CHARLESTON, W.Va. — What’s being called the most comprehensive scientific studies to date into the chemical MCHM that contaminated drinking water for residents in parts of nine West Virginia counties last year show “very little reason for concern about long-term health effects.”
The results of a yearlong studies from the National Toxicology Program were released Tuesday concluding West Virginia took appropriate public health measures in the hours and days after the January 2014 spill of MCHM into the Elk River in Charleston.
“This should be reassuring to the citizens and residents who were impacted in the nine-county area. It is something that needed to happen, needed to be documented that we’ve had the world’s best scientists doing the study and we are both very confident and very happy to receive this news,” state Commissioner for the Bureau for Public Health and State Health Officer Dr. Rahul Gupta told MetroNews.
The state Bureau of Public Health issued a ‘Do Not Use’ water order a few hours after the spill was discovered. It remained in effect for several days as the water continued to be tested by the state and federal Centers for Disease Control.
The scientists with NTP did a series of short-term toxicity studies to evaluate MCHM and other chemicals that spilled from the Freedom Industries tank farm.
“All together, the NTP findings support the adequacy of the drinking water advisory levels established at the time of the spill,” said John Bucher, Ph.D., NTP Associate Director in a statement released by the state DHHR. “The results identified an opportunity to evaluate a potential health effect in the affected communities. NTP used a comprehensive suite of state-of-the-art toxicology tools to look at the spilled chemicals, and found very little reason for concern about long-term health effects.”
Dr. Gupta, who was the director of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department at the time of the spill, said the state Bureau of Public Health had very little data about MCHM to make the decision that it did. He said it’s good to hear the right decisions were made.
“There seems to be no cancer-causing potential and the recommendation at this point is the long-term impact should not be there. That’s basically what the studies tell us,” Gupta said.
Gupta and DHHR Secretary Karen Bowling traveled to Washington, D.C. last year to meet with officials from NTP and the CDC, along with members of the state’s congressional delegation, to urge the additional studies be done. Gupta said the results show the additional look was well worth the time and effort.
“While it’s taken us a year-and-a-half to get there—I think the results only reemphasize that those screening levels provided to us by the CDC were accurate,”
Gupta said.
As a result of the studies, the state Bureau of Public Health has agreed with a recommendation from the NTP and CDC to conduct a study of children with low birth weights born during the water emergency.
“We’re going to do everything we can to protect the health of those babies and therefore, we are going to do a trend analysis to make sure we can ensure there was no such impact,” Gupta said.
The CDC said it would provide technical assistance.
“It is reassuring that the NTP study results confirm both CDC and ATSDR’s determination in the early days of the spill that the levels of MCHM in drinking water were not likely to be associated with adverse health effects,” said Patrick Breysse, PhD, director of CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health and Deputy Administrator of ATSDR said in a statement released by DHHR. “CDC and ATSDR support the leadership that West Virginia continues to take to ensure the continued health of its residents, including the low birth weight analysis planned by DHHR’s Bureau for Public Health.”
In the end, Gupta said it’s good to know the Bureau of Public Health made the right decisions in a very uncertain time.
“We had very little data to make the decisions that we did and now we have very good documentation of scientific evidence to back that up which was not only necessary but essential to make sure that we did,” Gupta said.