GRIST.ORG – Vanessa Dominguez barely noticed the warehouse just beyond the cobblestone wall at the back of her house in west El Paso.
It really wasn’t until the COVID-19 stay-at-home mandate in 2020 that she noticed the stream of trucks pulling in and out of the facility. Sometimes, she would hear the rumble of 18-wheelers as early as 6:30 a.m.
Still, she made little of it. She didn’t realize that the warehouse was owned by Cardinal Health, one of the largest medical device distributors in the country, or that it is part of a vast supply chain that the American public relies on to receive proper medical care.
But for Dominguez and her family, what seemed little more than a minor nuisance was actually a sprawling menace — one that a Grist data analysis found was exposing them to exceedingly high levels of a dangerous chemical.
Cardinal Health uses that warehouse, and another one across town, to store medical devices that have been sterilized with ethylene oxide.
Among the thousands of compounds released every day from polluting facilities, it’s among the most toxic, responsible for more than half of all excess cancer risk from industrial operations nationwide.
Long-term exposure to the chemical has been linked to cancers of the breast and lymph nodes, and short-term exposure can cause irritation of the nasal cavity, shortness of breath, wheezing, and bronchial constriction.
Dominguez’s family would go on to experience some of these symptoms, but only years later would they tie it to ethylene oxide exposure.
Warehouses like the ones in El Paso are ubiquitous throughout the country. Through records requests and on-the-ground reporting, Grist has identified at least 30 warehouses across the country that definitely emit some amount of ethylene oxide.
And they are not restricted to industrial parts of towns — they are near schools and playgrounds, gyms and apartment complexes …
