EAST CHICAGO | Midway through the first phase of a multiyear study of polychlorinated biphenyls in the bodies of city children, researchers are looking to expand and extend the project.
Since 2006, scientists with four major universities have been measuring concentrations of PCBs in the blood of participating West Side Junior High School students and their mothers.
The study also involves collecting air samples taken in the students' homes, at Central High School and along the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal for comparison with a similarly sized community in eastern Iowa that has no known sources of PCBs.
"We hope to recruit more incoming junior high school students this fall to increase the number of participating families," said Peter Thorne, University of Iowa environmental health scientist and principal investigator for the program.
Dubbed AESOP -- Airborne Exposure to Semi-volatile Organic Pollutants -- the study is sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and combines resources of the University of Iowa, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and University of Kentucky.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has determined that exposure to PCBs can cause cancer of the liver and biliary tract, and the chemical has been linked to problems with motor skills and a decrease in short-term memory in children.
While PCBs were banned in the United States in 1977, contamination of Lake Michigan -- affecting 18 million people -- continues through fallout of PCBs from the air in the Chicago area, said Keri Hornbuckle, University of Iowa engineering professor and chemist.
"We don't know what's dangerous, really, with PCBs," Thorne said. "We're breaking new ground here -- this is the first study in the country to uncover this sort of information."
After giving an initial DNA sample to the researchers, study participants allow the air monitors in their homes to be checked every three months and give a blood sample each year.
"There were a lot of things I didn't know about the effects of chemicals before I got involved with this," said Nancy Morales, a registered medical assistant and phlebotomist who changes the air monitors' filters and draws participants' blood in East Chicago.
While recruiting volunteers in the city has been a challenge, teachers at West Side have been wonderful, said Jeanne DeWall, study coordinator, in helping researchers contact students and parents.
Victoria Persky, UIC internist and community outreach leader for the project, organized interactive science programs at last week's Puerto Rican Festival for children ages 5 to 10. The children might join the study when they reach junior high school.
"There is a federal commitment to continue this research program," Thorne said. "We're already thinking about the next five years."
So far, PCB levels found in East Chicago have not been significantly higher than those in Chicago. But levels in Chicago are much higher than the background amounts of PCBs found in the nation as a whole, Hornbuckle said.
"There's a remarkably complex industrial history in East Chicago," Hornbuckle said, "And we're picking apart just a small piece of it."
The researchers plan to continue the study through the planned 2011 dredging of the harbor and canal by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to measure any potential increase in airborne PCBs from the project.
