Following the June, 2001 meeting of ORRHES I have several concerns specific to this meeting and of a more general nature.
The four most important general concerns with the activities of ORRHES over
the last seven months are listed below.
1) The lack of meaningful communication with the community is a major
shortcoming. There should be at least one hour of structured dialog
with the public at each meeting at a convenient time. A moderator
could facilitate this by interrupting people that were restating
previous concerns, and for new issues directing question to ATSDR
staff, ORRHES members, or taking other appropriate actions.
2) Failure to include DOE/ORO as a non-voting member of ORRHES is
totally unacceptable to me. The statement that DOE has not responded
to specific individuals truthfully (assuming this is true) should not
exclude their participation in this evaluation of ORR. This indicates
to me that ATSDR is more concerned with placating special interests
than achieving their stated objective which requires a meaningful
dialog with DOE---the major source of data and funding for the
project. My own experience as a community member requesting
information from DOE/ORO was totally satisfactory. I received
information (that I was never able to obtain from the contractor) from
ORO in less than a month. In a public forum where communications and
trust are essential, failure to include DOE/ORO speaks for itself.
Failure to include DOE/ORO in a civil dialog can never lead to a
"meeting of the minds" on issues that are of great importance to the
future of ORR and the surrounding communities.
3) A considerable amount of time was spent by several Subcommittee
members drafting a recommendation concerning the need for and content
of a ORRHES web site ( see
www.csm.ornl.gov/~frome/orrhes/ for details) . For an
organization that is suppose to be able to communicate effectively the
lack of ability to develop and maintain a useful web site for ORRHES
is beyond my comprehension. Thanks to Al Brooks a temporary web site
has been provided, but this is far short of what is needed to meet the
needs of the Subcommittee and community.
4) The time required for the many work group meetings and preparation for
the Subcommittee meetings is also a major problem. If my time was
being spent in positive and constructive ways I would not be so
concerned (the web site being just one example of wasted time on
something that should have been handled up-front by ATSDR)
I also have two specific concerns related to the June 11-12, 2001 meeting.
1) Much of the material presented by Dr Hoffman on Monday, June 11 was
totally inappropriate for ORRHES at this time. The ATSDR Public
Health Assessments as described at atsdr1.atsdr.cdc.gov/HAC/PHA/foreword.htm
clearly describes the first step in the PHA process... "Exposure: As the first step in the evaluation, ATSDR
scientists review environmental data to see how much contamination is
at a site, where it is, and how people might come into contact with
it."
Dr Hoffman did not explain his methods for
addressing the above issue for I-131, but focused on relative risk
models and probability of causation to hypothetical individuals that
may have been exposed to I-131. The material should have been
presented at a PHA work group meeting and the problem of technical
content and relevancy to the PHA process could have been resolved. I
am sure that many Subcommittee members did not have the technical
background to understand much of his presentation.
The presentation by Peipins and Berger on Tuesday morning was well
done and understandable to the Subcommittee. At the very least this
should have preceded the Monday afternoon session.
2) On Tuesday, June 12, a recommendation was brought before the
Subcommittee concerning a one day "team building" meeting. About 15
minutes was spent discussing when the meeting might take place before
a recommendation was made to have the meeting. After the
recommendation was made to have the meeting I requested an opportunity
to discuss the motion and this request was refused by the chair. I
have spent many hours listening to other Subcommittee members discuss
and repeat the same position, and find this failure to allow me to
speak once on this issue before a vote was taken totally unacceptable.
This topic was discussed in detail at a COWG meeting, but was never
discussed by the entire Subcommittee in any detail. The concerns I
raised at the COWG meeting were never addressed by ATSDR staff or
discussed by ORRHES.
For these and related personal reasons I do not feel that I can ask my
family and my employer to allow me the time that is required to be an
effective member of ORRHES and, therefore, request that you accept my
resignation.
I enjoyed meeting and working with many members of ORRHES and ATSDR
staff and hope you will be successful in your efforts to deal with the
public health concerns associated with the ORR.
Ed Frome
P.S. I will be glad to follow the activities that are described on
the OFFICIAL ORRHES web site,
and if there are items on the agenda for a work group meeting that
involve statistics or epidemiology I will try to participate in these
discussions. However, I strongly recommend that you obtain the
independent advise of a statistician at ATSDR or CDC on the somewhat
complex and controversial statistical issues that seem to be of
concern to the Subcommittee. For an Online Introduction to Statistics
click here- see Item 6