The "belated" release of the Great Lakes Study is coming under fire.  Two Michigan lawmakers, Rep Bart Stupak and John Dingell both Democrats have sent a letter to the CDC announcing their probe into the matter.  The probe will investigate allegations that the Bush administration suppressed the report, an inquiry questioning the demotion of one of the authors who pushed for the study's release and also to pursue and investigate concerns raised between the correlation of contaminated areas and the health of citizens living there.  According to "The Detroit News" the letter states:

"If the conclusions of this study are accurate and correct, the health of millions of people in the Great Lakes region may be at risk," Dingell and Stupak write in their letter to the CDC. "Moreover apparent withholding of this report raises grave questions about the integrity of scientific research at" the agency, they write.

The letter asks the CDC to turn over any documents relating to the report or the decision not to publish it, as well as records on the demotion of Christopher DeRosa, the scientist who led the work on the report."

According to an AP article at Mlive:

"David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment with the University at Albany in New York, said he twice had reviewed the draft and recommended its publication.

"I don't know of any improvements that could be made," said Carpenter, a member of the International Joint Commission's science advisory board. He said he respected Frumkin but feared the final version of the report might be watered down.

The Bush administration "has been very much attempting to downplay the role of toxins around the Great Lakes," Carpenter said."

Of the twenty-six "areas of concern" (AOC), Wisconsin has four.  The AOC in Wisconsin are Brown County, Sheboygan County, Milwaukee County and Douglas County.  Three indicators in the AOC were utilized to assess contamination.  These indicators called "Beneficial Use Impairments" or BUI's include:

• Restrictions on fish and wildlife consumption
• Restrictions on drinking water consumption
• Beach closings

The study cites eleven critical pollutants.  These include, PCB's, dioxins and dioxin-like compounds, PCDF's and TCDF's, DDT, and others.  According to the CDC site:

"Recent studies indicate that exposure to Great Lakes contaminants might cause disturbances in reproductive parameters and cause neurobehavioral and developmental deficits in newborns and older children"  it continues:

"These children had been exposed in utero through the consumption of contaminated fish by their mothers during the six years before and during pregnancy.  After adjustment for many confounding factors, including maternal alcohol consumption, cigarette use, socioeconomic status, maternal age, parity of the mother, and exposure to lead and mercury, the results indicated that the most highly exposed children (based on maternal milk PCB concentration)

• were three times more likely than controls to have low full-scale verbal IQ scores,
• were twice as likely to lag behind at least two years in reading comprehension, and
• have difficulty paying attention

These intellectual impairments were attributed to in utero exposure to PCBs and to related contaminants at concentrations slightly higher than those found in the overall population.  How the presence of lead and mercury relate to levels of PCBs in the same children was unclear, but impairment was also associated with higher concentrations of these other substances."  (emphasis mine)

The implications ARE "alarming" as the Center for Public Intergrity claims.  But the effects are not limited to the Great Lakes region.  An article in the Daily Mail (a must read) added these statistics:

"They include the common plastic PVC; dioxins, the notorious pollutants found almost everywhere; PCBs, one-and-a-half million tons of which have been used in countless products from paints to plastics; and phthalates, universally used to make plastics more flexible.

Recent tests by WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) on 14 basic foodstuffs taken from supermarket shelves found that every single one contained PCBs, and most were contaminated by phthalates.

Both substances have been shown to have deeply worrying effects on babies and children.

Scientists at Rotterdam's Erasmus University have found that boys born to mothers exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea-sets.

And research at the University of Rochester in New York State has shown that the male children of women exposed to phthalates have smaller penises and other signs of feminisation of their genitals.

Communities exposed to high levels of these and other gender-bender chemicals, from the Great Lakes of North America to the Russian Arctic, have been found to give birth to twice as many girls as boys.

This may offer a clue to the cause of a mysterious shift in the sex of babies worldwide."

We've heard about PCB's for so long that we almost don't give it a second thought and many people are just plain sick of the mantra.   After the initial "scare" back in the late seventies people have tended to ignore the warnings.  It's time we wake up and make this study as well as the Great Lakes Compact meaningful, the situation is serious and it's not just the Great Lakes region this time.