Originally published January 15 2006
Ohio Health officials suggests air-borne pollution is causing mental retardation in children
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Dick Wittberg, head of the mid-Ohio Valley Health Department, has requested a governmental study to determine the effect of manganese dust, released into the air by local factories, upon the mental health of the area's children.
In the Ohio River Valley along the Ohio-West Virginia border, factories annually send into the air hundreds of thousands of pounds of manganese dust, a heavy metal that can harm the brain and nervous system.
Biologist Dick Wittberg, who heads the mid-Ohio Valley Health Department, has been pressing for years for a full-blown government study to determine if those releases are harming the children in his hometown of Marietta, Ohio.
Nobody knows for kids how much is too much.'' Similar concerns span the country, though communities with the worst factory pollution sometimes are frustrated they don't have more research to rely on.
In the Detroit suburb of Ecorse, which has sued U.S. Steel over decades of air pollution, Mayor Larry Salisbury wants the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate how industrial toxins affect health.
''Once they do, they have a certain liability to enforce.'' U.S. Steel spokesman John Armstrong said his company took over the Ecorse plant in 2003 from bankrupt National Steel and has spent millions cleaning up problems.
An Associated Press analysis of federal pollution, health and Census data found that more than 30 neighborhoods around the Great Steel Works plant in Ecorse rank among the worst 5 percent nationally for potential health risks from industrial air pollution.
The measures can be used to compare the chronic health risk from industrial air pollution from one part of the country to another.
N.J., is home to more than 100 contaminated industrial sites and seven minority neighborhoods that rank among the top 1 percent in the nation for the long-term health risk posed by factory pollution.
Robert Pedowitz said his Camden practice sees about 25 patients a day for asthma or allergy complaints, more than any other private practice in New Jersey.
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