EPA Meeting Focuses on Health Risks Near Terumo BCT Facility in Lakewood

When Blake Darnell attended Lakewood High School from 2004 to 2008, he rode his bike around the Sunset Park bike jumps near Kipling Street and Tenth Avenue in Lakewood nearly every day. In 2009, Darnell went to the emergency room because of pain in his leg. He found out that he not only had cancer, but also necrotizing fasciitis. He was eventually transferred to the Colorado Blood Cancer Institute, where he spent the next five years receiving treatment for acute lymphocytic leukemia, which is common in children but more difficult to cure in adults.

Less than a mile from Sunset Park on West Collins Avenue is Terumo BCT Sterilization Services Inc., a facility that manufactures and distributes blood-related medical devices around the globe. In a lawsuit filed in Jefferson County District Court last April, Darnell claims that Terumo BCT caused his cancer and the health problems that he still experiences, by exposing him to ethylene oxide through his high school years.

Darnell isn’t the only person who believes Terumo BCT caused their cancer; he’s part of a twelve-plaintiff case against the company.

On September 22, five months after Westword shared Darnell’s story, the Environmental Protection Agency held a community meeting in Lakewood to discuss risk at the facility. Terumo BCT uses ethylene oxide to sterilize equipment because it helps break down DNA — but that’s also why it can cause cancer, most often lymphoma and leukemia.

According to Madeline Beal, senior risk communication advisor at the EPA, ethylene oxide is currently the only Food and Drug Administration-approved sterilization method for blood products. “They’re actively engaged in trying to figure out ways in which [ethylene oxide] might be able to be replaced in some circumstances,” she said at the meeting. “But the reality is, as of now, there isn’t a good replacement for some of its uses.”

With that in mind, the EPA and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment have worked with Terumo BCT over the years to cut down on ethylene oxide emissions. After a 2017 CDPHE inspection found the facility out of compliance with regulations, having failed to provide an emissions notice to the state for more than eighteen months after it was required to do so, the facility made updates to its equipment.

Those updates reduced the cancer risk two- to five-fold, according to the CDPHE, but risk remains.

“Risk is too high,” said KC Becker, a former Colorado lawmaker who is now the EPA’s Region 8 administrator. “The EPA remains concerned about that risk. It’s important to emphasize the risks we have modeled are risks from a long-term, lifetime exposure in the immediate area of the facility. They are not risks from exposure over short periods of time.”

According to the EPA, lifetime exposure is defined as risk over seventy years. In the area around Terumo BCT — up Simms street from close to Eighth Avenue to 18th Avenue, and from Union Street to Oak Street near Colfax, there is elevated risk that 100 in one million people will get cancer if exposed over those seventy years. Within blocks of the facility, the risk is greater, with 600 in one million people likely to get cancer. These numbers are a measure of current risk; in the past, the risk was likely higher. Sunset Park is just outside the main risk circle identified by the EPA.

Children and babies are more vulnerable, with about half the total seventy-year risk tied to the first sixteen years of life, according to Beal. The risk comes in the form of air pollution, the EPA noted, finding no evidence that ethylene oxide is in water or soil in the area.

“Some of our estimates are extremely high,” shared Kerry Hicks, an air toxics coordinator with the EPA. “We assume that people spend all of their time in the area where there’s elevated risks, which means we assume that people are sitting on their front porch with direct exposure for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from birth to age seventy. Those might not be realistic assumptions.”

According to the EPA, people living in the area should ask themselves three questions to determine their personal level of risk: How close are you to the facility? How much ethylene oxide is coming out of the facility? How long have you been exposed to both in terms of both years and hours?

The risk discussed at this meeting was specific to residents. An assessment on risk to workers and patrons at nearby businesses is projected to come later this year; there is one preschool within the affected area, but no other schools.

Other than staying away from the area, there isn’t much that people can do to mitigate risk, according to the EPA. But since ethylene oxide doesn’t last for long in the environment, the facility can take action: reducing emissions would go a long way toward reducing risk.

Terumo BCT is currently doing another upgrade to its pollution control system that should be in place by summer 2023. “This upgrade will reduce emissions further and reduce the risk in the community,” Hicks said. “Although we do not anticipate it will eliminate all concerns.”

The update will only address controlled emissions. Fugitive emissions — those that don’t make it into the control system and escape through other means like gaps in windows and doors — will still exist.

Terumo BCT is one of about 100 sterilization facilities in the country; the EPA plans to start a rulemaking process at the end of the year to help communities like this one face lower risks from ethylene oxide, by reducing allowed ethylene oxide emissions and reducing fugitive emissions. At the meeting, Colorado Air Pollution Control Division Director Michael Ogletree said the state supports the EPA’s decision to change the rules regarding ethylene oxide.

“It may feel like a new challenge to learn about and consider as you make choices for your own families,” Beal told the gathering.“I just want to validate that it’s totally reasonable if you feel upset or angry at any of this information. … We need to share this information that we have with the public in a way that is understandable, but also helps inform your decisions.”