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Pesticide Studies Won E.P.A.’s Trust, Until Trump’s Team Scorned ‘Secret Science’

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For years, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have been studying the effects of pesticides on California farm workers and their children. Partly funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, findings from this important epidemiology research have been used to argue for restrictions on toxins such as insecticides.

The research has found links between pesticides sprayed on fruit and vegetable crops and “respiratory complications, developmental disorders and lower I.Q.s among children of farm workers.”

According to the article:
“.. weeks after Donald J. Trump was elected president, CropLife America, the main agrochemical trade group, petitioned the E.P.A. to “halt regulatory decisions that are highly influenced and/or determined by the results of epidemiological studies” unless universities were forced to share more of their data.”

The article, published in the New York Times on August 24, 2018 was written by Danny Hakim and Eric Lipton.

Read the full article at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/business/epa-pesticides-studies-epidemiology.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Worse Than Lead? Special Investigation: The chemical industry strikes again, shifting from lead to flame retardants that also sicken and kill.

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“Today, thanks in part to the efforts of a single Virginia family, as many as 97 percent of Americans have toxic flame retardants in their blood. Deeply poisonous, and linked to cancer, genetic damage, and behavioral and learning difficulties, the prevalence of flame retardants, here and around the world, owes to the fact that these chemicals have been placed in many of the objects of daily life—in our homes, automobiles, and workplaces, even in our beds.”

As Jamie Lincoln Kitman illustrates in his new investigative piece for The Nation, flame retardants are yet another Chemical Industry example of reckless disregard  for human suffering and environmental damage. In this case, key perpetrators are the Gottwalds, the most powerful shareholders of the Albemarle chemical company. The Gottwalds chose the same methods favored by all manufacturers of unnecessary and harmful products, from tobacco to lead to pesticides to GMOs:

“..these manufacturers mounted aggressive scare campaigns to create a perceived need for their products: They crafted regulations and lobbied legislatures to adopt them; attacked scientific findings they didn’t like; ridiculed public-health advocates; spun journalists; and bought political access with millions of dollars in campaign contributions.”

Of course, despite their toxicity and pervasiveness, flame retardants are just the tip of an enormous poison-laced iceberg,

“A shocking fact: The EPA maintains a database of some 85,000 chemicals that have been manufactured or processed in the United States, but it has subjected less than 300 of these to rigorous testing under the Toxic Substances Control Act and has banned only five (including PCBs.)”

Read the full story at: “Worse Than Lead? Special Investigation: The chemical industry strikes again, shifting from lead to flame retardants that also sicken and kill,” by Jamie Lincoln Kitman. Published by The Nation on August 15, 2018.

“Poison Papers” and Major Monsanto Document Release Exposes Toxicity and Collusion

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Published in The Maui Independent on August 2, 2017 by Jon Wood house and Jonathan Greenberg

Historic Disclosures Prove That Safety of FDA and EPA-Approved Chemicals Were Based on Tobacco Industry-like Collusion Promoting Demonstrably Faked Science.

More than 100,000 pages of documents exposing how the chemical industry and government regulators knew about the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products, yet worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press, were made publicly available last week through a remarkable project called the Poison Papers.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  explained, “Monsanto has been spinning its lethal yarn to everybody for years and suborning various perjuries from regulators and scientists who have all been lying in concert to American farmers, landscapers and consumers. These new revelations are commiserate with the documents that brought down big tobacco.”

Read the full article at: https://mauiindependent.org/poison-papers-major-monsanto-document-release-exposes-toxicity-collusion/

The OrganicView interviews Dr. Jonathan Latham about The Poison Papers Project

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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

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