This is more of the saga of Physics and PD.
 
It is presented here in the interest of research.
 
University Times
VOLUME 27 NUMBER 16
 
Copyright (c) , University of Pittsburgh
 
Despite Parkinson's cases, Allen Hall is safe,
committee determines
 
Allen Hall is safe, ac- cording to the Parkinson's Disease Cluster Committee.
 The four cases of
Parkinson's disease reported between 1974 and 1991 in physics department faculty
 members who
worked in the building may have been simply the result of chance.
 
Those are the conclusions reached by the cluster committee, which has been
 investigating for almost
two years the unusual number of occurrences of Parkinson's disease in Allen
 Hall.
 
According to committee member Roger Simon, chairperson of the University of
 Pittsburgh Medical
Center's (UPMC) Department of Neurology, Parkinson's disease occurs in about 200
 individuals
per every 100,000 people in a population. The outbreak in Allen Hall, the
 committee found, is about
30 percent higher than in the general population.
 
However, according to committee member David Tollerud, director of occupational
 and
environmental medicine in the Graduate School of Public Health, the 30 percent
 higher than normal
figure in Allen Hall does not indicate any causation or point to the building as
 the source for the
disease. It simply confirms that the occurrences are unusual.
 
"If you take enough people and wait a long enough time, you will see remarkable
 clusters of almost
anything you want to look at," Tollerud said.
 
"Often you can't explain a [disease] cluster," added committee consultant
 Allison Tepper, of the
National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). "It is a
 statistical phenomena that
occurs in a population by chance. I think the conclusions that have been drawn
 here are correct."
Along with Simon and Tollerud, cluster committee members include: chairperson
 Michael Zigmond,
neuroscience; John Grence, Norman Austern, Ray Willey and Frank Tabakin, all of
 physics and
astronomy; Rosalyn Pinkus, the Center for Medical Ethics; Howard Rockette,
 biostatistics, and W.
Richard Howe, Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean's office.
 
In addition to Tepper, outside consultants to the committee include: Carolyn
 Tanner, of The
Parkinson's Institute, and William Scorby, a military physician with experience
 in cluster
investigations.
 
"Much research, hours of meetings and consultation with several experts in the
 field indicate to us
that Allen Hall is safe and can continue to be used by students, staff and
 faculty," said committee
chairperson Zig-mond, during an April 3 open meeting with physics and astronomy
 staff, faculty and
graduate students.
 
"More specifically," he continued, "exhaustive testing of the air, the dust and
 the building materials in
Allen Hall have failed to uncover a single indication of any reason to consider
 the building to be
hazardous." Although the committee has concluded that Allen Hall is safe,
 committee members are
aware that some people who work in the building may be worried that they have
 developed
Parkinson's disease. To help alleviate those concerns, committee member Simon, a
 neurologist, said
he would test anybody who is worried about having contracted the disease because
 of working in
the building. But Simon noted that early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease is
 very difficult and that
there is little advantage to detecting the disease early. Drugs can counteract
 some of the effects of
the disease, even in people who have had it for many years, but there is no cure
 and its progress
cannot be stopped by early treatment.
 
"If one were to delay a month or a year or seven to nine years before testing,
 it wouldn't change the
therapy, speaking as of today," Simon said.
 
Parkinson's disease has afflicted humans for thousands of years, according to
 Simon. Once called
"paralysis agitans" and "shaking palsy," it became known as Parkinson's disease
 after the English
physician James Parkinson described it in his 1817 book "An Essay on Shaking
 Palsy." A
progressive nervous disorder of a person's later years, Parkinson's disease is
 characterized by
muscular tremor, slowing of movement, partial facial paralysis, peculiarity of
 gait and posture, and a
general weakness. The exact cause or causes of the disease is unknown and there
 is no cure, but it is
increasingly being linked to toxic substances in the environment, according to
 the American
Parkinson's Disease Association.
 
Committee chair Zigmond admitted to the more than two dozen people who gathered
 in Thaw Hall
to hear the committee's report that it is possible some contaminant was once
 present in the building,
but has now vanished. He added, however, that "it now seems likely that the
 relatively high incidence
of the disorder had nothing at all to do with the Allen Hall environment." "In
 any event," Zigmond
continued, "the bottom line remains: We find absolutely no reason for concern
 regarding the safety of
the building today." Committee consultant Tepper, who is a NIOSH authority on
 disease clusters,
said that in the course of the Pitt investigation she also investigated a
 similar cluster occurrence of
Parkinson's disease in the physics department of Penn State University. The
 building in which that
cluster occurred had absolutely nothing in common with Allen Hall, she said.
 
Besides Allen Hall and Penn State, Tepper said the only other place she knew of
 where a similar
cluster outbreak of the disease has occurred was a kibbutz in Israel in the
 1960s.
 
Located at 3941 O'Hara St., Allen Hall was built in 1913 as the original home of
 Mellon Institute.
 
Some of the institute's researchers specialized in industrial chemistry. Their
 projects included testing
Union Carbide Corp. products for possible toxic hazards and investigating the
 effects of asbestos
and silica dust on the lungs.
 
Mellon Institute ceded the building to Pitt in 1939. It was remodeled to provide
 laboratories and
classrooms for Pitt's medical school, including the biochemistry department,
 which was located on
the second floor. As medical school departments and remaining Mellon Institute
 researchers
gradually moved out of the building in the 1950s, the physics faculty moved into
 Allen Hall. By
1960, the physics department had taken over the entire building.
 
Cluster committee member Austern became the first physics professor to be
 assigned an office in
Allen Hall in 1958. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1981.
 
Other physics faculty members who were diagnosed with the disease are: * Former
 physics
department chairperson Frederic Keffer, who was the first person diagnosed with
 the disease in
1974. He died in December 1992 at the age of 73.
 
* Professor emeritus John Townsend, diagnosed in 1985.
 
* Cluster committee member Ray Willey, diagnosed in 1991. It was Willey's
 diagnosis that lead to
the charging of the committee by Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Peter Koehler
 and the
investigation of Allen Hall for a possible cause or causes of the disease.
 
According to committee member Tollerud, the investigation was conducted using
 guidelines set by
the United States Centers for Disease Control.
 
The first question investigators sought to answer was whether or not the four
 cases in Allen Hall
were unusual in relationship to what is known about Parkinson's disease in the
 general population.
 
After confirming that the cluster in Allen Hall was about 30 percent higher than
 in the general
population, investigators did an extensive literature review and developed a
 list of known possible
causes of Parkinson's disease as a target for the investigation. They followed
 up that review with
interviews of the four faculty members who had been diagnosed with the disease.
 They talked to
them about everything from their work history to their hobbies, going so far as
 to draw diagrams of
their offices and compare them to the various uses of Allen Hall since it was
 constructed in 1913.
 
Samples also were taken of the building's dust, bricks, mortar, stone, plaster
 and other building
materials and analyzed, by outside laboratories, to determine if a toxic residue
 of some sort from
previous activities in the building might have caused the cluster. A drainpipe
 encrusted with
decades-worth of disposed chemicals and other potentially toxic materials was
 sent to an
independent laboratory to be analyzed.
 
"It was with some trepidation that we took that sample [the pipe] and sent it
 off to have it analyzed
because we knew what we were going to get back was a very long list of
 chemicals," said Tollerud.
 
"Still, I don't think we were quite prepared for the volume we got. There were
 pages and pages and
pages and pages and pages of chemicals, some of which we later found out were
 part of the normal
makeup of clay pipe. We now know more than we care to know about the normal
 makeup of clay
pipe." Among all of the chemicals found in the pipe, though, nothing could be
 identified that is clearly
linked with Parkinson's disease. And among the building materials only three
 substances were found
with links to Parkinson's disease. They were manganese, chlordane and lindane.
 
Manganese has been shown to cause Parkinson's disease in miners who inhale its
 dust. However,
the manganese found in Allen Hall was 1,000 times below the levels considered
 safe by the federal
government and was sealed within the building's bricks.
 
Chlordane and lindane were among the ingredients of once common pesticides
 banned 10-15 years
ago. The amounts of both chlordane and lindane found at Allen Hall were very
 tiny and only on the
outside of the building.
 
"The bottom line to all of our technical investigation was that we really could
 not find anything that
scientifically or medically was of any concern or that we could link in anyway
 to the Parkinson's
cluster," said Tollerud.
 
--Mike Sajna
 
John Cottingham                     "KNOWLEDGE is of two kinds: we know
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