Anybody with an interest in documenting the connection between TCE and disease should know that important lessons may lie with View-Master, where a single contaminant - TCE - poisoned a single, private water supply and exposed an entire company to TCE as a result. So why won't the federal government prioritize a thorough study of the View-Master workers?

The following piece was published in The Oregonian on Thursday, June 14th and authored by Tom Griffith, professor emeritus of physics at Pacific University and secretary of the View-Master Citizens Advisory Group. We're reprinting this in full with Tom's permission:

The exposure that needs more exposure
Thursday, June 14, 2007

In 1998, high levels of the organic solvent trichloroethylene -- known as TCE -- were discovered in the drinking water of the View-Master plant in Beaverton. The levels were 300 times the maximum established as safe at that time by the Environmental Protection Agency. It's estimated that as many as 25,000 workers were exposed, some of them to high levels of TCE for 30 years or more.

TCE is a probable carcinogen and is known to produce health effects besides cancer with high enough exposures. It was a commonly used degreaser and dry-cleaning fluid from 1950 to 1980, and there are more than 3,000 sites around the country where it is present in groundwater. But very few of these sites have produced levels of exposure anywhere near those at View-Master.

Since discovery of the contamination, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has implemented a remediation plan for cleaning up the groundwater beneath the site. This cleanup is ongoing and will take at least 20 more years to complete.

The Oregon State Public Health Division completed a limited mortality study of the site in 2004, designed to determine whether a more thorough study was called for, and it more than met that goal. It showed death rates for kidney cancer in women workers at the plant were roughly six times higher than the rates for other Oregon residents of similar age. It also found high rates for a few other cancers.

Since then, however, efforts to conduct a more thorough study have been stymied by a lack of money. It's been almost 10 years since the initial discovery of the TCE contamination, and nothing definitive has been done.

In the meantime, former View-Master workers are left in a fog regarding what health problems they might face and what they should do about it. Some of these workers clearly face an increased risk of cancer and other ill effects. The number potentially harmed is large. Some have already died.

The irony is that the View-Master workers represent an ideal population to gain better knowledge of the effects of exposure to TCE, a national problem. These workers were exposed at high levels to essentially a single contaminant over a long period of time. And their numbers are large enough to provide reliable statistics. In other words, studying them has a high probability of producing definitive results that will be useful in assessing the effects of TCE exposure at other sites.

So why has such a study not been funded? It's a complicated story, but the problem lies, at least in part, with bureaucratic buck-passing among the federal agencies that could provide the money to pursue it. No one in the vast alphabet soup of federal agencies seems to have a clear mission to fund epidemiology research of this nature.

But the state of Oregon is not blameless either. The Public Health Division has no direct funds allocated for such research. The state scientists in the epidemiology department must find external money through grants to get anything accomplished.

Those charged with protecting our health and safety need to step up and see that the appropriate scientific work is done at View-Master. Otherwise, the funds already spent will have been wasted and the former View-Master workers will be left with no good information. Just as importantly, our nation will have missed an opportunity to learn something definitive about a national concern.

So who will step up as the buck passes along? The View-Master workers aren't getting any younger.

Next time a politician or federal representative (EPA, ATSDR, NIOSH, etc) tells you that they would like nothing better than to study the link between TCE and disease (but laments that it is oh so hard to find a good study population), make sure to ask them why they refuse to study View-Master.