documents

Unsealing the Science: What the Public can Learn from Internal Chemical Industry Documents

September 28, 2018 By Jonathan Latham, PhD

A panel discussion with the people who brought the three new chemical industry documents collections to the UCSF library explored what the documents mean for public health and the perils they faced in making these documents public. Professor Stanton Glantz, who began the library with the first collection of internal tobacco industry documents and explained how the documents have been used to inform litigation, documentaries and public policy decisions. University Librarian and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Information Management Chris Shaffer gave an overview of the Industry Documents Library and introduced the panel. Panelists included Dr. Jonathan Latham, Director of the Bioscience Resource Project, and Gary Ruskin, Co-founder and Co-Director of U.S. Right to Know. The panel was moderated by Dr. Tracey Woodruff, Professor and Director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment and Co-Director of the UCSF Environmental Health Initiative, which has supported the development of the Chemical Industry Documents library.

https://lecture.ucsf.edu/ets/Play/342d5d84275441b2b97aa9f641d0dca51d

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

August 12, 2018 By Allison Wilson

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/

U.S. Right To Know Provides Access to Key Monsanto Documents Relating to Glyphosate Cancer Lawsuits

September 26, 2017 By Allison Wilson

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/.

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

August 28, 2017 By Jonathan Latham, PhD

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.’”

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

August 5, 2017 By Allison Wilson

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