In 1970 in the town of Le Roy, New York, 25 cars from a eastbound 114 car freight train derailed in the town, rupturing and spilling approximately 2,000 pounds of cyanide crystals, and 30,000 to 35,000 gallons of the solvent trichloroethene. The cyanide crystals were removed, but the trichloroethene had soaked into the ground and contaminated at least two nearby wells, producing a noticeable smell and solvent properties. The Lehigh Valley Railroad attempted to eliminate the smell in the spill area by pumping approximately 1 million gallons of water from a nearby flooded quarry and saturating the cleanup zone with it, then allowing the water to seep into the ground. This resulted in the trichloroethene further saturating groundwater in the area, with many more wells becoming contaminated, with approximately 50 wells testing positive for TCE by 1990 to 1994. Being the 1970's, the school did not yet exist - it was a large swamp. Being a dirt-poor community, out in the middle of nowhere, the EPA apparently decided that the best way to deal with the spill was to dig up the contaminated topsoil and dump it into said swamp - which the new school was later built upon! Beginning in August of 2011, 13 girls and 1 boy from the LeRoy High School began reporting perplexing medical symptoms including verbal outbursts, tics, seizure activity and speech difficulty. Following a thorough workup by local doctors and investigations by independent medical specialist, a number of different diagnoses were applied to describe the symptoms including Tourette syndrome, "hysteria" and "conversion disorder". Several of the teenage girls were interviewed on national television describing their symptoms and difficulty functioning in day to day life. Since the doctors did not have any idea what was causing it, the patients were told that their symptoms were all psychlogical, or a psychiatric disorder. http://holisticremediesnews.com/2060/le-roy-mystery-disease-questions-the-parents-should-be-asking/ 2012: If we though the mystery disease in Le Roy NY was just restricted to teenagers, guess again. A 36-year-old woman who has been exhibiting the same Tourettes-like symptoms as the 15 teenagers has stepped forward with her story: An added note: many forms of brain damage/disorders cannot be detected by normal CAT/MRI imaging Toxicity of Trichloroethylene My guess is the bacteria in the swamp may have converted the TCE into some longer lived metabolite, which could cause neurological symptoms through chronic exposure to developing children. There does not exist any good studies on the anaerobic metabolites of TCE, but one of the speculated metabolites is vinyl chloride. Chronic exposure to vinyl chloride can cause permanent parkinsons-like symptoms. references: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.mi.45.100191.001435 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2279728 Workers with workstations adjacent to the source of trichloroethylene and who were subjected to chronic inhalation and dermal exposure from handling trichloroethylene-soaked metal parts all had Parkinson's disease. Lesser chronic respiratory exposure to trichloroethylene led to many features of Parkinsonism, including significant motor slowing. Unfortunately, all too often in medicine when the cause of a problem is not known, there is a tendancy to blame it on psychlogical problems or "mass hysteria". This is an injustice to the people suffering.
All the more reason to approve the XL Pipeline, even the Sierra Club spokeshole says they are much safer than trains.
Except that most actual doctors, who are not bought and paid for by the Green Religion, think that it's Mass Hysteria. I'll trust doctors who were actually with the dozen or so kids over some Greenie with an agenda.
