Health officials don't recommend screening residents

ROME - Health officials are not recommending a general screening of Rome residents for PCBs, the hazardous material used at General Electric&#39;s now-closed transformer plant. <br> <br> Officials said it would be expensive and likely unnecessary since a study of 447 GE employees found some elevated levels of PCB contamination, but nothing to be concerned about. <br> <br> Doctor Wade Sellers is district health director for northwest Georgia. He says only 8 percent of those tested showed elevated levels of PCB, and that&#39;s not enough to warrant more testing. <br> <br> Sellers says the study was reassuring because those tested were former employees and had the greatest exposure to PCBs. <br> <br> The GE plant, which closed in 1998, used PCBs in the manufacture of transformers from 1953 until the 1970s. That&#39;s when PCBs were identified as a possible cause of cancer. It employed about five thousand people over its 45-year existence, drawing workers from a 60-mile radius. <br> <br> The PCBs were used to keep termites away, as a wood preservative and as a dust suppressant. The chemicals reached residential areas through drainage ditches that flowed from the manufacturing facility.