Chemical Dumping, Children Develop Mystery Illness, Doctors said it was just "psychological" - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Provision of the two UN HDI indicators other than GNP.
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In 1970 in the town of Le Roy, New York, 25 cars from a eastbound 114 car freight train derailed in the town, rupturing and spilling approximately 2,000 pounds of cyanide crystals, and 30,000 to 35,000 gallons of the solvent trichloroethene.

The cyanide crystals were removed, but the trichloroethene had soaked into the ground and contaminated at least two nearby wells, producing a noticeable smell and solvent properties. The Lehigh Valley Railroad attempted to eliminate the smell in the spill area by pumping approximately 1 million gallons of water from a nearby flooded quarry and saturating the cleanup zone with it, then allowing the water to seep into the ground. This resulted in the trichloroethene further saturating groundwater in the area, with many more wells becoming contaminated, with approximately 50 wells testing positive for TCE by 1990 to 1994.

Being the 1970's, the school did not yet exist - it was a large swamp. Being a dirt-poor community, out in the middle of nowhere, the EPA apparently decided that the best way to deal with the spill was to dig up the contaminated topsoil and dump it into said swamp - which the new school was later built upon!

Beginning in August of 2011, 13 girls and 1 boy from the LeRoy High School began reporting perplexing medical symptoms including verbal outbursts, tics, seizure activity and speech difficulty. Following a thorough workup by local doctors and investigations by independent medical specialist, a number of different diagnoses were applied to describe the symptoms including Tourette syndrome, "hysteria" and "conversion disorder". Several of the teenage girls were interviewed on national television describing their symptoms and difficulty functioning in day to day life.

Since the doctors did not have any idea what was causing it, the patients were told that their symptoms were all psychological, or a psychiatric disorder.


http://holisticremediesnews.com/2060/le ... be-asking/
......
2012: If we thought the mystery disease in Le Roy NY was just restricted to teenagers, guess again. A 36-year-old woman who has been exhibiting the same Tourettes-like symptoms as the 15 teenagers has stepped forward with her story:
Marge Fitzsimmons, 36, says her tics began in October, around the same time as the teens. She was diagnosed with "conversion disorder" brought on by stress, and in her case, childhood trauma.

"My doctor said 'your stress level is here'," she stated as she lifted her arm above her head. "So everything that you've ever suppressed erupted like a volcano."

Fitzsimmons said the derailment site (that leaked the toxic TCE ) is close to a quarry and pond where she spent time as a teenager. "We used to hang out in the quarry - used to do what teenagers do when you get a group together," she said.

Fitzsimmons was asked by HLN correspondent Jim Spellman if she thought that site or any environmental factor may have contributed to her condition. "At this point, I have to have faith in my doctors," she said. "All the lab work and CAT scans and MRIs that I had done have come back within range - within the normal range limits.
......

An added note: many forms of brain damage/disorders cannot be detected by normal CAT/MRI imaging


Toxicity of Trichloroethylene

My guess is the bacteria in the swamp may have converted the TCE into some longer lived metabolite, which could cause neurological symptoms through chronic exposure to developing children.

There does not exist any good studies on the anaerobic metabolites of TCE, but one of the speculated metabolites is vinyl chloride. Chronic exposure to vinyl chloride can cause permanent parkinsons-like symptoms.
references:
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10 ... 191.001435
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2279728

Workers with workstations adjacent to the source of trichloroethylene and who were subjected to chronic inhalation and dermal exposure from handling trichloroethylene-soaked metal parts all had Parkinson's disease. Lesser chronic respiratory exposure to trichloroethylene led to many features of Parkinsonism, including significant motor slowing.

Led by Don M. Gash and John T. Slevin, of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY, researchers conducting a clinical trial of 10 Parkinson’s disease patients came across a patient who described long-term exposure to TCE, which he suspected to be a risk factor in his disease.

The patient noted that some of his co-workers had also developed Parkinson's disease, which led to the current study of this patient and two of his co-workers diagnosed with Parkinson's disease who underwent neurological evaluations to assess motor function. All of these individuals had at least a 25 year history of occupational exposure to TCE, which included both inhalation and exposure to it from submerging their unprotected arms and forearms in a TCE vat or touching parts that had been cleaned in it.

In addition, questionnaires about experiencing signs of Parkinson’s disease, such as slowness of voluntary movement, stooped posture and trouble with balance, were mailed to 134 former workers. The researchers also conducted studies in rats to determine how TCE affects the brain.

The results showed that 14 former employees who reported three or more parkinsonian signs worked close to the TCE source, were found to exhibit signs of parkinsonism when they were examined and were significantly (up to 250 percent) slower in fine motor hand movements than age-matched controls. Clinical exams of 13 patients who reported no signs of parkinsonism revealed that they worked in the same areas as the symptomatic workers or further from the TCE vat, they exhibited some mild features of the condition and their fine motor movements were also significantly slower than controls, although they were faster than the group with symptoms.

The rat studies showed that TCE exposure inhibited mitochondrial function (which in humans is associated with a wide range of degenerative diseases) in the substantia nigra, an area in the brain that produces dopamine and whose destruction is associated with Parkinson’s disease. Specifically, Complex 1, an enzyme important in energy production, was significantly reduced in the substantia nigra. Dopamine neurons in this area also showed degenerative changes following TCE administration. From a biochemistry toxicological point of view this is not surprising because two other similar molecules, fluoroethanol and fluoroacetic acid, are both known to be very potent poisons, shutting down the mitochondrial energy cycle. Developing children would be especially vulnerable.


Unfortunately, all too often in medicine when the cause of a problem is not known, there is a tendency to blame it on psychological problems or "mass hysteria". This is an injustice to the people suffering

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