Doctors Helping Kellogg Expert On Lead Poisoning Brought To Silver Valley

Spokane’s chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility is helping community activists in Kellogg, Idaho, plan care for people exposed to lead and other hazardous metals from Idaho’s mines.

With the Cold War over, Spokane’s 50-member PSR chapter is switching its energies to regional health issues, said Spokane psychiatrist Jeffrey Hedge, chapter president.

“It’s a different focus from nuclear war,” he said.

The group’s international affiliate won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for helping defuse the threat of nuclear war.

The local doctors chose grass burning and lead pollution in the Coeur d’Alene-Spokane River basin as their new top-priority issues, Hedge said.

Hedge is also on the board of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council, which recently launched a “Get The Lead Out” campaign to alert Spokane and North Idaho residents to the hazards of heavy metals in their ground water.

The metals from a century of heavy mining and smelting in North Idaho have traveled through Lake Coeur d’Alene into the Spokane River.

That water-borne pollution poses a long-term hazard. But the people living in the 21-square-mile Superfund cleanup site at Kellogg are at risk now, studies show.

Last month, PSR volunteers helped pay for a nationally known lead poisoning specialist to travel from New York City to Kellogg.

The goal: to plan an aggressive medical surveillance and treatment program.

Dr. John F. Rosen heads the nation’s largest lead exposure treatment program at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.

Rosen, a Harvard Medical School graduate, is an outspoken critic of Superfund-related studies by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

He calls the agency’s approach at Kellogg and other Superfund sites “malpractice.” It’s wrong to study people without offering them medical care, Rosen said.

“Doctors aren’t supposed to diagnose a condition and then walk away. Clinical research can’t be disconnected from medical monitoring and intervention,” he said.

Many Kellogg residents lack health insurance and get very little medical care, said Kellogg community activist Barbara Miller, a founder of the People’s Action Coalition. “Our people know they have problems, and they are depressed about them,” she said.

Rosen wants a medical monitoring program that includes a database to track people’s health and a multidisciplinary staff for physical and learning problems that are a consequence of heavy metals poisoning.

That care doesn’t exist at any Superfund site nationwide, he said.

Rosen’s well respected, but not everyone agrees with him, said Steve West, chief of Idaho’s Bureau of Environmental Health and Safety in Boise.

Idaho has launched a variety of screening and surveillance programs and has also educated doctors in the area about heavy metal exposure, he said.

“It’s not the case that all that’s going on in the Silver Valley is study after study,” West said.

Those efforts have paid off as blood lead levels in children and adults have dropped in the past 20 years, West said.

But people continue to suffer, Miller said.

“One woman I know vomits two weeks out of the month. She deals with that - but she has no help,” Miller said.

Idaho is completing field work on a study of blood lead levels and other heavy metals in people outside the Superfund site, from the Montana border to Lake Coeur d’Alene, West said.

Preliminary results will be reported this winter, West said. “We don’t want to wait too long for people to get some insights into what’s happening,” he said.

The Kellogg coalition hopes to bring Rosen back for a second meeting in February, Miller said. “We want to present this to the community for their approval,” she said.

, DataTimes MEMO: IDAHO HEADLINE: Doctors reach out to Kellogg, lead problem

This sidebar appeared with the story: NEW STUDY The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Control will release results of a new study at a 7 p.m. meeting Wednesday at Kellogg Middle School. The agency study tracked area residents tested as children in the mid-‘70s for high lead levels in their blood.