The Poison Papers

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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

“POISON PAPERS” SNAPSHOT: HOJO TRANSCRIPT ILLUSTRATES EPA COLLUSION WITH CHEMICAL INDUSTRY

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Published in Independent Science News and Exposed by CMD on July 27th, 2017:

‘Poison Papers’ Snapshot: HOJO Transcript Illustrates EPA Collusion With Chemical Industry by Rebekah Wilce of the Center for Media and Democracy.

This is the first story based on The Poison Papers, the 20,000 document trove whose publication on DocumentCloud was co-organised by Independent Science News and the Center for Media and Democracy.

The story recounts a secret 1978 meeting between senior figures at EPA and chemical industry representatives. The purpose of that meeting was to cover up and delay a reckoning with a major chemical safety testing fraud perpetrated by Industrial Bio-Test (IBT).

“Dr. Arthur Pallotta, Consultant to the Special Pesticide Review Division in the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, stated that “there were few [IBT] studies that did not have discrepancies, errors and omissions” (p. 27). Elsewhere in the transcript, EPA accepted that over 80 percent of the test results from IBT were invalid (p. 123).”

In the meeting EPA agrees to ignore or accept defective and fraudulent safety data to buy time for the industry to repeat studies. However, many defective studies were never repeated. Thus, even today chemicals are on the market, including household names, for which IBT studies are still cited as evidence of their safety — when EPA could and should have rejected all IBT studies as fraudulent.

Read the full story at: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/poison-papers-snapshot-hojo-transcript-illustrates-epa-collusion-with-chemical-industry/

or

http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/07/26/poison-papers-exposes-epa-collusion-with-chemical-industry/

100,000 Pages of Chemical Industry Secrets Gathered Dust in an Oregon Barn for Decades — Until Now

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The Poison Papers became news today with the publication of Sharon Lerner’s interview with Carol Van Strum in The Intercept.

Depicts Carol Van Strum’s long history of collecting and working with crucial documents exposing human and environmental health hazards. This excellent article nevertheless only skims the surface of some of the important documents contained in the Poison Papers collection.

“Along the way, she amassed disturbing evidence about the dangers of industrial chemicals — and the practices of the companies that make them. Two documents, for instance, detailed experiments that Dow contracted a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist to conduct on prisoners in the 1960s to show the effects of TCDD, a particularly toxic contaminant found in 2,4,5-T. Another document, from 1985, showed that Monsanto had sold a chemical that was tainted with TCDD to the makers of Lysol, who, apparently unaware of its toxicity, used it as an ingredient in their disinfectant spray for 23 years. Yet another, from 1990, detailed the EPA policy of allowing the use of hazardous waste as inert ingredients in pesticides and other products under certain circumstances.”

To read the full article “100, 000 Pages of Chemical Industry Secrets Gathered Dust in an Oregon Barn for Decades — Until Now” by Sharon Lerner in The Intercept (July 26, 2017) go to: https://theintercept.com/2017/07/26/chemical-industry-herbicide-poison-papers/