C8 Health Project: 20,000+ to be Resampled

From WMOA today (www.wmoa1490.com):

The C8 Health Project is re-sampling the blood of roughly a third of the participants after a lab error resulted in the reporting of C8 levels that were slightly too high.

Dr. Paul Brooks of Brookmar, the court appointed study administrators, said in an interview yesterday that the problem was detected by quality control as they double checked the accuracy of the chemistry from their primary lab against a smaller group of results from another lab.

Brooks said it's a difficult test to run . . . which may have led to the error.

“It is a very sophisticated test,” Brooks said. “Laboratories have different methods of actually doing it. It's not done with the same method at any laboratory. We use different methods to extract it. There's a lot of variables and things that can happen in that testing, but we know we've found the problem and we're going to correct it. And, on the rerun all that is being run through quality control, too, just like the initial.”

Project administrators are faced with the monumental task of resampling the blood of more than 20,000 participants. But, they won't have to call people back to draw more serum.

“On the initial blood draw we saved blood on everybody so we can go back and retest the sample that was originally tested,” Brooks said.

And, once the resampling is complete, the first 20,000 people who participated in the C8 Health Project – or those who gave blood between September and December of 2005 – will receive revised results in the mail.

“We will give a new set of results, but we're not going to send that out until we complete everything – and we think that's going to be about 10 weeks from now,” Brooks said.

Brooks said that should happen during July. And, then the information will be turned over to the C8 Science Panel for their review.

Ultimately, the data will be used to determine the outcome of a class action lawsuit filed against DuPont for the contamination of local water supplies with the manufacturing substance.