The Brief

Vernon is an almost exclusively industrial city just southeast of downtown Los Angeles. And one of the companies that operates within Vernon has recently become the target of lawsuits over its use of a chemical called ethylene oxide, a colorless, flammable gas used to sterilize medical supplies. It’s also a known carcinogen.

As the lawsuits make their way through court, local air regulators say they are working to protect residents and off-site workers from potentially harmful chemical emissions.

And not just in Vernon — air regulators are monitoring ethylene oxide levels at more than a dozen facilities in Greater L.A.

What is ethylene oxide and who monitors it?

Because it can be used on a wide range of materials, ethylene oxide is well-suited for sterilizing medical equipment. But public health officials say long-term exposure to it can increase one’s risk of developing certain cancers, as well as reproductive issues.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) is responsible for monitoring the air and enforcing regulations in L.A., Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties.

There are currently 15 facilities that use ethylene oxide to sterilize medical equipment under the agency’s jurisdiction, according to Susan Nakamura, SCAQMD’s chief operating officer. There is also one facility devoted to ethylene oxide aeration, which is the process of removing residual gas from items that have been sterilized.

SCAQMD began investigating facilities that use ethylene oxide in March 2022. At the time, the Environmental Protection Agency was revising its regulations on the chemical’s potential toxicity after a ProPublica analysis found that ethylene oxide was the biggest contributor to excess industrial cancer risk from air pollutants nationwide.

Ethylene oxide’s use in Vernon

Community members and workers in Southeast L.A. County have filed separate lawsuits against Sterigenics U.S. LLC, a company that sterilizes medical equipment in Vernon.

Each lawsuit alleges the company knowingly exposed people to unsafe levels of ethylene oxide without warning them of the potential health risks.

Sterigenics has denied any wrongdoing. In an email, spokesperson Kristin Gibbs told LAist that the company “empathizes with anyone battling cancer,” but that it’s “confident that it is not responsible for causing the illnesses.”

“We will vigorously defend our essential and safe operations against these claims,” she added.

What do air regulators do to protect residents?

The agency investigates issues at regional facilities and posts those results as well.

For example: In May 2022, SCAQMD issued a Notice of Violation to the Sterigenics building on 50th Street. According to the agency, the building operators:

• failed to operate its air pollution control system in accordance with its permit and in good condition; and
• failed to include a differential pressure gauge and a pH meter in its control equipment. That violation has since been resolved. 

A few months later, SCAQMD issued additional Notices of Violation to the company for installing control equipment at both of its buildings without permits. Those violations have also been resolved.

Throughout that time, multiple public officials asked the agency to shut down Vernon Sterigenics until it no longer posed a public health risk, including state Assemblymember Miguel Santiago and L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn. The latter wrote:

Maywood residents spend time outdoors during a hot afternoon.

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Residential buildings in Maywood are in close proximity to industrial facilities in neighboring Vernon.

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The agency can also apply labels to companies that correspond to a level of risk.

In June 2022, for example, SCAQMD designated Vernon Sterigenics as a “Potentially High-Risk Facility.” That designation is used when emissions data show it has the potential to exceed a cancer risk threshold greater than 100 chances in a million, or that it already has. Sterigenics was then required to provide an emissions reduction plan and ordered to make a number of upgrades. Some are still in the process of being fulfilled.

To mitigate the potential impact of the Vernon facility’s emissions, “we used every tool in the tool box,” said Nakamura, SCAQMD’s chief operating officer. “We take the protection of public health very seriously.”

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Are air regulators confident in their ethylene oxide monitoring results? 

As Hahn noted in her letter to SCAQMD, Southeast L.A. County’s proximity to Vernon has made it especially vulnerable to environmental issues. This includes contamination from Exide, a now-shuttered battery recycler that spewed lead and arsenic into Bell, Boyle Heights, Commerce, East L.A. Huntington Park, and Maywood for decades. Local residents also live close to freeways and other industrial facilities.

To make sure SCAQMD’s ethylene oxide monitoring results are precise, the agency employs a two-step process. Jason Low, deputy executive officer of the agency’s monitoring and analysis division, told LAist that the process requires air quality regulators to take a few seconds of air samples near the facility, then more samples as they move away. Those samples are sent to the agency’s lab for analysis.

SCAQMD also has a mobile platform, which “can detect signals related to ethylene oxide in real time,” Low added.

“So we can drive around the facility, and then we can drive away from the facility and see how the levels of ethylene oxide change,” he said.

Once the agency determines that there are elevated ethylene oxide emissions near a sterilization facility, it puts up canisters near and around it, including in local residential areas. These canisters take samples over a 24-hour period. Then, those canisters are also taken to the lab.

“We're one of the few laboratories in the nation that can do this,” Low said.

Nearby residents are unlikely to see the warning signs on the Sterigenics buildings in Vernon.

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What else is being done to protect local residents?

On the outer walls of Sterigenics in Vernon, there are signs that read: “This facility contains one or more chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or reproductive harm.”

These signs are required by state law. Similar ones can be found throughout California, including in parking lots and in the coffee section of grocery stores. The signs are meant to help Californians make informed decisions about their exposure to potentially harmful chemicals. But their utility is unclear, particularly when it comes to those who live around Sterigenics.

Vernon is almost entirely industrial, with only a few hundred residents. People who live in surrounding neighborhoods don’t necessarily enter the city, unless they work there. As a result, they may be unlikely to see those warning signs.

Earlier this summer, LAist knocked on the door of 60 homes in Maywood, just a few blocks from Sterigenics in Vernon. About a dozen residents answered the door. None of them had ever heard of ethylene oxide.

Hop onto TikTok and you'll find lots of videos of young people — mostly women — fake baking under the glowing UV lights of a tanning bed. Seattle dermatologist Heather Rogers says this is an alarming trend that comes after years of decline in indoor tanning in the U.S.

She points to a 2025 survey from the American Academy of Dermatology which found 20% of Gen Z respondents prioritize getting a tan over protecting their skin. And 25% say it's worth looking great now even if it means looking worse later.

They feel like "it's better to be tan than it is to worry about skin cancer," Rogers says.

A new study in the journal Science Advances reinforces just why they should worry.

Researchers found that tanning bed users were nearly three times as likely to develop melanoma — the deadliest form of skin cancer — compared to people who'd never tanned indoors. They also had DNA damage that can lead to melanoma across nearly the entire surface of the skin.

"Even in skin cells that look normal, in tanning bed patients, you can find those precursor mutations" that lead to melanoma, says Dr. Pedram Gerami, one of the study's authors and the IDP Foundation professor of skin cancer research at Northwestern University.

Gerami and his collaborators compared the medical records of nearly 3,000 patients who used tanning beds to an age-matched control group of patients who didn't tan indoors. They found that the more people used the tanning beds, the higher their risk of melanoma.

"If they had 10 to 50 tanning bed exposures, their risk was twice as high as the control group," Gerami says. If they had over 200 tanning bed visits, their risk was more than eight times as high.

"If you think about it, getting 200 tanning bed exposures can happen really quickly. If you go once a week for four years, there you are," he says.

The researchers also performed genetic sequencing on normal skin cells from tanning bed users. Most were younger women, which makes sense, because studies have shown that young women in their teens and 20s are the heaviest users of indoor tanning, says study co-author Hunter Shain, an associate professor of dermatology at the UC San Francisco.

Shain says when the researchers compared these skin samples to normal skin cells from people in the general population who were twice the age of the indoor tanners, they were "stunned" by what they found.

"Women in their 30s and 40s had more mutations than people in their 70s and 80s from the general population," says Shain, whose research focuses on the biology of skin cancer. "They somehow were able to cram in two lifetimes' worth of UV damage in 30 years."

Dr. Heather Rogers, who was not involved in the study, notes that tanning beds can emit ultraviolet radiation that is 10 to 15 times stronger than what you'd get from the sun. She says that tanning beds are often marketed as being safer than the sun, but this study shows how wrong those claims are.

Dr. Pedram Gerami says many of the patients he sees at a high-risk melanoma clinic are women who started indoor tanning as teens wanting to look better for events like homecoming and prom.

"Now, as young adults, they're having to deal with frequent skin checks, frequent doctor visits, frequent biopsies, lots of anxiety, and the emotional burden of having been diagnosed with cancer at a young age," Garami says. "So they have a lot of heaviness to deal with."

He says some of these patients chose to donate skin samples to the study in hopes of helping other young people avoid the same fate.

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Nearly every pop music holiday song written in the past 80 years owes at least some of its DNA to one Christmas tune in particular: "White Christmas," written by Irving Berlin and sung by Bing Crosby, which he first recorded in 1942.

It's reportedly still one of the best-selling songs of all time in any genre, though chart data from decades ago is unreliable. Even given that murkiness, the Guinness Book of World Records named it as the best-selling physical single of all time in 2012.

"White Christmas" wrote the formula for modern secular holiday songs — despite its complex and troubling history.

Songwriter Irving Berlin wasn't destined to be a Yuletide magic maker. He was born Israel Baline in Siberia to an Orthodox Jewish family; his father was a cantor turned kosher butcher. But Berlin embraced assimilation — he married an Irish Catholic woman and had Christmas trees in his house. Even so, for Berlin, Christmas was a holiday shadowed by personal tragedy.

"On Christmas Day, 1928, his only son died. He always told members of his family that he disliked Christmas for this reason, that he could never, never get past the sadness that he experienced on Christmas Day," said author and New York Times contributing writer Jody Rosen, who wrote a book called White Christmas: The Story of an American Song.

The infant Irving Berlin Jr. died suddenly, less than a month after he was born. And at its heart, "White Christmas" is a deeply melancholic song.

Most Christmas carols and pop songs were unabashedly joyful. Berlin's song represented a turn, Rosen said: "It was strange to have a song that was all about this nose-pressed-up-to-the-glass feeling."

It also set a certain standard for Christmas songs that are about nostalgia, about some lost Christmas past. (Think, for example, of another enduring hit that came shortly after Berlin's smash: "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," which Judy Garland sang in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis, and which was written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane.)

But there's other stuff going on too. Irving Berlin was a hit machine as a Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songwriter. As a New Yorker and an immigrant himself, he was intimately familiar with a particular genre of songs, Rosen said: "That tradition of so-called 'home songs,' you know, songs that pine for a lost place, a lost ideal. These songs are so huge because we have an immigrant population, lots of people who've done a lot of moving. So there were songs about Irish people longing for Ireland and Italians longing for the old country there."

He said Berlin took that genre and flipped it into a Christmas song.

That's especially true of a largely forgotten, tongue-in-cheek introductory verse Berlin originally wrote for "White Christmas." The narrator is a New Yorker stuck in California (as Berlin frequently was, churning out songs for Hollywood): "The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway ... but it's December the 24th, and I am longing to be up north!" the protagonist sings.

Rosen said most people listening to "White Christmas" are missing additional subtext. He said that much of that nostalgic vibe in "White Christmas" — all that longing for a pristine, innocent Christmas of yore — is a reference to explicitly racist minstrel songs like Stephen Foster's "Old Kentucky Home," sung by Al Jolson and others — music that was still a staple in Berlin's day.

Foster was inspired by the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the song, hailed by Frederick Douglass and Paul Robeson, was meant to be empathetic to the abolitionist cause — the narrator is longing to be reunited with his wife and children, but their family has been torn apart by slaveholders. It later became a popular tune at minstrel shows, with its saddest lines omitted and its meaning twisted.

In "Old Kentucky Home," Rosen said, "You have, grotesquely, the freed Black man longing for life back below the Mason-Dixon line, back on the plantation. Here, instead of a Black man in the north longing for the sultry south, we have a well-to-do white person longing for the wintry north."

But the racial dynamics of "White Christmas" aren't just a matter of subtle references to older songs. Irving Berlin had great commercial expectations for "White Christmas." He built a whole movie around it: 1942's Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.

Holiday Inn is stuffed with racist stereotypes and an entire blackface number. (That scene is usually excised from TV broadcasts today, but the whole film is available to stream online.) As Crosby and his love interest, played by Marjorie Reynolds, prepare to perform a song about Abraham Lincoln, Crosby spreads greasepaint on her face, as the orchestra plays "White Christmas" underneath. Not only is "White Christmas" the movie's biggest hit, it's also the film's romantic theme.

Blackface on stage and on screen was very much a recent memory for 1940s audiences, said scholar Brynn Shiovitz. She's the author of the book Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood's Golden Age.

In Holiday Inn, Shiovitz said, "We get a pairing of nostalgia for Christmas, but also nostalgia for blackface, because so many of the people that were watching Holiday Inn when it premiered in the theaters grew up watching vaudeville, grew up watching their parents maybe even perform in blackface."

Audiences loved the song "White Christmas" and its spotlight in Holiday Inn — and American GIs stationed abroad during World War II clamored for the Armed Forces Radio Service to play the song. "White Christmas" was so sturdily successful that Hollywood made another movie centering the song in 1954 — also called White Christmas — this time starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen.

Since then, legions of musicians have recorded their own versions of "White Christmas" — including The Drifters, Elvis Presley, Iggy Pop and Sabrina Carpenter. And of course, each generation adds new layers of meaning to the song as it is stitched into our holiday season each year, said Shiovitz.

"With all of these other memories that people have of Christmas, whether it's being piped in while you're shopping, or it's playing on the radio in the car as you're driving to visit family — it's easy to kind of separate it from its history. People develop new memories with it. People have their own ideas of what the song represents, so it's just incredibly complex," Shiovitz said.

Today's audiences and artists don't necessarily hear or even know about the song's racist history, Shiovitz said — but that doesn't mean it's not there.
This story was edited for radio and digital by Jennifer Vanasco.
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