Review panel criticizes Great Lakes health study

By JOHN FLESHER

Associated Press Writer

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) -- Substandard science has hurt a federal agency's seven-year effort to document possible links between industrial pollution and health problems in the Great Lakes region, an independent review panel said Friday.

The Institute of Medicine said drafts of a report still under development by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were deeply flawed. Shortcomings included use of questionable data and conclusions that were overstated or not backed by sufficient evidence, the institute said.

"The problems we found in the drafts would limit the ability of officials and others to draw conclusions from them about whether any health risks are associated with living in or near certain places around the Great Lakes," said Robert Wallace, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa and chairman of the committee that conducted the review.

The CDC asked the institute, a scientific advisory organization and part of the National Academies, to evaluate the report's quality after drawing accusations of a cover-up from some members of Congress for delaying its release.

Versions made public earlier this year suggest pollution is causing health problems such as cancer and premature births in 26 highly contaminated locations on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes.

About 9 million people live near those sites, which are tainted with toxins such as PCBs, mercury and dioxins. Among the cities with such "areas of concern" are Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee.

The CDC last March released drafts from 2004 and 2007 after a nonprofit group posted an unauthorized copy on its Web site. But administrators acknowledged they were acting under pressure from Congress and that some of the science was weak.

The institute's report echoed those concerns, and Wallace said in a telephone interview he believed CDC bosses were right to delay its release.

"We think a lot of refinements could be made," he said.

A spokeswoman said the CDC was preparing a response.

The study was requested in 2001 by the International Joint Commission, a U.S.-Canadian agency that advises both nations about the Great Lakes and other boundary waters. The CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry conducted the study.

It produced no new statistics, but pulled together information from a variety of government health and environmental databases.

In a letter to the CDC, the Institute of Medicine questioned why and how certain data sets were used in the study while other potentially helpful ones were excluded.

A particular issue, also raised by ATSDR directors and some peer reviewers, was that environmental data from specific contaminated sites were lumped together with health data taken from entire counties -- and at different times.

The report did not make clear how particular contaminants could have caused the identified health problems, the institute said in a news release.

"This juxtaposition of data without explanation or support could lead readers to assume links between contamination and health problems regardless of whether they actually exist," it said.

U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak, one of the lawmakers who criticized the CDC for withholding the report, said the institute had identified shortcomings in the documents but hadn't explained "why it took seven years for a draft of this report to see the light of day."

"CDC now has a blueprint for perfecting this report and presenting Congress and the American people with a clear picture of what our greatest public health risks are along the Great Lakes," said Stupak, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of a House subcommittee investigating the CDC's handling of the matter.