“David Baker (of Anniston, Alabama) drove us around the community. And he explained that this person, this resident, passed away such and such year and this is one of the...our relatives passed away, passed away he passed away. So, it was so heartbreaking. Very, very sad experience,” said Professor Ryoichi Terada, of Tokyo’s Meiji University.
Please find Alabama Public Radio’s entry for the SPJ Sigma Delta Chi Award for Best Feature Reporting, titled “Bad Chemistry: 20 years after the Monsanto settlement with the Anniston, Scars Remain.” The APR team spent eight months, with no budget, producing this program.
2023 marked 20 years since the Monsanto Chemical Company settled with residents of Anniston, Alabama. 20,000 people in this town northeast of Birmingham blamed chemicals called PCBs, produced a local factory, for medical problems ranging from cancer to birth defects. Twenty years later, Anniston still bears the scars.
The impact of Monsanto’s PCBs in Anniston didn’t harm one generation, but many. APR news worked with twenty-four-year-old Taylor Phillips to tell the story of how these chemicals killed members of her family in Anniston. This account goes back to her great grandfather in 1930. This feature began as an academic paper by Phillips at Rice University. She’s now entering medical school at the University of Pennsylvania.
And, APR met Professor Terada, and another researcher from Japan, who are studying the long term impact of PCBs on Anniston, following a similar man-made disaster in their country. Their guide was activist David Baker, who led the effort to sue Monsanto, and who’s brother died of cancer, and an enlarged heart, allegedly due to PCB exposure.
“Bad Chemistry” follows previous in-depth reports by APR, including an eight month investigation into preserving slave cemeteries in Alabama, a ten month probe into the ongoing impact of the BP oil spill on the tenth anniversary of the disaster, a fourteen month examination of human trafficking in the State, and a yearlong effort on rural heath in Alabama, among others. The U.S. State Department invited APR to present the results of our trafficking investigation before a delegation from thirteen African nations. There was a follow up request to address a national conference of Fulbright scholars on APR’s rural health report.
Respectfully submitted
