Dr. Roni Neff's Presentation to York, Pa., School Board

My name's Roni Neff and I'm research director at the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I'd like to share the presentation that I had planned to give last night and a board meeting of the Southeastern School District in Pennsylvania just North of the Maryland line. And I would have described potential public health concerns of having school buses parked next to a large scale swine production facility and the community members who had invited me there showed a whole stack of documents during the meeting indicating that they had gone through proper channels to have my talk put on the school board's agenda and what we got there I was told that I couldn't speak because I wasn't a resident. So this is what I would have said last night and I hope that school district will take to heart and I want to emphasize that this is not about politics and the statement that I'm making is based on my own summary of the science and this is about protecting the health of the children and the bus drivers who would ride on these buses everyday and as well as since we're partly talking about infectious exposures it also would affect for those who contact those individuals. So I'm here from the Center for a Livable Future and we are an academic center focused on the connections between public health, food production, environment, and diet and there's particular focus on animal agriculture and public health and we work with researchers from throughout the university. Let's turn to the scenario that we're looking at and so here you can see in this graphic um taken from Google satellite images to the right is where eight school buses are parked daily for we're told about fourteen hours a day and you can actually see them parked there on the day they took the Google Images shot. And then you can see just over a quarter mile away is where there is a proposed swine facility where they would have two thousand four hundred and fifty swine and so the question is, is this a public health risk? Should the school board be concerned? Might they want to look into alternative ways of getting the kids to school? So I'm gonna briefly share an overview of the air emissions that could be coming from this kind of facility, the health effects that have been associated with these kinds of exposures and um in particular I'll talk to you a little bit about antibiotic resistant bacteria that are known to come from many of these facilities...So there are a large number of documented air emissions from large-scale hog operations First there's a lot of dust and particles including bacteria, including antibiotic resistant bacteria as I'll discuss. Viruses, mold, toxins, irritants, allergens, drugs and then the manure which is typically stored at the site and then eventually might be sprayed on fields nearby um can off gas things like ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, methane, volatile organic compounds, and other um substances So how would kids on these school buses get exposed? Potentially the air as we know can travel quite far and people that are several miles away from swine facilities can sometimes smell the site so a quarter-mile away they could certainly smell it. There will be settled dust and the air and the dust are gonna get in whether the school bus windows are closed or not. Flies as well and can easily fly one to two miles and these flies can pick up bacteria and bring it where ever they land. So what are some of the health effects of these types of exposures? And these what I'm talking about is community health effects beyond what is experienced by the workers that are in these sites. Including increased rates of asthma attacks for those who have existing allergies, um bronchitis cough respiratory tract and mucus membrane infection, a number of different respiratory effects caused not just by the odors but what people are breathing. Another type of effects are headaches and nausea and then there's infectious disease an antibiotic resistance. So what is this antibiotic resistance that I keep referring to? We know that there's a lot of evidence antibiotic resistant bacteria that have been found near in the environment near animal operations that are using antibiotics in their feed and this contributes to the epidemic that we are experiencing across the country of drug resistant infections. And um where does this come from? Well actually about seventy percent of antibiotics used in this country are used in animal feed and they're used to promote growth or enable animals in large-scale operations to basically survived their conditions they're not used to treat...this isn't talking about treating illnesses these are um and used quote prophylactically. And how does this widespread administration of antibiotics lead to antibiotic resistance? And here's a graphic to kind of demonstrated it. You can see here in the gray a population of bacteria and one little red guy that has developed antibiotic resistance genes and then the antibiotic is administered RIP to most of them and the one guy survives and then when that bacteria multiplies you'll see a large population of antibiotic resistant bacteria and that has been demonstrated in the environment are swine CAFOs. So in summary let me return to the initial question is having the busses park so near to the proposed site of this hog operation a risk and should the school board be concerned? And I would say that we know that air emissions can easily travel a quarter-mile, they can settle on surfaces meaning that those who use the buses could be exposed to the dust and pathogens and antibiotic resistant bacteria. Not everyone who's exposed gets sick. We do know that children are an unusually susceptible population and we know that they pass around infections among themselves As a public health person I would say that often there's a situation where we don't know about the health risks until afterwards when something happens and everyone says why don't we do something about this one to prevent it and in this case we do know about it and still in the planning stage the school district has the opportunity to prevent these exposures. I would say public health has to be the priority here and the school district's transportation policy actually agrees, it states "the main objective of the transportation services is the safety of the children"...thank you.