Source: CBS News
As CBS News first reported, FEMA has been under heavy fire for failing to acknowledge then adequately address health problems like respiratory illness associated with the toxic chemical formaldehyde found in travel trailers that became home for hundreds of thousands of survivors of Hurricane Katrina. More than 143,000 families have lived in the toxic trailers, and more than 40,000 still do.
Now, CBS News has learned, the public health fiasco reaches beyond FEMA – into the one of the nation’s most respected agencies.
CBS News has learned that the Centers for Disease Control, the nation’s top public health agency, suppressed repeated warnings from one of its top scientists, raising questions about whether the CDC bowed to pressure from FEMA to conceal the long-term health risks of formaldehyde in the trailers it distributed to hurricane victims – health risks like cancer and birth defects, CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports.
A string of internal documents obtained exclusively by CBS News reveal that Dr. Christopher De Rosa, director of the CDC’s Division of Toxicology and Environmental Medicine, told his superiors “there is no safe level of exposure” to formaldehyde in trailers. That warning never made its way into any public report about the trailers.
CDC, FEMA, Katrina
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