Archive for November, 2007

Congressman Bruce Vento was always considered a champion of the working man. He also knew that consensus building was difficult in his line of work. From six years in the Minnesota Legislature and 24 years in the U.S. Congress, he realized that opposing opinions would always have difficulty working towards common goals, no matter the relevance of their differences.

As a champion of worker and environmental rights, Mr. Vento would have been proud to see the passage of the federal ban on nearly all asbestos containing products on October 4th. While a general ban has been in place for the last quarter-century, the widespread ban was on all asbestos-containing products (classified by federal regulations as products which contain 1% or more asbestos) passed by the U.S. Senate unanimously. It was a victory for Mr. Vento. It was victory for bipartisan cooperation.

Asbestos has been named as the only cause of a rare and aggressive form of cancer, mesothelioma. In addition to mesothelioma, asbestos can cause other respiratory difficulties.

Mr. Vento was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2000, nearly 40 years after his employment in asbestos –laden factories to finance his way through college. Mr.Vento would lose his own battle with mesothelioma in 2001, just ten months after diagnosis. Though throughout his battle, he continued to fight for more stringent worker protection.

The bill includes further funding for research into a largely unfunded cause. While the Mesothelioma Applied Research Grant has provided nearly $4 million in grants for the study of this rare affliction, the new bill will augment their contributions with annual contributions of over $10 million.

A former beautician at a York, Pennsylvania nursing home is suing the facility, claiming she was exposed to damaged asbestos tiles in the salon where she catered to elderly residents.

According to an article in the York Daily Record, Mary Ann Gruzs has filed suit against the Pleasant Acres Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, alleging unnecessary exposure to asbestos. Gruzs, who began working at the facility in 2001, says that the condition of the salon’s floor tiles had deteriorated greatly by 2005 and that she made several requests for the broken, brittle tiles to be replaced. A maintenance worker at the home told her the tiles contained asbestos.

When the tiles were finally replaced, Gruzs complains, it was done with no regard to the health and safety of staff and residents, and those removing the tiles were not licensed to work with asbestos, Gruzs adds.

Gruzs asked for an air quality test after the floor was removed, but nursing home officials refused, claiming that the air was fine. Instead, Gruzs took some of the discarded tiles to a laboratory for testing, where the tiles were determined to contain hazardous levels of asbestos.

Union officials, says Gruzs, would not accept her complaint. Next, notes the article, “she participated in a conference call with the union and a representative of the state Department of Environmental Protection on June 5, 2006, and then again filed a grievance with the union based on her belief that the tiles contained dangerous levels of asbestos-containing materials and the tiles were not properly removed and disposed of, possibly exposing residents, coworkers, and Gruzs to dangerous levels of airborne asbestos particulates.”

She was then told that the grievance would be heard but instead, when she arrived at the meeting, she was fired. The nursing home claims she was absent without notice and that that was the reason for her termination.

Gruzs is asking for compensatory damages in excess of $350,000 with interest and costs and reasonable attorney fees.

Long time supporters of the recently-passed Senate bill calling for a total ban on asbestos are now lobbying against the bill, claiming it has been “watered down to appease powerful lobbyists and industry.”

“Many asbestos-containing products now aren’t covered by the ban at all,” says an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Nonetheless, says Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the ban is “a major step forward, and I passionately wish it covered all asbestos products.”

“If I was just Patty Murray and I didn’t have to worry about getting other votes or a Republican president or that I have a one-vote majority in the United States Senate, I’d have a 100 percent ban,” Murray said last week.

Murray staffers, along with those who work for fellow senator Barbara Boxer of California, say that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is totally on board with all the parameters outlined in the bill and that the agency “fully supports the bill as passed.”

EPA officials say that’s not the case. Documents obtained by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer show that the agency has “significant concern” that the ban doesn’t go far enough.
In a draft of a letter prepared for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which will hold the hearings on the Senate-passed bill, the EPA quickly went to the issue that is concerning much of the public health community, says the article.
“To protect public health and the environment from asbestos hazards, the ban should target any products in which asbestos is intentionally added or knowingly present as a contaminant,” read the evaluation, which was to be signed by EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.
But last month, the White House Office of Management and Budget rejected the entire document and told the EPA it could not submit it.
The EPA scientists, however, in comments drafted for Congress last week, repeated that the ban should apply to “any product to which asbestos is deliberately added or used, or in which asbestos is otherwise present in any concentration.”

Supporters of the bill say that the lobbyists also want to control how the research the legislation demands would be done.

The article in the Post-Intelligencer also lists several examples of last-minute changes to the Senate Bill - changes that have angered supporters. Some concerns are as follows:

*  An epidemiologist with the Connecticut health department told the Consumer Product Safety Commission earlier this year that asbestos was found in modeling clay that children were using in art classes. The art clay, the health official wrote, contained asbestos-contaminated talc from the R.T. Vanderbilt talc mines in upstate New York. Though federal health investigators documented the presence of asbestos in that mine decades earlier and scores of workers have been sickened or killed from exposure to asbestos in the talc, the Senate ban would not prevent the tainted powder from being sold.

*  Along the Iron Range in northern Michigan and Minnesota, waste from the taconite iron mines is contaminated with asbestos. Miners with asbestosis and the fast-killing mesothelioma are never far from tanks of oxygen. Elaborate marketing plans obtained by the P-I show how the taconite industry plans to sell the mining waste across the Midwest for construction of roads, airports, bridges and other public products and to claim that the product is free of asbestos. The current legislation will do nothing to prevent that.