safe until proven otherwise, and the EPA is granted neither the time nor the resources to adequately study the toxicity of the 85,000 industrial chemicals currently in use. PFOA is just one of those compounds.

The municipal water systems of Flint and Hoosick Falls are not the first public drinking water systems to become contaminated in this country, nor will they be the last. But one would expect our public health and environmental agencies to at least be equipped with the authority to handle the emergencies that arise. As long as chemicals for which human health and environmental impacts are not yet known can be incorporated into consumer products and released into soil, air, and water — as long as these compounds can loiter in our drinking water resources, unmonitored and unaddressed, our current rules are not enough.

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