Documenting the history of pesticide hazards in the United States
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/
On its webpage entitled: The Monsanto Papers: MDL Glyphosate Cancer Case Key Documents & Analysis, US Right To Know has links to the key documents involved in the lawsuit, as well links to excellent articles based on the documents. The lawsuit alleges that Roundup herbicide caused plaintiffs or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
As discussed in the many news articles linked to on the site, the documents reveal Monsanto’s collusion with researchers, editors of scientific journals and regulators to hide or dismiss evidence of harm caused by glyphosate.
You can find this valuable resource of primary court documents and news stories at: https://usrtk.org/pesticides/mdl-monsanto-glyphosate-cancer-case-key-documents-analysis/.
Newly released documents from 2015 show the EPA working with the Pesticide Industry to keep toxic chemicals on the market for as long as possible.
“Newly released government email communications show a persistent effort by multiple officials within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to slow a separate federal agency’s safety review of Monsanto’s top-selling herbicide. Notably, the records demonstrate that the EPA efforts came at the behest of Monsanto, and that EPA officials were helpful enough to keep the chemical giant updated on their progress.”
Read the full Huffington Post article by Carey Gillam “Collusion Or Coincidence? Records Show EPA Efforts To Slow Herbicide Review Came In Coordination With Monsanto” (published August 17, 2017) at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/5994dad4e4b056a2b0ef02f1