As lawyers cash in, testing at a crawl

DuPont has paid a lawyer overseeing a medical program that is supposed to test 100,000 Ohioans and West Virginians for C8 contamination nearly $15 million in the past 2 ½ years, yet the chemical company has spent only about $860,000 on actual testing.

In all, about 2,020 people have been tested for contamination with the chemical used to make Teflon.

Some want the court to order program director and New York City lawyer Michael K. Rozen to spend some of his own money to promote the

court-ordered $235 million medical-monitoring program to residents and pay for their testing.

In a motion filed April 7 in Wood County Circuit Court in West Virginia, Cincinnati attorney Robert A. Bilott noted that Rozen receives $187,000 a month.

“There should continue to be more than sufficient funds available to the director’s office to cover the cost of such a C8 blood collection project,” he wrote.

Jeffrey Dugas, spokesman for Keep Your Promises, a grass-roots group of Mid-Ohio Valley residents that is keeping an eye on DuPont’s progress with the medical-monitoring program, agrees.

“People’s lives are at stake,” he said.

Dugas says DuPont, which produced Teflon at its Washington Works plant along the Ohio River just south of Parkersburg, West Virginia, is obstructing the program to limit the number of people diagnosed with C8-caused diseases and, therefore, its liability.

Information packets about the free medical testing were sent to the 100,000 residents, but Dugas said they were hard to read and understand.

Rozen, who declined to comment, set up a few town-hall meetings to explain the process, but scheduled them during work hours, said Dugas. That limited attendance. The last one was in spring 2015.

“It’s the fox guarding the hen house,” Dugas said of DuPont paying Rozen directly.

According to monthly expense statements Rozen files with the Wood County court, DuPont has paid him as much as $500,000 a month to oversee the program.

He also files weekly reports with the court about program participation. As of March 31, out of 99,065 “potential participants,” 6,678 people had registered and 5,955 had been accepted for monitoring. Of those accepted, 2,020 have seen a doctor.

Only 88 people registered in 2016, Bilott said in his motion.

Bilott was a lead attorney in a class-action lawsuit in Wood County that claimed DuPont contaminated drinking water in several communities by releasing C8-tainted water into the Ohio River from Washington Works. DuPont settled in 2004, agreeing to pay 70,000 residents to have their blood tested for C8.

The test results were given to a science panel, which reported in 2012 that a probable link existed between C8 and six diseases: kidney and testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, pregnancy-induced hypertension, thyroid disease and high cholesterol.

A separate medical panel recommended the monitoring program, which began in September 2014 and is overseen by Rozen.

In addition to $14.6 million paid to Rozen, DuPont has paid $5.6 million directly to the Garden City Group for managing the program and $374,00 to HealthSmart for processing claims.

DuPont has said it considers those implementation costs and that money from the $235 million fund should go only to actual medical testing.

Dugas said the company needs to spend more than the $860,000.

“In a truly sinister ploy, DuPont has hijacked the program,” he said. “We’ve seen for a long time now a pattern of obstruction and delay on the part of DuPont.”

The company knew C8 was toxic since the 1950s and later a cancer risk, plaintiffs said in 3,500 lawsuits that were transferred to U.S. District Court in Columbus. DuPont lost the first three trials and ended the fourth in February by agreeing to settle all the cases for $671 million.

A DuPont spinoff company, Chemours, now operates Teflon production at Washington Works. In 2012, C8 was replaced by a compound called GenX.

The Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment issued a statement in December saying that, “based on the limited information available,” one of the three substances that make up GenX “is probably less harmful than PFOA.”

It’s that limited information that worries critics. “I’m hopeful that it’s not as bad (as C8). But do I think it’s OK? No,” Alan Ducatman, professor of occupational and environmental health sciences at West Virginia University, has said.

European officials began an investigation of GenX last month.