While receiving my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in entomology from Utah State University, I helped some of my professors investigate various pesticides to see how spraying affected both insect pests and beneficial insects prevalent in the area. Then, after completing work on my master’s degree, I served as a captain in the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps for two years.

For several months I did entomological and pesticide research at the Army Environmental Hygiene Agency at Edgewood Arsenal, before being sent to South Korea for a 13-month tour of duty. There I was appointed officer-in-charge of the 5th Preventive Medicine Laboratory. Our job was to find which arthropods (i.e., insects) might be transmitting diseases to U.S. troops and the Korean people. I organized an ambitious project to survey South Korea for ectoparasites that we thought might be involved in the disease called epidemic hemorrhagic fever. It had devastated U.S. troops during the Korean War. Our laboratory’s medical entomology team collected fleas, ticks, lice and mites from rodents throughout the southern part of Korea and from an adjacent island. For my medical research in Korea the Army gave me its commendation medal.

Utah was one of 13 states to receive such contracts from the EPA to gather data and evaluate the effects pesticides were having on people and the environment. Rachel Carson’s popular book had convinced many people that pesticides were going to produce a "silent spring" as we "poisoned" our planet such that no more birds could be produced. Government funding for these pesticide effects studies was based on the popular assumption that pesticides caused environmental and health problems. EPA assumed that gathering scientific data from places in the country where pesticides were most heavily used could verify the seriousness of these problems. Thus was born the agency’s Community Pesticides Study program.

We also investigated pesticide poisonings. We saw a variety of poisonings, including a few deaths, but all of these poisonings were cases where the instructions on the pesticide labels were not followed. People were just doing dumb things, such as one Utah man who sprayed parathion (a highly toxic pesticide) from a garden hose adapter and soaked himself and his clothes with concentrated parathion. Some people tried to commit suicide by drinking pesticides. Some were successful, some were not. In our Utah tests, the guy that drank malathion died and the guy who drank DDT didn’t.

In all, 13 states where pesticide usage was heavy sent medical test data to the EPA. All 13 issued quarterly reports to the EPA, describing what they had done, for year after year. The federal agency, however, did not want the state projects to analyze their own pesticide effects data. While the EPA was supposed to do the analysis and interpret the data, their statistical and computer programming people soon appeared overwhelmed by the quantity of information they were receiving. So toward the end of the study, many of us working in the state projects began analyzing our data to see if we could identify any health effects from occupational pesticide exposure.

After 11 years of research and not getting any "positive" results, EPA decided (wisely, I think) to terminate the Community Pesticide Studies. I remember talking with an EPA official who still believed that there were pesticide effects. He commented that the community pesticide studies were "misdirected." I’m not sure why he said that, except that EPA didn’t find what they had expected to find. The government spent millions of dollars in 13 states exploring every conceivable way to detect the pesticide health effects that EPA thought should be there, but after more than a decade of research we couldn’t find those expected effects. Personally, I don’t think that constitutes "misdirected" research. We found an answer—it just wasn’t the answer that EPA wanted. EPA never got around to fully analyzing or publishing the results of this extensive pesticide research.

About this same time, the Utah State Health Department became involved in another health effects study funded by the EPA. This was an air pollution study called CHESS (Community Health and Environmental Surveillance System). There were about five of these studies across the country. The air pollution research branch of EPA knew that I had was directing the Utah community pesticide study, so they asked me to take over leadership of the Utah CHESS study as well. My staff was more than doubled, and I had a whole new group of EPA people to work with.

The reason Utah was selected to participate in this EPA air pollution study was a large sulfur dioxide pollution source, a Kennecott Copper Corporation smelter located in the Salt Lake Valley. It had been in operation for a long time, and because the Salt Lake Valley is sort of bowl-shaped, air inversions would trap pollutants in the valley and subject many people to this type of air pollution. The EPA wanted data on the expected health effects of sulfur dioxide air pollution.

To conduct this study, EPA selected four communities: Magna, which was right underneath the smelter’s smoke stack and had the highest sulfur dioxide exposure, the nearby community of Kearns, Salt Lake City itself and the more distant community of Ogden. We put air monitors in each of these areas to monitor the amount of sulfur dioxide to which people were being exposed. Then we monitored hundreds of people in those areas in various ways to find out how their health was being impacted by exposure to this air pollution.

We selected these people for different study groups. For example, one group was comprised of people who had asthma. Other groups included elderly people and children. We had some keep diaries and indicate in them when they had health problems. We also brought some people in for pulmonary function testing so that we could learn about their lung capacities. With all of this information, we were trying to document the effects of environmental exposure to air pollution. The other CHESS studies around the United States were studying different kinds of air pollution.

When we analyzed the data, we found (as in the pesticide study) a strong correlation between cigarette smoking and the health indicators we were measuring. There was also evidence that people who were occupationally exposed to the air pollution, such as people who worked in the smelter itself, were adversely affected (but the effect was smaller than that of cigarette smoking). There was hardly any statistical evidence to indicate that ordinary people living in Magna, Kearns, Salt Lake City or Ogden were adversely affected by sulfur dioxide air pollutants.

After five years, this research project also was canceled because it was not producing the results that the EPA had expected. Neither EPA’s big pesticide study nor its air pollution study were ever given very high regard. This always puzzled me, because the results of these tests were pretty clear indicators to us in the Health Department that the effects people had worried about, if present at all, were not strong enough to be of much concern.

Toward the end of the air pollution study, I got involved in another environmental health study. This time the EPA wanted information on the effects of arsenic in drinking water. The community of Hinckley, Utah had naturally occurring arsenic in its drinking water—at concentrations four times higher than the national drinking water standard. Hinckley residents had been drinking this arsenic containing water for decades, ever since Mormon pioneers had settled that area. We proposed a study to the EPA to compare the health of people in Hinckley to the health of people in Delta, another Utah community. Delta’s water met the national arsenic standard.

Since arsenic was thought to be a carcinogen, we focused on cancers, particularly skin cancer, which arsenic was alleged to cause. We organized a team of medical professionals, including a dermatologist and a neurologist. We gathered health histories and conducted physical examinations to see if we could detect any effects that might be attributed to the arsenic, including skin cancers and neurological abnormalities.

In this study, we were responsible for analyzing the data ourselves. We found hardly any skin cancers, and the few we did find were more or less evenly distributed between the two communities, so we could not say they were caused by arsenic exposure. Our dermatologist concluded from the examinations he conducted that there was no reason to believe that arsenic was causing people in Hinckley the health problems that it had been alleged to cause. Nor did the neurologist find any arsenic effect either. Our detailed statistical analysis of the data indicated no difference in the health of people with high arsenic exposure compared to people with low exposure.

I reported these results in two national meetings with the EPA. Again, the fact that no adverse effects had been found caused some consternation. Some implied that we must not have done a very good job, or else we would have found the expected effects. I had to point out that if the exposed people were just as healthy as anyone else, the expectation of adverse health effect might be based on a faulty premise. Nevertheless, EPA’s regulatory branch pressed forward with its plans to force the people of Hinckley to spend a lot of money to find an alternate source of drinking water—despite our finding of no adverse health effect.

By this time, interest in these studies was waning because no "positive" results were being found. We also had a change in administration in Utah. Governor Scott M. Matheson’s approach to environmental problems was different from that of his predecessor, Governor Calvin C. Rampton. Rampton had taken the advice of professionals in the state health department and he also valued the department’s research findings. Matheson tended to cluster politically correct advisors around him, and they developed a hostile relationship with the Health Department.