No link between arsenic, litter and leukemia, jurors told
Last updated Tuesday, September 19, 2006 1:53 PM CDT in News
By Ron Wood
The Morning News
FAYETTEVILLE -- Breathing arsenic will cause cancer but it won't cause the rare form of leukemia suffered by Prairie Grove resident Michael Blu Green.
"There's only one and that's lung cancer," Dr. Steven Lamm, an epidemiologist and physician, told jurors Tuesday morning.
Green and his parents sued Alpharma and Alpharma Animal Health, makers of the arsenic-based feed additive Roxarsone. The Greens claim exposure to arsenic from litter spreading near Prairie Grove in the 1990s caused Blu to develop leukemia.
The plaintiffs in the case are working under the theory that Roxarsone passes through the birds and degrades into a harmful form of arsenic in the litter, which is then spread on farm fields as fertilizer. Wind then carries the dust into homes and schools in the community.
Lamm told jurors that, despite what experts for the other side said last week, there have been no studies to link arsenic with chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, the rare type suffered by Green.
"They show no association between the inhalation of inorganic arsenic and leukemia," Lamm said. "There is no confirmed association between CML and arsenic."
Lamm, who's paid $450 per hour to testify, also told jurors that chemicals or toxins in the environment don't cause CML. He said one of the few recognized risk factors is exposure to high doses of radiation.
There's also no link between leukemia and arsenic in broiler litter, Lamm said. He compared rates of leukemia in Washington County and statewide. Washington County is among the lower half of Arkansas counties in the rate of CML and the state and county are both at or below the national average, Lamm said. Washington County is below the state and national averages for white males with CML, Lamm said.
Lamm said he tested a hypothesis that counties that produce more chicken litter would have more CML but it was not born out by the data. Washington County is one of the state's top producers of both poultry and poultry litter but doesn't have leukemia rates any higher than counties that produce no poultry at all, Lamm said.
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