EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — Days following his ninth trip to East Palestine in the wake of last year’s Norfolk Southern train derailment, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown pushed for long-term health monitoring and a voluntary disease registry for residents impacted by the February 2023 rail disaster during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on March 14.

In an exchange with Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Brown asked for a registry for both Ohio and Pennsylvania residents as well as continued support to address health concerns in the wake of the derailment and chemical release.

“The administration has announced a few NIH grants to get work on health monitoring and that’s a really good first step,” Brown said. “I want to ask HHS to set up a voluntary disease registry for the residents of that community, and I want you to commit to working with my office and the residents of East Palestine and its surrounding communities, including Senator (Bob) Casey’s impacted constituents, with a voluntary disease registry and additional resources for long-term health monitoring. I just want you to commit to working with my office and the residents of East Palestine.”

President Joe Biden announced six National Institute of Health grants during his visit to the village last month. The grants will be awarded to research universities to study the short- and long-term effects of the derailment. While pleased with the grants, Brown pressured the HHS to do more. Becerra said the agency was willing to do so, while recounting what has already been done.

“You know, I feel like you’re always nipping at my behind on this one, and making sure we’re doing something. I am glad we were able to get $250,000 to that local community health center right after the incident occurred to help them out,” Becerra said. “We’re glad we sent the CDC out there to do the in-person surveys to find out what the health status was of the people. The NIH has now announced six grants to help understand what’s going on down here for the folks in East Palestine, and we are absolutely prepared to work with you and state and local partners on this issue, on a registry and other matters.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collected data in the days and weeks following the derailment by requesting residents fill out an Assessment of Chemical Exposure survey. When the preliminary results of the 704 ACE surveys were released last March, it was reported that 76% of East Palestine residents participating in the health assessment experienced headaches while 54 percent experienced coughing, 52% experienced fatigue and 50% experienced a rash or irritation of the skin. In addition, 62% reported anxiety.

It was later confirmed by the CDC that seven of the agency’s investigators who were in the village to help conduct the surveys experienced similar symptoms.

During Brown’s visit to the village on March 11, Brown said he saw “a lot of rashes and burns” that were attributed to the derailment and subsequent vent and burn of 1.1 pounds of vinyl chloride from five damaged tank cars — an event the National Transportation and Safety Board has deemed “unnecessary.” Brown said the health concerns are warranted.

“I saw what these burn pits did in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a very different kind of exposure, it’s a longer exposure, those men and women serving our country, and some people died because of that,” Brown said. “I am not saying that will happen here, but I am saying we need to be cautious.”

The military relied on open-air burn pits to dispose of, among other things, plastics and petroleum products in Afghanistan and Iraq. The fumes that have since been linked to cancer and lung disease. The comparison of the military burn pits to that of the vent-and-burn performed in East Palestine has been made before and debated.

The Department of Defense air testing at the largest of the military burn pits in Balad Iraq indicated a slew of both polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzo(a)pyrene, toluene, and acetone. All three compounds were confirmed by the EPA to be detected in East Palestine surface water sampling with two exceedances of benzo(a)pyrene reported during the recently-completed reassessment of both Leslie and Sulphur Runs ordered by the EPA in October.

As far as air sampling, the EPA has maintained that over “100 million air monitoring and sampling data points” were collected with no elevated levels of derailment-related chemicals detected since the evacuation was lifted three days after the vent-and burn on Feb. 9, 2023.

That data was disputed by Carnegie Mellon and Texas A&M. The universities found that levels of acrolein — one of the VOCs identified in large amounts at Balad — were six times higher than normal were detected near the derailment during a two-day period in 2023 ( Feb. 20 and 21). The test results were published in July in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

The EPA initially said the levels of acrolein in East Palestine were within levels typically found in ambient air. The Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General (OIG), an independent office within EPA that conducts independent audits, evaluations and investigations, criticized the agency for what it referred to as “missing data on the concentrations and public health impact of acrolein, a hazardous air pollutant that was presumably created by the burning of other chemicals during the incident.”

Texas A&M was awarded one of the six NIH grants announced by Biden to continue to study “elevated VOC levels, particularly acrolein.”

The University of California, San Diego was also awarded a grant with Dr. Beatrice Golomb named as the study’s principal investigator. That study will assess the short-term health impact of being exposed to a mixture of toxins. Golomb, who was formerly on VA’s Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses and was the one of the first researchers to present direct evidence between illness and the military burn pits, has already been studying the health impacts of the derailment.

University of Kentucky and Dr. Erin Hayes, who has also been tracking the potential health impacts of the rail disaster, received a grant to continue to measure health symptoms, stress and well-being of East Palestine residents.

The University of Pittsburgh was awarded two grants for two derailment health studies. One will “collect soil, water, and sediment samples to capture the extent of the contamination and to document the ongoing impact on the local environment” and the other “will use citizen science strategies to actively engage community members in collecting environmental samples, biospecimens, and health outcome data to better understand the interaction of psychosocial stress and vinyl chloride exposure on their health, and to find ways to reduce the immediate and long-term impacts of these exposures.”

Case Western Reserve University accounts for the sixth and final grant. The research team “will engage community partners and talk with East Palestine residents to better understand their experiences and concerns during and after the disaster” as well as “collect, and store for future research, blood and saliva samples and analyze them to understand how the mixtures of chemicals impact health both short- and long-term.”