The Poison Papers

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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

Dissent Inside EPA Deepens says PEER

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A 30-year U.S. Environmental Protection Agency senior official is leaving federal service today convinced that her agency is being steered in a disastrously wrong direction, according to her farewell message posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).  She is an eyewitness to the wreckage wreaked by Administrator Scott Pruitt and his cadre of political appointees.

https://www.peer.org/news/news-releases/dissent-inside-epa-deepens.html

“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/