Documenting the history of pesticide hazards in the United States
Published in Salon Magazine, 19th May, 2018.
“the evidence is overwhelming that permethrin has a marked tumor-inducing or carcinogenic activity which is expressed in many different forms.” Adrian Gross Senior EPA Scientist
This article by Jonathan Latham, director of the Project, focuses on the pesticide permethrin and how EPA accepted fraudulent research to allow it on the market. It asks the question, why would they do that?
On November 1, 2017, In These Times published “How Monsanto Captured the EPA (And Twisted Science) To Keep Glyphosate on the Market”. The article was written by Valerie Brown and Elizabeth Grossman, with illustrations by Jean-Luc Bonifay.
“Since 1973, Monsanto has cited dubious science, like tests on the uteri of male mice, and the EPA has let much of it slide.” For example, when EPA scientists expressed concerns about the carcinogenicity of glyphosate revealed by a mouse study, “their interpretation was subsequently reversed by EPA upper management and advisory boards, apparently under pressure from Monsanto.” The collusion continues to this day.
Read the original story at:
http://inthesetimes.com/features/monsanto_epa_glyphosate_roundup_investigation.html
The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy launched “The Poison Papers Project” which reveals decades of collusion between industry and regulators over toxic pesticides and other hazardous chemicals. In this segment of The Organic View from August 2017, Dr. Latham talks to host, June Stoyer about this massive cover-up and how it began.
Listen to the interview at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBEf1WH31HQ
Published Tuesday, Nov 14th, in Independent Science News, the English translation of “Years Before Vietnam, the Chemical Industry Knew About Dioxins” was first published in German in BuzzFeed by Petra Sorge.
Synopsis: Decades before the herbicide 2,4,5-T was pulled from the US market for containing dioxins, the global chemical giants Dow, BASF, Monsanto, and others, had extensive discussions amongst themselves of whether to sell dioxin-contaminated chemicals. These discussions ranged from chemical analysis of each other’s products to comments on their safety and whether to inform governments that their products contained contaminants of “extraordinary danger”. The internal discussions reported in this article are now available to the public for the first time thanks to The Poison Papers Project.
“In any event, on 19 December 1964 Boehringer Ingelheim, in response to a request from Dow, described their experiences with dioxin.
Boehringer wrote: ‘Until now we have disclosed the content of this report to no one outside of our company, as we attach a special value thereto, because the extraordinary danger of tetrachlorobenzodioxin is not generally known’.”
ClassAction.com interviewed Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), about the “Poison Papers” and why CMD and the Bioscience Resource Project joined together to get the documents online and available to the public. Graves also discusses some of the issues documented in the Poison Papers and their relevance today.
“And there’s an array of documents from studies that show harms by a number of chemicals, including PCBs, dioxins, and more. What we’re left with is a situation in which many of these chemicals remain on the market, are in products that are being used by consumers and by government agencies, and continue to pose a risk to human health and to the health of our ecosystem.”
“‘Poison Papers’ Reveal Chemical Industry Secrets” published on ClassAction.com on September 6, 2017 can be found at https://www.classaction.com/news/chemical-industry-poison-papers/