‘Children are not little adults’: Another epidemiologist weighs in on CDC downplaying benzene as a childhood leukemia risk factor

A renowned academic childhood leukemia epidemiologist offered a different take on the CDC’s downplaying of benzene as a childhood leukemia risk, today.

We were actually talking on background about other aspects of childhood leukemia research, but since I had him on the line, I asked. (Unfortunately, this was after I already reported at epiNewswire what other researchers had to say.)

He wouldn’t have included benzene in the review in the first place, he said. But he thought it “pretty weird” that Environmental Health Perspectives, the U.S. government’s flagship public health journal, had altered the original review’s text rather than  simply adding a correction note.

“I’ve never seen that done before,” he said. “That’s weird. I don’t think they should go back and change the original paper.”

Regarding the rationale for EHP having removed mention of benzene, he said there’s no reason to believe AML is a different disease in children and adults, but that benzene has yet to be proven to be a leukemogen in kids.

‘Children are not a different species’: expert questions CDC’s downplaying of benzene in review of childhood leukemia risks

Leukemia epidemiologist Peter Infante, who originally identified occupational benzene exposure as a leukemia risk in the 1970s, yesterday questioned the decision to remove benzene from the abstract of a 2007 CDC review of childhood leukemia risks published in the U.S. government’s flagship public health journal, Environmental Health Perspectives.

The authors of the review, who work at the U.S. Centers of Disease Control (CDC), asked editors to remove mention of benzene as a childhood leukemia risk from their paper’s abstract and a section of the paper itself, after the paper had been published.

That came as a surprise to NIEHS leukemia researcher James Huff, but NIEHS spokeswoman Christine Bruske Flowers defended the CDC’s request.

“At the time, the data didn’t indicate benzene was a risk factor for childhood leukemia specifically,” Flowers told me. “I think there’s a distinction to be made between saying benzene’s a human carcinogen and saying benzene’s linked to childhood leukemia.”

That explanation didn’t seem to sit well with Infante.

Infante was quick to say the authors were of course free to change their opinion and ask for their paper to be changed.

But he also said the rationale offered by NIEHS’s spokeswoman — that there is or was insufficient evidence tying benzene to childhood leukemia — “doesn’t make sense.”

There are, in fact, studies tying fetal and childhood exposure to benzene, to childhood leukemia risk, he said. Large studies have shown that in-utero exposures to paint, which contains benzene, is a risk factor for childhood leukemia, Infante pointed out.

Moreover, he aruged, there’s no biological basis for assuming children are immune to benzene’s carcinogenicity. Benzene is best established as a risk factor for Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), Infante said.

Should we assume a 16 year-old’s AML is less likely sparked by benzene than a 19 year-old’s AML?

“Why would children be any different than adults,” he asked. “Children aren’t a different species. So you have to demonstrate benzene causes AML in children (too)? There are hardly any studies of leukemia in people over 75. Do you have to have evidence it (benzene) specifically causes leukemia in patients in that age group, too?”

CDC authors requested removal of benzene from EHP review of childhood leukemia risk factors

Centers for Disease Control (CDC) authors of a 2007 review of childhood leukemia’s risk factors instigated the post-publication removal of benzene from their paper’s abstract, National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) spokeswoman Christine Bruske Flowers told me Thursday afternoon.

NIEHS publishes the influential journal Environmental Health Perspectives, in which the review had been published.  The 2007 paper’s abstract originally included both benzene and ionizing radiation as risk factors for childhood leukemia, but removal of benzene from the abstract was requested “by the CDC” within months of its publication, Flowers said.

Asked whether she was referring specifically to the CDC researchers who authored the paper, as opposed to other CDC officials, Flowers said it was her understanding the authors themselves requested the change.

“At the time, the data didn’t indicate benzene was a risk factor for childhood leukemia specifically,” Flowers said. “I think there’s a distinction to be made between saying benzene’s a human carcinogen and saying benzene’s linked to childhood leukemia.”

NIEHS journal’s benzene/leukemia ‘correction’ comes as surprise to leading NIEHS leukemia researcher

An unattributed and undated correction in Environmental Health Perspectives removed mention of benzene as a risk factor for acute childhood leukemias from the abstract of a 2007 review.

The influential journal is published by the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), but the correction came as a surprise to a leading leukemia researcher at NIEHS, James Huff.

“I do not know what this means,” Huff told me Tuesday. “Of course benzene in our experiments and now others does cause leukemia (and) lymphoma in mice, correspondent with humans.”

Another chemical plant spill into China’s Songhua River; millions of downstream residents potentially affected

A flood in northeast China reportedly swept more than 160 tonnes of toxic chlorotrimethylsilane into the Songhua River Wednesday from a chemical warehouse in the city of Jilin.

When mixed with water, chlorotrimethylsilane produces hydrochloric acid. “Smoking barrels” floating by the city, reportedly caused residents to gag, cough and report headaches.

City officials cut off the water supply. But local news media were initially ordered not to report on the spill and city officials denied the river had been contaminated.

Five years ago, the Songhua River made headlines when a massive chemical plant explosion caused thousands of gallons of benzene, aniline, and nitrobenzene to flow into the waterway.

Jilin city officials attempted to cover up the spill, which affected an estimated four million residents in downstream Chinese and Russian towns and cities.

Remarkably little has been published in English-language scientific journals about the spill and its environmental and health outcomes. Four years after the benzene spill, Russian and Chinese environmental toxicologists reported high levels of benzene and benzene metabolites in downstream fish populations.

Benzene no longer a childhood leukemia risk?

Earlier this month, I got an interesting e-mail from Terry Nordbrock, executive director of the National Disease Clusters Alliance (NDCA).

Terry pointed out a curious “correction” in the monthly government scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives. (EHP is the flagship journal of the National Institutes for Environmental Health Sciences.)

EHP had added a “correction” to a 2007 CDC review of risk factors for acute childhood leukemias, Terry noticed.

Whereas the authors had originally reported in the paper and its abstract that both benzene and ionizing radiation were risk factors for childhood leukemia, the correction indicated that benzene was not, after all, a leukemia risk for children:

In the Abstract and in the section “Risk Factors,” the sentences “Only two environmental risk factors (benzene and ionizing radiation) have been significantly linked to ALL or AML” in the original manuscript published online have been changed here to “Only one environmental risk factor (ionizing radiation) has been significantly linked to ALL or AML.”

That’s a hell of a shift in thinking to be buried, unexplained, in a correction note.

Drug-resistant Acinetobacter deadlier than antibiotic-sensitive strains

Reporting in epi yet more evidence that multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter infections are indeed deadlier — or, more precisely, associated with significantly higher patient death rates — than drug-sensitive strains of the bacteria.

That seems to further contradict U.S. Army studies, based on selected patient populations, that suggested Acinetobacter does not meaningfully affect patient mortality.

June saw more US soldier suicides than any previous month on record

The U.S. Army continues to flounder in its attempts to stem its suicide crisis with PR contracts and educational videos, most recently another suicide prevention training video.

Meanwhile, their newly-released suicide tally for June present a daunting picture of the challenge, which may be “unstoppable” because “the damage has already been done,”  some military medical officials have confided to me on background.

June saw 21 active-duty U.S. soldiers take their own lives and 12 National Guard personnel and reservists commit suicide. Suicides are up 12 percent this year from the first half of 2009.

I’m still pursuing FOIA requests for details, and am taking a look at motor vehicle fatality trends that may be masking an even larger problem with Army suicides.

As I reported in epiNewswire earlier this year, Army epidemiologists initially identified combat deployments as a significant risk factor for soldiers’ suicide — flatly contradicting the official line that there are no discernable correlations for the increasing suicide rate since 2004.

That finding was declared a “political hot potato” at a high-level meeting about the study, and the findings were subsequently “re-analyzed” with “more rigorous” (but undisclosed) statistical analyses.

The new analysis showed no correlation between suicide and combat deployments.

Studies of suicide rates were among the potentially-sensitive research censored by the Army under its obscure Actionable Medical Intelligence review program, the existence of which was first reported by epiNewswire in 2008.

So it goes.

Who is testing Gulf fish for carcinogens? Everybody but EPA, apparently.

Marian Wang’s been doing a hell of a job covering the environmental toxicology front in the BP oil spill response, for ProPublica.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to be the lead agency in the public health response to oil spills, but the last I heard, they still have not begun to put their world-renowned environmental toxicology labs to work measuring carcinogens in contaminated Gulf water.

But Wang reports today that other agencies have been measuring carcinogens, including NOAA and Gulf states’ labs.

Why not EPA?  There’s a story there, but I don’t know what it is, yet.  Once I get my various editors their stories for the week, I’m going to start taking a look at the agency’s other recent disaster responses, to look for clues.

How are those French cancer rates?

The French Paradox has been heavily promoted by the wine and spirits industries, and an eager news media. (Anybody who has hung out with journalists knows we tend to like our ethanol.)

Basically, the story goes like this: despite eating tons of cholesterol and saturated fats, the French stave off heart disease by drinking a lot of wine.  The supposedly investigative 60 Minutes uncritically reported on the hypothesis nearly 20 years ago.

Less reported has been ubiquitous evidence that whatever the cardiovascular benefits of moderate alcohol consumption may be, ethanol is a carcinogen.

I just reported on the latest such news, the publication this month of a new meta-analysis tying even very moderate alcohol consumption to oral and pharyngeal cancers.