EAST CHICAGO | After a century of industrial dumping, the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal are considered among the most contaminated the Great Lakes area, and the sediments have been found to contain high levels of dozens of hazardous and toxic chemicals including PCBs.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to remove some 4.6 million cubic yards of polluted sediment from the waterways and permanently store the material on a 275-acre former refinery site just 800 yards from Central High School and West Side Junior High.

Will vapors from the dredging of the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal transport toxic chemicals into the bodies of city children?

Scientists with four major universities are looking for local participants in a four-year study of polychlorinated biphenyls in the air, and in the blood of city students and their mothers.

The research program will track 54 West Side Junior High students and their mothers for four years, and compare the data with those from a community in eastern Iowa of a similar size and ethnic composition which has no known sources of PCBs.

Using sophisticated air monitoring equipment and regular testing of volunteer families, researchers hope to learn about concentrations of PCBs in residents, both before and during the 30-year dredging project, which is scheduled to begin in 2009.

"We don't know what we're going to find," said David Osterberg, outreach co-leader from the University of Iowa. "We do not know if the dredging is going to increase PBCs or not."

Dubbed AESOP -- Airborne Exposure to Semi-volatile Organic Pollutants -- the study is sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and combines resources of the University of Iowa, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and University of Kentucky.

Researchers advertised earlier this year for research assistants with English and Spanish skills to take blood samples and survey information from participants, and response to the ads was good, said Keri Mercer, study coordinator.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has determined that exposure to PCBs can cause cancer of the liver and biliary tract, and the chemical has been linked to problems with motor skills and a decrease in short-term memory in children.

Though PCBs were banned in the United States in 1977, the chemicals evaporate rapidly when exposed to the air and are carried long distances by wind. PCBs have even been detected at the North Pole.

The study is not designed to measure the health effects of PCBs on children, said Peter Thorne, environmental health scientist at the University of Iowa and principal investigator.

Rather, he said, researchers will be collecting data on PCBs in the local atmosphere, and how much of the carcinogenic neurotoxin winds up in the bodies of residents.