Preliminary reports link Chinese drywall, corrosion in U.S. homes

(CNN) -- The suspected link between Chinese drywall and toxic effects reported by thousands of U.S. homeowners was strengthened Monday by three preliminary reports issued by the federal government.

The strongest link came from an analysis of air sampled inside dozens of homes containing drywall made in China.

"While the study of 51 homes detected hydrogen sulfide and formaldehyde ... at concentrations below irritant levels, it is possible that the additive or synergistic effects of these and other compounds in the subject homes could cause irritant effects," the Consumer Product Safety Commission said in its executive summary of the study.

Two other preliminary studies found copper sulfide corrosion in metal components taken from homes containing the Chinese drywall.

The drywall in question was imported from 2005 through 2007, when a housing boom and two active hurricane seasons created a shortage of building materials in the southern United States.

Since then, the product safety agency has received nearly 2,100 reports from 32 states -- but mostly from Florida, Louisiana and Virginia -- of homeowners complaining of a rotten-egg smell, sickness, failed appliances, and corroded wires and pipes. Many have moved out of their homes. In some cases, insurers have refused to reimburse them.

The air study tested 41 houses containing Chinese drywall and compared those findings with air from inside 10 homes in the same geographical areas whose homeowners had not complained, said Jack McCarthy, president of Environmental Health & Engineering Inc., which carried out the work.
Video: Drywall sacks Saints coach
Drywall dangers
RELATED TOPICS

* U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission
* China
* Bill Nelson

The investigators also examined materials such as copper pipes and wiring for corrosion, and looked at indoor air humidity, temperature and air exchange, he said. Copper and silver strips were left in the homes for two weeks and then examined for corrosion, he said.

The result: in the 41 homes containing the problem drywall, there was a "strong association" between the high levels of hydrogen sulfide and the corrosion of the metals, he said.

"Temperature, humidity and air-exchange rates also appear to be contributing factors," McCarthy told reporters on a conference call, noting that higher moisture and temperature levels and lower air-exchange rates were connected with more corrosion.

Formaldehyde, also a potential source of irritation, was found in both complaint and noncomplaint homes, he said.

Though McCarthy cautioned that the study was not intended to examine health effects, "we can say that the levels of the pollutants we found, particularly the hydrogen sulfide and formaldehyde, could possibly contribute to some of the health problems that have been reported to the CPSC."

McCarthy also said that not all Chinese drywall may be alike. Its risk "depends on what it is made of, not necessarily what country it's from," he said.

The next step is to determine how to identify homes with the corrosive materials and how to fix them, said Scott Wolfson, the product safety agency's director of information and public affairs, who noted that the investigation is the largest in the agency's history.

He said none of the tainted drywall entered the United States this year. Hundreds of thousands of suspect boards have been stockpiled in warehouses; their owners have been told it will not be sold, he added.

Several weeks ago, agency representatives traveled to China, where they visited mines, factories and government officials to determine the scope of the problem, which is still not clear, Wolfson said. "The CPSC is working hard to determine how many homes in how many states are affected," he said, adding that the data do not support the widely reported figure of 100,000 homes.

Wolfson said the Chinese helped investigate. "They're committed to helping us with the technical side of this investigation," he said.

Though the study raises suspicions that the drywall is responsible for the health effects reported by some families, Wolfson said a causal association has not been proved. "The work continues," he said. "The work toward an exact nexus between drywall and effects is still ongoing."

Wolfson called on the news media to help alert homeowners in affected houses to report the problem. Some may be hesitant to report because they are afraid their insurers will drop their coverage, he said, but he pointed out that the reports can be made confidentially.

"We will make sure that you are not harmed in any way by reporting to the government," he said.

Monday's report did not surprise Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, who said the product safety commission's chairwoman, Inez Tenenbaum, told him Monday she did not know when further testing would be completed.

"I am very disappointed with the whole process, and especially that the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] can't say whether drywall is harmful to people's health," he told CNN. "Common sense says otherwise, but we still lack definitive answers."

Joan Glickman, who moved out of her townhouse in Pompano Beach, Florida, after her wiring and air conditioning failed, said Monday's report told her nothing new.

"It was a huge letdown because it still didn't tell me how to fix it, who's going to fix it, how do we go about fixing it, where the money comes from," said Glickman, who moved in with her mother. "This has left us in such a mess."

Idealismo Asesino

by Paul Hollander

Paul Hollander is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of the study Reflections on communism 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall published by the Cato Institute.

The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this month was the very symbol of communism. It represented an unprecedented historic effort aimed at preventing people "vote with their feet" and leave a society that rejected them. The wall was only the most visible segment of an extensive system of obstacles and fortifications: the Iron Curtain, which stretched for thousands of kilometers along the border of the "Socialist Commonwealth." I was one of those who managed to cross these obstacles in November 1956 when they were temporarily dismantled along the Austrian-Hungarian border. My experiences in communist Hungary, where I lived until age 24, had a lasting impact on my life and my work.

Although they were very interested in communism in the late forties and early fifties, the American-hostile or sympathetic, actually knew very little about the system, and little is said today about the collapse of the Soviet empire. The fleeting media attention to the important events of the late eighties and early nineties matched his previous indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of large-scale atrocities, assassinations and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially when compared with public knowledge of the Holocaust and Nazism (which resulted in many fewer deaths ). The number of documentaries, films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared to those of Nazi Germany and / or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses about those remaining communist states or missing. For much of the West, communism and its various incarnations, remains an abstraction.

Different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as the result of communist atrocities are seen as side effects of noble intentions, which had difficulties to materialize without resorting to drastic measures. In contrast, the atrocities of the Nazis are seen as pure evil and no justification, and are not backed by an attractive ideology. There is much more physical evidence and information about the Nazi genocide and the extermination of these methods were highly premeditated and nasty, while many victims of communist systems were killed by lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of Communism were killed with modern manufacturing techniques.

Communist systems ranging from small Albania to the giant China, from the highly industrialized eastern European countries to underdeveloped countries in Africa. Although they were different in many ways, they all had in common the confidence in Marxism-Leninism as its source of legitimacy, the party system, control over the economy and the press, and the presence of a huge police force policy. They also shared an alleged commitment to the creation of a morally superior human being-man socialist or communist.

Political violence under communism had an origin and an objective idealist purifier. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle gave ideological support for genocide. People were persecuted not for what they were doing but because they belong to social groups that made them suspicious.

After the fall of Soviet communism, many Western intellectuals continue to believe that capitalism is the root of all evil. There has been a long history of rancor among Western intellectuals that they gave him the benefit of the doubt or openly sympathized with political systems that denounced the pursuit of money and proclaimed their commitment to creating a more humane and egalitarian society, and humans they were not selfish. The collapse of communist systems to improve human nature means that any attempt to do so is doomed, but rather that such improvements will be modest and unlikely to be achieved through coercion.

Soviet communism collapsed for many reasons, including economic inefficiencies that resulted in chronic shortages of food and consumer products, and dominant and false propaganda, which was equivalent to the routine distortion of reality by highlighting the gap between theory and practice, between promise and fulfillment of this. The political will of the leaders behind the Iron Curtain fell over time, due in part to the 1956 revelations of Nikita Kruhchev about Joseph Stalin's crimes but also the product of their own experiences with the system failures . They no longer had the will to destroy those who dissented. In the eighties, Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the new revelations were made public about the errors and evils of communism, further undermining the legitimacy of Communist rule.

The failure of Soviet communism confirms that humans are motivated by noble ideals capable of inflicting terrible suffering with a clean conscience. But the collapse of communism also suggests that under certain conditions people can differentiate between good and evil. The grip and the rejection of communism correspond to the spectrum of attitudes ranging from deceptive and destructive idealism to the understanding of human nature that excludes the utopian social arrangements and that the careful balance of ends and means is the essential precondition for create and preserve a decent society.