NEW ORLEANS — The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should have reacted sooner to concerns about hazardous fumes in government-issued trailers housing thousands of Gulf Coast hurricane victims, a CDC official told a congressional panel Tuesday. ‘In retrospect, we did not engage the formaldehyde issue as aggressively and as early as we should have,’ Howard Frumkin, director of the CDC’s National Center For Environmental Health, told a Senate subcommittee on disaster recovery. The committee met in Washington. The CDC announced last month that tests on hundreds of occupied Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers and mobile homes found formaldehyde levels that were, on average, about five times higher than what people are exposed to in most modern homes. The results prompted FEMA to step up efforts to move roughly 35,000 families still living in the trailers after the 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita. ‘This is a little too late,’ Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., told Deputy FEMA Administrator Harvey Johnson Jr. during Tuesday’s hearing. Johnson said the number of occupied trailers on the Gulf Coast, which peaked at more than 143,000 after the hurricanes, has dropped to about 34,000 as FEMA rushes to move people into […]