Free clinic set up by Monsanto settlement closes Friday

Sept. 30--The West Anniston Medical Clinic, which for more than a decade treated claimants in the federal Monsanto settlement, will close Friday. The end comes as the settlement money that provided for those services runs out.

"It was a good thing for the community," said David Baker, the Anniston resident who urged lawyers in both the state and federal lawsuits against Monsanto to set up that free clinic. Baker was chairman of the group Community Against Pollution, and was instrumental in the push to expose the dangers that PCB pollutants made by Monsanto presented to west Anniston residents.

Ultimately, the clinic was set up as part of the 2003 settlement agreement in the federal lawsuit against Monsanto, an agreement that provided medical, dental, eye and prescription drug care without charge for the 18,500 claimants in that case since 2004.

Monsanto manufactured PCBs at its west Anniston plant from the 1930s to the 1970s. The Environmental Protection Agency banned the production of PCBs in 1979. The chemical compound, used as a coolant in electrical components, had been found to cause various adverse health effects.

That Tolbert Health Care Plan provided that free care through Anniston Quality Health Care at 1316 Noble St. and through the Pediatric Care Center of Northeast Alabama at 304 E. Fourth St.

Ed Gentle, the lawyer who oversees the Monsanto settlement and the clinic, said by phone Thursday that the settlement called for free medical care to be provided for 10 years, "and we stretched it to about 12" by working to reduce the cost of providing that care.

A $2 million grant from Pfizer started the clinic in 2004, and it was to continue to operate through annual installments of $2.5 million from the settlement for a period of 10 years.

Gentle urged claimants to visit the clinic's transition office on the second floor of the Anniston Quality of Life Health Care Clinic, where staff can guide them to other benefits, such as signing up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act or one of many programs that help pay for prescription drugs.

Aniston Quality Health Care and Pediatric Care Center of Northeast Alabama will remain open for those with health insurance, Medicare or Medicaid benefits. Anniston Quality Health Care is also accepting applications for the office's sliding fee scale for low-income patients.

The transition office will remain open at least through the end of October to help guide patients toward continued care by other means, Gentle said.

"It was about the people," Baker said, speaking of the free medical care for those living in west Anniston who were exposed to PCBs. "I worry every day about them. When you don't have a clinic to go to you fill up the emergency room."

Baker said it was his late wife, Betty, who urged him in the early days of those lawsuits against Monsanto to ask for that free health care for west Anniston residents who lived with PCBs in their soil, water and air. She died in a car accident in 2001, three years before the clinic opened.

"I just think about her being in heaven right now," Baker said. "she'd say 'David, you did what I asked you to do.'"

Claimants with questions about the clinic's closure or about signing up for medical insurance through the Affordable Care Act may call Edith Ingram at the clinic's transition office at 205-716-3000.

Staff writer Eddie Burkhalter: 256-235-3562. On Twitter @Burkhalter_Star.

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