Manganese can stunt intelligence in children
Metal study done in East Liverpool, Ohio
Ellen Kiger, holding her 13month-old son, Jeremiah, was worried last week as she sat in the basement meeting room of Purinton Hall on Kent State University’s branch campus in East Liverpool, Ohio.
Jessica Elsass, with her 6month-old daughter, Aemilia, was angry.
They were among three dozen people gathered in the eastern Ohio border town, 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, to hear the results of a new study that found children with higher levels of manganese in their bodies also had lower IQ scores.
“What do you mean how do I feel? We’re talking about irreversible brain damage for developing children,” said Ms. Elsass as the meeting broke up. “You cannot detox from it. Heavy metals poisoning is irreversible.”
The peer-reviewed study by environmental health researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine analyzed blood and hair from 106 children, 7 to 9 years old, in East Liverpool and surrounding communities, from March 2013 to June 2014.
Its results, recently published online in the journal NeuroToxicology, show a significant association between higher manganese in hair samples and declines in IQ, mental processing speed and working memory, said Erin Haynes, associate professor in the University of Cincinnati’s Department of Public Health and lead author of the study.
She said she was invited to conduct the study by the East Liverpool School District superintendent because of the region’s long-term high airborne manganese levels and low student academic achievement. In 2010, the school district reported it had a higher percentage of students in special education (19 percent) than the state as a whole (13 percent).
Manganese is a naturally and widely occurring element found in many soils, rocks and foods. It is used industrially in the production of steel, alloys, unleaded gasoline, batteries and fertilizers. It also plays an important role in childhood brain growth, but exposure to higher levels of the element can damage brain development and impair motor skills and memory, Ms. Haynes said.
“There are socioeconomic issues at play in East Liverpool, including the parents’ IQs, parental relationships and the presence of other neurotoxicants, but they are also compounded by potentially significant environmental exposures,” Ms. Haynes said. “Children may be particularly susceptible to the neurotoxic effects of ambient manganese exposure as their brains grow and develop.”
A pilot study by Ms. Haynes in 2011 found levels of manganese in East Liverpool children at double those found in children who lived in Cambridge, Ohio, a control town without industrial facilities producing airborne manganese, and set the stage for the follow-up study and the results she reported last Tuesday.
The latest study also builds on a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study of adults, reported in 2013, that found residents of East Liverpool and Marietta, Ohio, where a manganese smelter operates, showed increased tremors and marginally lower memory, mental processing speed and strength the closer they lived to sources of airborne manganese.
“My pediatrician recommended my children have their blood tested, and I’ll be getting that done,” said Ms. Kiger, who also has a 5-yearold daughter, Kaydence Boyle. “Someone needs to be held accountable for these high manganese levels.”
Randy Taylor, the East Liverpool schools superintendent, said he understands the concerns expressed by parents but was cautious about putting all the blame on high manganese levels.”
There are multiple socioeconomic factors at play here,” he said, “and regardless of what the children are facing, we are trying to meet their individual needs.”
He said the school district remodeled its buildings in 2010 and renovated its airhandling systems using microbial filters.
“We’re still investigating what else we can do in the schools,” said Mr. Taylor, adding that he and other administrators are meeting with Ms. Haynes on Tuesday to review the study findings and begin to develop a response. Located along the Ohio River and the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, East Liverpool, once known as the “Pottery Capital of the Nation,” has a long history of industrial development and ongoing environmental exposures.
High concentrations of manganese have been measured in East Liverpool’s air since at least 1999, when federal and state monitoring began. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency in its 2010 “All Ohio Air Toxics Report” listed manganese concentrations in East Liverpool up to 30 times higher than the federal EPA safe reference concentration, or guideline, of 0.05 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
And as calculated by the Ohio EPA in 2010, the noncancer hazard index for East Liverpool was 34.5, by far the highest in the state and primarily due to elevated manganese readings. A hazard index below 1.0 is considered “safe.”
Monitoring by the Ohio EPA has determined that the 92-acre S.H. Bell Co. industrial site, spanning the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, is a primary source of airborne manganese in East Liverpool. The familyowned storage, transfer, processing and warehousing facility opened in 1963 and ships a variety of metals materials, including manganese, via river barge, truck and rail.
Residents at the meeting last week spoke of Bell’s open material storage piles and dust blowing off company’s trucks and materials storage pads along the Ohio River. But Lisa Bailey, a toxicologist with Gradient, a Boston environmental consulting firm hired by Bell, said the company no longer stores manganese outside — hasn’t in at least five years — and has made other operational changes to reduce airborne manganese.
Ms. Bailey also said East Liverpool’s manganese concentrations, now in the 0.2 milligrams-per-cubic-meter range, are actually lower than the latest, higher screening guideline for safe manganese exposure of 0.3 micrograms per cubic meter adopted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and DiseaseRegistry in 2012. She also said the “respirable manganese” — the smallest particles that can be inhaled deeplyand travel through the bloodstream to the brain — is a fraction of the total amount ofmanganese in the air.
“That suggests there is no risk from manganese in the community,” Ms. Bailey told the crowd.
To calculate exposure risk, the federal EPA recognizes both the 0.05 milligrams-per-cubic-meter measure, established in 1993 and used agency-wide, and the 0.3 milligrams-per-cubic-meter exposure guideline. But Ms. Haynes said the differences in those threshholds are beside the point of her study, which focused on bioaccumulation of manganese in children.
“Our study did not investigate the relationship between air concentration and child IQ — we examined biological concentration of manganese and child IQ,” she said. “This is a much stronger analysis — a measure of what is in the children and their IQ rather than what is in the air around them.
*** The high concentrations of airborne manganese in East Liverpool are nothing new. The Ohio EPA issued orders in 2008, 2010, and February and October 2016 that aimed at reducing those levels.
According to the federal EPA, East Liverpool airborne manganese monitoring data from 2006 to 2013 showed a downward trend, but concentrations increased again in 2014-15, raising concerns at that agency, the Ohio EPA, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. In its October 2016 order, the Ohio EPA noted that the average monthly manganese concentration in East Liverpool from July 2015 through July 2016 was 0.324 milligrams per cubic meter — still higher than the ATSDR guideline.
In January 2017, citing concerns that the manganese emissions “may endanger the health of residents who live near the facility,” the U.S. EPA filed a consent decree in U.S. District Court in Cleveland that requires S.H. Bell to monitor and take measures to reduce manganese emissions, immediately and over the long term. Those measures included fugitive dust controls, a tracking system for manganese materials, fence-line monitors and corrective measures if emissions exceed certain “trigger levels.”
George Bollweg, an environmental health scientist at the federal EPA’s Region 5 office in Chicago, said there have been several enforcement actions involving S.H. Bell by both his agency and the Ohio EPA over the past five to seven years. He said the company has made significant changes, including enclosing materials processing operations, paving roads and changing work practices. Ms. Haynes said more research is needed and that the study will continue this coming spring when some of the tested children, who were 7 to 9 years old in the original study and are 12 to 14 years old now, will undergo magnetic resonance imaging testing at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC.
“The [National Institute of Environmental Health Science] has asked that we go back and test the same kids, examine their neuromotor skills, make biological measurements of metals, and do the MRIs to see what impacts manganese exposure have on the brain,” she said. “Lead impacts are very clear, but we are just starting to understand manganese.
“Our goal would be to do something about it, remedy it, do an intervention that removes the manganese exposure.”
Although Ms. Haynes said repeatedly that the study does not identify a specific source of the high airborne manganese, emissions controls are warranted.
“Industry needs to be responsible for what it’s doing,” she said. “And we all need to be responsible for what is in our backyards.”
“Industry needs to be responsible for what it’s doing. And we all need to be responsible for what is in our backyards.” — Erin Haynes, associate professor, University of Cincinnati’s Department of Public Health and lead author of the manganese study