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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2001Fighting environmental racism
Atlanta - I attended a meeting of the Board of Scientific Counselors of ATSDR
(Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry) in November. This was set up
to address many communities' concerns about ATSDR.I've been one of the special consultants to the board's Community/Tribal
Subcommittee (CTS) for four years. The first two years, I thought we were making
progress. After a change of leadership, nothing was accomplished. We just didn't
know if they would ever put in place any of our recommendations to change
certain procedures to be more responsive towards communities. The CTS had two
years to put these recommendations in place. They're trying to say now that on
some things they didn't understand what we were talking about. There's a special committee to look at five communities and to look at the
new guidelines for ATSDR and see if they used our recommendations and how they
used them, and if they were being responsive to the community. Four of those
communities are at military sites. One is an industry site. We wanted to go back
over each health assessment to see if ATSDR followed the procedures the way we
wanted them to. We know there's been a major time gap in doing them. Some health
assessments take ATSDR two years; some take six months because they don't do any
research, they just take whatever the polluter gave them and that's it. The "health assessment" is not a health evaluation as you might
think. It is a site evaluation, because they only look at the site. I've said
this over and over. Public health means having a clinic in our hands, taking
care of people's health in the community. But public health has a whole
different meaning to agency people. There needs to be clarification of that.
Because people of color are not receiving any help when it comes to health
issues. And we're not going to receive it because of the racism. The anthrax the postal worker in New Jersey died from shows the racism in
dealing with people of color: they gave him a Tylenol and sent him home even
though the man had told them that he might have anthrax. They could have given
him Cipro as a precaution. But I feel that because he was Black, they just don't
care about his health. Period. I think the only way communities of color are going to get the help we need
is to raise doctors in the community and get the churches, which are what many
of us are involved in, to start setting up clinics all over the country. We need
to get our own people to work in these clinics. Doris Bradshaw |
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