Peter Angelos, of asbestos fame, and Chris Nidel, an environmental lawyer in Washington, D.C., have filed a lawsuit in York, Pa., against Synagro Technologies, a sludge-hauling company. The suit asks for unspecified amounts on behalf of Shrewsbury, Pa., residents who claim that sludge spread near their homes caused property damage and health problems. Could a similar case against Johns Hopkins researchers who neutralized lead-contaminated homes in East Baltimore with compost be far behind?
Remember when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was up in arms and Rep. Elijah Cummings and Sen. Barbara Mikulski wanted a congressional inquiry into this compost experiment? And Marvin L. “Doc” Cheatham Sr., president of NAACP’s Baltimore chapter, said at that time that medical research should not come at the expense of children being studied like guinea pigs?
This uproar resulted from the magnificent collaborative efforts put forth by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Kennedy Krieger Institute to treat and prevent lead poisoning in East Baltimore’s children. Compost, treated sludge from industrial and human waste, was applied to nine yards in the East Baltimore area in 2000, after it was documented that the soil in those yards contained excess lead.
Lead poisoning is no joke. It can cause irreversible neurological damage, kidney failure and learning disabilities in children. The doctors, not the politicians, were at the receiving end of a lead poisoning epidemic at Hopkins for years before they decided to take definitive action against it. To do nothing about this tragedy was not an ethical choice for the physicians at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. They witnessed a whole generation of children going to waste in East Baltimore because of the abysmal conditions in which these children lived without choice. The soil on which these children walked was saturated with lead from car exhaust and lead paint. Dissatisfied with what they had to offer East Baltimore’s children, the doctors opted to attack the root causes of lead poisoning.
Politicians raised their voices in declamations against the high-handedness of the Hopkins researchers, but they never showed up as saviors of the children who languished in hospital hallways.
Lawyers and lawmakers want research without unintended consequences or side effects. They expect science to be perfect with neatly sewn-up solutions to complex problems and scientists to be magicians who can know and foretell all the consequences of their actions. It is the harsh truth that most scientific advancement is based on trade-offs, and there are no rewards without risks in science. In the case of the lead research, the simple question is this: Did the benefits far outweigh the risks for the children of East Baltimore?
Hopkins doctors have clearly documented that the amount of lead dropped dramatically after they intervened, so I would conclude that the research was successful and the end point was beneficial to these children.
To politicians, compost could not possibly be different from sludge, and because the scientists who spread this “inimical sludge” in the yards of East Baltimore’s poor were white men from the ivory tower of Hopkins, they must be unconscionable guys willing to toy with the lives of poor black children for nothing more than self-aggrandizement in the name of science.
These politicians not only assumed the worst about the scientists, they did the same to the people of East Baltimore, acting as though the parents of these children were gullible fools suckered into a dangerous experiment by reckless doctors.
Black leaders frequently grumble that science neglects the poor and not enough research is done on blacks. They are ravaged by hypertension, diabetes, cancer and other chronic diseases, and the prognosis for these diseases is often far worse for blacks than whites. While the medical community should work hard to dispel the mistrust, the superstition and the fear that past historical injustices have etched in the minds of blacks, black politicians and leaders should stop fanning the flames of suspicion in the black community and deal with the world of research in a rational manner.
If the two parties don’t meet halfway to suspend the anxiety one rouses in the other, hope will dim for the kind of research that will one day conquer the many diseases that afflict blacks. I sincerely hope researchers are spared the “Angelos legal rod” in the case of fiction versus fact about compost and lead poisoning.
Usha Nellore is a writer living in Bel Air. Reach her at [email protected].
