Remember PBB in Milk? The Flint Water Crisis is Not Without Parallel in Michigan History

[Octafish]

News context missing from Corporate McPravda:

The Flint Water Crisis is Not Without Parallel in Michigan History

Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping knowledge and intention secret…. In so far as it can it hides its knowledge and action from criticism.

— Max Weber, Essays in Sociology.

by GREGORY BUTTON
CounterPunch, Feb. 2, 2016

EXCERPT...

The story of the Michigan PBB disaster, long a mainstay of my environmental health policy curriculum, provides us with a compelling exploration of the role of downplaying and denial in the midst of a public health crisis. It is a story that forty years ago seized the nation’s attention and has as many twists and turns of mind-baffling decisions as the present day crisis in Flint.

In the early 1970s the state of Michigan faced an environmental health crisis when the highly toxic chemical PBB, developed as a fire retardant, was accidentally introduced into agricultural feed that ultimately resulted in the deaths of thousands of cows and the pervasive presence of the highly toxic chemical polybrominated biphenyl in both milk and meat and affected the health of Michigan residents. Medical researchers concluded that the entire population of Michigan, some nine million people, was found to have measurable levels of a carcinogen in the blood of Michigan’s citizenry. The presence of which at the time was considered a severe threat to pregnant and nursing mothers and their children. Decades later it was found that the greatest threat to the exposure of PBB was in breast milk when researchers discovered that PBB is 100 times more concentrated in breast milk than in the food chain.

Some of the nation’s top chemical manufacturers considered PBB to be too risky to manufacture because of the chemical’s likely chronic toxicity. Their reluctance however did not deter Michigan Chemical Company who, based on test results from a private lab, decided the chemical posed no real threat and dismissed the hesitancy of major chemical manufacturers like Dow and DuPont (Michigan Chemical Company later became Velsico a corporation which over the years has been involved in a number of toxic scandals around the nation).

For well more than a year state officials failed to effectively intervene. The Michigan Department of Agriculture issued a statement early in the crisis that stated that there was no need for concern for public health risks. The director of the department went so far as to state the situation, was pretty much under control. Newspaper accounts of the potential threat of PPB were less reassuring when they reported that Ann Arbor physician Dr. Thomas Corbett’s (who assumed a whistleblower role somewhat similar to present day Virginal Tech’s Marc Edwards) warned that the chemical maybe far more serious that state officials believed at the time. Four decades later researchers from Emory University confirmed his fear when they found PBB to be a hormone disrupter that to this day continues to threaten public health. The researchers tested 850 people and found that 85% of them had PBB in their body and even more worrisome that the chemical has to date affected three generations. Among their findings were women with high exposure to PBB have an increased chance of breast cancer. Equally disturbing, daughters of women with high exposure are more likely to experience a miscarriage. The study also discovered that men with high exposure are at greater risk of having thyroid problems.

SNIP...

Republican Governor William Milliken was slow to respond to the crisis and among other her things vetoed a bill that the state legislature had unanimously passed to provide financial relief to the affected farmers. The governor later met with defeat when after two years of his reluctance to lower the PBB guidelines to a minimum detectable level his own Scientific Advisory Panel recommended the reduction.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/02/the-flint-water-crisis-is-not-without-parallel-in-michigan-history/

I wonder what else is missing from the news, besides context?