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expensive thing of going and getting the animals or the people or whatever and doing the study. It
<br />enhances your information. Lately, it has become so popular in science now that it’s really being
<br />used all the time, and I’m afraid that it’s being misused. Because it is a tool, it’s a tool like addition,
<br />subtraction and so on, you know what I mean? And when you are gathering information, you need
<br />to gather the information with a knowledgeable view, not just of statistics, but of biology and
<br />physiology and chemistry and toxicology and geology and all these other fields that go into what
<br />does this study mean. And Mayor Kenoi rightly said, oh, the meta-analysis, what a great idea, it’s
<br />going to take all the information and put it into one place. Well, unfortunately, that’s not true.
<br />What a meta-analysis is going to do is they are going to gather a lot of this stuff, but they are going
<br />to exclude, they are going to have to exclude, a lot of informational studies. Why? Because they
<br />need numbers from each study to clunk into the formula to stir it around. And so they would be
<br />forced to eliminate studies, and we will lose the information from those studies, if we go this route,
<br />which is a meta-analysis at this stage. It’s not going to bring us the information that we seek. There
<br />is an idea out there that it’s going to, but trust me, after studying a series of studies for over 15
<br />years, a meta-analysis cannot just be neutral; it can give us misinformation. The people go, oh, the
<br />meta-analysis says that it’s true. No, it’s not. And so I just want to give you that, and say that at
<br />our center I have a statistician, I can give him numbers and he’ll have a meta-analysis for me by
<br />tomorrow afternoon. He is really good. And if you have questions about a meta-analysis, please
<br />feel free to call us, and we’ll do our best to answer those questions. Thank you again.
<br />
<br />GONZALES: Thank you.
<br />
<br />GREEN: Hi, I’m Elisabeth Green. I have a Master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Duke
<br />University. I want to thank you guys, for all of you, women and men, for beginning to hear some of
<br />the recommendations that we made, that you, the State, pay the Honolulu mediator to collect. I
<br />have experience, let’s see, we, you know, we have already performed the literature research
<br />necessary to know what mitigation is required to maintain the health of the people downwind of
<br />PGV. We have logged our symptoms with the clinicians and the Travises. I designed my own
<br />prevention and treatment system. I began to ask for reimbursement for my own mitigation 15
<br />months ago. So I want to thank you for beginning the hearing process for this mitigation. Okay, so,
<br />I have developed breathing gases and life-support systems for major universities and corporations. I
<br />have plan design conducted, analyzed and reported experimental research with human subjects. So
<br />I have designed a health study more than a year ago for that I think the Asset Fund should be used,
<br />because it focuses on mitigation. It compares treatments and it comes up with a scientific
<br />determination of the proximal cause of the reported symptoms. And for that I will need a monitor.
<br />I am willing and able to help with monitoring. I live three miles downwind of PGV; I can keep the
<br />monitor on at all times. I can calibrate it with my own hydrogen sulfide calibration gas, but
<br />someone else here has more experience in calibration. And we need to identify reliable monitor
<br />operators. We don’t need a monitor that’s going to sit in a cabinet at the Civil Defense until
<br />somebody tells them that it’s time to use it. We need an entire monitoring system that is very
<br />statistics, sophisticated, the state of art monitoring and alarm system that alerts those in the area of
<br />the current and predicted hydrogen sulfide levels, that shows the dispersion models, maps on your
<br />Smartphone, shows where, gives you the alert at your location, if you have your location turned on,
<br />and also it’s connected with a siren for local residents using the Pāhoa siren, if necessary. And we
<br />need gas masks, which, of course, I use whenever I smell the hydrogen sulfide. Okay, now, I have
<br />tried to start this whole study for more than a year, but the Island’s procurement process precludes
<br />employment of biomedical engineers, biostatisticians and other talents some of which are in this
<br />room. Now, we are here because PGV has an open source permit to emit hydrogen sulfide in
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