18 Jun Reckless fear-mongering about Cape Breton health

The only daily in Cape Breton and the largest daily in Nova Scotia devoted half their front pages Wednesday to error-riddled stories alleging steel plant slag spread on abandoned Devco Railway beds may be causing cancer.

The stories are wrong.

There is no evidence slag causes cancer. There is abundant evidence—right here in Cape Breton—that intensive processing of steel plant slag and its widespread application in the construction of gravel roads does not cause air pollution or give rise to health concerns.

None of those incontrovertible facts stayed the Cape Breton Post or the Halifax Chronicle Herald from recklessly fanning false fears of cancer in our community.

The stories don’t quote a single scientist, oncologist, toxicologist, public health specialist, or risk assessor. They rely entirely on the unsupported claims of a single, distraught 66-year-old Glace Bay man, recently diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, whose home lies roughly 100 feet from a rail bed where four to six inches of slag was applied two years ago, in March 2013.

Steel plant slag is the inert, stony, greyish material left over when molten iron is extracted from iron ore, or mixed with limestone in steel production. It consists of various oxides—mainly calcium, silicon, and iron—with lesser amounts of magnesium and manganese. It may have trace amounts—trace amounts—of chromium or vanadium.

One hundred years of steelmaking produced a small mountain of slag on the steel plant. It’s the hill bordering the north section of Open Hearth Park. Over the last 15 years, the slag heap has been shrinking as a private company mined and processed it for use in concrete production and road construction.

Except for the last year or two, this period of intense slag extraction and processing in the middle of Sydney coincided with the Tar Ponds cleanup, which also made extensive use of slag for temporary worksite roads. Throughout the same period, Sydney’s air was subject to one of the most intensive air monitoring campaigns ever conducted in Canada. Half a dozen monitoring stations, scattered throughout the community and equipped with advanced detection devices, probed for upwards of 100 contaminants at levels as low as a few parts per billion. (The Tar Ponds cleanup was subjected to special, site-specific air quality standards more stringent than normal Canadian environmental guidelines.)

How many times were any of the elements found in slag detected at levels exceeding these ultra-cautious standards?

Zero.

As a health concern, slag is a non-starter.

To be diagnosed with advanced lung cancer at any age is a terrible blow, and we can only feel sympathy for the gentleman who raised the alarm in Wednesday’s papers. We can even sympathize with his desire to find some external factor he can blame for his terrible misfortune.

As I understand it, however, lung cancer is a long time in the making. Absent some horrific exposure akin to Chernobyl, it doesn’t appear and rise to the level of stage four in less than two years, the period of time since slag was applied to the rail bed near this gentleman’s home.

As to other, more plausible factors—smoking, diet, stress, occupational exposures—the Herald and Post are silent.

How about checking for reports of health problems among workers who’ve been processing slag at the steel plant for the last 15 years? Again, the papers are silent.

There is no question Cape Breton coal miners and coke oven workers suffered serious occupational health effects throughout the 20th Century. It is equally true that, more recently, Sydney suffered years of paralyzing anxiety over broader environmental health fears—such as lead and arsenic contamination—that stringent testing by public health authorities, toxicologists, and risk assessors eventually showed to be groundless.

Unreasoning fear is itself a public health risk.

Given this history, any journalist reporting claims of environmental health risks in industrial Cape Breton owes the public a special duty of care. The slipshod reporting of a false association between slag and cancer, in an already troubled community, without the slightest attempt at fact checking, amounts to journalistic malpractice.