Unsafe Refuge

The Centers for Disease Control recently reported on the case of a family poisoned in their home after a botched Florida fumigation. It would be reassuring to view this as a fluke event, but the backstory is as scary as the actual event itself.

The narrative laid out by the CDC in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) recounts the basics (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6527a4.htm). A family of five had their home fumigated for termites on August 14, 2015. Two days later they were told by the applicator they could safely return. They did so that afternoon. By evening, the mother and her 9 year-old son started vomiting; by morning, the whole family was ill. It was the boy who was most seriously affected: he went on to develop severe neurological impairment clinically consistent with damage to areas of the brain linked to Parkinson’s disease.

Somewhat unusually for the CDC, the MMWR report also provides a bit of legal follow-up on the company that directly applied the fumigant, a widely used chemical called sulfuryl fluoride (the brand in this case being “Zyclor,” manufactured by Ensystex out of Fayetteville, North Carolina). An investigation by the oddly-charged Florida Department of Agricultural and Consumer Services, working with federal authorities, determined that the fumigation company had not followed the strict protocols that are mandated for this dangerous substance. One key element is rigorously measuring the residual amount of sulfuryl fluoride still in all the rooms of the home to determine it is safe to go back in, not simply a unilateral declaration of “all clear,” as was done in this incident. The MMWR goes on to recount that this past March, two men associated with the fumigation company pled guilty to related charges in federal court.

For all of this detail, there still is much that the MMWR story omits. Additional background on the overall sad state of regulation and enforcement of fumigation controls can be gleaned from a 76-page report put out in January 2016 by Ron Russo, Florida’s Inspector General (http://media.wptv.com/image/Report.pdf). That review found that the fumigation business is robust: 66,700 structural fumigations by 137 pest control businesses had taken place in the state over fiscal 2014-2015, representing a 57% increase in applications. It has been especially good business for sulfuryl fluoride. Russo reports that this was the fumigant used 99.92% of the time (Inspectors General don’t tend to round off). The report also includes an appendix reproducing the warning labels for all three of the major brands of sulfuryl fluoride: Vikane (Dow AgroSciences); Master Fume (Drexel Chemical Company); and the specific culprit in this case, Zythor. Lest you wonder whether this brand is meant somehow to subliminally invoke the power of the Norse pantheon, the product logo is embodied with no less that Thor himself, armed with his classic hammer, but also bearing a termite-like bug on his shield. Or, as the Ensystex website makes clear, “Who is Thor? Thor represents more than just another source of the products that make your job easier. He also represents a fundamental shift in how these products are produced and made available to you” (http://www.ensystex.com/about.php). One assumes the corporate marketers were not worried about any alliteration between Zythor and Zyklon.

To find details of the actual sentencing of the perps, one can learn a lot more from a press release put out by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida (https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/fumigation-company-and-two-individuals-sentenced-connection-illegal-pesticide). The company that applied the fumigant (unnamed by MMWR) was called Sunland Pest Control Services, Inc. and the two people sentenced each received one year in prison (in a symbolic nod to our post-Citizens United world, the corporate entity of Sunland also received five years’ probation). But there was another key detail discretely avoided by the CDC, but revealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Sunland was merely a subcontractor, as the U.S. Attorney’s office makes clear: “The family was falsely assured by Terminix and Sunland that the aeration and clearance requirements had been met.”

But to really understand the role of Terminix and hear the personal story of the poisoned family, one needs to go to a series of reports by Jared Werksma of WPTV, the NBC local affiliate in West Palm Beach (http://www.wptv.com/). Last November the family gave an exclusive interview to the station - the father Carl, the mother Lori, and the son, Peyton McCaughey (by then home from the hospital where he had turned 10). “‘This is a kid who played baseball, played hockey, was learning to surf and for the doctors to tell us, well, pretty much all of that is more than likely gone...’ said Carl McCaughey. He says it's a new reality for him and his wife Lori and a new way of life for their son Peyton. ‘Do you feel like he was cheated, like your family was cheated?’ asked Contact 5 Investigator Jared Werksma. ‘We don't want to publicly criticize anybody or any company but yeah we're angry towards Terminix,’ said Lori. ‘We're mad and we're hurt and our 10-year-old son is the one who has to suffer for it,’ she added with tears in her eyes.” By January, the family had even more reason to be angry. A follow-up report by Werksma revealed that Terminix stated in a court filing that the McCaugheys were at fault because they had “conducted themselves in a negligent and careless manner.” The McCaughey’s had contracted with Terminex; Terminex then turned around and subcontracted the actual work out to Sunland. As they were waiting outside an urgent care center, the morning after the gassing, Terminix reportedly returned Carl McCaughey’s emergency call to tell him that Payton’s illness could not be due to the fumigant – “they had checked it.”

This is not the first time that I have posted about Terminix: they also had a hand in the gassing of another family using a different fumigant (methyl bromide) back in March 2015 in the Virgin Islands (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/household-hazards/201509/meet-the-methyl-toxic-chemical-family). That outbreak was also detailed in the MMWR. But there is no reference to that case in the CDC’s description of the current sulfuryl fluoride incident. It would have been a difficult segue in any event, as Terminix is never mentioned nor is the matter of subcontracting alluded to in the latest MMWR report.

A tenant of British and American common law is the nearly inviolate status of the home, embodied in oft repeated maxim that one’s home is a castle. But its Latin underpinning, rendered in translation “each man's home is his safest refuge” is more apt to these toxic home invasions.