Post by blackcrowheart on Nov 22, 2006 11:32:28 GMT -5
Oases in Navajo desert contained 'a witch's brew' - Rain-filled
Posted by: "binstock@peakpeak.com" binstock@peakpeak.com aspergerian
Tue Nov 21, 2006 4:49 am (PST)
Photo Gallery: Poisoned Water
www.latimes.com/extras/navajo/Day2/
- - - -
Oases in Navajo desert contained 'a witch's brew'
Rain-filled uranium pits provided drinking water for people and animals.
Then a mysterious wasting illness emerged.
By Judy Pasternak
Times Staff Writer
November 20, 2006
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-navajo20nov20,0,6106722.story
IN ALL HER YEARS of tending sheep in the western reaches of the Navajo
range, Lois Neztsosie had never seen anything so odd.
New lakes had appeared as if by magic in the arid scrublands. Instead of
hunting for puddles in the sandstone, she could lead her 100 animals to
drink their fill. She would quench her own thirst as well, parting the
film on the water's surface with her hands and leaning down to swallow.
Despite the abundant water, an unexpected blessing, her flock failed to
thrive. The birthrate dropped, and the few new lambs that did appear had a
hard time walking. Some were born without eyes.
Lois' husband, David, wondered whether the sheepdogs were mating with
their charges. A medicine man, he also suspected witchcraft. He tried to
fight the spell by burning cedar and herbs and gathering the sheep around
the fire to inhale the healing smoke.
The livestock were not his only worry. A mysterious sickness was affecting
the couple's two youngest daughters.
Laura, born in 1970, had a weak right eye and was prone to stumbling.
Arlinda came along the following year and developed ulcers in her corneas
by age 5. A few years later, she was walking on the sides of her feet.
At the Indian Health Service hospital, doctors were mystified. Experts
concluded that both girls suffered from a rare genetic disorder.
There was another possibility, but no one considered it until many years
later.
No one connected the children and the sheep.
Tainted oases
In the mountains and mesas of the Navajo reservation, mining companies
drilled tunnels in the sides of cliffs to extract uranium for the nation's
nuclear weapons program during the Cold War. But in the red and ocher
sands around Cameron, where deposits were shallow, the ore was blasted out
of the plains, creating pits.
As demand for uranium eased in the late 1950s, the U.S. government allowed
the companies to leave without filling in the craters. The pits collected
snowmelt in the winter and runoff from summer torrents. The holes, some as
deep as 130 feet, soon formed oases in the desert.
Lois grew to depend on them as she ranged far from home, covering as much
as 10 miles in a day. At dusk, she often camped for the night. She got in
the habit of filling and refilling a small container with her drinking
supply as she moved from one "lake" to the next, watering her herd.
Every few weeks, the Neztsosies butchered one of the sheep. They ate each
one down to the bones, which they sucked around the fire. They destroyed
the lambs that could not walk.
Deformed animals were showing up in other sections of Dine Bikeiyah, Home
of the People, as Navajos call their homeland. In areas around old mines,
lambs and cattle developed shaking limbs, yellow eyes and white patches on
internal organs that were discovered after slaughter.
Word of these strange developments did not reach the Neztsosies. Navajo
families tend to live miles apart from one another. They prize their
privacy. Local officials heard occasional complaints about damaged
animals, but no one discerned a trend.
Baffled doctors
Arlinda, nicknamed Linnie, had that "funny walk," as her family described
it. At the Indian Health Service clinic in Tuba City, Ariz., doctors
prescribed Vitamin A for her eyes and gave her goggles to wear. Classmates
teased her, so she stopped using them.
When she stopped taking her supplements, her Vitamin A levels remained
normal � but her corneas did not improve.
Laura had similar but milder symptoms and was small for her age. Her
mother took her to the clinic too. "Go home," Laura said she was told.
"There's nothing wrong with you."
In truth, medical records show, the doctors were stumped. Something was
affecting the girls' peripheral nervous systems, but what? Linnie and
Laura were the youngest of nine children. None of their siblings or other
relatives had experienced anything like this.
Like many Navajo families, the Neztsosies led semi-nomadic lives. A
rough-planked one-room shack served as home base for Lois' sheep-herding
expeditions and David's long commutes to a sawmill in Flagstaff. There was
no electricity. They got their drinking water from a well installed by the
U.S. Public Health Service.
Around the time of the daughters' visits to the IHS clinic in the
mid-1970s, the family's prospects were looking up. David had built a
cinderblock house to replace the shack.
Laura started thinking about her future. Perhaps she would manage a hotel
or become a stewardess. "I could be well-dressed and serve people," she
remembers thinking.
In 1976, researchers from the University of New Mexico published an
article in the journal Archives of Neurology. They had discovered a
disabling illness that appeared to be hereditary. Corneal ulcers, muscular
weakness and liver disease were among the symptoms.
All four cases cited in the paper were Navajo children. Two were siblings.
"This does not constitute proof that the disease is genetically
determined, but it seems likely," wrote the authors.
In the years to come, researchers would pronounce in more and more certain
terms that the illness was purely hereditary. They called it "Navajo
neuropathy." There was no cure.
Another family's loss
While the Neztsosie girls were baffling their doctors, the Nez family
braced for another death.
Leonard and Helen Nez lived most of the year at their sheep camp at the
base of Tah-chee, a hill in the middle of the reservation.
They too had dealt with a spate of disfigured livestock � a calf with a
crooked leg, another diagnosed with cancer of the eye, a lamb born with
three legs, "kind of like an omen," one of the Nez daughters recalls.
Soon enough, the Nezes started losing children. First, in 1963, a
stillbirth. Then, in 1969, daughter Dorinta and son Jerome died four
months apart. In 1972, Claudia died. These three siblings had suffered
from blurred vision, failing livers and limp muscles. None lived past a
fourth birthday.
Three more Nez children were displaying similar symptoms. At the Indian
Health Service clinic in Chinle, perplexed staff members asked Helen
whether she engaged in incest, consumed alcohol while pregnant or suffered
from mental problems.
No, she said, offended. None of these apply.
The doctors urged her to stop having babies, she said.
In the spring of 1978, the family's youngest, 2-year-old Euphemia, was in
serious decline. By then, there was a name for the ailment. The IHS
arranged for the child to undergo liver surgery in an Albuquerque
hospital.
The treatment team included Russell D. Snyder, a pediatric neurologist at
the University of New Mexico. Snyder was one of the authors of the article
suggesting a hereditary cause for Navajo neuropathy.
But Helen, now 68, said Snyder expressed concern when she told him she
lived near a uranium mine � an abandoned pit atop Tah-chee. Helen said he
warned her that uranium was dangerous.
Snyder declined to be interviewed. In notes on the Nez family that he
wrote in 1990, after treating the siblings for years, he included this
observation: "A uranium mine was within one mile of the home where all
these children lived, and uranium tailings were closer."
Until that conversation at the hospital, the Nez family had not considered
the old mine a danger. Then Helen got to thinking: Their drinking water
came from Tah-chee.
On July 31, 1978, Euphemia died. She was the fourth Nez child to succumb
to Navajo neuropathy.
Unanswered prayers
In 1980, the IHS sent Laura and Linnie Neztsosie to be examined by Snyder.
Linnie was 9, Laura 10.
The girls spent two weeks at the hospital with their mother, and left
feeling as bewildered as when they'd arrived.
In a letter to the reservation doctor, Snyder considered whether "heavy
metal intoxication" was the cause of their problems. But Snyder concluded
that "by far the most likely possibility is a hereditary" disorder �
perhaps "partial Navajo neuropathy."
In 1983, the heath service sent Laura and Linnie back to Albuquerque and
Snyder. In their referral letter, IHS physicians wondered whether the
girls should be tested for lead, arsenic or thiamine � all known to cause
neurological problems at high doses. There is no record that they were
tested for these or any other toxic substances.
By 1986, Linnie's fingers and toes tingled and tended to curl up like
claws. It was becoming harder for her to walk, and her hands and feet were
losing muscle tone.
"Clinical dx: Navajo neuropathy � Prognosis: Guarded. Progressive
disability expected," wrote Stanley Johnsen, a pediatric neurologist who
examined her in Phoenix.
Then Laura began to have stinging and prickling sensations in her limbs.
David Neztsosie took the medicine man's view: Bitterness between him and
his wife must be affecting his daughters. He left the house and the
marriage.
For a year, Laura and her mother prayed. They tried traditional rituals
and steamed inside a sweat lodge. The ceremonies, they hoped, would halt
the strange sensation before it progressed.
One morning, Laura had trouble getting out of bed. Her fingers and toes
had stiffened into hooks, like her sister's. They would not unbend � and
have not since.
The older Neztsosie children chopped wood for the fire and cleaned the
house when they were home from Indian boarding school, but the two
youngest "couldn't help our mom," Laura recalled. "We used to crawl around
on the floor, on the sandy floor."
Disquieting discovery
In 1986, Donald W. Payne, an environmental health officer for the IHS,
made a disquieting discovery.
Payne, then on loan to the tribal government, agreed to help a National
Park Service ranger work on his water sampling technique. They tested 48
water sources around a national monument near Cameron.
What they found appalled them.
Uranium levels in the water at Cameron were as high as 139 picocuries per
liter in wells and up to 4,024 in abandoned pits like the ones where Lois
Neztsosie watered her sheep and filled her drinking bottles.
EPA rules permit no more than 20 picocuries per liter in drinking water.
The water in many of the pits also had high concentrations of radium-226,
a radioactive byproduct of uranium.
Payne had never seen the pits before. "I was amazed by the sheer size of
the things," he said.
In reports to the tribal government, he wrote that "the Indian Health
Service, as the primary public health providers for the Navajo people"
should "make every effort" to warn residents not to drink from the shallow
wells or let their livestock drink from the pits.
The tribe, Payne wrote, "must mount a concerted program to restrict access
of livestock to the heavily contaminated pits and impoundments."
Charles A. Reaux, a regional IHS official, knew animals were not the only
ones at risk; in a 1986 memo, he had written of "suspected human use" of
the pit waters.
Reaux was reluctant to commit his agency's resources to uranium-related
health hazards because the cost seemed open-ended. But on reading Payne's
findings, he recommended that the health service "get involved in
determining if there are contaminated water sites in Cameron � and other
areas," adding that the IHS "may also have to support this effort
financially."
The suggestion died quietly.
Neither the tribe nor the IHS mounted the educational campaign urged by
Payne. Navajos who were drinking from the pits or watering their animals
there had no reason to stop.
Now retired and living in Maine, Payne says the government's inaction
still bothers him.
The IHS "should have told them, and they should have found the money to
give them water that was safe to drink," he said. "You don't just stick
your head in the sand."
Staff members of the tribe's environmental commission showed photos of the
water-filled pits in Cameron and elsewhere to their director, Harold Tso,
a radio-chemist
Tso, now 68, said he was overwhelmed by other urgent problems, such as the
piles of radioactive waste at old uranium-processing mills.
"I wanted to get out there" to see the pits, he said, "but I never did."
Focus on genetics
Medical research continued to focus on a genetic explanation for the
mysterious wasting disease. In February 1990, the journal Neurology
published an article on possible causes of Navajo neuropathy.
"No common environmental factors (i.e., water source, heavy metal
exposure, toxin exposure, family occupation) have been discovered," the
report said.
But the research team did not fully consider the possible role of uranium
mining.
Posted by: "binstock@peakpeak.com" binstock@peakpeak.com aspergerian
Tue Nov 21, 2006 4:49 am (PST)
Photo Gallery: Poisoned Water
www.latimes.com/extras/navajo/Day2/
- - - -
Oases in Navajo desert contained 'a witch's brew'
Rain-filled uranium pits provided drinking water for people and animals.
Then a mysterious wasting illness emerged.
By Judy Pasternak
Times Staff Writer
November 20, 2006
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-navajo20nov20,0,6106722.story
IN ALL HER YEARS of tending sheep in the western reaches of the Navajo
range, Lois Neztsosie had never seen anything so odd.
New lakes had appeared as if by magic in the arid scrublands. Instead of
hunting for puddles in the sandstone, she could lead her 100 animals to
drink their fill. She would quench her own thirst as well, parting the
film on the water's surface with her hands and leaning down to swallow.
Despite the abundant water, an unexpected blessing, her flock failed to
thrive. The birthrate dropped, and the few new lambs that did appear had a
hard time walking. Some were born without eyes.
Lois' husband, David, wondered whether the sheepdogs were mating with
their charges. A medicine man, he also suspected witchcraft. He tried to
fight the spell by burning cedar and herbs and gathering the sheep around
the fire to inhale the healing smoke.
The livestock were not his only worry. A mysterious sickness was affecting
the couple's two youngest daughters.
Laura, born in 1970, had a weak right eye and was prone to stumbling.
Arlinda came along the following year and developed ulcers in her corneas
by age 5. A few years later, she was walking on the sides of her feet.
At the Indian Health Service hospital, doctors were mystified. Experts
concluded that both girls suffered from a rare genetic disorder.
There was another possibility, but no one considered it until many years
later.
No one connected the children and the sheep.
Tainted oases
In the mountains and mesas of the Navajo reservation, mining companies
drilled tunnels in the sides of cliffs to extract uranium for the nation's
nuclear weapons program during the Cold War. But in the red and ocher
sands around Cameron, where deposits were shallow, the ore was blasted out
of the plains, creating pits.
As demand for uranium eased in the late 1950s, the U.S. government allowed
the companies to leave without filling in the craters. The pits collected
snowmelt in the winter and runoff from summer torrents. The holes, some as
deep as 130 feet, soon formed oases in the desert.
Lois grew to depend on them as she ranged far from home, covering as much
as 10 miles in a day. At dusk, she often camped for the night. She got in
the habit of filling and refilling a small container with her drinking
supply as she moved from one "lake" to the next, watering her herd.
Every few weeks, the Neztsosies butchered one of the sheep. They ate each
one down to the bones, which they sucked around the fire. They destroyed
the lambs that could not walk.
Deformed animals were showing up in other sections of Dine Bikeiyah, Home
of the People, as Navajos call their homeland. In areas around old mines,
lambs and cattle developed shaking limbs, yellow eyes and white patches on
internal organs that were discovered after slaughter.
Word of these strange developments did not reach the Neztsosies. Navajo
families tend to live miles apart from one another. They prize their
privacy. Local officials heard occasional complaints about damaged
animals, but no one discerned a trend.
Baffled doctors
Arlinda, nicknamed Linnie, had that "funny walk," as her family described
it. At the Indian Health Service clinic in Tuba City, Ariz., doctors
prescribed Vitamin A for her eyes and gave her goggles to wear. Classmates
teased her, so she stopped using them.
When she stopped taking her supplements, her Vitamin A levels remained
normal � but her corneas did not improve.
Laura had similar but milder symptoms and was small for her age. Her
mother took her to the clinic too. "Go home," Laura said she was told.
"There's nothing wrong with you."
In truth, medical records show, the doctors were stumped. Something was
affecting the girls' peripheral nervous systems, but what? Linnie and
Laura were the youngest of nine children. None of their siblings or other
relatives had experienced anything like this.
Like many Navajo families, the Neztsosies led semi-nomadic lives. A
rough-planked one-room shack served as home base for Lois' sheep-herding
expeditions and David's long commutes to a sawmill in Flagstaff. There was
no electricity. They got their drinking water from a well installed by the
U.S. Public Health Service.
Around the time of the daughters' visits to the IHS clinic in the
mid-1970s, the family's prospects were looking up. David had built a
cinderblock house to replace the shack.
Laura started thinking about her future. Perhaps she would manage a hotel
or become a stewardess. "I could be well-dressed and serve people," she
remembers thinking.
In 1976, researchers from the University of New Mexico published an
article in the journal Archives of Neurology. They had discovered a
disabling illness that appeared to be hereditary. Corneal ulcers, muscular
weakness and liver disease were among the symptoms.
All four cases cited in the paper were Navajo children. Two were siblings.
"This does not constitute proof that the disease is genetically
determined, but it seems likely," wrote the authors.
In the years to come, researchers would pronounce in more and more certain
terms that the illness was purely hereditary. They called it "Navajo
neuropathy." There was no cure.
Another family's loss
While the Neztsosie girls were baffling their doctors, the Nez family
braced for another death.
Leonard and Helen Nez lived most of the year at their sheep camp at the
base of Tah-chee, a hill in the middle of the reservation.
They too had dealt with a spate of disfigured livestock � a calf with a
crooked leg, another diagnosed with cancer of the eye, a lamb born with
three legs, "kind of like an omen," one of the Nez daughters recalls.
Soon enough, the Nezes started losing children. First, in 1963, a
stillbirth. Then, in 1969, daughter Dorinta and son Jerome died four
months apart. In 1972, Claudia died. These three siblings had suffered
from blurred vision, failing livers and limp muscles. None lived past a
fourth birthday.
Three more Nez children were displaying similar symptoms. At the Indian
Health Service clinic in Chinle, perplexed staff members asked Helen
whether she engaged in incest, consumed alcohol while pregnant or suffered
from mental problems.
No, she said, offended. None of these apply.
The doctors urged her to stop having babies, she said.
In the spring of 1978, the family's youngest, 2-year-old Euphemia, was in
serious decline. By then, there was a name for the ailment. The IHS
arranged for the child to undergo liver surgery in an Albuquerque
hospital.
The treatment team included Russell D. Snyder, a pediatric neurologist at
the University of New Mexico. Snyder was one of the authors of the article
suggesting a hereditary cause for Navajo neuropathy.
But Helen, now 68, said Snyder expressed concern when she told him she
lived near a uranium mine � an abandoned pit atop Tah-chee. Helen said he
warned her that uranium was dangerous.
Snyder declined to be interviewed. In notes on the Nez family that he
wrote in 1990, after treating the siblings for years, he included this
observation: "A uranium mine was within one mile of the home where all
these children lived, and uranium tailings were closer."
Until that conversation at the hospital, the Nez family had not considered
the old mine a danger. Then Helen got to thinking: Their drinking water
came from Tah-chee.
On July 31, 1978, Euphemia died. She was the fourth Nez child to succumb
to Navajo neuropathy.
Unanswered prayers
In 1980, the IHS sent Laura and Linnie Neztsosie to be examined by Snyder.
Linnie was 9, Laura 10.
The girls spent two weeks at the hospital with their mother, and left
feeling as bewildered as when they'd arrived.
In a letter to the reservation doctor, Snyder considered whether "heavy
metal intoxication" was the cause of their problems. But Snyder concluded
that "by far the most likely possibility is a hereditary" disorder �
perhaps "partial Navajo neuropathy."
In 1983, the heath service sent Laura and Linnie back to Albuquerque and
Snyder. In their referral letter, IHS physicians wondered whether the
girls should be tested for lead, arsenic or thiamine � all known to cause
neurological problems at high doses. There is no record that they were
tested for these or any other toxic substances.
By 1986, Linnie's fingers and toes tingled and tended to curl up like
claws. It was becoming harder for her to walk, and her hands and feet were
losing muscle tone.
"Clinical dx: Navajo neuropathy � Prognosis: Guarded. Progressive
disability expected," wrote Stanley Johnsen, a pediatric neurologist who
examined her in Phoenix.
Then Laura began to have stinging and prickling sensations in her limbs.
David Neztsosie took the medicine man's view: Bitterness between him and
his wife must be affecting his daughters. He left the house and the
marriage.
For a year, Laura and her mother prayed. They tried traditional rituals
and steamed inside a sweat lodge. The ceremonies, they hoped, would halt
the strange sensation before it progressed.
One morning, Laura had trouble getting out of bed. Her fingers and toes
had stiffened into hooks, like her sister's. They would not unbend � and
have not since.
The older Neztsosie children chopped wood for the fire and cleaned the
house when they were home from Indian boarding school, but the two
youngest "couldn't help our mom," Laura recalled. "We used to crawl around
on the floor, on the sandy floor."
Disquieting discovery
In 1986, Donald W. Payne, an environmental health officer for the IHS,
made a disquieting discovery.
Payne, then on loan to the tribal government, agreed to help a National
Park Service ranger work on his water sampling technique. They tested 48
water sources around a national monument near Cameron.
What they found appalled them.
Uranium levels in the water at Cameron were as high as 139 picocuries per
liter in wells and up to 4,024 in abandoned pits like the ones where Lois
Neztsosie watered her sheep and filled her drinking bottles.
EPA rules permit no more than 20 picocuries per liter in drinking water.
The water in many of the pits also had high concentrations of radium-226,
a radioactive byproduct of uranium.
Payne had never seen the pits before. "I was amazed by the sheer size of
the things," he said.
In reports to the tribal government, he wrote that "the Indian Health
Service, as the primary public health providers for the Navajo people"
should "make every effort" to warn residents not to drink from the shallow
wells or let their livestock drink from the pits.
The tribe, Payne wrote, "must mount a concerted program to restrict access
of livestock to the heavily contaminated pits and impoundments."
Charles A. Reaux, a regional IHS official, knew animals were not the only
ones at risk; in a 1986 memo, he had written of "suspected human use" of
the pit waters.
Reaux was reluctant to commit his agency's resources to uranium-related
health hazards because the cost seemed open-ended. But on reading Payne's
findings, he recommended that the health service "get involved in
determining if there are contaminated water sites in Cameron � and other
areas," adding that the IHS "may also have to support this effort
financially."
The suggestion died quietly.
Neither the tribe nor the IHS mounted the educational campaign urged by
Payne. Navajos who were drinking from the pits or watering their animals
there had no reason to stop.
Now retired and living in Maine, Payne says the government's inaction
still bothers him.
The IHS "should have told them, and they should have found the money to
give them water that was safe to drink," he said. "You don't just stick
your head in the sand."
Staff members of the tribe's environmental commission showed photos of the
water-filled pits in Cameron and elsewhere to their director, Harold Tso,
a radio-chemist
Tso, now 68, said he was overwhelmed by other urgent problems, such as the
piles of radioactive waste at old uranium-processing mills.
"I wanted to get out there" to see the pits, he said, "but I never did."
Focus on genetics
Medical research continued to focus on a genetic explanation for the
mysterious wasting disease. In February 1990, the journal Neurology
published an article on possible causes of Navajo neuropathy.
"No common environmental factors (i.e., water source, heavy metal
exposure, toxin exposure, family occupation) have been discovered," the
report said.
But the research team did not fully consider the possible role of uranium
mining.