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Years Before Vietnam, the Chemical Industry Knew About Dioxins

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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’.”

Original ISN English translation posted here:

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/years-before-vietnam-the-chemical-industry-knew-about-dioxins/

Original German BuzzFeed article posted here:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/petrasorge/diese-dokumente-zeigen-wie-basf-bayer-co-gefahrliche-stoffe?bffbdenews&utm_term=.fwDv3Pqpb#.qy6Z240Mw

‘Poison Papers’ Reveal Chemical Industry Secrets

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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.”

Original article posted here

“‘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/

 

How an Oregon activist’s barn produced the ‘Poison Papers’ that aids in a lawsuit against Monsanto

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St. Louis Public Radio has published a new article about The Poison Papers and Carol Van Strum. Van Strum is an activist who collected the documents during her past 40 years involved in lawsuits against chemical companies and the federal government.

“It began in the early 1970s, when Van Strum’s family saw an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle and moved to a farm in the Siuslaw National Forest.

Soon after, she said, they were sprayed by a helicopter with 2,4,5-T — a component of Agent Orange — that was meant to treat a timber crop on nearby public land.

She banded together with neighbors, sued and won an injunction to stop the spraying.”

The hope is that the newly digitized Poison Papers will aid in current efforts to protect the public from toxic exposure.

“Bill Sherman, assistant attorney general for the state of Washington, said he was reviewing the new documents and expected they would be involved in the state’s lawsuit against Monsanto.

‘They confirm that Monsanto was aware of the harms that their PCBs were causing and continued to sell them without telling the public or their customers,” Sherman said of the documents.’”

Read the full article, “How an Oregon activist’s barn produced the ‘Poison Papers’ that aids in a lawsuit against Monsanto” on St. Louis Public Radio (August 24, 2017) at: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/how-oregon-activists-barn-produced-poison-papers-aids-lawsuit-against-monsanto#stream/0

Monsanto sold banned chemicals for years despite known health risks, archives reveal

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“Monsanto continued to produce and sell toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs for eight years after learning that they posed hazards to public health and the environment, according to legal analysis of documents put online in a vast searchable archive.”

The Poison Papers archive has been analyzed by Bill Sherman, the assistant attorney general for the US state of Washington. Washington state and various west coast cities are suing Monsanto for PCB contamination. Sherman is quoted as saying that Poison Paper documents provide “damning evidence” that was previously unknown to the state.

Due to their extreme toxicity to human and environmental health, by 1979 PCBs were banned in many countries.

“Yet a decade earlier, one Monsanto pollution abatement plan in the archive from October 1969, singled out by Sherman, suggests that Monsanto was even then aware of the risks posed by PCB use.”

To learn more about what Monsanto knew and hid about PCB toxicity read the full article “Monsanto sold banned chemicals for years despite known health risks, archives reveal” by Arthur Neslen on The Guardian (10 August 2017) go to: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/09/monsanto-continued-selling-pcbs-for-years-despite-knowing-health-risks-archives-reveal.

The Swamp: Newly Released Monsanto and Government Documents Show Why Toxic Pesticides Stay on the Market

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Evaggelos Vallianatos worked at the EPA and knew Adrian Gross, whose letter describing the chemical testing company IBT features in the Poison Papers. Vallianatos describes Gross’s initial experience of IBT in 1976:

“You wait but no one shows up. You decide to explore the place. You enter a large room with the infrastructure of a lab: tables loaded with knives, glass tubes, chemicals, and equipment for operations and pathology studies. You immediately react, wishing to get out of the room. An awful stench is hanging in the air. A broken water sprinkler is throwing water over cages full of mice, rats, and dogs. Rats are running into a swamp: water mixed with animal excrement covering the floor. Then, astonishingly, you see a technician holding a canister of sleeping gas running after rats. You back off in horror and reenter the reception room where the calm receptionist is on the phone calling the police for an intruder, you.”

His article also discusses how flawed testing and compromised regulatory agencies continue to put and keep toxic chemicals on the the market.

Read the full article “The Swamp” by Evaggelos Vallianatos (4 August 2017) on The Huffington Post at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-swamp_us_5984c3bde4b00833d1de27c4