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Effect of "Sludge" In Baltimore Backyards Goes Unstudied

     While government records show that poor black neighborhoods have often been used as test labs, officials are now asking why there was no follow-up medical care after human and industrial wastes were spread in the yards of poor black families in Baltimore.
It’s called sludge. It is made from leftover semisolid wastes filtered from water pollution at 16,500 treatment plants.
    It was placed in the yards of nine low-income families in Baltimore row houses. Each family was told the sludge was safe. They were given food coupons and free lawns to participate in the Housing and Urban Development-funded study which was published in 2005.
    Although the idea that sludge is safe has been federal-policy theory for three decades, few studies have researched its harmful side effects. Sludge contains waste, as well as heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and disease-causing microorganisms.
Moreover, not one study has ever shown whether spreading sludge on land is safe, said Thomas Burke, a professor at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
   “There are potential pathogens and chemicals that are not in the realm of safe,” Burke said. “What’s needed are more studies on what’s going on with the pathogens in sludge—are we actually removing them? The commitment to connecting the dots hasn’t been there.”
    Poor neighborhoods which are often destined for demolition make it harder to track a study’s participants, said Baltimore environmental activist Glenn Ross. “If you wanted to do something very questionable, you would do it in a neighborhood that’s not going to be there in a few years.”
    Most of those connected with the studies in Baltimore refused interview requests, including the study’s lead author Mark Farfel, who currently directs the World Trade Center Health Registry which is surveying tens of thousands of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.
   

Posted April 23, 2008

  But these are the facts. Children and family members were not tested after the sludge was spread on their lawns, said a spokeswoman for John Hopkins, whose medical school approved the study and the consent forms provided to participating families.
    If families were told the sludge was absolutely safe, then it wasn’t ethical, said soil chemist Murray McBride, director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute. Sludge can bind lead in its soil. Lead which has been found in house paint some children in poor neighborhoods have eaten. But beyond that little is known about sludge’s effect on human beings.
Some critics are comparing this recent study in Baltimore to an earlier one which led to a lawsuit in 2001. Lawyers sued the EPA, which researched the effects of lead-based paint on 75 poor children, living in partially renovated homes in Maryland.
    The Maryland Court of Appeals likened that study to Nazi medical research on concentration camp prisoners, as well as the U.S. government’s 40-year Tuskegee study that denied treatment for syphilis to black men in order to study the illness. Then there was the study on Japan’s use of plague bombs in World War II, which led to the study of infection on entire villages.
    The recent Baltimore study was like these experiments because it was aimed at vulnerable “subjects: uneducated African-American men, debilitated patients in a charity hospital, prisoners of war, inmates of concentration camps and others falling within the custody and control of the agencies conducting or approving the experiments,” the court said.

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