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Jilly_in_VA

(9,852 posts)
Mon Jan 24, 2022, 01:47 PM Jan 2022

Toxic PCBs Festered at This Public School for Eight Years as Students and Teachers Grew Sicker

For Michelle Leahy, it started with headaches, inflamed rashes on her arms and legs, and blisters in her mouth.

Some students and staff at Sky Valley Education Center, an alternative public school in Monroe, also had strange symptoms: cognitive problems, skin cysts, girls as young as 6 suddenly hitting puberty.

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Leahy, like others, eventually became too sick to return to campus. She developed uterine cancer as her other symptoms escalated.

“Who would ever think that the job that you love was making you sick?” Leahy, 62, said.

She didn’t know it then, about seven years ago, but her classroom contained some of the highest levels of toxic chemicals found at Sky Valley. Inspections and environmental testing across campus found an amalgam of harmful environmental conditions, including very high levels of carbon dioxide, poor air ventilation and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a banned, synthetic chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency has linked to some cancers and other illnesses.

https://www.propublica.org/article/toxic-pcbs-festered-at-this-public-school-for-eight-years-as-students-and-teachers-grew-sicker

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Toxic PCBs Festered at This Public School for Eight Years as Students and Teachers Grew Sicker (Original Post) Jilly_in_VA Jan 2022 OP
Most PCBs in a school would be from lighting ballasts. They stopped making that type FSogol Jan 2022 #1
the State of Washington KT2000 Jan 2022 #2

FSogol

(45,355 posts)
1. Most PCBs in a school would be from lighting ballasts. They stopped making that type
Mon Jan 24, 2022, 01:53 PM
Jan 2022

around 1978(?). Every school district I work replaced their lighting by the 90s and usually again after that to take advantage of LED changes. How can a school system still have antique lighting ballasts? How are they still working?

KT2000

(20,544 posts)
2. the State of Washington
Mon Jan 24, 2022, 03:30 PM
Jan 2022

is well versed in denying any toxic chemical situation. I would even be surprised if anyone who got ill had decent medical care. When it comes to these situations, the medical community works for the employer.

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