Can’t link poultry litter to disease, scientist says

Can’t link poultry litter to disease,
scientist says
BY ROBERT J. SMITH
Posted on Saturday, February 23, 2008

TULSA — Oklahoma can’t produce any evidence to connect disease rates in the Illinois River watershed to poultry-litter spreading, an epidemiologist testified Friday.

Herman Gibb, senior epidemiologist with Alexandria, Va.-based Sciences International Inc., told U. S. District Court Judge Gregory Frizzell that there’s no way for Oklahoma to tie the few incidents of salmonella and campylobacter in each of several Oklahoma and Arkansas counties to poultry litter.

Gibb’s comments contradicted Wednesday’s testimony by Christopher Teaf, a toxicologist and associate director of biomedical research at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Teaf testified for the state, saying poultry litter is responsible for human diseases that occur in the watershed.

John Elrod, an attorney representing Simmons Foods of Siloam Springs, asked Gibb if it would be “intellectually honest” to connect poultry litter to disease rates in the watershed counties.

“It certainly doesn’t appear we’ve got any more impairment in the Illinois River watershed than in the rest of the state,” Gibb said.

Poultry companies on Friday got their first chance to present expert witnesses, including Gibb, against Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson’s request for a preliminary injunction.

Edmondson wants the court to ban poultry litter from farm fields in the watershed, contending poultry litter is solid waste under the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 and that it threatens human health.

The seven-day hearing, one aspect of the lawsuit Edmondson filed against eight poultry companies in 2005, started Tuesday, and Oklahoma’s expert witnesses testified through mid-day Friday.

During a break Friday after- noon, Edmondson said that Frizzell told state attorneys they faced an “uphill climb” to convince him to consider evidence presented Thursday by Jody Harwood, a University of South Florida biology professor who said she’d found a way to trace bacteria from poultry houses to streams.

Jay Jorgensen, an attorney representing Springdale-based Tyson Foods Inc., referred to Harwood’s work in court on Thursday as “novel,” cutting edge ” and “revolutionary.” For those reasons, and because it hasn’t faced the scrutiny of her peers, poultry company attorneys want Frizzell to discount Harwood’s testimony and research.

Frizzell hasn’t said whether he’ll consider it.

A 1993 U. S. Supreme Court decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc. suggested that judges look closely at the scientific evidence of expert witnesses, and whether their work has been published in scientific journals and put up to scrutiny of their peers.

Edmondson said Harwood’s work is valuable but removing it wouldn’t weaken the state’s request for an injunction.

“They haven’t poked any holes in our case that are significant,” he said outside the courtroom Friday.

The work of Roger Olsen, an environmental consultant in the Denver office of Cambridge, Mass.-based consultant Camp Dresser & McKee, is critical to what the state believes it has proved, Edmondson said.

Olsen, who oversaw every aspect of the state’s research, testified on Thursday and Friday. He said he’s discovered poultry litter contains a chemical signature that’s unique from other things in the environment.

The signature’s 25 components can be found in other places, but not in the same amounts as in poultry litter.

However, Olsen said that he hadn’t tested everything. He collected samples from septic tanks, for example, and never tested those samples for the components.

“Is presence the only factor in the analysis ?” asked David Page, a private lawyer working for the state on the case.

“It’s the presence and the concentration,” Olsen said.

“Is your opinion supported by other lines of evidence ?” Page asked.

“We found it from the very source all the way to Lake Tenkiller,” Olsen said, referring to the lake near Tahlequah, Okla, and is fed by the Illinois.

Olsen’s conclusions were based on samples taken by Camp Dresser & McKee researchers who collected hundreds of soil, water and poultry-litter samples.

Jay Churchill, an environmental engineer with Conestoga-Rovers & Associates, was hired by the poultry companies to monitor the sampling. In court Friday, Churchill described the sampling as sloppy, saying many workers taking samples failed to meet basic procedures for how samples should be obtained.

Workers didn’t clean shovels and other equipment between samples. They poked steel probes through cow manure to take soil samples. They rarely changed rubber gloves, allowing one sample to taint another, Churchill said.

“Quite frankly, they appeared to be rookies,” Churchill said.

Page accused Churchill of failing to take his own samples if he believed the ones the state collected weren’t fair.

“Your job was to just be out there and take pictures on a ‘gotcha’ kind of basis,” Page said.

“Our job was to observe,” Churchill said.

The hearing will continue March 3, with more testimony from witnesses for the poultry companies.