Residents who live within a half-mile radius of two art glass factories in Portland should not eat vegetables grown in their backyard because of a risk that they might be packed with toxic metals, health officials said Thursday.

The Oregon Public Health Division said vegetables grown close to Bullseye Glass in Southeast Portland and Uroboros Glass in North Portland could contain harmful levels of chromium, arsenic or cadmium. They asked physicians to advise patients not to eat them until more is known.

State environmental regulators are in the process of testing soil in the area.

"There is a lot of uncertainty," said Dr. Paul Lewis, health officer for Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties.

The immediate impact of the warning may be limited because it's wintertime.

The heads of the Department of Environmental Quality, the Oregon Health Authority, the Multnomah County Department of Health and other top officials spoke at a press conference at Harriet Tubman Middle School in North Portland Thursday evening before a community meeting on the toxic air issue. There's a high level of anxiety among local residents about what health risks they've faced while living within close proximity of small companies that emit carcinogenic metals through their smokestacks.

Uroboros and Bullseye voluntarily stopped using hexavalent chromium and cadmium after concerns arose Feb. 3, and Bullseye also stopped using arsenic.

Some families are having urine tests done to check for harmful levels of the metals. Any test above a safe level will be sent to the Oregon Public Health Division, said Dr. Paul Cieslak, the state's director of communicable disease. He announced at the meeting that the state will pay for the tests for any families who need it, but asked that residents have the testing done by their physicians if they can.

The state has not yet worked out the details of the testing. They cost about $35 to $50 each, Cieslak said.

Dr. Gillian Beauchamp, of Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon Poison Center, said calls have been pouring in by physicians, asking for help interpreting the tests. She said so far none has been above a level considered safe and that none of the doctors who has called has reported a patient with symptoms.

No one yet knows how many families have been tested, who they are and how long they've lived or worked near the two companies.

Health officials are especially concerned about cadmium, which can stay in the kidneys for years. Chromium is flushed out within minutes to hours, and arsenic leaves the body in hours to days.

Health officials don't expect to see any tests with high levels of arsenic or chromium from people who merely breathed the air. They don't know about soil exposure. But even metals that have been cleared out of the body could still pose a problem.

"It's like a little bomb that that goes off in your body and then it's excreted," Lewis said. "But it doesn't have to be there long to do damage."

Cadmium is associated with lung cancer and kidney damage; arsenic can cause lung, skin or bladder cancer, and chromium can damage the lungs.

An initial analysis of lung and bladder cancer cases between 2009 and 2013 show that there was no increase among residents who live near Bullseye Glass. The state looked at three census tracts near the factory and compared them with information from cancer registries. They could not take kidney disease into account because the state does not collect that data, said Dr. Bruce Gutelius, chief science officer for the Oregon Public Health Division. The state cancer registries also do not include information about the type of skin cancer associated with arsenic.

State health officials said they released the data as soon as they could to help calm any anxieties.

"The early results have been reassuring," Gutelius said. "The area around Bullseye Glass - it's not any higher than would be expected."

He said the state will be doing similar analyses in the census tracts around Uroboros Glass.

After the meeting, Gutelius acknowledged to The Oregonian/OregonLive that a more thorough analysis needs to be done. The results only cover cancer cases over a five-year period. The factories have been there for 40. But he said the state used more recent data because that corresponds with the U.S. Forest Service testing of moss, which identified the toxic hot spots.

-- Lynne Terry

lterry@oregonian.com

@LynnePDX