We don’t know about the teens’ issues, but Erin Brockovich sure is full of it.
The Daily Mail reports,
A mysterious disorder which exhibits symptoms similar to Tourette’s has affected more students at the same high school.
Earlier this month, it was reported that 12 female students, who all attend Le Roy High School, in New York, had been diagnosed and were being treated for the unexplained illness.
That number has now risen to 15 teenagers and they are all reportedly suffering from verbal outbursts and involuntary twitches.
Bizarrely, two students from a school 250 miles away have also reported similar symptoms…
Fifteen out of the 17 go to Le Roy High School in Genesee County, New York State. Only one boy has been affected, the other 14 sufferers are girls.
The other two girls live in Corinth, Saratoga County, around 250 miles away.
One of the teenagers affected, 16-year-old Lori Brownell, posted a video on YouTube discussing how her symptoms started last August and looking for help from anyone who might explain her condition…
Campaigning lawyer and environmental activist Erin Brockovich is believed to be now looking into the case. In 1996, Brockovich fought and won a mass lawsuit for an estimated $333 million dollars against Pacific Gas and Electric, who allegedly contaminated drinking water in the town of Hinkley, California.
Brockovich, who was the inspiration for the eponymous film starring Julia Roberts, has already started investigating, according to digg.com.
She has suggested that a chemical spill from a train derailment in the 1970s near the site of the school may be the cause. She has sent scientists to collect soil samples around the high school.
‘When I read reports like this that the New York Department of Health and state agencies were well-aware of the spill and you don’t do water testing or vapor extraction tests, you don’t have an all-clear,’ she said…
Read the entire Daily Mail article.
Lori Brownell’s YouTube video is below.
A 40 year old spill cannot produce disease symptoms suddenly? So you know about the spill. What was spilled? How those chemicals change as they degrade? Things already in the soil that these decomposed parts of the original spill may combine with? Effects of moisture, weather, etc… You must have considered all the factors if your conclusions are valid. Otherwise, you have to send out experts, which is what your condemning this woman for doing.
Nonetheless, it is probably not the spill. I’m banking on a silent virus which is causing an autoimmune response causing the body to attack the basal ganglia. Like PANDAS, or encephalitis lethargica. Let’s just hope there are no further outbreaks and these people recover.
Trichloroethene POISONED WELLS
http://www.epa.gov/region2/superfund/npl/0203481c.pdf
Further sampling of private wells by New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH), U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) between 1990 and 1994 detected TrichloroetheneTCE in approximately 50 wells located east or southeast of the Site.
The total population served by private ground-water wells within four miles of the Site is approximately 2,515. The
bedrock aquifer was the only significant source of ground water for private wells in the Site’s vicinity until a waterline wascompleted in 2003. Since the completion of the waterline, the bedrock aquifer has not been used for public water supplies within four miles of the
“Documented successes”? You’re the ignorant one. There are none. Just hoaxes. See Ben’s response.
I think these kids recently watched an old episode of South Park.
Erin has no idea what caused this outbreak of odd behavior. She also has no idea, nor does she care, how to go about finding out.
What she sees is an opportunity to generate income by blaming this episode on a 40-year old spill from a railroad car. She also sees that the railroad in question (or its successors) still exists and that it has large quantities of cash. This situation is reminiscent of the one that existed in California a few years back. Even then there were no data that demonstrated that exposure to chromium 6+ in drinking water was in any way a cause of cancer. Even EPA acknowledges that inhalation is the critical exposure pathway.
What Erin and her friends saw then and Erin sees now is an opportunity to get to a sympathetic jury and to extort loads of cash from the railroad, just as she did in the PGE case. There was no adjudication in the PGE case, the company (which was a regulated utility) decided that the easiest course was to pay the extortion and add the cost to the bills of its customers.
She is shameless and up to her old tricks again.
Notso: If it is due to this 40 year old spill, where are the victims from the last 39 years when the chemical was fresher and more concentrated?
Notso, Brockovich has had a place in these headlines before. One a few months ago took the famous case from her movie and did a cancer study on the people exposed to the carcinorgens. It was to our shock and horror that there was actually lower than expected cancer rates and higher than normal lifespans in the area versus American averages. The horrific harm caused by years of “chemical exposure” was non-existent.
Similarly, to my knowledge, her hype hasn’t played out anywhere else. This is a particularly stupid case. A 40 year old train wreck and chemical spill causing a small number of ticks in a few high school girls? The results would have been seen in the 70s, not forty years later, and they would be more widespread, not confined to 15 people and their never-been-exposed-to-the-spill neighbors over 200 miles away. Any answer would be better than that.
Notso, please apply your “common sense” to the situation. When has Tourette’s been associated with a 40 year old chemical spill? Not logically impossible, but c’mon.
“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
She is right up there with Deiddra Imus. Wack jobs
You do not have to be a lawyer or environmentalist to have common sense and an inquisitive mind.
Erin’s documented successes in ferreting out other toxic consequences of contaminants constitute plenty of practical experience. One has but to read a couple informative books to increase one’s education or
technical understanding of any issue. Give us a break, Zangox!! Your own ignorance is showing!
Sounds like the Salem witch trials.
Erin Brockovich is not a lawyer, she has no law education. Erin is a loud, self-promoting hustler, with no technical or legal education or experience. She is good at generating hype, and donations.