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Air-quality samples taken in Ben Avon by members of Clean Water Action and given to the Allegheny County Health Department continue to show the presence of acrylonitrile, a man-made chemical by-product that has been linked to cancer, the environmental group's local director said Thursday.

The source of the contamination, however, remains a mystery because no industries with a permit to discharge the chemical by-product are nearby. The substance is a by-product of the manufacture of certain chemicals and plastics.

While its long-term effect on humans is not fully established, acrylonitrile has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory rats, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"It's a pretty hazardous chemical. It causes cancer, said Myron Arnowitt, local director of Clean Water Action. "The health department doesn't know of anyone on Neville (Island) with a permit to discharge that."

Arnowitt said the recently released results were compiled from samples taken at 10:15 p.m. on Sept. 15.

The results are a follow-up to another set of data released to the health department back in August.

Those results were compiled after 18 months of testing.

"We don't think the health department has really done anything since we released the results at the end of August," Arnowitt said. "The state Department of Environmental Protection has offered to help the health department, so it doesn’t seem to be a resource problem. They just seem to not want to do it."

County health department monitoring stations regularly test the air for only about half a dozen of some 200 known pollutants.

Joseph Chnupa, assistant regional director for the state Department of Environmental Protection, was out of the office Thursday and could not be reached for comment.

Guillermo Cole, department spokesman, said it still is unknown where the acrylonitrile is coming from.

"There are not any known emission sources on Neville Island," he said.

The only known source of acrylonitrile in the county is a Forward Township landfill, which emits very slight amounts. Cole said the department is still reviewing Clean Water Action's last findings.

"My thinking is we'd want to look at their results and take a look at what the sources on Neville Island were doing," Cole said.

"We've told Myron that we are going to do our own sampling. We think it's important for us to do our own sampling. We've committed to do sampling with proper assurance and proper controls.

"The method they are using is not the accepted method for organics, which is what acrylonitrile is. We're also doing some research to see whether vehicle emissions could be a source of acrylonitrile."

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