Opinion: Government shouldn't wait for our bodies to prove the harm from pollution in SELA

After spending almost thirty years as a data analyst, I trust what I can measure. These days, I put those skills to work by running a community air monitoring program in Maywood, where intermodal rail yards, industrial facilities and the I-710 freeway together create some of the most toxic air in the region. The industrial polluters in my community include two Sterigenics plants in neighboring Vernon that emit ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing gas used to sterilize medical equipment, plants with a history of air pollution violations.  

Despite the air monitor sensors and the data we can take from them, the most sensitive instrument I have is not one I can calibrate. It is my own body — lungs that catch chemical odors a mile from those stacks, a nervous system already fighting multiple sclerosis, a scar where a tumor was removed. 

In a community like mine, the harm gets recorded in people long before it shows up in an official database. My neighbors carry that record, too: in the inhalers in kitchen drawers and the diagnoses in household after household. 

Laws on the books say that we should be protected against this pollution. But history and experience tells us the government will not act on any of it until the damage becomes impossible to ignore — until the incidence of cancer among children spikes, as it did near Sterigenics' plant in Willowbrook, Illinois, before the state finally stepped in to end the pollution.  

It is shameful. No community should be made to  wait for human bodies to confirm what the science already showed. 

But it does not have to be this way. In 2024, after years of community pressure, the EPA finalized rules requiring commercial sterilizers like Sterigenics to sharply cut and to continuously monitor ethylene oxide emissions, rules built on decades of science showing this gas causes leukemia, lymphoma and breast cancer. Then, in 2025, President Trump signed a proclamation exempting these facilities from those rules that protect communities, a favor handed to the industry, with no chance for the people breathing its pollution to object. 

The administration cannot justify the exemptions. Safer sterilization methods exist. The FDA has approved hydrogen peroxide And many plants across the country, including the Sterigenics facilities in Vernon, have already installed the controls required by the rule and are meeting the standard today.  

The Trump Administration is claiming  that compliance technology is not available. That is plainly false. Technology is not the obstacle. Neither is the science: the National Academy of Sciences recently reaffirmed the federal assessment of just how dangerous ethylene oxide is. Our community's health is simply the price this administration is willing to pay to cut costs for industry. 

Maywood is a Spanish-speaking immigrant community already permeated with the lead that the Exide battery plant left in the soil, a cleanup still unfinished, plus the diesel from freight corridors, the rendering plants, a warehouse fire that showered our homes with toxic ash.  

No agency calculates what it means to breathe all of it at once, layered on bodies that have absorbed decades of it already. Communities like mine are treated as sacrifice zones. Our communities are seen as convenient for industry, invisible to regulators, and forgotten until the damage is measured in funerals. 

But “forgotten” is not the same as “silent.” My neighbors and I have gone to court alongside other frontline communities to challenge the commercial sterilizer exemptions, and we will keep fighting until the protections we won in 2024 are enforced. 

I will keep setting up the sensors and reading the numbers every morning, because someone has to. But no mother's lungs, no child's bloodstream, no scarred body should have to register the harm before the government is willing to do something about it. Our health should be what the rules protect, never the proof that they failed.