Like wildebeest on the Serengeti or salmon in the Pacific Northwest, monarch butterflies take part in an epic migration.
Each fall, hundreds of millions of monarchs sweep down from eastern Canada and the United States to the mountains of central Mexico, where they spend the winter clustered in fir trees. The following spring, they turn northward again. Researchers don’t know how such small organisms can travel so far, or how the butterflies navigate during their journey of up to 3,000 miles. Do monarchs fly along certain routes? How does weather affect them? And, most importantly, why are their numbers declining?
The summer sunlight filters down through the maples and tulip trees and glints off the surface of the swirling stream. Monte McGregor stands in the calf-deep water, digging into the sand and gravel with a gloved hand, pulling out what appear at first to be elliptical brown rocks.
Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he plunges back in and comes up with more strange creatures: a pink heelsplitter, a monkeyface. Then he grins wide. “There’s a fanshell,” he says proudly. “This is endangered. This is as rare as anything in Africa.”
McGregor, a malacologist, or mussel scientist, with the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, counts four endangered fanshell mussels on this trip—but that’s nothing. There are hundreds of them here on the Green River in central Kentucky, not far from Mammoth Cave National Park. This particular site has about 25,000 freshwater mussels in an area the size of a football field—a biological treasure chest buried in the sand. Mussels can live for 40 to 50 years, some growing to the size of a dinner plate.
In a cloud forest in Panama, hundreds of frogs turn up dead, the life sucked out of them by a strange fungus.
In the wetlands of northwest Iowa, where hunters once collected 20 million frogs a year for their meaty legs, there is only one leopard frog left for every thousand frogs the pioneers saw.
In southern Missouri’s mountain streams, scientists struggle to protect dwindling populations of the Ozark hellbender, a wrinkled, primitive salamander that can grow to two feet long.
All around the planet, amphibians such as these are in trouble. It’s not just the colorful, exotic rainforest species that are disappearing, but also the common frogs, toads, newts and salamanders that people used to see in backyards across America. A third of all amphibian species are considered threatened, making them the most vulnerable group of animals in the world. By comparison, 12 percent of birds and 23 percent of mammals are threatened.
BENHAM, KY. – For years, this eastern Kentucky town had seemed little more than a crumbling memorial to Appalachian coal.
There had been good days, sure. During World War II, Benham was as rich as the black seams of rock that generations of men and women extracted from the surrounding hills – a jewel of Appalachia with its country club, lawn tennis, and theater.
But it couldn’t last. Eventually, Northern steel mills no longer devoured Kentucky coal. Miners fell out of work. Stores closed and windows were boarded up. At one point, the town didn’t have the cash to fix its lone police car.
The time had come for a revolution – and it came, but in the most unlikely manner.
No dotcom start-up saved this hamlet of 700 residents from despair. Rather, it was a group of gray-haired ladies, their garden tools, and lots of bake sales.
Around town, they are known as the “Petticoat Mafia” – seven members of the Benham Garden Club who, come January, will hold every major elected office. Betty Howard is mayor; her six comrades in straw hats are the town council members.
In the past decade, this gardening junta has resuscitated Benham almost singlehandedly. They’ve bought a new $147,000 fire truck, two police cars, and a garbage truck; built one park and refurbished another; and erected a $30,000 statue to coal miners. All this with money from a thrift store, picnics, and community events.
Calls have come from as far away as New York and Canada, asking for the Benham Garden Club’s old-fashioned recipe for urban revitalization. Indeed, it’s being held up both here and across the country as an example of how one small group can change the future of a community.
“It’s small-town America in action,” says Sylvia Lovely, executive director of the Kentucky League of Cities. “And it’s in a part of the state that can use a lot of that.”
The patina of poverty still rests here on the heart of Kentucky’s coal fields. During the war years, Harlan County consistently ranked among Kentucky’s top five tax-revenue-producing counties. Now, the poverty rate is 29.9 percent, more than double the US average, according to Census figures.
Yet Benham shines like a bright penny. The town has no grocery store, gas station, or significant employer, but the garden club makes sure the ditches are clean, the flowers are blooming, and the parks are open. Club members have painted street signs themselves.
“You haven’t seen us in our straw hats and gardening gloves,” says Mayor Howard with a chuckle.
Garden club members, many of them retired or widowed, work six days a week to raise cash for their projects. Most of the money comes from a thrift store run by the club, which sells shirts for a quarter and dresses for $1. The club also sponsors community events, such as this summer’s political picnic, where they sell home-cooked meals for about $5 a plate. An elaborate Halloween haunted house brought in another $2,500 this fall.
The events draw people from around the county and even from other states. Volunteers from nearby towns pitch in, too.
A decade ago, however, shortly after the mine closed, Benham’s future seemed dark. That’s when the Petticoat revolution began. In 1990, the town needed a new fire truck. Knowing the town was broke and not wanting to raise taxes, former Councilman Gary Huff suggested having a garage sale to raise money.
Garden club members ran the event. Originally scheduled to last two weekends, it never stopped. Donations rolled in from around the country, and eventually, the garage sale became the garden club thrift shop, known as the This ‘N’ That Store.
“We were just doing so well. Why stop?” says Thelma Brock, a town council member and Howard’s mother, sitting at a plywood table in the store.
From there, the ladies began their assault on municipal office. The revenue brought in from the thrift shop and special events paid for refurbishing Veterans’ Park with new benches and flags.
The club’s greatest pride, however, is the Coal Miners Memorial Park, built on the site of a former dump. The completed park includes a picnic shelter, a gazebo, a mile-long walking trail, and a memorial to the 35 miners who died in Benham mines. A bronze statue of a miner carrying a pick and lantern stands in the middle.
Town council member Wanda Humphrey remembers how old miners cried the day the statue was dedicated. “One of the coal miners [got] down on his knees. The others put their arms around each other. I’ll never forget that,” she says.
But the garden club doesn’t stop at beautification projects. Their fundraising contributes as much as $3,000 a month to the city for items such as furnaces and police uniforms. In fact, the club provides about one-fourth of the city’s annual $120,000 budget.
“I doubt very seriously this city could survive, if not for these ladies,” says Bob Clay, who is both police and fire chief.
During the first half of the 20th century, Benham didn’t have to worry about its survival. It was a company town, founded by International Harvester in 1911. Harvester operated the mines, where local workers toiled in three shifts to supply coal for the steel mills that fueled the Industrial Age.
When Harvester prospered, so did Benham. There was the hospital and country club. Coal-company doctors made house calls, and the company commissary sold name-brand clothing and fine fabrics to housewives.
“I guess we lived in the best world,” says Ruby Sweet, a council member whose husband died in a mine accident in 1978.
Harvester disbanded in the late 1960s, leaving residents to build a government from scratch. When the mine closed in the late 1980s, Benham fell into disrepair. “In the early ’90s, … all the windows were busted out,” says Howard, who has been mayor since 1994. “It was a town that had gone to nothing.”
Today, the Petticoat Mafia is talking about refurbishing some of the historic buildings, such as the old company clubhouse. The goal, says Howard, is to get more tourists to come through and visit the town’s major attractions: the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum and the Benham Schoolhouse Inn, a bed-and-breakfast set in the old company school.
Garden club member Debbie Hammond says some people were at first skeptical about the garden club. One town councilman elected in 1994 even refused to take office with the gals.
But no one is complaining now. “They’re wonderful,” says Harlan County Circuit Judge Ron Johnson, a Benham native. “I can’t say enough about them.”
Note: Computer-assisted journalism workshops often use this story as an example of data mapping. Journalism Accelerator interviewed Sara in 2011 about the project.
Flood waters of the Illinois, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers near St. Louis, Missouri on July 29, 1993 (Gumley and King, 1993)
This series originally appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 27-31, 2003
By Sara Shipley of the Post-Dispatch
More than $2.2 billion worth of new development in the St. Louis area stands on land that was under water in the 1993 flood.
The building boom has brought jobs, services and tax revenue to the region, but it could lead to a more costly disaster in the future.
Flood plain development is a gamble against the river, and Missouri has rolled the dice on more land than any other state affected by the flood, according to a study done for the Post-Dispatch. In the past decade, offices, shopping centers and highways have covered at least 4,200 acres of Missouri flood plain, most of which were under water. And there’s more in the works.
Projects under way or on the drawing boards in the counties of St. Louis and
St. Charles would convert 14,000 acres of agricultural flood plain into
commercial and residential development.
Since the flood, development interests have pushed with renewed zeal to control the flood plains, which represent the biggest tracts of open, private land left in the St. Louis region. City officials and landowners have worked hand-in-hand with developers to take advantage of liberal regulations and generous public subsidies for flood plain development.
Supporters say the benefits justify what they consider to be a small chance of flooding.
“Name me a place where you wouldn’t have some risk,” says J. Wayne Oldroyd, community development director for Maryland Heights, which has designed the single biggest new flood plain development in the region on 8,000-plus acres near the Missouri River. The plan calls for 16.5 million square feet of hotels, offices, restaurants and light industry behind a reinforced levee.
“Would there be, in geological time, a point in which the river would come over that levee? Sure,” Oldroyd said. “That’s a business decision (to build in the flood plain). The market will decide whether it’s confident in putting
development there.”
Critics say the trend puts short-term economic gains ahead of long-term safety and environmental stability.
James Lee Witt, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Bill Clinton, predicts that the costs of new flood plain development will outweigh the benefits to society.
“If it’s in the flood plain, it’s not in a good area to develop,” Witt said. “I
don’t care how many levees you build, at some point, you will be impacted.”
Witt said that construction in flood-prone areas also makes flooding worse
elsewhere. “We’ve actually caused a lot of these problems ourselves, by not
protecting our environment so it can protect us,” he said.
Aggressive development contradicts task force
An examination by the Post-Dispatch has found that:
Missouri’s aggressive development contradicts the recommendations
of a federal flood task force headed by respected former Army Corps of
Engineers Gen. Gerald Galloway. The 1994 Galloway Report said that new flood plain development should be avoided, levee construction should be limited, and people and buildings should be moved out of the river’s way, whenever possible.
Missouri lawmakers have declined to enact statewide flood plain
regulations, allowing communities to develop flood plains without fully
evaluating or compensating for negative effects on their neighbors. Some Midwestern states – including Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin – have stricter rules on flood plain development.
A growing body of scientific evidence has detected increased flood
heights of 3 to 12 feet on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, a trend that shows no signs of stopping. The scientists blame levees and flood plain development in part for the increase.
Increased flooding caused by new development could affect a great number of people and buildings already in the region’s flood plains. Up to 1.1 million people live in the historic flood plains of seven states in the Upper Mississippi River basin, according to the Post-Dispatch’s study. Much of this commercial and residential development is in levee-protected areas, where flood insurance is not required.
Taxpayers subsidize flood plain development through levee construction, levee repair, disaster aid, insurance costs and infrastructure such as roads, bridges and drainage systems. In Missouri, more tax money has been funneled to flood plain construction through the use of an economic development tool called
tax-increment-financing.
“We should be ashamed of ourselves for what we’ve done with the taxpayers’
money,” said Wayne Freeman, executive director of the Great Rivers Habitat
Alliance, a conservation group based in St. Louis. “We can’t afford to
subsidize high-risk development.”
St. Peters Mayor Tom Brown, who backs flood plain development, said the St.
Louis region has enough river bottoms to support both economic development and
open space.
“St. Louis city has a flood wall. Riverport is in a flood plain. Think of the
jobs created in Earth City. It’s in a flood plain. So yes, very positive things
can be done,” he said. “In St. Charles County, probably 40 percent of the land
will (remain) in flood plain. So we’ll always have farmland and hunting
ground.”
Developments take over flood plains in Missouri
From a strip shopping center in Chesterfield Valley billed as the nation’s
largest to the high-end outlet mall being built in Hazelwood, most of the
Missouri River flood plain in St. Louis County will have been set aside for
development by the end of this year.
Bridgeton has approved plans for a 417-acre commercial park. Levee districts in
Chesterfield and Maryland Heights are in the process of raising existing levees
to the 500-year-flood level to encourage development. The Missouri Bottoms
Levee District, farther downstream, is considering the same.
Across the river in St. Charles County, the city of St. Charles has 2.3 million
square feet of new commercial space in the Mississippi River flood plain. St.
Peters has one new levee around its Old Town district and plans to build a
1,670-acre business park in the flood plain nearby. O’Fallon has designs on
annexing flood plain to the north.
Nowhere in the Midwest is this growth pattern as dramatic, according to a
satellite image analysis of development in seven states that were more affected
by flooding in 1993.
The Post-Dispatch hired Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota to conduct the
analysis. No state or federal agency keeps detailed records on flood plain
development.
The study looked at development in areas that were under water in 1993 and
development within the river’s historic boundaries, typically defined by river
bluffs.
The analysis included levee-protected areas and focused on land in and around
population centers.
The results showed that more than 3,870 acres of land in St. Louis and St.
Charles counties had been converted from fields and trees to highways,
buildings and parking lots. In Kansas City, 405 acres were developed, making a
total of about 4,275 acres in Missouri.
In Missouri, about 75 percent of the development happened on land that had been
under water in 1993.
In other states, development was limited mostly to land that didn’t flood 10
years ago. In Illinois, for example, most of the development was in those parts
of the Metro East area protected by levees that held in ’93.
It may be no surprise that Missouri developed the most flood plain land. The
state has the two biggest cities in the flood-affected area – St. Louis and
Kansas City. Both are on major rivers and have rapidly growing suburban
fringes.
Missouri also has the biggest flood plain – about 6,400 square miles, compared
with 4,755 for Illinois and 4,330 for Iowa, the next two largest, according to
the study.
Michael F. Robinson, a senior policy adviser at FEMA in Washington, said St.
Louis has an unusual set of factors that makes it a natural spot for new flood
plain development.
“You have to have a big, wide flood plain next to an urban area to make that
economically viable,” Robinson said. “It may be the only area where this kind
of development would happen.”
Elsewhere in the nation, some attempts to create similar major developments
have been rebuffed. FEMA refused to permit the 4,600-acre Green Diamond
development in South Carolina because it was too close to the Congaree River.
Missouri has a reputation for huge new levees, said Tim Searchinger, a lawyer
for Environmental Defense, an advocacy group based in New York that tracks
flood plain issues.
“The area we hear the most complaints about stupid new big things in the flood
plain is basically in Missouri,” he said. “We haven’t heard of them elsewhere.”
New stores rise on once submerged land
Missouri’s building boom might have seemed unlikely a decade ago, when the
nation’s most costly flood struck.
The five-month-long deluge covered 17,000 square miles of land in nine states
and forced the evacuation of about 54,000 people. Thousands of people helped
fill sandbags, only to lose the battle in places.
Whole towns were swallowed in a lake of brown floodwater. High water shut down
12 commercial airports, 388 sewage treatment plants and almost all bridges over
the Missouri and Mississippi rivers between St. Louis, Kansas City and
Davenport, Iowa.
Damage estimates ranged from $12 billion to $20 billion, not counting the toll
from lost productivity and disrupted lives.
By most counts, Missouri suffered the most direct damages, with at least $3
billion in losses. At the nexus of two of the most powerful rivers in the
nation, floodwater in Missouri reclaimed much of the rivers’ ancient channels,
consuming farm fields, factories and homes.
Until 1993, many Americans believed that they could keep rivers safely in place
through engineering and sheer tenacity. The flood challenged that thinking.
Government figures compiled in the flood’s wake showed that federal taxpayers
had spent about $140 billion on flood-control structures and disaster
assistance nationwide in the previous 25 years, an average of $5.6 billion each
year.
Yet flood damages in the United States have more than doubled since 1900 in
inflation-adjusted dollars, rising to more than $5 billion per year on average,
according to a National Weather Service estimate.
“That flood was, to me, the ultimate repudiation of the basic American approach
to flooding for the past 70 years,” said David Conrad of the National Wildlife
Federation, who wrote a critical report on the issue in 1998.
“It pointed out that to rely exclusively on a flood-control approach, rather
than managing our land use, means that we are ultimately putting more and more
people and property at risk.”
Galloway, the retired Corps of Engineers civil engineer who headed the White
House task force on the flood, said it shifted the nation’s collective
consciousness – at least for a while. Instead of assuming that rivers should be
dominated, people began to think about giving them room to roam.
“The United States has made a fundamental change,” he said. “Structural methods
(such as levees) don’t solve the problem by themselves.”
The federal government spent $1 billion to buy 25,000 flooded properties
nationwide to turn the land into open space.
Missouri embraced that offer more than any other state, moving more than 4,700
households permanently out of harm’s way. Illinois bought out about 3,000
properties, including a whole town.
But the buyout program was voluntary and, in Missouri, applied only to
residential property. Before long, people were thinking about moving back into
the flood plains.
“You go two to three years after a flood, and human optimism prevails over
human experience,” said Scott Faber, water resources specialist with
Environmental Defense.
Most officials consider devastating flood unlikely
Today, most city officials and developers working in the river bottoms play
down the likelihood of another devastating flood.
All the new commercial flood plain developments in St. Louis and St. Charles
counties are protected by earthen levees or built on top of plateaus of dirt
designed to withstand what’s called a 500-year flood.
A 500-year flood is one that has a 1-in-500 chance of happening in any given
year. Stated another way, that would be a 1-in-10 chance of happening over 50
years, or a 1-in-5 chance of happening over a century.
“There is always a risk of flooding,” said Mike Geisel, Chesterfield’s public
works director, who also manages the city’s flood plain development permits. “I
think the valley is reasonably safe. It could – eons in the future – flood
again.”
Modern 500-year levees are considered the gold standard of protection for major
urban areas like Kansas City and St. Louis. None has ever had a catastrophic
failure.
But in recent years, bigger floods have called even the mighty 500-year levee
into question. During the ’93 flood, most 500-year levees performed solidly.
But a 500-year levee at Riverport and a 500-year flood wall in downtown St.
Louis needed reinforcements.
And now the Corps of Engineers has proposed building a 1,000-year levee across
the Missouri River from Jefferson City. The added protection is needed because
spiraling flood levels mean the levee will offer only 500-year protection by
2031, according to the corps’ Kansas City office.
Other studies since the early 1970s have documented increasing flood levels for
similar volumes of water on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Many
researchers believe that levees and other man-made constrictions squeeze water
higher in the channel.
That means a 500-year levee might not really offer 500-year flood protection.
“Even at 500 years, somewhere a levee is going to get overtopped someday,” said
FEMA’s Robinson. “When it does happen, it’s going to be a big disaster.”
There’s also a debate over whether these new levees will make flooding worse
elsewhere by pushing water onto other property.
“You’re a fool if you don’t say it does,” said Dennis Stephens, chief of
hydrologic engineering for the corps’ St. Louis District.
The question is, how much.
The corps says that levees generally increase flooding upstream and increase
water velocity downstream, because water backs up at the levee and then shoots
downstream through a narrower opening. The agency figures the additional
flooding caused by each of its levee projects and compensates other landowners
for it. That might mean building a ring levee around a vulnerable water plant,
for example.
But some dismiss the impact of levees. The Upper Mississippi, Illinois and
Missouri Rivers Association, which represents businesses along the rivers,
believes that the impact of levees is localized and minimal. The association
wants the corps to build a uniform flood-protection system along the entire
upper Mississippi.
“Levees don’t cause floods. Rain causes floods,” executive director Heather
Hampton-Knodle said.
Others say they can engineer around the problem. St. Peters Mayor Brown said
the city has spent $1.25 million on studies for the planned commercial park.
The result is that the project “does not raise the level of the Mississippi
River one bit,” Brown said.
Federal rules permit projects in flood plain
New flood plain development is allowed under federal rules – and some say
federal policies even encourage it. Missouri lacks its own laws, leaving local
communities in charge.
Critics say FEMA’s 30-year-old rules for new flood plain development are too
lax. For instance, the National Flood Insurance Program, the basis for flood
plain management in 19,000 communities nationwide, allows development to
consume most of the flood plain.
No insurance or other precautions are required so long as the buildings are
protected from a 100-year-flood by levees, flood walls or elevation. FEMA will
even remove the protected areas from its official flood plain maps upon
request.
“Right now, our national approach is, we’re going to show you the high-risk
area and then show you how to build there,” said Larry Larson, executive
director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, based in Madison,
Wis.
Witt, the former FEMA director, wanted to raise the 100-year-flood standard to
at least a 200- or 300-year-flood level.
“We’ve overbuilt and overdeveloped in high-risk areas,” Witt said. “Water runs
off much faster than it ever did.”
FEMA’s Robinson agreed that the program isn’t perfect, but he said it reflects
a necessary compromise between preventing flood damages and respecting private
property rights.
“We estimate our flood plain management regulations have saved well over $1
billion in damages annually,” he said.
Development subsidies come under scrutiny
Since the ’93 flood, subsidies for flood plain development have come under
scrutiny.
Congress took some steps to shut off disaster aid to repeatedly flooded
property and to make communities pay a little more for their own
flood-protection systems.
But some financial incentives still exist. For example, the Corps of Engineers
pays for up to 65 percent of new levee construction and 80 percent of levee
repair after a flood.
In the case of Chesterfield Valley, the corps’ help could be worth up to $38
million of the estimated $58 million cost of raising the levee there to
500-year protection. The agency already has spent more than $1.5 million on
studies for Chesterfield and plans to pay for big-ticket construction items
later, or even reimburse local costs outright.
“We don’t make a value judgment on whether that property should be protected,”
said Alan Dooley, a spokesman for the corps’ St. Louis district. “As long as
people can show they can meet the requirements, they’ll get a permit, whether
we like building in the flood plain or not.”
The federal government has also spent billions on flood insurance and disaster
aid. The ’93 flood cost federal taxpayers $4.2 billion in direct payments, plus
$1.3 billion in insurance payments and $621 million in loans.
The flood insurance program has been largely self-sustaining since 1986, but
taxpayers have spent $1.2 billion to support it since its inception, and now
face another $1 billion bill to update old flood plain maps.
Flood insurance premiums aren’t raised no matter how often a property floods.
Steve Ellis, vice president of programs for Taxpayers for Common Sense, a
federal budget watchdog group, says this amounts to setting the same car
insurance premium for an 18-year-old in a Ferrari and a 50-year-old in a
Chevette.
“Here we are, building in these risky places, and at some point we’re going to
turn around and have to pay through the nose for these new properties,” Ellis
said.
Larry Zensinger, acting director of FEMA’s recovery division, wants to dispel
notions of unlimited government largesse. Individual families and public
entities qualify for disaster aid, but businesses are limited to low-interest
loans.
“Those people who own industrial or commercial property who tell you, don’t
worry, FEMA will bail us out, are misinformed,” Zensinger said.
Galloway says that government programs should avoid creating what he calls a
“moral hazard” – an incentive for bad behavior.
“If people are well-educated and know better, they can make decisions that are
rational,” Galloway said. “But if the government is creating programs that
induce people to take a risk, we are creating a moral hazard.”
Sen. Jim Talent, a Republican who lives in Chesterfield, says the government
should support both flood control and economic development, which in turn
improve the region’s quality of life.
“There’s a risk to an area of not creating jobs and not developing,” he said.
“I urge people who don’t like these things to remember we’re dependent on this
happening somewhere.”
Christopher Carey and Eric Heisler of the Post-Dispatch contributed to
this report.
This article was originally published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Feb. 28, 2004.
By Sara Shipley
Former workers at a Missouri microwave popcorn plant are slowly suffocating from breathing a chemical that was known to be toxic long before most of them got sick, according to documents obtained by the Post-Dispatch.
At least 31 people who worked at a popcorn factory in Jasper County have been diagnosed with severe lung disease linked to breathing vapors from a butter flavoring. Eight are on waiting lists for lung transplants.
Doctors spent years figuring out what had caused the workers’ lungs to scar and harden, their chests to tighten and wheeze, their skin to peel off in chunks.
A lawsuit filed in Jasper County Circuit Court claims that the butter flavoring manufacturer “knew or should have known” that its product was hazardous, and that the manufacturer failed to adequately warn those who worked with the chemical.
That manufacturer, International Flavors & Fragrances, has denied liability in the case, which is set for trial Monday. The company declined to comment for this report.
Did the company know that its butter flavoring could cause respiratory disease? That question is the foundation of the case.
What is clear, according to documents obtained by the Post-Dispatch, is that a key ingredient of the butter flavoring was known within the chemical industry to be highly toxic to rats in 1993, before the workers at the Gilster-Mary Lee plant in Jasper, Mo., fell ill.
Gilster-Mary Lee is not a defendant in the lawsuit. The company, based in Chester, Ill., bought the Jasper plant in 1999.
Similar lung problems have been detected among workers in at least six other plants nationwide, including a popcorn plant in Ridgway, Ill.
Chemical giant BASF studied the chemical, known as diacetyl, in 1993. The buttery-smelling chemical can be made from a solvent. Diacetyl also occurs naturally in cheese, milk, coffee, vegetables and other foods.
After breathing diacetyl vapors for just four hours, some rats gagged and gasped for breath. Half the rats in the study died within a day.
The BASF study has never been published in the public domain. The flavoring industry had access to it, however, through a database kept by the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association, a trade group based in Washington.
The Post-Dispatch obtained a copy of the information from a federal health investigator familiar with the case.
The results are similar to those found in a rat study conducted in 2001 by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a federal workplace safety agency investigating what has come to be known as “popcorn workers’ lung.”
NIOSH’s rat study was published in the journal Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology in 2002. In the government study, 19 rats were exposed to heated butter flavor vapors for six hours. The vapors contained levels of diacetyl ranging from 203 to 371 parts per million, about two to four times the highest average level measured during a workday, but much lower than the concentration in holding tanks that workers might peek inside.
Dr. Ann Hubbs, a veterinary pathologist at NIOSH, examined tissue samples from the animals and found “the most dramatic case of cell death I’ve ever seen” in some of their airways.
The gentle carpet of cells containing fingerlike projections that normally sweep the airway clean had been destroyed in spots. Parts of the airway lining had disintegrated, exposing the tissue underneath, like the inside lining of a hose being pulled away from the wall.
Researchers theorize that such damage would scar the airways, crimping the tube that carries air into the lungs, Hubbs said.
“Airway injury can be a real concern, because it affects everything that goes on below the spot at which the injury occurs,” she said.
BASF’s study had similarly disturbing results. Thirty rats were divided into three groups and exposed to diacetyl vapors at much higher levels than in the NIOSH study. A summary of the results is included in the industry database, along with dozens of other studies and statements about the chemical.
All rats exposed to diacetyl rapidly showed signs of distress. Those exposed to medium and high levels died within seven days, according to the industry data. Of the 10 rats with highest exposure, nine died the first day.
Examination of their tissues after death showed that parts of their lungs had collapsed and filled with blood and fluid. Tissue swelled in the liver and cells in the kidney died.
A spokesman for BASF declined to comment on the study or whether any follow-ups were done. The company is not named in the lawsuit.
It’s unclear exactly when the BASF study was added to the flavoring industry database, or when the members had access to it. The earliest hazard statement in the database is dated April 1989, when diacetyl vapor was pronounced to be “irritating to throat and lungs.”
Entries dated January 2001 add that diacetyl carries a risk of serious damage to eyes, is harmful by inhalation, and is irritating to skin. The note, “wear face/eye protection” bears the same date.
The flavoring industry association, which is not named in the lawsuit, has previously issued statements saying that flavors are safe when handled properly. The association did not return calls for comment on the BASF study.
Waiting for transplants
For the sick workers, the dangers of diacetyl became public far too late. Linda Redman started working as a packer at the Jasper popcorn plant in 1995, two years after the original study. Within two years, her breathing was so bad that she had to quit.
Redman used to work 12 hours a day and then come home to garden, cook dinner, and do her family’s laundry. Now, she lives alone in Joplin, relying on home health nurses four days a week to help with basic chores around the house.
Redman, 55, doesn’t have the stamina to change her bedsheets or cook herself dinner, unless it’s something out of a can.
Only 15 percent of her lung capacity remains. Redman bides her time while waiting for a lung transplant by taking breathing treatments every four hours. She is constantly tethered to an oxygen tank, but she still gets exhausted walking from the bedroom to the couch.
“There’s no amount of money that can ever buy back what we’ve lost – our health,” Redman said of herself and the other sick workers. “There’s a couple of us I don’t think can make it much longer.”
Eric Peoples, 31, and the father of two small children, will be the first plaintiff to have his case heard. He started work at the plant in 1995 and now is on the waiting list for a double lung transplant.
Angela Nally, 51, started working at the plant in 1993 and quit eight months later. She has 20 percent of her lung capacity left.
Dustin Smith, 24, started at the plant in 1999 and didn’t quit until NIOSH told him he had lost half his lung capacity.
One plaintiff still works at the plant, which has changed its procedures to comply with new federal safety recommendations.
“It’s a shame we all had to end up this way,” Redman said. “I feel like it’s the flavoring people’s fault that we ended up like this. They knew it was dangerous when they sold it. I’m angry at them, taking a chance on hurting so many people. They could have saved a lot of people’s lungs.”
No warnings to workers
Dr. David Egilman, an expert on occupational lung disease at Brown University, said that all of this misery could have been avoided if the chemical and flavoring industries responsibly followed up on the 1993 rat study.
The BASF study proved that the chemical was lethal to rats at a level similar to that which could be experienced by plant workers, Egilman said.
The middle exposure level in the rat study was 1,483 parts per million of diacetyl. A 2000 NIOSH study took a reading of 1,232 parts per million of diacetyl inside a butter flavor holding tank. That reading was taken after exhaust vents had been installed, so previous concentrations were probably higher, NIOSH studies said.
“That’s why it’s so sad,” said Egilman, who is scheduled to testify as an expert witness for the plaintiffs. “It wasn’t hard for (the flavor manufacturer) to prevent people from dying. They had enough information to prevent people from getting sick.”
Instead of warning its customers appropriately, Egilman said, International Flavors & Fragrances led its customers to believe that the product wasn’t dangerous.
The company distributed a safety sheet with its butter flavoring that read, “Respiratory protection: none generally required. If desired, use NIOSH-approved respirator.” The Material Safety Data Sheet is dated 1992.
A safety sheet written in 1994 by flavoring manufacturer Bush Boake Allen, another defendant in the lawsuit, said that respirators were not normally required for its butter flavoring, unless vapor concentrations were “high.” The company is now a subsidiary of International Flavors & Fragrances.
International Flavors & Fragrances said in a 2002 financial statement that it provided information on “appropriate engineering controls, such as adequate ventilation, proper handling procedures and respiratory protection for workers” to the popcorn plant in Jasper. The company said it believed that Gilster-Mary Lee failed to follow those instructions, and, as a result, any injuries employees suffered were due to “inadequate workplace conditions.”
A spokesman for Gilster-Mary Lee said he could not comment on what safety instructions the company received. “We view this as a very serious issue,” said Tom Welge, vice president for technical sales. “We’re committed to a safe workplace for our employees.”
Dr. Richard Kanwal is a medical officer for NIOSH who is investigating the popcorn case. Kanwal said the agency has mailed a detailed warning to companies that may use butter flavor or similar preparations. The agency’s recommendations include switching to safer flavorings, making the process a self-contained system to keep vapors down, and using respirators where needed.
So far, no “safe” level of workplace exposure to butter flavoring has been determined. The Food and Drug Administration has said that consumers are not at risk from preparing microwave popcorn at home.
“Even though there’s limited data on which to base standards, there’s plenty of information on how to be safe,” Kanwal said.
Ken McClain, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said that information was there all along, but it wasn’t given to the workers.
“The only thing this group of people ever did wrong,” he said of the plaintiffs, “was go to work.”
Note: This series of stories broke national news about “popcorn lung,” a mysterious and deadly disease workers developed due to breathing artificial butter flavoring. The story continued to expand nationwide, resulting in a Congressional investigation, extensive national media coverage, and proposed new regulations.
This story was originally published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 4, 2004.
By Sara Shipley
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Federal health investigators warn that the threat of “popcorn workers’ lung” could go far beyond Midwestern microwave popcorn factories.
View the CDC's "Flavorings-Related Lung Disease" page at www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/flavorings
Investigators at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health say that workers who make a wide variety of products, from candy to snack cakes to potato chips, could be at risk of developing a severe lung disease associated with breathing butter flavoring vapors.
“We know that butter flavorings are very widely used,” said Dr. Gregory Wagner, director of the agency’s Division of Respiratory Disease Studies. “What we don’t know is how much injury has occurred.”
NIOSH first investigated an outbreak of lung disease associated with butter flavoring at a Missouri microwave popcorn factory nearly four years ago. At least eight former workers at the Gilster-Mary Lee plant in Jasper are reported to be on lung-transplant waiting lists. One woman became totally disabled after working around the flavoring for just eight months.
The agency now has documented cases of similar lung disease at four out of five other microwave popcorn plants it has investigated. Additional cases have been reported at three other popcorn factories and four manufacturers of butter flavoring.
Recently, NIOSH has received scattered reports of problems in other facilities — including a candymaker and a snack food plant — but the agency has been unable to confirm those cases so far.
According to NIOSH research, the threat is serious.
The agency’s animal studies have documented that chemicals in the butter flavoring cause rapid, severe damage to the airways of rats. One scientist, research physiologist Jeffrey Fedan, used the words “astonishingly grotesque” to describe the toxic effect of diacetyl, a key ingredient in the flavoring.
Vincent Castranova, chief of NIOSH’s pathology and physiology research branch, said that the effect of breathing butter flavoring vapors could be likened to inhaling acid.
“The airway response is the worst we’ve ever seen,” Castranova said. And that’s comparing it to a catalogue of notorious respiratory toxins such as asbestos and coal dust.
“When we say this is bad compared to what we’ve done before, we have a database of 20 years of exposure to different things that we compare it to,” Castranova said. “In layman’s terms, it ate away the coating of the airway.”
Guidelines are voluntary
Despite the severity and speed with which the butter flavoring chemicals appear to act, no regulations have been developed to prevent workers from breathing the mixture.
The Occupational Health and Safety Agency, the federal agency that enforces workplace safety standards, has focused instead on developing voluntary guidelines.
OSHA developed a brochure in October 2002 for the Popcorn Board, a Chicago-based industry group, to distribute to its members across the country, agency officials said.
The 10-page document recommends that microwave popcorn factories require workers to wear air-purifying respirators and goggles while working with flavoring chemicals. Other recommendations include instituting annual breathing tests for employees, installing adequate room ventilation and conducting air monitoring inside the plant.
A high-level OSHA official said the agency doesn’t need specific regulations on butter flavoring to protect worker safety. A general provision in the law requires employers to provide a safe workplace. Any facility that fails to carry out OSHA’s recommended controls and has a worker with flavoring-related lung disease could be subject to a citation, he said.
However, OSHA has not cited any of the companies where workers fell ill.
OSHA inspectors visited the Jasper popcorn plant in May 2000, after the workers had been reported ill, and found no violations. “We were satisfied with what we saw of the airborne exposure,” the official said in a recent interview.
John L. Henshaw, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, issued a statement saying that OSHA is committed to helping employers assure the health and safety of their workers.
“As soon as the (popcorn) issue arose, we began working with NIOSH and the popcorn manufacturers and their employees to do everything we can to ensure that the highest health and safety practices were implemented,” he said. “Guidance documents have been prepared and issued and we will continue to follow up to assure this issue is properly addressed.”
Frustrating limitations
Meanwhile, the small team of NIOSH investigators who cracked the popcorn cases is powerless to make any industry heed its warnings.
An arm of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency has no regulatory authority. It can only conduct scientific studies, try to educate workers, and cajole employers to cooperate.
NIOSH is charged with investigating reported workplace dangers. Its state-of-the-art health effects laboratory examines potential hazards ranging from air pollution and workplace stress to injuries caused by machinery vibrations. Its field investigators are dispatched all over the country, sometimes on an emergency basis.
NIOSH can investigate work sites only where it has been invited by management, a union, a state health department or a group of three workers.
This limitation has proved frustrating in the case of butter flavoring.
The agency initially heard about the Missouri plant in the spring of 2000, after Dr. Allen Parmet, a Kansas City occupational health physician, contacted the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services. Parmet was concerned that eight workers from the same plant exhibited signs of the same strange lung disease.
The state agency referred the call to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which passed it on to NIOSH, said Dr. Kathleen Kreiss, chief of NIOSH’s respiratory field studies branch.
Kreiss said it took several months of phone tag to get state health officials to appreciate the seriousness of the reports. In August 2000, a new state epidemiologist, Dr. Eduardo Simeos, learned of the disease cluster and asked NIOSH for help.
Within weeks, a NIOSH team arrived at the plant, returning for a detailed health survey in September and October. One researcher drove a trailer full of X-ray equipment from Morgantown to Missouri to test the workers.
Initial breathing tests showed that 27 percent of workers had abnormal lung function, Kreiss said. “We knew right then that we had a major ongoing problem,” she said.
It was a problem that had gone unrecognized for a long time.
“Wife was persistent”
One of the first workers to fall ill, former housewife Angela Nally, was forced to quit work in 1994 when she learned she had just 20 percent of her lung capacity left. Five years would pass before Donna Woods surmised that something at the plant must be making her husband, Hal, grow weak and lose chunks of skin from his hands and feet. She made a round of phone calls in 1999 and figured out that several other former workers were sick, too.
Woods asked her son, attorney Jace Kentner, to investigate. Kentner and another lawyer rounded up medical records for eight workers who had been seen at clinics all over the country, having been diagnosed with asthma, emphysema and other illnesses.
That’s when Parmet diagnosed the eight as having bronchiolitis obliterans, an irreversible lung disease. The illness should be rare, but it appeared that the small town of Jasper was having an epidemic.
“The reason this came to light is, a worker’s wife was persistent,” Kreiss said. “Had it happened in Chicago, where people didn’t all go to the same doctor, and they didn’t see each other in the Wal-Mart parking lot struggling with shopping carts, it might never have been put together.”
Some plants resist
The process could have failed at any number of steps, had NIOSH not been perceptive and persistent in its work.
Kreiss was prepared for the job. She had worked at the premier lung hospital in the nation, National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver. And she had at her disposal a team of public health doctors, technicians and scientists who specialize in respiratory diseases.
The popcorn team visited the Missouri site eight times, but they didn’t stop there. In the summer of 2001, NIOSH started a national hunt to find out how far the problem went. A search of the Dun & Bradstreet business database turned up fewer than 100 plants nationwide that packaged unpopped popcorn, research industrial hygienist Greg Kullman said.
NIOSH met in the fall of 2001 with the American Popcorn Board and the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association, hoping to share information and to gain access to more plants.
Some companies, such as family-owned B.K. Heuermann Inc. in Nebraska, welcomed NIOSH. But others were less cooperative.
ConAgra Foods Inc., for example, let NIOSH conduct air sampling at its popcorn plant in Hamburg, Iowa, in 2001, but the company would not allow workers to be interviewed or tested, NIOSH medical officer Dr. Richard Kanwal said.
Later, ConAgra officials refused to let NIOSH visit its plant in Marion, Ohio, even after the agency learned in 2002 that a former worker had been diagnosed with bronchiolitis obliterans. Only after three employees signed a confidential request did investigators get to the scene.
The flavoring industry itself has been even less open. NIOSH investigators were allowed to walk through Bush Boake Allen’s now-defunct plant in Chicago. But the plant wasn’t making butter flavoring that day, and no tests were conducted, agency officials said.
“Despite our repeated offers to come and look and get some information we’ve not been invited to do any kind of survey at any flavoring plant,” Kanwal said. “We know from talking to a handful of workers that there’s a lot of open handling of a variety of different ingredients, some of which are highly irritating.”
In a statement issued last month, a spokesman for the flavoring manufacturers association said that the trade group held workshops on respiratory safety in 1997 and 2002 to educate its members.
“We take each report of a potential problem with the safety of flavors in manufacturing settings very seriously,” executive director Glenn Roberts said. “Fortunately, such incidents are very rare in our industry. Our goal is to understand what happened, and work with the best medical and workplace safety experts to recommend to our members and customers any additional workplace safety measures that may be needed.”
Testing chemicals
Another challenge is identifying the toxic agents in the complex butter flavoring mixture, which contains dozens of different chemicals. Tests from the Missouri plant showed that lung illnesses correlated with exposure to diacetyl, a yellowish substance that smells and tastes like butter.
In study published in 2002, rats exposed to butter flavoring vapors for six hours had severe damage to parts of their airways. In a new follow-up study, rats exposed to pure diacetyl vapors showed a similar result.
Veterinary pathologist Dr. Ann Hubbs presented some of the findings at the Society of Toxicology meeting in Baltimore last month. Cell damage occurred at levels of about 200 parts per million of diacetyl and above; at levels of 100 parts per million and below, those changes were not seen, Hubbs said.
The butter flavoring mixture affected a different part of the airways than diacetyl alone, Hubbs said. “The effects of mixtures often are not the same as any single component,” she said.
Hubbs said researchers plan to test other chemicals in the butter flavoring alone and in combination with diacetyl. The agency also plans to examine what happens when animals inhale short, intense bursts of the vapors, much as workers could on the job.
It could be years before all these studies are completed, paving the way for the creation of a workplace exposure limit. Based on its research, NIOSH can recommend a level of chemical exposure that should not be exceeded. OSHA, the regulatory agency, can adopt or modify the recommendation.
NIOSH Director Dr. John Howard said that the butter flavoring investigation is a top priority. To date, the agency has spent more than $2.5 million on the job.
“I think it’s a very pressing issue. NIOSH has put a tremendous amount of work into it,” Howard said.
NIOSH has mailed a detailed brochure to companies nationwide, warning them of the possible dangers and suggesting safety measures. The agency also plans to create a recommended exposure limit as soon as possible, Howard said.
OSHA also is preparing a safety and health information bulletin for nationwide distribution in a few months to food and fragrance manufacturers, a high-level official said.
“Even if you have a regulation, life isn’t all nirvana. You still have to get people to comply with your regulation,” Howard said. “So, at its core, it’s a sales job . . . That’s why we need to get that information out and acted on.”
This article was originally published in Business Traveler magazine, October 2005.
New Orleans struggles to rebuild its tourism-based economy after one of the worst natural disasters in American history.
By Sara Shipley Hiles
The patients kept coming, hot, tired, and some clad in the same stinky clothes they had worn through waist-high flood water. Some people had cuts on their hands and feet from debris or flying glass. Others had run out of medication to treat their diabetes or high blood pressure.
A first aid station in the Superdome had been converted into a makeshift emergency room for the 25,000 people who took refuge there from Hurricane Katrina. Supplies stocked to treat minor ailments during football games quickly disappeared.
Bill Brown, a nurse and emergency medical technician, tried to comfort patients as best he could. With only a generator to provide light, and no running water or basic medicines, all Brown could offer were compassionate words.
“I would tell people, ‘I know you have diabetes, and I know you need insulin, but we don’t have any right now. You can manage this. I don’t want you to think about it. You’re alive, and we’re going to be okay. They’re coming to rescue us. And God bless you.’ ”
When Brown arrived in New Orleans Aug. 21 on a Delta commercial flight, he expected to spend a week enjoying Cajun cuisine and attending a professional conference. As executive director of the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians, a certifying agency based in Columbus, Ohio, Brown travels to about 50 meetings around the country each year.
But when he left the devastated city on a medical evacuation helicopter Aug. 31, two days after deadly Katrina struck, Brown had a feeling that neither he nor New Orleans would ever be the same.
“It was the most miserable, stressful, difficult situation I’ve ever been in, in my life,” he said. And Brown knows stressful situations. During the Vietnam War, he rescued pilots behind enemy lines as a member of the U.S. Air Force Pararescue team, and later he confronted life-or-death situations as an emergency nurse and paramedic, he said.
New Orleans may have had its own near-death experience in Katrina. The storm left up to 80 percent of the city mired in filthy floodwater for weeks. Commerce halted during a mandatory evacuation, and authorities warned the few who stayed behind about the spread of disease from bloated corpses drifting unattended through abandoned streets.
Reports of widespread looting left the impression that the city had descended into uncontrollable chaos. House Speaker Dennis Hastert even floated the idea of not rebuilding the below-sea level city, which will always be vulnerable to hurricanes and floods.
Although it may have seemed briefly that “The City That Care Forgot” might be forgotten for good, New Orleans’ vital role in shipping and tourism makes that unlikely. New Orleans already is beginning to recover, a process expected to take years.
$100 Billion of Damage
Hurricane Katrina’s assault on the Gulf Coast and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans caused more than $100 billion in economic damage, according to an estimate by the firm Risk Management Solutions of Newark, Calif. New Orleans accounted for more than half of the estimated damages.
“As a factual matter, in a span of 24 hours, we lost a third of our economy,” said Dan Juneau, president of the Louisiana Association for Business and Industry, a statewide chamber of commerce based in Baton Rouge. State officials estimated that the storm disrupted 70,000 firms in the New Orleans region.
Hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents and businesses fled to Baton Rouge, Houston, Dallas, Memphis, and points beyond.
“It’s realistic to think that some of them won’t come back,” said James Richardson, an economist at Louisiana State University.
“There’s no doubt that there are some businesses that will decide it’s better to be elsewhere,” said Richardson, who co-authors an annual report on Louisiana’s economic outlook. “I think every business now will be more cautious. It’s only natural.”
Richardson predicted that the “new” New Orleans will be smaller and leaner. But he believes that all of the city’s top industries—oil and gas production, maritime shipping, higher education, and tourism—will return.
Within weeks of the storm, there were signs of improvement. The Port of New Orleans, which ships Midwestern farm crops around the world and handles tons of imported steel, rubber, and coffee, reopened to commercial traffic in mid-September.
Gasoline prices started to fall as major refineries in the Gulf went back online. The Louis Armstrong International Airport reopened to commercial traffic. At press time, the airport had limited service from five airlines.
For some sectors, normal business operations are months away. Major universities in New Orleans, including Tulane, canceled classes for the semester, farming students out across the country.
The homeless New Orleans Saints had to move out of the damaged Superdome for the rest of the NFL season. The team is now based in San Antonio, with several games scheduled in Baton Rouge.
At battered hotels in the heart of the city, workers ripped out waterlogged carpeting and drywall. New Orleans proper remained largely empty for weeks, save for emergency workers and a few thousand hardy residents who’d ridden out the storm. More flooding came courtesy of Hurricane Rita, which struck the Texas-Louisiana border Sept. 24.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin began letting New Orleans residents back into the city,
neighborhood by neighborhood. A handful of hotels reopened with limited services, and others promised to open their doors by Nov. 1.
The Last Resort
The city’s tourism and convention business, the jewel of its economy, may take the longest to recover.
All city-wide conventions have been canceled through March 31, 2006, according to the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, which served as a shelter of last resort for thousands of evacuees, suffered extensive damage to its roof, meeting halls, and interior during and after the storm.
Staff members working out of temporary offices in Baton Rouge scrambled to help reschedule conventions for about 400 groups who were set to meet in New Orleans.
New Orleans is expected to lose an estimated $3.5 billion in visitor, meeting and convention income due to the storm, said Jeff Anding, director of convention marketing.
At least one group—the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America—moved its convention to Houston in February 2006, said Jordy Tollett, president and CEO of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau. The meeting is expected to bring 20,000 people to Houston, with an estimated economic benefit of $19.6 million.
Other groups are heading to Chicago, Atlanta, Orlando, and Washington, D.C.
Overland Park, Kan.–based Brooke Corp. announced it would cancel its 2005 convention, which was set for New Orleans on Oct. 16–19, out of deference to franchisees and others affected by the storm. The company specializes in financial services and insurance.
Brooke executives also said in a press release that the company planned to return for its 2006 convention “to demonstrate our confidence that the great city of New Orleans will soon rebuild.”
Anding said the visitor’s bureau has received an outpouring of support from similar groups offering to book future conventions in New Orleans. “People have said, ‘You tell us when you’re ready, and we’ll book all our meetings with you,’ ” he said. “It warms my heart.”
Stephen Perry, president of the New Orleans visitor’s bureau, posted a statement on the organization’s Web site emphasizing that the city’s historic core remains largely intact. The French Quarter stayed mostly dry during the flood, and many buildings in the Central Business District had power restored quickly.
“America’s most romantic, walkable historic city is not itself; how long it will be before we are back on our feet and welcoming you again to New Orleans, we do not know,” he wrote. “We hope it will only be a matter of months. The birthplace of jazz, home of magnificent European architecture, and originator of the most renowned cuisine on the planet has suffered a terrible blow. But the city’s spirit is strong, its people are resilient, and its incredible history and character survive.”
Business Travel Will Rebound
Juneau, the leader of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, said the storm provided a unique opportunity to redesign New Orleans for the better. In rebuilding, the city can diversify its economic base beyond tourism, he said.
“I think there’s an opportunity here for some creative planning,” he said. “In a sense, you have a blank slate to write on.”
The city’s image will need polishing, too, because of “some of the negative images that came out of the news stories,” Juneau said.
Long known for its high crime rate and low school rankings, New Orleans’ seedy side looked even worse at the height of the storm. The slow, ineffective emergency response hit a sour note for others.
Dr. Judy Embry, a psychologist at Argosy University in Dallas who was stranded at a hotel in New Orleans during the storm, said she talked to a group of Dutch visitors whose government had tried unsuccessfully to evacuate them. “They were appalled by the whole situation, and said they’d never come back,” she said.
But Embry said the experience would only make her more likely to return to New Orleans, and she praised the staff at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside hotel for evacuating more than 800 people safely. “As soon as [New Orleans residents] get going, we all need to go back and visit. That is what will get them up back on their feet,” she said.
Brown, the nurse/EMT who volunteered at the Superdome after the storm, said he would “absolutely” go back. He said residents of the city exhibited great courage during their ordeal. “I think New Orleans will be a safer, more prosperous city in the future than it was before the storm,” he said. “It’s a gigantic urban renewal project.”
Lana Sonnier, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Economic Development Department, said officials are taking into account that the city needs to repair more than just its physical infrastructure, such as levees and pump stations. The state is welcoming entrepreneurs and trying to attract new businesses and industries, as well as planning to improve urban services.
“We’re working not so much to rebuild as to recreate the city,” she said. “This tragedy that’s befallen us unfortunately brought to light a lot of things that weren’t on the priority list previously, due to a lack of resources. We’re not going to take for granted the lessons we’ve learned.”
Caleb Tiller, a spokesman for the National Business Travel Association, said he did not expect the disaster to have a long-term effect on business travel to the city. For example, after the terrorist bombings in London this year, the organization polled its members and found no evidence that travelers would shy away.
“In recent years, business travelers have learned to be resilient. They’ve learned these unfortunate events happen, but they’ve learned that continuing with business is an important thing to do,” he said.
Brown said the chance of another hurricane would not stop him from doing business in the city. “I’m not going to decide not to do a business trip to L.A. because of a (potential) earthquake, and I’m not going to decide not to go to the East Coast because of a (potential) hurricane,” he said.
Slurp up a bowl of noodles at Pho Republique, a hip Asian fusion restaurant in Boston’s South End, and you’ll get a taste of the latest weapon in the world’s war against bird flu.
Star anise, a fragrant, licorice-flavored spice used for centuries in Chinese cooking and medicine, plays a modern role in making one of the most sought-after drugs in the world. Eight-pointed seed pods picked from Chinese evergreen trees form the raw material for manufacturing Tamiflu, one of the few treatments for seasonal flu, and now a possible weapon against an avian flu pandemic.
Scientists who study botanicals — plants used for medicinal purposes — say it’s not surprising that an herb used as a flavoring in Chinese Five Spice powder and the French liqueur Pernod could yield a powerful drug. Roughly 40 percent of medications come from botanicals, including aspirin and the breast cancer medication taxol.
The process used to make star anise fruits into an antiviral drug is long and complicated, far removed from bowls of steaming noodles and the shelves of traditional Chinese pharmacies.
The star anise tree, a member of the magnolia family, grows in the misty mountains of four provinces in southwest China. Workers harvest its delicate star-shaped fruits by hand and then dry them in kilns.
The drug manufacturer Roche Holding AG of Switzerland processes the fruits to obtain shikimic acid, the raw material used to make Tamiflu. Spokesman Al Wasilewski would not describe the manufacturing process in detail, saying it was proprietary.
But Roche medical director Dominick Iacuzio said in testimony before Congress in May that making the drug takes eight to 12 months,using many intermediary steps, including a ”potentially explosive” one that can be carried out only in specialized facilities.
Some reports claim that Roche already has bought up 90 percent of the star anise crop, creating a shortage that might limit future production of the drug. Wasilewski would not comment on those reports, but he said the company is not limited by availability of star anise.
Star anise got picked as the building block for Tamiflu because it happens to have a high concentration of shikimic acid, but the acid is found in nearly every plant, and Tamiflu was originally made from a different acid found in the bark of the cinchona tree grown in Zaire — a source that was abandoned because of the political upheaval in that country.
Roche has since developed a method of obtaining shikimic acid from bioengineered E. coli bacteria using a fermentation process, Wasilewski said. This method currently accounts for a third of Roche’s shikimic acid production, and the company is working to increase that amount, he said. It is also continuing to expand production, which, by the middle of next year, will have increased tenfold since 2003.
Roche has donated 3 million courses of the drug to the World Health Organization to be used in the event of an outbreak of human-to-human transmitted avian flu. The US Health and Human Services Department plans to stockpile about 4.3 million courses of Tamiflu, enough for about 1.5 percent of the American population.
Tamiflu works by preventing the flu virus from replicating. Even if Tamiflu does work against the bird flu virus, which is not entirely clear, it will shorten the period of infection, but probably not prevent someone from getting infected in the first place. With no vaccine to prevent bird flu yet developed, panicked consumers are rushing to buy any defense they can find.
Chinese and Western medicine practitioners alike said eating or drinking star anise — which can cost nearly $27 a pound for whole stars — is not the answer.
Star anise ”goes through several intermediate steps [to become Tamiflu], and some of them are very toxic,” said Norman Farnsworth, director of a federally funded botanical research center at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
”I certainly wouldn’t recommend to my patients to buy and eat star anise,” said Weidong Lu, chairman of the Chinese herbal medicine department at the New England School of Acupuncture in Watertown.
Lu said using star anise for bird flu goes against the traditional theory of Chinese medicine, which calls for balancing a ”hot” condition, like the fever that comes with flu, by using a ”cold” treatment, such as eating mung bean sprouts. Star anise is considered a ”hot” substance because it’s spicy, so it wouldn’t make sense to use it for the flu, he said.
Instead, star anise has been used traditionally to treat pain, hernia, and stomach discomfort, said John Chen, a registered pharmacist and traditional Chinese medicine practitioner in Los Angeles. ”I use star anise mostly for gastrointestinal complaints, and it works well for that,” he said.
The herb is also popular in making tea to treat cough or colic in babies, though the Food and Drug Administration issued an advisory two years ago against using star anise teas because some infants who drank the tea suffered seizures, vomiting and other neurological effects. The agency said the tea might have contained Japanese star anise, which contains a toxic chemical. Chinese star anise, an herb that looks the same but is botanically very different, is considered safe to eat.
Linda Barnes, a medical anthropologist and associate professor at Boston University School of Medicine, said star anise tea is still popular. She was coughing recently when she visited a local santero, a traditional Cuban medical practitioner. The man’s wife jumped up and brewed her a tea made from ginger root, star anise, and honey. It worked, and Barnes thought it was good enough to try at home.
But by far the most common everyday use of star anise is as a cooking spice, in Chinese ”red liquid” cooking, Thai iced tea, some Indian foods, and Western-style jams and pickled vegetables.
Arnond Sreesuvan, a sous chef at Pho Republique, said the restaurant uses about 250 whole stars a week to make the pho, or noodle dishes, for which the restaurant is named. One star is boiled in the broth for each dish, then removed before serving. ”You always need to put star anise in pho, always,” he said.
Sreesuvan said he didn’t know anything about bird flu, but star anise, he said, is ”very special.”
This article was originally published in The Boston Globe, March 6, 2006.
By Sara Shipley Hiles
Globe Correspondent
Would you run into a burning building to save a stranger’s life? Would a chimpanzee do the same?
Acts of altruism — helping an unrelated creature with no apparent benefit to yourself — have long been an evolutionary puzzle because the behavior seemingly contradicts the notion of ”survival of the fittest.” Until now, humans were the only members of the animal kingdom with a proven record of behaving altruistically.
But a study published in the journal Science last week suggests that both human children and chimpanzees have altruistic tendencies. In the experiment, both toddlers and chimps helped a researcher who was having trouble completing a task — for example, picking up a clothespin that he had dropped on the floor and couldn’t reach. The researcher gave no praise or reward for the assistance.
The study’s lead author, Felix Warneken, said the study suggests that rudimentary helping behavior evolved before humans split from chimpanzees about six million years ago. In other words, maybe chimps aren’t so different from people when it comes to helping out.
”At least this shows us that some rudimentary form of helping was already present in our evolutionary ancestor,” said Warneken, a developmental psychologist from Germany who is on a fellowship at Harvard University. ”It clarifies something about the evolutionary trajectory. It tells us what we are already prepared for biologically, and what comes mainly from learning.”
Warneken’s study is part of a flood of new research that seeks to understand the origin of social behavior in animals. The growing field draws from psychology, evolutionary genetics, anthropology, economics, biology, paleontology, and other disciplines.
”It’s an exciting time. I think we’ve learned more about animal cognition in the last 10 years than in the previous 100 years,” said Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard evolutionary biologist who directs the university’s Cognitive Evolution Lab.
Hauser said that in the past few years, there has been an explosion of new evidence supporting the idea that some animals have a ”theory of mind” — that is, the animal has some concept of what another creature might be thinking. Having a theory of mind is the basis for such sophisticated behaviors as empathy.
Soon, Hauser predicts, research will show that although important distinctions will remain, animals are closer to the human condition than previously thought. ”There are lots of areas that people hailed as being uniquely human that are being hammered from all directions,” he said.
Language, memory, mathematical ability, self-recognition, reading facial expressions, and gauging false beliefs are all being probed deeply, he said.
Altruism and other forms of cooperation also are a hot topic. Humans are extremely cooperative, forming groups to accomplish difficult tasks. They’re also frequently altruistic, donating blood and helping little old ladies across the street.
When and why do animals cooperate? Animals frequently hunt in groups, but it’s unclear whether they work together deliberately or accidentally. Another study published in Science last week found that chimps understood when they needed help to reach a food tray, and they recruited a partner to do so. When given a choice of partners, the chimps chose collaborators who had previously succeeded in completing the task.
In that study, both chimps directly benefited from cooperating, because only by working together could they reach the food. But would chimps help purely out of the ”goodness of their hearts”?
Two previous studies found that chimpanzees didn’t give food to another chimp when they had the opportunity. Warneken, however, figured that food was precious, and he wanted to see whether chimps would help if food were not involved.
His study, conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, put children and chimps to the same tests. A researcher performed everyday tasks in front of the subject, such as hanging laundry on a line, stacking books in a pile, or putting magazines in a cabinet. In one part of the study, the researcher completed the task without any problem. In another part, the researcher pretended to have trouble — for example, dropping a marker on the floor and not being able to reach it to pick it up. In that case, the researcher gazed at the out-of-reach object, looked at the subject to elicit help, and, after a few seconds said, ”My marker!”
Warneken and his co-author, Michael Tomasello, a director of the institute, reported that the children in the study, aged 18 months, jumped to help very quickly and with very little prompting. The children also helped in a variety of tasks, from retrieving a spoon in a box to picking up a clothespin.
The chimps helped with only one kind of task — the out-of-reach object. They didn’t help with the more complex tasks, like the spoon-in-a-box test.
They also took longer than the children to retrieve the object in question. Both the kids and the chimps helped when they saw that the adult needed help and not in cases when it was apparent that the researcher had dropped the item on purpose.
Scientists have debated the origin of altruism since Darwin’s time.
One theory is that altruism evolved because it improves group survival. ”Some researchers say that when you live in a helpful society, you will have an advantage over a totally egoistic selfish group,” Warneken said.
Warneken acknowledged that his study found that chimps helped only in limited circumstances, and more research is needed to further understand those limitations.
Hauser questioned whether Warneken’s study really showed altruism, because the children and the chimps likely would have received an ”emotional reward” — a good feeling — for helping, he said. He also said the cost of helping was low because the subject didn’t have to overcome any risks or challenges.
Warneken acknowledged that the subjects might have gained an emotional reward but said he has no proof of that.
Additionally, if it’s true that humans and chimps get a good feeling from helping others, that could be further evidence that both humans and chimps are biologically programmed to identify with others’ needs, he said.
As far as the ”cost” of helping, Warneken said, such small acts of altruism — like picking a marker up from the floor — are still noteworthy because ”you could do something that is more important to yourself than helping someone else,” he said. ”You have to be motivated to act on behalf of the other, not your own goals.”
