Newsweek reports that the children displaced by Hurricane Katrina who spent the longest amount of time in government-provided temporary housing—a.k.a. FEMA’s toxic trailers—are “the sickest I have ever seen in the U.S.,” according to , and a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
The ailments, according to a study of 261 post-Katrina kids, range from mental health disorders to anemia, and are astonishingly widespread: Forty-one percent of the children are anemic—twice the rate found in minors in New York City homeless shelters—and 42 percent have respiratory infections and other problems likely linked to the excessive formaldehyde in the trailers.
As we’ve discussed on Discoblog, formaldehyde is a probable carcinogen as well as an allergen, and is used in many products, including the wood used to build these disaster homes. The formaldehyde gas levels in FEMA’s trailers were so toxic that Katrina victims began complaining of illnesses, including breathing difficulties, bloody noses, and even gas-linked deaths, almost immediately after they moved into them.
Even worse, a Salon report in January of this year revealed that FEMA had pressured scientists to water down a report on the health risks of formaldehyde in the trailers, all as part of an effort to avoid getting sued. Of course, the real results have been severe and possibly permanent damage to the health of thousands of children. We could wag a finger at this umpteenth egregious example of how the Bush administration’s policy on science obfuscation has endangered lives, but we’re too aggrieved to try.
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November 25th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Melissa-
As you may know, the CDC testing done on the FEMA trailers came up with a geometric mean of only 77 ppb, lower than even the newly defined 100 ppb “Level of concern.”
Note that even these numbers were probably high in that no correction was made for the effects of cigarette smoke. Yes, there were a small number of trailers that did have levels higher than a few hundred ppb, but even those levels would only affect people who–frankly–were either already sick or highly sensitive.
The main problem with the CDC testing was that it was not done terribly well, and there is a significant possibility that some of the trailer dwellers were coached to make the results higher.
I would not put too much stock in the Salon story, especially since there there will be no successful suits against FEMA, unless the Supreme Court decides to go against the precedent of the Dalehite case, and I doubt that will happen.
As to the “sickest kids” remark, it may well be true, but the sad fact is that poor health does correlate with poverty, and his finding is not surprising. It is unlikely that formaldehyde in those low concentrations created the sick kids.
November 25th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Before passing judgement on the ineptitude of FEMA on this one, I would like to see how many non-FEMA-trailer children had similar sicknesses, and compare similar percentages. No mention of non-trailer related health effects on the Newsweet report. My feeling is that the toxic soup that these children were around had a significant (if not complete) influence over the children’s health. Full disclosure: I hate Bush too.