The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention failed to act for at least a year on warnings that trailers housing refugees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita contained dangerous levels of formaldehyde, according to a House of Representatives subcommittee report released Monday.
Instead, the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry demoted the scientist who questioned its initial assessment that the trailers were safe as long as residents opened a window or vent, the report said.
That appraisal was produced in February 2007 at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had received thousands of complaints about fumes after providing the trailers to families left homeless by the 2005 hurricanes. One year later, FEMA and CDC reversed course and acknowledged that formaldehyde levels in the trailers were five times as high as what is typically found in new housing.
Formaldehyde is known to cause cancer, chronic bronchitis, eye irritation and other ailments. It was used in glue for rugs, plywood, fiberboard and other materials.
“FEMA was more concerned about legal liability than they were about people living in the trailers,” said Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology Subcommittee on Investigation and Oversight. “It certainly appears that (the agency) was more interested in giving FEMA what FEMA wanted, amazingly, than it was in its mission of protecting the public.”
The subcommittee’s report came three days after a federal judge in New Orleans ruled that FEMA could be sued by hurricane victims who claimed they were exposed to toxic fumes.
The CDC issued a statement Monday saying that the subcommittee report focused on the February 2007 assessment and not an October revision or other CDC efforts to address formaldehyde exposure.
The subcommittee noted that the agency took eight months to revise its initial finding and did so only after Christopher De Rosa, the agency’s demoted director of the Division of Toxicology and Environmental Medicine, publicly flagged scientific errors.
