CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) RESOURCE CENTER Read More
Add To Favorites

Mothers request monitoring for PFC exposure

Concord Monitor - 9/7/2017

Portsmouth Herald

Several mothers whose children were exposed to contaminated water at the former Pease Air Force Base urged the Task Force on the Seacoast Pediatric Cancer Cluster to recommend ongoing medical monitoring in its final report.

Andrea Amico of Portsmouth, co-founder of the Testing For Pease community group and website, told the task force two of her three children and her husband were exposed to high levels of PFCs from a city-owned well at Pease International Tradeport.

“Medical monitoring is absolutely critical to our community,” Amico told the task force at its meeting Wednesday in City Hall. She noted her daughter, who just entered first grade, was exposed to the contaminants while at a day care at Pease. “I wonder how these chemicals are going to impact her body as she grows.”

Amico maintained the failure by the state Department of Health and Human Services to recommend ongoing medical monitoring, which was outlined in the landmark C8 health studies, has meant some people who want additional tests for their children are being turned down by their pediatricians.

“It has created barriers for our community accessing medical monitoring,” Amico said.

Michelle Dalton of Durham, another Testing for Pease co-founder, said both her and her son were exposed to the PFCs at Pease. She has been unable to get her pediatrician to agree to conduct ongoing medical monitoring for her son because DHHS has not recommended it.

“I’m sure you can understand my frustration,” Dalton said. “My child is not like every other unexposed child. Sufficient is not good enough for me and my son.”

DHHS’s failure to recommend medical monitoring is “actually preventing parents like me from being proactive,” she said.

“We didn’t ask to be contaminated but the reality is we are,” she said. “I feel there’s something wrong with that.”

Portsmouth mother and Pease Community Assistance Panel member Lindsey Carmichael said “my son drank contaminated water for four years.” She has “very strong feelings about the need for medical monitoring” and added it offers families the “primary opportunity we have for early detection.”

Greenland resident and community activist Jillian Lane read a letter from Testing For Pease co-founder Alayna Davis of Dover, who could not attend Wednesday’s meeting because of a work commitment. Davis stated in the letter that she was exposed to the PFCs at Pease when she was pregnant with her son. Her and her husband were “devastated” when they saw the high levels of PFCs in their son’s blood.

Her son’s exposure continued until he was 5, Davis said in the letter, and she worries PFCs have “compromised his immune system.”

Her son missed a week and a half of school last year fighting pneumonia, she said in the letter. She worries how the PFC exposure might affect her son now and decades later. “I would not wish the uncertainty and worry ... on any other family,” Davis said in the letter.

Their comments came Wednesday after State Epidemologist Dr. Benjamin Chan at a previous task force meeting called the idea of medical monitoring “controversial.” He referred to the C8 study and its recommendations for ongoing medical monitoring as “a little controversial because doctors like to base testing decisions on evidence-based medicine.”

Task Force Chairman Tom Sherman, a medical doctor, noted he and Chan “have disagreed for a long time about the data that’s available to support medical monitoring.”

“I disagree wholeheartedly about his statement that this was based on a legal settlement,” Sherman said at the previous meeting.