Experts say laundries may be responsible for health challenges

By Caribbean Medical News Staff

In a 68-page report, two international experts have said that the emissions from two nearby laundries to the Louis Lynch Secondary School in Barbados may be responsible for a plethora of health challenges experienced by the teachers and students there. A teacher has since very recently passed away from cancer.

The school has closed its doors.

The report has been made public and named the Pink Pelican Laundry (closed since 1991) and Tropical Laundries which opened on the same location in Country Rd, Bridgetown as the possible source of ills that plagued those in surrounding areas as well.

The report was obtained by the island’s daily paper, The Sunday Sun and was compiled by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2006 by consultants, Dr Pierre Auger and Dr March Rhains, at the height of the controversy surrounding air quality issues that afflicted the staff and students. Some of these ailments are alleged to included cancers, respiratory issues and other illnesses.

The investigators, report said: “We strongly believe that chemical emissions from the Tropical Laundries operations and the Pink Pelican Laundry operations in the past, could be associated with the negative health effects reported in some occupants of the LLSS”.

In an unfortunate twist, one of the advocates for disclosure and investigation into what was going on at the LLSS died of prostate cancer.

In an exclusive report with the same newspaper, the now late Nigel Marshall ( a former teacher at LLSS) called for the contents of the investigation to be made public prior to his death. He also asked his family members to release his interview to the public in the event of his death, according to reports. Marshall was transferred from LLSS to Queens College.

“I know for the first three years of my school life that gave us a fit; it would just belch soot all across the compound. . . . A lot of students would leave the classrooms and go outside where the hard court is now. We would have asthmatics getting really, really sick,” he told Nation Newspaper reporters. Marshall also told the press that soot was left on their cars and the white school shirts of students were “a shade down”.

He said that when things became unbearable, they decided as teachers to take action.

“I remember Reginald Farley, who was a member of the staff, and some of the other teachers petitioned the Ministry of Education to do something and address the situation because they were not happy about it. They pushed for an environmental study and a few years after it was done by Oxley Associates, which found that there were contaminants in the air.”

However, no action was taken, Marshall said.

“We felt our primary responsibility was to the children. We made a noise, got some level of notice and we just decided that we would wait for something to happen, but nothing really did happen,” he told the Nation Newspaper.

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