No clusters of major cancers were found in a government investigation of the area around Sterilization Services in South Memphis after health alerts were raised on emissions from the company last year.
The company uses ethylene oxide (EtO) in its Florida Street facility to sterilize medical equipment. The gas is odorless and colorless and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wasn’t aware emissions could raise cancer rates until 2016.
Now, the EPA says EtO emissions from the facility could pose a risk to those living in the neighborhood around it. The agency held public meetings in Memphis last year to warn the residents but said there was little they could do.
Since that meeting, officials with the Shelby County Health Department (SCHD) and the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) reviewed areas around the company’s facility. Specifically, they were looking for heightened cases of leukemia, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, stomach cancer, and breast cancer.
”This cancer cluster investigation did not provide evidence of increased amounts of leukemia, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, stomach, or breast cancers clustered near the Sterilization Services of Tennessee facility compared to a group of residents away from the facility,” reads the report. “Just because we cannot find evidence of increased rates of cancer that are associated with EtO does not mean there may not be increased risk.”
For the study, health officials compared the area around Sterilization Services to another area far from the facility, basically from Cordova to Eads in eastern Shelby County. To get a better context of any population shifts that may have happened, they also compared data from 2000-2009 and from 2010-2019.
SCHD officials announced the findings of the study this week in a public meeting. SCHD director Dr. Michelle Taylor fielded questions from the a audience and from those watching a live-stream of the meeting. Taylor said the company has been “very cooperative” during the investigation process.
“We’ve never had a problem with them, with our inspectors going in, asking questions, getting information for from them, none of that,” Taylor said. “So, really it is about finding out what the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] is expecting in the way of additional controls and then figuring out and negotiating how quickly that can happen.”
The company has used EtO here since the 1970s. The SCHD has permitted the facility since 1985. The EPA did not begin regulating emissions of EtO until 1994.
The company is now in compliance with all local, state, and federal regulations on emissions. The EPA is working on some rule changes to limit EtO emissions at places like Sterilization Services.
Until then, the company can only be asked to make changes voluntarily, which is what the Memphis City Council asked them to do in a resolution in January. At the time, council member Dr. Jeff Warren said Sterilization Services has facilities across the U.S. and has already enacted emission interventions at some of them.
Citizens asked Taylor this week if the health department could intervene and demand the company to act, even to get them to move.
“If we learned anything from Covid, we know that our authority is limited at the health department,” Taylor said. “Industry is not just regulated by us, it’s regulated by code enforcement, it’s regulated by zoning, it’s regulated by many other divisions that are not the health department. So, when you’re talking about asking an industry to move somewhere else, the short answer is, we as a health department, as a single entity — we just cannot do that alone.”
