Dow-funded U-M researcher at odds with DEQ

State officials say that a Dow Chemical-funded University of Michigan study on dioxin exposure in the Saginaw River watershed has spurred misperceptions about the contamination threat caused by Dow — and they say U-M’s lead researcher has not fully cooperated in efforts to address the problem.

Dr. David Garabrant / photo by Eartha Jane Melzer

State and federal officials are in negotiations with Dow over how to address the dioxin contamination, which has spread downstream from Dow’s Midland complex through the Tittabawassee and Saginaw rivers into Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay. Dioxin is known to cause health problems at even minute levels of exposure and property owners in the contamination zone, which could include thousands of people if a class action is allowed by the courts, are fighting to sue Dow for damages.

Dow has spent $15 million on the University of Michigan Dioxin Exposure Study that set out in 2004 to explore the relationship between dioxin in soils and dioxin in people’s blood. The company was allowed to make suggestions about the project’s design.

When U-M researchers began giving presentations about the findings of their study, officials with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality noticed that the results were being mischaracterized.

The university’s study did not heavily sample households in the most contaminated areas, but it still found that people in the Saginaw and Midland area have more dioxin in their blood than people elsewhere. According to a university press release about the study, soil contributed only a little to elevated blood dioxin levels, but in public statements about the study lead researcher, David Garabrant, was unequivocal about the blood-soil relationship.

In an October interview with Michigan Messenger, for example, he said:

There is no relation between dioxin in soil and dioxin in blood. The mere fact of living on the soil does not have any influence on your blood level of dioxin.

“People thought this was the end-all, be-all of dioxin information,” said DEQ spokesman Bob McCann.

Many who learned of the U-M dioxin study wrongly concluded that the dioxin contamination of the state’s largest watershed does not pose a health threat to people in the area.

In interviews, DEQ officials argued their agency has invested substantial money and staff time to address the confusion generated by Garabrant’s study and the way it has been presented to local audiences.

The department hired statistician John Kern to evaluate the study and when his analysis, released in March, pointed out limitations in the design of the project, DEQ held a series of joint meetings with U-M researchers.

The goal was to come to a common understanding about how the study’s conclusions should be characterized, said Deborah MacKenzie-Taylor of DEQ’s Waste and Hazardous Materials Division. “The thing we were looking for was to develop together a way to communicate the limitations of the study.”

In an April 1, 2009, letter to Garabrant, DEQ Deputy Director Jim Sygo said that after officials and U-M researchers came to that understanding, “… we expect that these conclusions will be developed and communicated to the public in one or more collaboratively authored, publication-quality documents.”

But this didn’t happen.

Officials say that in June they were surprised to learn that although the state and the Dow-funded researchers had not yet hammered out an agreement over how to characterize the study results, Garabrant had given a presentation to the Midland Area Chamber of Commerce.

When they asked him to provide a copy of the presentation he had given, Garabrant did not comply.

According to officials, Garabrant indicated that he planned several more presentations during the fall and that these were a condition of his grant.

In a June 11 letter to DEQ officials, Garabrant said: “I will be happy to keep you informed of my public outreach activities and will provide you with my powerpoints.”

He went on to note that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had undertaken its own analysis of the UMDES, and he said he was concerned that the agency might use Kern’s comments as a basis for saying that the report is unreliable and irrelevant.

“It would be a great help if MDEQ and Dr. Kern would publicly state that we have made substantial cooperative progress since his original comments and that they no longer reflect your opinions about the UMDES,” Garabrant wrote. “If you could say positive things, like you believe the data collection and analytic approaches are reliable and appropriate, this would be even better.”

DEQ did not pick up on Garabrant’s talking points, and EPA went on to identify several of the same limitations detailed in the Kern analysis and announced that the U-M study “provided limited data about some important sources of exposure.”

Garabrant did not share details of how he is representing his study in presentations to the Midland Area Chamber of Commerce, the Saginaw County Chamber of Commerce and other community groups.

Instead, in a Sept. 25 letter, he again claimed that the issues identified by Kern had been addressed and he pressured DEQ to remove Kern’s analysis from its website, stating that “… leaving Dr. Kern’s original critique unchallenged … unfairly disparages the University of Michigan and its scientists.”

In another indication of how politicized the dioxin study has become, Garabrant addressed his concerns to DEQ Director Stephen Chester and copied the governor, U.S. Rep. Dave Camp (R-Midland), state Senators Jim Barcia (D-Bay City), Roger Kahn (R-Saginaw Township), and Tony Stamas (R-Midland), state Representatives Andy Coulouris (D-Saginaw), Kenneth Horn (R-Frankenmuth) and Jim Stamas (R-Midland) and many others.

DEQ has refused to take down the Kern report.

“… MDEQ does not agree that these key issues have been fully resolved,” DEQ Deputy Director Jim Sygo responded in an Oct. 20 letter to Garabrant. “Until they have been fully resolved, we plan to leave the Kern Report on our Web site.”

Sygo went on to state that “the conclusions of the UM DES that the main exposure in the Midland/Saginaw area occurred during the 1960s and 1970s are suspect.”

Claims that dioxin in the blood of area residents was due to exposure to pollution pre-1980 do not take into account the fact that people are currently being exposed to historic dioxin releases when they eat local fish that have absorbed the toxin, he wrote.

Although the dioxin study claims that elevated blood dioxin levels are the result of exposures decades ago, Sygo wrote: “… these elevated serum levels of this short half life cogener could not be caused by exposure during that specific timeframe (2,3,7,8-TCDF has a half life of about a half year in the human body).“

Sygo noted that DEQ data contradicts published findings of the U-M study.

“We understand you are continuing to present results of the [U-M dioxin study] to local community groups,” Sygo wrote. “We requested copies of your presentation materials on June 11, 2009, July 17, 2009, and July 22, 2009. You committed to provide them to us in your e-mail of June 11, 2009; however, we have not yet received these materials and would appreciate receiving them from you at your earliest convenience.”

In an e-mail, Garabrant confirmed that he had not shared his presentations with DEQ, despite having promised on June 11 to share his PowerPoint presentations from those presentations with them.

“This is obviously very troubling,“ said Tracey Easthope, environmental health director for the Ann Arbor-based Ecology Center, “a publicly funded research institution should be very open.”

“It’s troubling and it’s not clear why he is unwilling to share the information.”

“It seems fair and reasonable to expect Dr. David Garabrant to make public and widely available the dioxin exposure study presentation he has made to select audiences in Midland and Saginaw,” said Noah Hall, executive director of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center at Wayne State Univeristy.

“Making the dioxin exposure study presentation public may be required under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), since Dr. Garabrant made the presentation as professor at the University of Michigan, a public university. Further, making the presentation public seems warranted by the University of Michigan’s educational and public mission.”