The Spreading Menace Of Pcb

There was ironic laughter in the coffee shop of Chicago's Pick-Congress Hotel last Friday when Nathaniel P. Reed, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, glanced at the menu and said, "Ah, fresh salmon sandwich!" Only an hour before, at the concluding session of the National Conference on Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs), Reed had delivered a blistering speech on PCB contamination of fish, including Great Lakes salmon.

"The problem is a national problem," Reed had emphasized to some 400 scientists, bureaucrats and conservationists. "I am deeply shocked by the pervasiveness of PCBs; they are literally everywhere. I am very troubled by the exceedingly high levels found in fish in all our drainage systems, and I do not mean just the Hudson and the entire Great Lakes system, but the Merrimac and Connecticut rivers of the Atlantic Coast, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers of the Midwest, the Columbia River system in the northwest, the Sacramento in the West, the Rio Grande and other Gulf Coast streams...even the Yukon in Alaska."

Reed called for the elimination of all sources of PCBs in the U.S. environment within three years. With a candor unusual for a federal official, he criticized the sponsor of the conference, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has done little protecting, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has established a "tolerance" level of five parts per million of PCBs in fish for human consumption.

"Quite frankly," Reed ended his speech, "I am thoroughly disgusted by the gnashing of teeth, wailing and rubbing of hands. To the agencies which have the enforcement responsibilities, a word on behalf of the bewildered but concerned American people—get on with It!"

PCBs are chlorinated hydrocarbon compounds used by industries throughout the world because of their resistance to heat. More durable than DDT, PCBs are a proved menace to animal organisms, ranging from invertebrates to man (SI, Sept. 1). In 1968 an estimated 1,200 Japanese came down with Yusho disease after using rice oil heavily contaminated with PCBs. The clinical effects included stillbirths, undersized infants, bone and joint deformities and various neurological disorders including loss of libido.

In this country, in a recent experiment on laboratory rats, PCBs caused liver cancer. Last week in Chicago the scientist in charge of that experiment, Dr. Renate D. Kimbrough of the U.S. Public Health Service, delivered a paper in which she warned, "Because of these findings in experimental animals, ingestion of PCBs in humans must be curtailed." The EPA estimates that about half the American public now carries around with it from one to three parts per million of PCBs in its fatty tissues.

Another speaker at the Chicago meeting was Dr. James R. Allen of the University of Wisconsin Medical School, who fed eight female rhesus monkeys a diet that included 2.5 ppm of Aroclor 1248 (one of the nine trademarked PCB compounds made by the sole domestic manufacturer, Monsanto Industrial Chemicals Company) for six months. They were then bred to normally fed male rhesus monkeys. Two females resorbed their fetuses, one suffered a stillbirth, and the five infants born were all undersized. Two of the infants died while nursing. The three survivors are now eight months old, and although they have been on a PCB-free diet for four months, preliminary observations by Dr. Diane H. Norback, a colleague of Dr. Allen, indicate that the youngsters are hyperative.

The PCB problem, which has been growing for years, began to receive nationwide attention last summer when Ogden R. Reid, commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, warned the public against eating striped bass from the Hudson River or salmon from Lake Ontario. Reid issued his warning after receiving a report from EPA scientists who noted that two General Electric plants at Hudson Falls and Fort Edward were discharging at least 30 pounds of PCBs per day into the river. In September, Reid brought action against G.E. to force the company to reduce its discharge to two pounds a day by Dec. 31 and to zero by Sept. 30 of next year. The action is now before a state hearing officer, and G.E. is contesting it all the way. It is worth noting, however, that in response to a state interrogatory before the hearing began, G.E. admitted, "During the past 15 years, 49 employees have reported to the dispensaries complaining of allergic dermatitis, diagnosed as having been caused by contact with PCBs."

No one really knew that PCBs were present in the world environment until 1966 when Sweden's Dr. S�ren Jensen isolated and identified the compounds that had been baffling researchers working on DDT residues. PCBs were then commonly used in a wide variety of everyday products, such as paints, sealants and caulking compounds. In 1971 Monsanto announced it would restrict sales of PCBs to use in so-called "closed cycle" systems, such as capacitors and transformers. U.S. industry turns out more than 100 million capacitors a year, including those for home air conditioners. When junked, such an item is commonly taken to a dump, where the chance exists that PCBs can leach through the soil to bodies of water. In western New York state several companies have been draining PCBs from old transformers, mixing them with crankcase oil and selling the gunk to municipalities to put on roads as a dust suppressor. There is also a report the PCBs have been spread on airport runways in Maryland to prevent skidding in wet weather.

Beyond such practices, there is the danger that transformers can rupture or leak. According to EPA records available in Chicago, a transformer leak occurred on April 16, 1974 on a railroad train running between Philadelphia and Paoli, Pa. From 10 to 100 pounds of PCBs were spilled. The same type of spillage occurred on July 5 of last year from a transformer leak in Stamford, Conn.