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Is Wood County and much of the Ohio Valley an area that is harmful to habitation?
What to believe.
With chromium and other contaminants that poison fish in the Ohio River and Little Kanawha River, and Wood County on the bad air list, it seems insult to injury to consider DuPont's C-8 problem, which a law suit contends has injured public health through the water supply and possibly other causes.
All the alleged polluters deny there is a problem.
The Environmental Protection Agency says there can be potential health risks from exposure to low levels of C-8 used in making Teflon.
DuPont's Washington works in Wood County just released a study which has indications the chemical could be linked to raised cholesterol and triglyceride levels in people. DuPont did the study on 1,000 employees.
DuPont said there was nothing in the study to prove that the chemical was the cause.
DuPont has agreed to pay as much as $343 million dollars to settle charges that it contaminated drinking water in Ohio and West Virginia with C-8 during the past 50 years.
The government has claimed DuPont failed to report problems related to birth defects in pregnant women who worked at the Washington plant.
EPA lawyer Meredith Miller said the agency "wanted to make sure it was getting information about a serious risk of harm."
She said the agency's "fuzzy" guidance to industry in the mid-1990s about what information had to be reported amounted to "a big gift to the industry, and DuPont is now trying to use that as a shield."
The EPA says DuPont failed to provide a one-page document about health problems in the employee population.
DuPont also is accused of failing to provide results from blood samples taken last July from 12 people living near the company's plant.
The EPA says those people were exposed to C8 through drinking water from a public supply.
The agency says that three years after they had stopped using the supply as their primary source of water, their blood samples still showed concentrations of C8 averaging more than 13 times the national average.
DuPont's lawyers say the company has done everything it is suppose to do.
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