More than the Common Cold
Bayview physician determined to raise health awareness

When the Department of Public Health asked Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai to set up some children's health clinics, the first one went up in Visitacion Valley, close to the Sunnydale Housing Projects, just steps from where she grew up. Right away, she noticed a strange pattern in the cases she was seeing: it seemed like everyone in Bayview Hunters Point had a cold.

One after the other, mothers were coming in to get cold medicine for their children and themselves. "I was encountering a lot of kids with lingering upper-respiratory infections," she said. "[Mothers would come in] and say 'I need some cough syrup; he's had a cold for two weeks,'" but Sumchai knew that something besides the common cold was to blame. Upon closer inspection, she diagnosed most of these complaints as cases of both childhood and adult asthma.

When advances in biomonitoring technology came about, Peter Palmer, a chemist from San Francisco State University, conducted studies pinpointing specific toxins in the air. Among other poisons, studies showed extremely high concentrations of benzene, a known carcinogen and asthma conributor, all across the Bayview. Even indoors, at George Washington Carver Elementary School, benzene levels were at the point "where the EPA had determined them to be not only cancer-causing but neurotoxic [poisonous to the brain]." According to Sumchai, this school registers an asthma rate of 25% among students, almost five times the national average.

Photo by Hugo Salgado

Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai discovered a pattern of colds that she believes have more to do with industrial pollution than with the common virus.

Given these alarming figures, however, Dr. Sumchai found that she was at an impasse about what to do. Although the air was certainly a bigger problem than she had anticipated, cleaining it up would prove to be a far bigger challenge because of the number of factors involved. "We don't know if it's coming from automobiles criss-crossing 280 or 101, whether it's coming from the shipyard landfill, which documents volatile organic compounds coming out, or if it's coming from the power plant, but benzene is there," said Dr. Sumchai. The crusade had officially begun.

The Path to Environmental Justice

When Sumchai first decided to go to medical school, she had no idea that she would wind up on a lifelong campaign for environmental health. In fact, when she first started school at San Francisco State University in 1976, Sumchai was on a dance scholarship and took classes in many different departments, including journalism, physiology, and writing. Five years later, at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), she thought she might become a surgeon.

After completing a fellowship at Stanford University in emergency medicine, Sumchai decided against surgery specialization and began to work at the Veterans' Association in Palo Alto. Specifically, she worked on the Persian Gulf Agent Orange and Ionizing Radiation Registry, one of the largest toxic registry's in the world, cataloguing the health problems caused by exposure to Agent Orange and other toxic chemicals. It was her first foray into public health and its environmental factors.

Several years later, in 1992, she became permanently involved in environ-mental justice when her father died of asbestosis (a lung condition caused by prolonged exposure to asbestos). Sumchai knew her father had developed this condition while working as a longshoreman at the Naval Shipyard in Bayview Hunters Point. Because of her medical background, sitting through the civil litigations following her father's death was especially disconcerting. The Navy was secretive about a lot of their past procedures and was reluctant to admit its obvious role in her father's death. "That kind of pulled me in on a personal level," she said.

More recently, she was elected onto the Restoration Advisory Board (RAB), the neighborhood committee that works side-by-side with the Navy in monitoring the transfer of naval property to the city. Caroline Washington, a former co-chair of RAB, first suggested the nomination after spotting Sumchai at a few meetings and listening to her speak. She was impressed by Sumchai's articulate manner and scrupulous attention to detail. "When she goes after something, she goes after all the angles and researches everything," Washington said. "I told her to think about joining so she wouldn't have to wait for someone to recognize her every time she had something to say. You can't speak at RAB unless someone who's on the committee recognizes you."

Sumchai's frustrations over the proceedings surrounding her father's death have led to what she feels is an especially rewarding experience on RAB. Even though the commitment is more time-consuming than other committees she serves on, she realizes the importance of community liaisons. "RAB is one of the few governmental bodies that allows community people to have a legitimate voice," she said.

Health in Bayview Hunters Point

Before being elected to RAB, Sumchai served on a multitude of different community boards. While on the Bayview Hunters Point Health and Environmental Assessment Task Force, she read study after study documenting the high incidences of many health problems, including congestive heart failure, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Of all these, Sumchai believes that respiratory illnesses are the biggest problem in Bayview Hunters Point because of their widespread presence. And, she says, when people come down with colds that seem to last forever, they now know how to blame: the Naval Shipyard and the PG&E power plant.

"I think the level of community awareness about the power plant and the shipyard is pretty high," she said. "They know the shipyard is a problem and they know the plant is a problem," even if they may not know the gritty details. Sumchai feels that there is "a common fund of knowledge" regarding the ill effects of these entities, but change is taking place slowly because of a lack of outside interest, which the community sorely needs. "There is a lot of [community activism] but the media has chosen to neglect it," she said. "LEJ [Literacy for Environmental Justice] organized 500 young people one time to a rally to close the PG&E power plant and the press didn't even pick it up."

As a contributor to The BayView newspaper, Sumchai is trying to draw more attention to waht she feels are largely unheralded issues. Ross Mirkarimi, who led the campaign for Proposition D, says Sumchai is "a very insightful and very detailed writer. She adds a lot of punch to her writing because of her medical degree background. It gives the environmental health issues the upgrading of rhetoric to substance."

The fight for neighborhood health, Sumchai feels, could also use some more political support. Although district supervisor Sophi Maxwell has supported the city's energy plan, Sumchai disagrees with her treatment of the naval shipyard.

It may be an uphill battle, but Sumchai is optimistic about the general clean-up of Bayview Hunters Point. The community, she contends, is fostering a stronger political presence and she is just one of the many that are dutifully playing a part. "People have been very aggressively fighting for change," she said. "For at least 10 years, it's been one of the strongest environmental justice movements in the Bay Area."

Mirkarimi points to Sumchai as one of the key players whose participation on multiple community boards helps to unite the separate factions of advocacy. "Ahimsa is too shy to admit that she could be a leader in her own life...either elected or in a position more powerful than the one she commands now," Mirkarimi said, adding that her bid for the Community College Board may have failed because she didn't incorporate political tactics into her campaign. "She may be ambitious but her ambition is modest. it's not an ambition that's driven to advance her but an ambition to advance the issues," he said.

Filmmaker Kevin Epps, who describes Sumchai as "an incredible, incredible woman," included her in a scene from his latest film, Straight Outta Hunters Point. "What she was representing was essential to the community," Epps said. "She's very action-oriented against a very unwelcoming bureaucracy and opposition....she's always going from meeting to meeting. That's her life."