How Did Pbb Get Mixed With Cattle Feed
Michigan PBB: Not a Comedy, But Plenty Of Errors
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July 2, 1978
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DETROIT— It was a very human mistake.
In early summer of 1973 the Michigan Chemical Co. accidentally shipped about 600 pounds of a chemical fire retardant to the Battle Creek feed distribution center of Farm Bureau Services, a private Michigan company that deals in agricultural supplies.
What the Farm Bureau had ordered was a feed additive for milk cows. The result of the error, compounded by a string of other little mistakes and oversights, of complacencies and incredulities, literally poisoned Michigan, its people and its politics and maybe the land itself, to this day.
A county court judge is now considering written arguments in the state's $119 million law suit against Farm Bureau Services Inc. and the chemical company for the damage that resulted from the mistake. If the suit is successful and the sum awarded, it will be the highest penalty ever imposed in a case of industrial pollution.
The fire retardant, polybrominated biphenyl — or PBB — was mixed with the cattle feed and shipped out to Michigan farmers. What happened next demonstrates what many environmentalists believe is the greatest pollution danger of the future — contamination by the thousands of chemical products in daily use whose toxic properties, if any, are largely unknown and whose effects, once set in motion, are extremely difficult to trace or alter. Cattle began to get sick, milk production dropped, cows aborted, some animals died. Throughout the rest of 1973, farmers complained to the Farm Bureau about the effect the feed seemed to be having. The feed was tested, but because the chemical was unknown to veterinarians they naturally failed to find it. The sick: nesses were laid to other causes.
By the fall of 1973, plenty of people knew something was wrong. But little was done, and what that little was is hard to determine, now that the case is in the courts. In December, 1973, the Farm Bureau stopped making the tainted feed, and says it informed the State Agricultural Department. But no law required the company to notify the public that it had sold apparently dangerous feed, and the public, especially farmers and their families, continued to eat the meat of the tainted animals. Unknown to anyone, PBB residue clinging to the sides of Farm Bureau feed mixers also contaminated chicken and pig feed, further spreading the poison. •
Even after some of the feed killed laboratory rats at Michigan State University in earli? 1974, the state did not alert the public. In fact, the poison was eventually pinpointed only when one farmer, having lost faith in the state's willingness to probe the animal sicknesses, hired his own toxicologist in April, 1974.
By a striking coincidence, the toxicologist just happened to have done some work with PBB, recognized it in the feed samples, and knew that Michigan Chemical was the only company making it. He told the chemical company and the feed distributor, but not the state. Lansing learned the an‐. swer five days later, from the United States Department of Agriculture.
Even then the state did not begin testing animals for PBB contamination until early 1975, seven months after the poison was identified. Nor did it notify the farmers officially. "I can't mail something to every farmer in the state," B. Dale Ball, Stati Agricultural Department Director, fs re‐• ported to have said. "We assume farmers can read, and read the paper." So the tainted animals continued to be sold for meat, as did cows' milk containing PBB traces.
As public outcry grew following reports that all Michigan residents were likely to have some of the chemical in their bodies, the state began quarantining tainted farms and destroying animals. Some 35,000 cattle have been destroyed. and buried so far, along with a million pigs and chickens.
Farm Bureau Services and Michigan Chemical, now known as Velsicol, have paid millions in damages to farmers but more than 300 claims are still pending against one or both of them.
Just how damaging the PBB poisoning is to humans remains to be seen. After considerable prodding, and mounting indications that the state's handling of the disaster was becoming an election‐year liability for Gov. William B. Milliken, the state authorized what is said to be the largest public health survey in the country to determine the effects of PBB. Some 3,000 peoole, selected as a xample of the state's population, will undergo phys'cals to determine the levels of the chemical in their bodies, and to see what effects, if any; it has had.
Other tests so far have been inconclusive and sometimes contradictory. But members of farm families who owned tainted animals and ate their meat have complained of weight loss, fatigue, and greater than normal susceptibility to infection.
In a telephone poll that is part of the health survey, respondents are also being asked politically useful questions, such as their party affiliations and whether they believe PBB has hurt them.
Governor Milliken, who at first seemed little concerned with the PBB issue, continues to be criticized for retaining 'his unpopular Agricultural Director, Mr. Ball, but has otherwise modified his views to reflect the continuing public anxiety.
The state's main actions so far have been to tighten up reporting procedures in case of chemical contamination, impose more stringent poison labeling laws, and lower the maximum permissible level of PBB contamination in food to below Federal levels.
Governor Milliken's Democratic opponents for this fall's elections, meanwhile, have seized the state's handling of PBB as a prime campaign issue and are therefore helping keep the controversy alive.
The Governor and other state officials say the pollution has now been contained, although there is evidence that growing grass has been contaminated and that PBB has entered the natural food chain. Tests are under way to evaluate 'this evidence.
Mr. Milliken has also partially deflected the PBB issue by saying that the contamination of cattle by PBB is less• serious than the total effluent of the many chemical firms on Michigan's western shore. He is working on legislative solutions to the fear that these chemicals may also creep into people's food.
"If anything good comes out of all this," Norris McDowell, an official of the State Department of Natural Resources said, "I hope it will be a system of hazardous chemical disposal. We've got lots and lots of discarded chemicals, some of them more dangerous than PBB, and we don't know what to do with them."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/07/02/archives/michigan-pbb-not-a-comedy-but-plenty-of-errors.html
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