If you would like to read additional background, here is a recent article, called “Who Will Tell Students About the Dioxin Dorms?” Here is a website devoted to the issue, and a blog that updates fairly regularly.

If you know people in the media, such as editors to radio hosts to bloggers, please send them this page. Thank you.

Here is a quote:

A Washington State University researcher has demonstrated that a variety of environmental toxicants can have negative effects on not just an exposed animal but the next three generations of its offspring.

The animal’s DNA sequence remains unchanged, but the compounds change the way genes turn on and off — the epigenetic effect studied at length by WSU molecular biologist Michael Skinner and expanded on in the current issue of the online journal PLoS ONE.

While Skinner’s earlier research has shown similar effects from a pesticide and fungicide, this is the first to show a greater variety of toxicants — including jet fuel, dioxin, plastics and the pesticides DEET and permethrin — promoting epigenetic disease across generations.

“We didn’t expect them all to have transgenerational effects, but all of them did,” Skinner said. “I thought hydrocarbon would be negative but it was positive too.”

My name is Katyanna Keyser and I am a breast cancer survivor who lived in Gage Hall at SUNY @New Paltz from 1991-1993.

Entering as a freshman my name was Katyanna Fetterling.

In late December of 1991 there was a car crash releasing dangerous toxins into our dorm [Gage Residence Hall] causing it to close for a brief period of time. On Feb 1, 1992 we were invited back into the dorms with reassurance that it was “safe.” My parents trusted that the institution was honest and entrusted my welfare in them.

I lived in Gage Hall until June 1993.

For the next 15 years I muddled through life with a low immune system and was sick often.

In 2008, just 2 months after getting married, I felt a lump in my breast. I acted quick and was in the doctor’s office the next day where they whisked me away to St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany, NY for my 1st mammogram. Within seconds I was in another room receiving an ultra sound. Minutes later, I was in front of the director of the breast cancer center in tears. She was 100% insistent that I had a cancerous tumor and needed a sentinel node biopsy the following day. I was broken, in tears and in shock, a newlywed, childless and 36 with no family history of breast cancer.

The next Monday I went in for a biopsy and that Wednesday I sat in front of Dr. David Edmondson (surgical oncology St. Peter’s Hospital) reading me the painful results, surrounded by my supportive family. I had a very aggressive tumor (3 to 5 cm) in my left breast; invasive ductal carcinoma, grade 3 and stage 2. My tumor was 20% progesterone positive and and estrogen negative.

I asked if I could freeze my eggs as we were trying to have a baby but was denied that gift as it was not an option. My tumor was oddly growing vigorously and we needed to act fast in order to save my life. Saving my eggs would mean giving me steroids which would boost the size of the tumor.

Conflicted and running short on time we decided to try adjuvant chemotherapy to shrink the tumor, preserve the breast and opted for BRCA gene testing/counseling. Without family history of breast cancer, the young diagnosis and the aggressiveness of the tumor, my surgeon bypassed all the red tape. I had a port surgically put in my chest, was gene tested and started chemo 2 days later.

A newlywed, I took a leave of absence from my teaching job (after 9 years), cut my hair in anticipation of losing it, and moved into my retired parent’s home for 24 hour care while my husband of 2 months worked to pay the bills. My world was shattered and upside down.

While tested for BRCA1 and BRCA2 Dr. Patricia Brady asked me if I had ever been exposed to cancerous materials or dioxins. The only moment or environment I could recall was my time in Gage Hall while a student at SUNY New Paltz. Still, I wouldn’t allow myself to think that my college would ever allow me to be harmed or injured, even years down the road. Thankfully my results came back negative; no mutations detected in all panels. This was a very specific test and ruled out the majority of abnormalities believed to be responsible for heredity susceptible to breast cancer or ovarian cancer.

So what did this mean? My doctors did say, that in no terms, they could not rule out that my cancer was environmental.

I went through 16 weeks of agonizing chemotherapy, a lumpectomy, a port removal surgery, 32 radiation treatments and to this day have abnormal hormonal issues.

I lost the 1st year of my marriage and can not get pregnant.

I wake up every day scared that my cancer will come back and go to bed sad that it has taken so much away from me. My hopes and dreams of motherhood and the fear that fills me constantly.

Do I think that my time at New Paltz, in Gage Hall, had anything to do with my cancer and hormonal issues? I can’t say exactly but I do know that there is an uncanny possibility and with that I feel that further investigation should be done around the campus and within the soil. I have recently heard that several friends and sorority sisters, who too presided in the contaminated dorms at the same time I did, have either suffered similar ailments or worse, have perished due to those diseases.

What I hope and pray for is that maybe, some questions can be answered. As a teacher, I have students who have recently been accepted to SUNY New Paltz, and as excited as I am for their future I am dually petrified that they too will be exposed to toxins.

My name is Katyanna Keyser and this is my statement.

1/30/12

Richard Ichioku Byakugan
Student Association Senator
Student Union Building
SUNY New Paltz
New Paltz, NY 12561

Dear Richard:

This is in response to your request for a brief summary about the toxins situation in Bliss, Capen, Gage and Scudder residence halls. The issue is fully documented at a website called DioxinDorms.com, though I can state the basic facts.

The four dorms plus two other buildings — Parker Theater and Coykendall — were contaminated when a power surge caused a series of transformers to explode. This happened Dec. 29, 1991. The transformers, located in their respective buildings, were filled with a toxic fluid that had been banned as “an imminent threat to human health and the environment” many years earlier; the equipment on campus was ‘grandfathered’ in and allowed to stay but was no less dangerous, as the situation has demonstrated.

Speaking of the dorms per se, all four on that quad were contaminated when the fluid, ashes, smoke and fumes flooded the buildings at different severities. My research indicates that all were re-opened to students prematurely, without adequate testing, and in truth they should be torn down and replaced because repairing them properly would cost more than replacement.

In effect, they are totaled. This is mainly due to the presence of contaminants in vents, hearing units, conduits and pipe chases that has not been properly addressed by state officials and their contractors. However in 2007, state Health Department officials admitted that the issue existed, but they they didn’t think it was worth dealing with.

In fact, the most likely contaminated areas have been ignored in the cleanup or treated only minimally, when the state had every reason to know the truth about the dangers from much prior experience (from a 1981 incident in Binghamton).

I am in touch with many students who got strange diseases young after living in the buildings, ranging from immune system collapse to hormone disease to various cancers (cervical, brain, and others). There are too many sick students for this to be a coincidence, and if anyone thinks that it is a coincidence they should do a proper study and find out.

As mentioned, full documentation, including test results of samples that I personally took, are on the Dioxin Dorms website. There is a blog on that site with the newest information, that is easy to find.

Note that these chemicals don’t “fade away” over time; once contaminated it’s like radiation: it stays toxic.

Please write to me if you have further questions.

Thanks for your interest in this issue.

Very truly yours,

Eric Francis Coppolino
former New Paltz grad student and TA
environmental writer and investigative reporter

It's not an aspect -- it's dioxin, the most toxic chemical. To be precise, it's 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin, or 2,3,7,8 TCDD for short. Note the distinctive, extremely stable double benzene ring, the bonded-on chlorine and the two oxygen molecules that make it flat and therefore deadly. If it was an aspect it would be a grand sextile -- note the six-sided shape of the benzene ring. That's why dioxin is so persistent. Benzene rings last a long time.

Environmental toxins issues move so slowly and against such odds it’s amazing they get anywhere, ever. But occasionally they do. The standout event today was the EPA finally, after some 20 years, releasing its reassessment of the toxicity of dioxin.

This study — really, a review of every known study — has been brewing since the 1990s, which cannot have been 20 years ago but it was, amidst truly incredible scandals.

Those astonishing scandals (hardly the first in history; the story of dioxin is the story of nonstop coverups) were so successful at obfuscating the issues that I’ve only seen dioxin covered (or even mentioned) on television about three or four times in all of those 20 years, when really it’s so significant it should be discussed every night.

Dioxin is bad for fetuses. It’s bad for the female and male reproductive systems. It’s bad for any animal (plants don’t seem to mind it, but then animals eat the plants).

How bad is bad? So bad you’re not supposed to know about it. Let’s see if I can get the backstory into one paragraph. In the early 1990s, the paper industry wanted to cover up the growing awareness of the extreme, as in ridiculous, toxicity of dioxin. So they commissioned a reassessment of that toxicity by the EPA, figuring that they could run their coverup from there. But as the data started coming in, it was damning. Dioxin was far worse than they thought, it affected more organ systems at lower levels and more was in the environment than they suspected. The reassessment ran out of control and became the international headquarters for proving how bad the stuff really is. That was largely thanks to two scientists: Dr. William Farland and Dr. Cate Jenkins, two people who actually understood the problem.

Okay, second paragraph. So with that not working out as planned, then came phase 2. The federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta working in cahoots with the paper industry, this thing funded by the Rev. Moon (of Moonie fame, close friend of the Bush family) called the “Wise Use Movement” (think: bullshit supposedly grassroots movement with billionaire funding) of farmers calling for the “wise use” of pesticides and herbicides (i.e., not banning them as should happen), and two reporters — Keith Schneider at the New York Times and Malcolm Gladwell at the Washington Post (yes, that Malcolm Gladwell) ran a little detoxifying campaign and between them all, convinced the public and the press that dioxin was “safe” and killed the dioxin story. This really happened; click that link if you’re curious.

This was all going on in the peak of my work on the SUNY New Paltz Dioxin Dorms case, so I had a front row seat. That was it: story dead, reassessment of dioxin forgotten in the wake of the Bill Clinton impeachment and the stolen election of Cheney and Bush (whose EPA of course was not going to resurrect the issue) and, we thought, that was that. And that was a long time ago. Like, 14 years ago.

Then today an email comes floating into my inbox, suggesting that I might be interested in this. The reassessment of dioxin’s toxicity had finally been released. We’ve been in a timewarp week — two aspirin between the knees, all men on the female contraception panel, political candidates who want to ban sex, and so on. And from two decades out of the past but with today’s date, I read:

After 21 years of wrangling over health threats, uncertain science and industry pressure, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday released its health assessment of dioxins defining how toxic they are.

A group of about 30 toxic compounds, including the infamous chemical in Agent Orange, dioxins are byproducts of combustion emitted by waste incinerators, chemical manufacturing plants, paper and pulp mills and other facilities. They persist in the environment and build up in the food supply and in human bodies.

Lauded by environmental activists and criticized by industry, the report concluded after reviewing mounds of evidence that there are potentially serious effects at ultra-low levels of exposure. Studies have linked dioxins to cancer, disrupted hormones, reproductive damage such as reduced sperm counts, neurological effects in children and adults, immune system changes and skin disorders.

My friends and I have not read the report or analyzed it ourselves. We don’t know what it really says on all of its thousands of pages, but we’re very familiar with the drafts that kept coming out in the 1990s. Unless the results have been totally reversed, it’s not going to be good for industry, which is exactly what we want. One critical number is apparently the same: the body burden threshold of 7 parts per trillion in human fatty (adipose) tissue. If that is really true, then it’s a very good sign.

Industry has gotten away with lying about the toxicity of dioxin for many decades (dioxin, a trace contaminant in chemical processes involving chlorine, was discovered in 1949). We all breathe in a little with every breath — that’s how pervasive it is. We eat a little with every bite of food, especially animal fats. It’s a miracle that this report is out at all; that the word “dioxin” is anywhere near the news.

But Monona Rossol, founder of Arts, Crafts and Theater Safety in Manhattan and a dioxin specialist, was cautious in her response. “The public has plenty of things to worry about,” she said Friday, responding to the issue of the dioxin reassessment. “Once they scratch something off the list, it’s hard to get it back on.”

Meanwhile, a French farmer won a lawsuit this week against Monsanto for poisoning him with a product called Lasso. Dow Chemical is at war with farmers over their 2,4-D resistant corn. (What is 2,4-D? It’s 50% of what Agent Orange was made of, and is contaminated with dioxin.) In Oregon, residents of forested areas are waking up and protesting aerial spraying of their forests. That issue has bobbed above the surface and sunk back down on and off since the 1970s. Uprisings are happening in a number of places at once, in the Coast Range, in and near Eugene, and in southern Oregon. (Also in California, particularly around the Sacramento delta areas where 2,4-D and other herbicides are routinely dumped into public waterways and sloughs to control aquatic weeds that flourish from all the sewage.)

And lately (coincidentally, around the 20th anniversary of the event) I’ve been in touch with many students from SUNY New Paltz who know they got sick from living in the dorms. Then tonight I met someone who grew up in the Love Canal neighborhood and got into a long chat; she turns out to live about three blocks away from me. (I covered Love Canal in 1983 as a student journalist, and that was my first dioxin story.)

These issues sleep for years before they go anywhere, and now in the past few weeks, they’re all waking up at once, with a big concentration as the Jupiter-Chiron sextile has been forming (which really goes back several months and which peaked this week). Why ever this is all moving, it is, and I’m happy to be on the ride again. I’ve been talking to some of my old, great friends from this movement, and people are excited. (I’m still looking for Bill Farland, Cate Jenkins, Gerson Smoger, Bill Snyder and a few other folks, in case you’ve seen them lately.)

I don’t know if we’ll prevail, but we will have fun. Dioxin Freaks Unite.

My name is Elzabeth Marks and in August of 1992, I was an excited twenty-one year old woman embarking on her first college dorm experience. Due to insufficient financial aid for another university, I came to SUNY New Paltz at the last moment as a transfer student. I attended the college from the fall of 1992 through August of 1994. Originally in 1992 I was placed in Shango dormitory with two eighteen year old freshman girls from NYC. Given the age difference and the small living quarters, I requested a new room assignment. I thought I was fortunate to find an opening in Gage Hall and moved in during the second week of the semester. I was not informed of the explosion earlier that year on campus or of the prior presence of PCBs and dioxins within the dorm itself.

Within a month of living in Gage Hall, I started to become ill. I had always been a healthy child and young adult so this was new to me. As the semester progressed, so did my symptoms. I experienced severe headaches, trouble eating, keeping any food in my stomach and was constantly spitting up blood.

I went to the campus health center several times and was ultimately advised to go to the hospital. I was admitted into the hospital where they pumped my body with fluids and tested my blood and urine for a cause to my symptoms. The ER doctor told me my esophagus was bleeding and I most likely had inflamed stomach ulcers that were also bleeding. Due to the severity of my condition I was given antibiotics, medications for the ulcers and placed on a liquid diet for a minimum of six weeks. I altered what I drank, ate and cut all unhealthy foods from my diet.

My life changed that day in the hospital. No longer was I a healthy young girl.

In January 1993 I moved from Gage Hall to the University Garden apartments off campus. I was slowly recovering but continued to suffer from severe headaches and digestive issues. In April 1993 I returned to my hometown for a routine examination and PAP test at my gynecologist. I was called with disturbing results that cancer cells were present on my cervix. I was asked to return immediately and meet with two additional doctors to provide a second and third opinion. It was unexpected for someone of my age to have such progressive cancer cells. After further examination and testing it was determined that I schedule surgery as soon as possible and remove the affected portions of my cervix. Three quarters of my cervix was removed.

I continued to have migraines and digestive issues that worsened over the years. I kept most of the pain at bay by maintaining a healthy lifestyle and with various prescription medications. During my one and only pregnancy I suffered a stress fracture on my left foot which through bone scans was determined to be marked osteopenia or “thinning of the bone”. The podiatrist told me that since I was only twenty-six years old, the condition was most likely due to poor nutrition. I was confused as I ate only healthy foods and took daily vitamins. Over the next five years my health deteriorated until one day I passed out in the middle of a restaurant. The medications, healthy diet and exercise were just not working.

The next two years were plagued by weekly visits to various doctors and specialists, numerous blood tests, nerve tests, allergy tests and tissue biopsies. No one could tell me why I was wasting away. There were no answers given as to why my teeth were chipping, my hair was falling out in clumps, why my fingers and toes would go go numb and why every bone ached. They tested for MS, Lupus, Chrohns, nerve disorders, Celiac and various other auto immune conditions. During this time I received weekly vitamin injections to insure my body was absorbing the vitamins and nutrients it needed.

At last, one doctor advised me to try the gluten free diet. I was willing to try anything; I was slowly dying and I knew it. I started to get stronger and over the course of a year was able to quit taking the medications and vitamin injections. My body still required vigilance in taking vitamins and strength training. To this day I am not 100% healthy and each day is a struggle with some sort of pain. The illnesses have effected job attendance, performance, capability to be a mother and wife and the overall quality of life I am able to lead.

When I think of all the health issues that I have been through and how it all began, I am extremely sad. It does not seem to be a coincidence that I became severely ill the semester after the PCB and dioxin cleanup. How could a the story of a prior healthy girl living in a dorm that was exposed to severe toxins be spitting up blood be overlooked?

The chain of events which started for me in the fall of 1992, and continues today, twenty years later.

– Elizabeth M. Marks

Anyway — you’re invited to get in touch any time.

yours truly–

Eric Francis