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When I’m teaching a class or speaking to a group about the “funding effect” – the close correlation between the results desired by a study’s funders and those reported by the researchers – people often ask how researchers do it. How is it that researchers paid by a sponsor usually get results favorable to the study’s sponsor?
I’ve try to help answer that question in an article that appears in today’s Washington Post, entitled It’s Not the Answers That Are Biased, It’s the Questions. (A longer discussion of the funding effect is in my book Doubt is Their Product).
Having a financial stake in the outcome changes the way even the most respected scientists approach their research. Scientists make many decisions about the doses, exposure methods and disease definitions they use in their experiments, and each decision affects the result.
Did Brush Wellman, the world’s largest producer of beryllium products, hire Hill and Knowlton, the public relations giant behind Big Tobacco’s campaign to fool the public about the hazards of smoking, to help Brush refute reports of beryllium’s toxicity? Brush says no, but we have the smoking guns — memos and invoices — that say otherwise. Keep reading for the details.
Beryllium is a remarkable metal. It is stiffer than steel, lighter than aluminum, and causes lung disease at incredibly low levels of exposure. And it causes cancer in humans. This lightweight metal is has long been employed in nuclear and defense operations, and is now being used is bicycle frames and other consumer products. There is no evidence of a safe exposure level. The question that needs to be asked is whether beryllium should be banned in non-defense applications.
There is a national discussion underway right now on the hazards of beryllium. The National Academy of Sciences will soon issue a report, requested by the Air Force, on protecting Defense Department personnel exposed to beryllium. The EPA has announced that it is revising its beryllium risk assessment document and is holding a meeting in July for public input into the process. And OSHA is moving at a glacial pace to replace the current outdated workplace exposure standard (it is sixty years old and even the beryllium industry acknowledges it is inadequate), although no one pretends anymore that this administration will actually issue a new standard.
To help advance the national discussion on beryllium, we’ve posted a case study of the beryllium industry’s thirty-year campaign to stop stronger beryllium standards on DefendingScience.org, the website of the George Washington University School of Public Health’s Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy.
On Saturday June 21st, I’ll be the guest on the Firedoglake Book Salon, talking about my new book “Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.” Please join me from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM Eastern time, for what promises to be an interesting conversation.
Doubt continues to get rave reviews. Here’s Lord Dick Taverne, writing in Nature:
“David Michaels has written a powerful, thorough indictment of the way big business has ignored, suppressed or distorted vital scientific evidence to the detriment of the public’s health. Doubt Is Their Product catalogues numerous corporate misdemeanours, especially in the United States, from the criminal neglect of the dangerous nature of asbestos and the lies told by the tobacco industry, to the suppression of adverse findings of deaths caused by the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx and the increased risk of suicide among teenagers taking selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors for depression. The book concludes with a list of prescriptions for securing better regulation and greater protection for the public, mainly through increased public disclosure of vested interests.”
The Weinberg Group is one of the product defense firms I write about in my new book “Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.” These firms help polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products avoid regulation – only now the Weinberg Group is not a product defense firm, it’s transformed itself into a “product support” firm.
My book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (Oxford University Press, 2008 ) will be officially released May 1st (though it’s available now through Amazon and Powell’s), and I’ll be writing and speaking more about it over the next several weeks. The book reports on the way scientists working for “product defense” consulting firms manufacture uncertainty in order to help polluters and producers of dangerous products avoid or delay public health and environmental regulation.
I’m fortunate that Doubt is Their Product has already been reviewed by two journalists who do an excellent job describing the problems that decades of manufactured uncertainty have created for today’s health and environmental advocates. The reviews by Chris Mooney at The American Prospect and Arthur Allen at The Washington Independent are both worth reading, whether or not you’re seeking book-purchasing guidance.
In Doubt, I recount how the strategy of manufacturing uncertainty was pioneered by the tobacco industry. Clearly successful, it has been adopted by the asbestos, beryllium, chromium, and pesticide industries, among others, and it is the strategy used by global warming deniers. There are few industries that haven’t tried it - Andrew Dressler at Grist has a new piece on how the Indoor Tanning Association is trying to convince the public that “there is actually no evidence linking sun exposure with cancer.” (I talk about that in my book, too.)
Challenging the science behind any proposed environmental regulations has become standard operating procedure. Doubt is Their Product describes how polluters have not only delayed action on specific hazards, but, with the help of the Bush Administration, they have constructed barriers to make it harder for lawmakers, government agencies, and courts to respond to future threats.
Diacetyl – the butter-flavoring chemical linked to severe lung disease in food and flavoring workers – hasn’t been in the news much recently. It got a lot of attention in September, when we drew attention to the case of a Colorado man who appeared to have developed bronciolitis obliterans from eating microwave popcorn twice a day for several years. (More details here.) Major popcorn manufacturers announced that they would be removing diacetyl from their microwave popcorn lines, and OSHA put out a press release saying it was initiating rulemaking on the chemical.
I haven’t written about diacetyl in a while but there are some new developments worth reporting.
On Monday February 4th, I’ll be doing the Public Health Reports’ monthly webcast, discussing the recent article Celeste Monforton and I wrote entitled Beryllium’s “Public Relations Problem”: Protecting Workers When There is No Safe Exposure Level. Here’s some background:
In a 1947 report, entitled Public Relations Problems in Connection with Occupational Diseases in the Beryllium Industry, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) asserted that the ability of the US government to produce nuclear weapons was threatened by the high incidence of severe health effects associated with exposure to beryllium, a metal vital to weapons production. In response, the AEC established a workplace exposure limit that dramatically reduced beryllium disease incidence. This limit is known as the “taxicab standard” since it was determined by two AEC scientists working in the back seat of a taxi on their way to a meeting.
Read the rest of this entry »
Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), a coal industry “astroturf” organization, is sponsoring the Republican presidential debate tonight and Democratic debate tomorrow night, both in California and hosted by CNN. Think Progress has noticed that ABEC has sponsored three previous debates on CNN, and, in each one, there have been no questions about global warming. That’s gotta be some kind of coincidence, right?
Catch Devra Davis on BookTV this weekend, talking about her terrific book The Secret History of the War on Cancer. More details, including broadcast times, are here.
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Annys Shin of the Washington Post has reported that Dr. Gail Charnley, a well-known corporate product defense expert, is the White House’s leading candidate for the chairmanship of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
We’ve written extensively here about this beleaguered agency. Finally, after the nation watched helplessly at the recall of millions of lead-contaminated toys, President Bush has evidently decided to replace current Chairman Nancy Nord with someone more competent to safeguard the interests of manufacturers of dangerous products.
The Post article lists a few reasons the public might be concerned about a Charnley appointment, including one dispute over a missing conflict of interest disclosure. Curious about Dr. Charnley’s work, I spent a little time on the web reviewing selected aspects of her work, and have turned up what appears to be a new failure to disclose a pretty basic financial conflict. But I’ll return to that after reviewing what the Post has learned:
A quick look at “Chernobyl: Relationship between Number of Missing Newborn Boys and the Level of Radiation in the Czech Regions” by Miroslav Peterka, Renata Peterková, and Zbyneˇk Likovsky´ in Environmental Health Perspectives.
As a rule, more boys than girls are born. But in November 1986 in the eastern regions of the Czech Republic, the reverse was true – more girls than boys. It appears that radiation exposure released by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in April 1986, brought to earth by rain over the area, increased radiation exposure. Fetuses that were approximately three months old at the time appear to have been effected, resulting in a reduction of newborn boys six months later.
Science bloggers Bora Zivkovic (also known as Coturnix) and Reed Cartwright, assisted by a panel of judges, are putting together an anthology of science blog posts from the past year – and I’m honored to report that my post “Popcorn Lung Coming to Your Kitchen? The FDA Doesn’t Want to Know” is included.
Open Laboratory 2007, like the 2006 edition before it, will be published by Lulu.com and soon available for order. You can also read all of the blog posts by clicking on the links at A Blog Around the Clock. It’s fascinating collection, sure to amuse as well as to educate. Here are some of the posts that Pump Handle readers might find particularly interesting:
There are two terrific book events scheduled for Monday January 7th, here in Washington DC. Les Leopold, author of The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi, will be in town to talk about Tony’s life and legacy.
Les’ book is a great read, an inspiring and illuminating account of Tony’s lifetime organizing for worker rights and safe factories. Here’s an excerpt, to give you a sense of the book’s content.
At noon on Monday January 7th, Les and several distinguished speakers from the House of Labor will be speaking at noon in the Gompers Room at AFL-CIO headquarters, 815 16th St. NW. Later that evening, there will be a book party at Busboys and Poets Cafe (2021 14th St. NW) starting at 6:30 PM.
More than any other individual, Tony is responsible for inspiring and building the current occupational safety and health movement. These events will be a fine an opportunity to catch up on old and new friends, and celebrate Tony’s life and work.
The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi is one of the Pump Handle’s top book recommendations this year (here’s an excerpt, to whet your appetite). On Monday January 7th, the book’s author, Les Leopold of the Labor Institute, will be coming to Washington to read from it and sign copies. There are two events scheduled that day. The first, featuring Les and a number of distinguished speakers, will be held at noon in the Gompers Room at AFL-CIO headquarters, 815 16th St. NW. That evening, there will be a book party at Busboys and Poets Cafe (2021 14th St. NW) starting at 6:30 PM.
More than any other individual, Tony is responsible for inspiring and building the current occupational safety and health movement. These events will be a fine an opportunity to catch up on old and new friends, and celebrate Tony’s life and work. See you there.
The journal Epidemiology has just published new evidence that drinking hexavalent chromium — also called chromium 6 — increases risk of stomach cancer. The study is important for public health purposes, since many drinking water sources are chromium contaminated (including the water in the community in the movie Erin Brockovich).
This new study is also the latest piece of a very ugly scandal that illustrates how polluters manufacture doubt to impede regulation. And this scandal is but one of several in which chromium polluters have manipulated epidemiologic studies to sow uncertainty - see our case study on chromium 6 at DefendingScience.org.
Pump Handle readers may recall our reporting on the controversy around a study of stomach cancer in Chinese villages where there were high levels of chromium in the drinking water. After an initial study reported elevated rates of stomach cancer, product defense consultants working for US chromium polluters reanalyzed the study, and the increased risk disappeared. The consultants re-analyzed the data and arranged for it to be published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM) without their names on it, hiding any connection to the product defense firm (Chemrisk) or the polluters who paid for the re-analysis. After the controversy was reported in the Wall Street Journal, the editor of JOEM retracted the study.
Tomorrow, the House Small Business Committee will convene a hearing based on a study that is so flawed it could be used to teach students how not to do survey research.
Last month, we wrote about this “survey,” conducted by the US Chamber of Commerce, purporting to show that compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley rules would be enormously burdensome to small business. It is difficult to believe anyone who reads the actual study would reach the same conclusion. The Chamber tried to identify small businesses that might be impacted by the law and asked almost 5,000 to complete a simple on-line survey asking questions that encouraged the answers the Chamber wanted. Only 177 (3.6%) of the businesses surveyed bothered to respond.
A quick look at two papers and an editorial on the effects on lung function of exposure to levels of air pollution below current EPA standards, published in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Epidemiologic studies of the health effects of air pollution keep improving, with scientists designing studies able to measure small but important effects of relatively low levels of exposure. There are implications for policy: our pollution current standards are not sufficiently protective, especially for individuals who already have lung disease or are otherwise more sensitive or susceptible to environmental exposures.
A quick look at “Predictors of Psychostimulant Use by Long-Distance Truck Drivers” by Ann Williamson in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
An Australian study finds that paying truck drivers by the job (instead of by the hour or week) leads to increased driver use of amphetamines and other stimulants, which is associated with increased risk for highway crashes.
Elizabeth Williamson of the Washington Post has written powerful article on the failure of the regulatory system to ensure that amusement park “thrill” rides don’t kill or injure customers, primarily teenagers and children. She provides grisly detail on a topic we’ve talked about here before: the inability and/or unwillingness of the Consumer Product Safety Commission to protect the public.
After describing one series of identical accidents that occurred several times on the same ride, Williamson notes
The CPSC has no employee whose full-time job is to ensure the safety of such rides. The agency’s 90 field investigators — who oversee 15,000 products, work from their homes and live mostly on the East Coast — are so overstretched that they frequently arrive at carnival accident scenes after rides have been dismantled.
As a result, critics say, supermarket shopping carts feature a more standardized child-restraint system than do amusement rides, which can travel as fast as 100 mph and, according to federal estimates, cause an average of four deaths and thousands of injuries every year.
A quick look at Blood Lead Concentrations Less than 10 Micrograms per Deciliter and Child Intelligence at 6 Years of Age by Todd A. Jusko, Charles R. Henderson, Jr., Bruce P. Lanphear et al., published online in Environmental Health Perspectives.
The current CDC definition of elevated blood lead in a child is 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood (written as 10 μg/dL). However, there is increasingly compelling evidence that lower blood lead levels are associated with decreased performance on intelligence testing. At the same time, it has just been reported that the EPA has just rejected the advice of scientific staff and an advisory committee to strengthen its environmental lead exposure standard, because of the deleterious effects of low level lead exposure. The study is still more evidence that lead remains a threat to children, even at levels previously thought to be safe, and that a stronger standard is needed.
Read the rest of this entry »
As we approach the Bush Administration’s final year, the gap between science and policy grows wider each day. Advances in science that could be used for the public good are rarely incorporated into public policy; some federal agencies seem almost unaware that the scientific literature exists and new studies are being published all the time.
A new wind is coming, though. The noteworthy failures of the FDA, EPA, OSHA, MSHA , CPSC, and other federal agencies that we’ve been chronicling here at the Pump Handle have led to increased demands for a government that uses science to protect the public.
To contribute to this effort, we are starting a new feature, Journal Scan, to report on articles in the scientific literature that inform, or should inform, public policy aimed at protecting our health and environment. In a few short paragraphs, we will try to summarize important scientific papers in non-technical language and discuss their policy implications.
We hope you, our readers, will contribute to this occasional feature. Please add not just your comments but send us full entries, as you see scientific papers which need to be part of the policy discourse.
Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, has a powerful op ed in today’s New York Times on Burger King’s role in ensuring that migrant farm workers receive sub-minimum wages.
The migrant farm workers who harvest tomatoes in South Florida have one of the nation’s most backbreaking jobs. For 10 to 12 hours a day, they pick tomatoes by hand, earning a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. During a typical day each migrant picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. For their efforts, this holiday season many of them are about to get a 40 percent pay cut.
Do you still believe the fairy tale that payments by a product’s manufacturer to a scientist (even the most well-meaning, independent-thinking scientist) do not inevitably influence that scientist’s interpretation of the technical data on product’s risks and benefits? If so, this will change your mind.
A few weeks ago, we wrote about an exciting new book, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi by Les Leopold (Chelsea Green 2007). The following is an excerpt from the book, reprinted here with permission of the publisher. For more information, go to www.chelseagreen.com, where you can also watch a short film honoring Tony Mazzocchi.
Mazzocchi’s antiwar organizing did not distract him from his quest for national health and safety legislation.
The workers who had been drawn to Mazzocchi’s road shows across the country had provided poignant congressional testimony in support of the new legislation.
“Our contribution was making the issue public through the conferences we had” and through bringing in workers to testify before Congress, said Mazzocchi. “I said to the labor lobbyists: ‘You guys know Capitol Hill, but in the absence of public pressure, you’re not gonna get anywhere.’”
Somehow, I missed Devra Davis’ powerful essay Off Target in the War on Cancer which appeared in the Washington Post last week. Davis, a well known environmental epidemiologist, is the author of the just published The Secret History of the War on Cancer. In the Post essay, she makes a very convincing case that there is much we can do to reduce cancer risk. While we don’t know all the answers, from a regulatory point-of-view its better to be safe than sorry:
Consider the icon of American cancer, the cyclist Lance Armstrong. He’s hardly alone as an inspiring younger survivor. Of the 10 million American cancer survivors who are alive five years after their diagnosis, about one in 10 is younger than 40. Could exposure to radiation and obesity-promoting chemicals help explain why, according to a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the rates of the testicular cancer that Armstrong developed nearly doubled in most industrialized countries in the past three decades? Should we wait to find out?
Read the rest of this entry »
Over at The Intersection, Chris Mooney has a teaser about his terrific article “An Inconvenient Assessment,” chronicling the effort by the Bush administration, in cahoots with ExxonMobil-funded climate change deniers, to undercut a vitally important climate change report. The longer article appears in this month’s issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
While the report in question, officially known as Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, was issued in 2000, it was packed with information that could have informed a national discussion on the potential impacts of climate change over the last seven years. But the report was besieged by climate change deniers and disowned by the federal government.
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I had thought that with the Democrats takeover of Congress, we’d be done with Congressional hearings convened so anti-regulatory groups like the US Chamber of Commerce would have a platform to present unscientific studies that purport to show the enormous damage done by federal regulatory policy. Sadly, I was wrong.
Last week, the Chamber released the results of a “survey” of the costs to small business of compliance with the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002, known widely as Sarbanes-Oxley or SOX. The Chamber tried to find small businesses that might be impacted by the law and asked 5,000 to complete a simple on-line survey asking questions that encouraged the answers the Chamber wanted. But only 177 (3.6%) of the 5,000 businesses surveyed bothered to respond.
Coming from the Chamber of Commerce, meaningless surveys are no surprise. What’s shocking is that the House Small Business Committee, chaired by Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), is holding a hearing on Wednesday, November 14th, to tout the survey’s results.
The news is out that Merck has agreed to settle 27,000 Vioxx lawsuits for $4.85 billion. Plaintiffs who claim they or their family members suffered injury or died after taking the anti-inflammatory drug will, on average, receive just over $100,000 before legal fees and expenses, reports the New York Times’ Alex Berenson.
The Vioxx debacle is an example of how not to interpret clinical trials data. Even before the FDA approved the drug, there was extensive evidence that taking Vioxx increased the risk of a cardiovascular event. Yet the FDA approved it and an estimated 20 million Americans took the drug. As a result, between 88,000 and 140,000 people suffered heart attacks, according to an estimate by FDA scientists.
What went wrong? How did the drug get through the FDA approval system? The documents that served as the foundation for the Vioxx litigation could help the medical community understand what happened.
Before a judge signs off on the settlement, I’d like to see her press Merck and the plaintiff attorneys to release to the public all the relevant documents.
The long awaited EPA study of chemicals emitted when microwave popcorn is popped has just been published. Its results are not surprising: popping microwave butter flavor popcorn releases a sizable number of chemicals into the air, although not necessarily in large amounts. These chemicals include diacetyl, the primary chemical implicated in the bronchiolitis obliterans (“popcorn lung”) cases seen in popcorn and flavor factories.
The study does not attempt to measure or model the exposure consumers get when they pop microwave popcorn at home. Rather, it simply measures what chemicals are emitted when you pop the stuff, and when you open the bags.
Why did the EPA insist on not sharing these results with anyone (including OSHA) before publication?
Yesterday, at the American Public Health Association annual meeting, I picked up a copy of Les Leopold’s new biography The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi. Tony is the towering figure in the US occupational safety and health movement. Until his death in 2002, Tony did more than anyone else in the country to shape the way unions and public health professionals work independently and together to prevent occupational injury and illness.
The book is a great read. It kept me up late last night fascinated and exhilarated, inside the passage of the OSHAct, the death of Karen Silkwood and other momentous events. I’ll try to get permission to excerpt parts of the book for The Pump Handle, but if you are involved in occupational health and safety and you don’t know the Tony Mazzocchi story, don’t wait. Buy this book now.
Devra Davis’s The Secret History of the War on Cancer is getting some wonderful, well-deserved reviews. Davis is a well-known an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh. Robin Mejia, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, writes
The book is a must-read for those concerned about their own health or that of their loved ones. It’s also fascinating.
Mejia is right - the book is filled with fascinating historical material, linked with a focus on cancer prevention right now. To Davis, this means more than just promoting healthier lifestyles, but addressing the effects of the many chemicals we’re exposed to every day. Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve been following the crescendo of stories illustrating the severe limitations of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (here, here, and here): CPSC lacks the resources to test products adequately, it can’t levy hefty enough fines to deter corporate wrongdoing, and it can announce a recall only through a news release that it negotiates with the company involved .
Now, a bill is moving through the Senate that would boost CPSC funding, increase maximum penalties for violating product-safety laws to $100 million from $1.85 million, protect whistleblowers, and let the understaffed agency hire at least 100 more people. (The Wall Street Journal has more details.) Manufacturers and retailers aren’t happy – and neither is the CPSC acting chair Nancy Nord, reports Stephen Labaton in the New York Times: Read the rest of this entry »
The spin doctors have been hard at work on the EPA’s Superfund Program. The result is that the public and many lawmakers are misinformed about how the program works, along with the continued need for the program.
Last week, Professor Rena Steinzor of the University of Maryland School of Law testified at a Senate oversight hearing examining the Superfund Program. Steinzor described the “five Superfund legends that have little relationship to history or reality:”
Since we broke the story of the first “popcorn lung” case in a popcorn consumer, many new readers have visited The Pump Handle. We’ve been writing about the hazards of diacetyl for years (here and here, for example). If this is your first visit, you might want to know who we are, where our name comes from, and why we are constantly writing about ways the FDA, EPA, OSHA, MSHA, CPSC, and other federal regulatory agencies could better protect our health and environment. Read the rest of this entry »
Just before the House passed legislation last month requiring OSHA to regulate diacetyl, OSHA’s press office went into high gear, announcing the agency was getting to work on just that issue. Two days before the vote, OSHA announced it was initiating rulemaking under section 6(b) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. In other words, it was finally going to start the process of issuing a standard to protect workers exposed to hazardous flavor chemicals. As part of that process, it announced a stakeholder meeting, scheduled for October 17, 2007. (I’ll be attending the meeting, and have prepared a statement for it.)
Occupational exposure to manganese has been in the news lately, with law suits by welders who claim neurological disease caused by manganese exposure. Now two scientists at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute have written a paper in which they argue that current guidelines for safe levels of manganese in drinking water are based on a misinterpretation of a twenty-five year old study, and that newer evidence suggests that at least for infants and other vulnerable populations, the current guideline values are not adequately protective.
In a paper available online at Environmental Health Perspectives, Karin Ljung and Marie Vahter trace back the foundation for the World Health Organization’s (and the EPA’s) recommendation for manganese in drinking water to a single study from 1982 that was misinterpreted in calculating a No Observed Adverse Effect Level. That mistake, combined with several new studies showing neurological effects in children, lead the authors to conclude that it’s time to re-evaluate the guideline data.
Are the political appointees who run OSHA delusional or merely mendacious? In her column in today’s Washington Post, Cindy Skrzycki reviews the efforts by members of Congress to require OSHA to issue standards protecting workers from diacetyl, the artificial butter flavor chemical that causes irreversible lung disease. One statement jumped out:
“I would characterize us as proactive,” said Jonathan Snare, acting solicitor at the Labor Department, which oversees OSHA.
The facts show this is simply false. The statement is so ludicrous that it should be an embarrassment even to the political appointees who run the agency. After OSHA was notified by the Missouri Department of Health of multiple cases of bronchiolitis obliterans among workers at a microwave popcorn plant, an OSHA inspector visited the plant and announced there was nothing he could do. OSHA did not conduct an inspection of another microwave popcorn or flavor factory for more than five years.
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) explaining his opposition to H.R. 2693, the Popcorn Workers Lung Disease Prevention Act, which would require OSHA to protect workers from breathing toxic chemicals used in artificial butter flavor:
“If there’s something wrong with popcorn, how did Orville Redenbacher live so long?”
The recent recalls of dangerous toys and defective cribs have received a great deal of press attention, but closer analysis reveals that consumer product recalls are generally ineffective at getting most defective products out of consumers’ homes.
By David Michaels
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By a vote of 260 to 154, the US House of Representatives has passed H.R. 2693, the Popcorn Workers Lung Disease Prevention Act. This was not a pure party line vote - over the objections of the White House and the Chamber of Congress, 47 Republicans voted with the majority, and only 8 Democrats opposed the resolution. The vote demonstrates the widespread recognition that OSHA has failed to protect workers and Congress needs to step in to force the agency to do its job.
Our thanks go out to Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, Workforce Protections Subcommittee Chairman Lynn Woolsey, and the terrific Education and Labor Committee staff.
Please tell your Senators that the Senate needs to pass similar legislation. The Senate phone number is 202.224.3121.
Here’s how they voted: Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
Days before the House will vote on legislation to force OSHA to regulate diacetyl (the artificial butter flavor chemical that causes bronchiolitis obliterans), the agency has apparently decided that perhaps it is finally time to begin the rulemaking process for this substance. Yesterday, fourteen months after we petitioned OSHA for an emergency standard, the agency has called for a stakeholder meeting to discuss how it might address the problem.
Although OSHA’s press release claims that the agency is “initiating rule-making,” if you read the small print, it is clear that OSHA is simply saying it will start collecting information. Given its timing, it is apparent that this is an attempt to preempt legislation that would compel OSHA to issue a standard protecting workers. There is no commitment to anything beyond a single meeting.
We welcome OSHA’s effort to collect information; after all, a group of public health and union activists met with OSHA staff last December and told them to do exactly this.
But Members of Congress should not be fooled. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
Later this week, the House of Representatives will vote on H.R. 2693 — The Popcorn Workers Lung Disease Prevention Act. Now is the moment to let your Member of Congress know how important it is for them to support the legislation.
Popcorn Workers Lung is a case study in regulatory failure. As we’ve written many times here, OSHA has ignored this deadly hazard for far too long. At least three workers have died and dozens more have developed irreversible lung disease as a result of exposure to diacetyl.
By David Michaels
Most media coverage of Friday’s announcement by the Consumer Products Safety Commission and a crib manufacturer that one million cribs were being recalled missed the story behind the story. Stung by an avalanche of bad publicity on its failure to protect children from toys with lead paint or dangerous magnets, the CPSC appeared to be getting ahead of the problem, taking action after the death of (only) two infants.
In fact, the CPSC had known about the risk of infant suffocation posed by these cribs for many months, and the Chicago Tribune had been investigating the agency’s unwillingness to do anything about it. Although the CPSC is denying it (see below), it appears that the agency acted only when it looked like it would be embarrassed in the press yet again.
By David Michaels
Congratulations to Ron Melnick! Ron is a senior toxicologist and director of special programs in the Environmental Toxicology Program at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Since coming to NIEHS as a young toxicologist 36+ years ago, Ron has produced made a huge contribution to our understanding of the health effects of chemical exposures.
Beyond this, Ron has worked tirelessly to ensure that NIEHS science is done in a way that it can be used in developing public health policy, and he has worked equally hard to ensure that policy makers use the best science in setting policy.
We’re congratulating Ron because the American Public Health Association has just announced that he is the winner of the 2007 David P. Rall Award for Advocacy in Public Health “for his outstanding contributions to public health through science-based advocacy.” Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
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The lead story in today’s New York Times reports something we’ve been writing about here at the Pump Handle for quite some time (here and here and here, for example): responsible corporations recognize the need for public health and environmental regulation.
In industry and after industry, corporations and trade associations are asking the Bush Administration for regulation. In some of these cases industry has realized that voluntary regulation has failed, and without mandatory regulation, consumers will reject their product. But some of the push for federal regulation is to pre-empt more stringent state or local regulation, or eliminate law suits against polluters or manufacturers of dangerous products. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
It is time for Congress to enlist the nation’s science and policy experts to help develop a federal workers’ compensation program for 9/11 rescue, recovery, and cleanup workers. The inadequacy of state worker programs led Congress to legislate special compensation programs for uranium miners, and civilian workers in nuclear weapons facilities. We did not require the families of those killed in the terrorist attacks to rely on state workers’ compensation programs. The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund (pdf) provided more than $7 billion to families of the victims. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
In a few short months, the country has awakened to several potential hazards associated with Chinese toys. Mattel and other manufacturers have already recalled millions of toys, some for lead paint and others because they contained magnets that, if swallowed, could cause severe injuries. Now, Louise Story of New York Times reports that the Walt Disney Company will conduct lead tests on 65,000 toys and other children’s products made by 2,000 companies that license Disney characters.
Things have gotten so bad that toy manufacturers are actually asking for federal regulation. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
The popcorn festival has just ended in Marion, Ohio (nickname: “popcorn capital of the world”), attended by more than 100,000 revelers. The Orville Redenbacher Parade is one of the festivals’ highlights. Redenbacher, who developed the hybrid corn strain that pops so uniformly, was actually from Indiana, but ConAgra Foods manufactures the best selling microwave popcorn brand “Orville Redenbacher’s” (along with Act II brand) at its factory in Marion.
I didn’t get to the festival, but you can be sure that there was a lot of talk about the first reported case of “popcorn lung” in a consumer, and that ConAgra and other major microwave popcorn manufacturers have decided to eliminate the chemical from their product. I’m sure the town hopes this will mean no more cases of “popcorn lung” there. According to Sabrina Eaton at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, at least 50 workers at the Marion and other Ohio plants have sued flavor manufacturers after developing lung disease they allege to be caused by diacetyl, the primary component of artificial butter flavor.
Now, with disease threatening not just workers but popcorn consumers, the country is awakening to the potential risks of exposure to airborne diacetyl. Exactly one year ago — Sept 8th 2006 — we formally requested the FDA to remove diacetyl from the list of “Generally Recognized As Safe” food additives. The FDA pretty much ignored us. Now, the pressure is rising for the government to take action to protect consumers. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
Over a year ago, unions petitioned the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to adopt an emergency temporary standard for diacetyl (PDF). More than 40 leading occupational health physicians and scientists sent a supporting letter (PDF) to Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao summarizing the strong scientific evidence linking exposure to the artificial butter flavoring chemical diacetyl to the lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans. In the more than 13 months during which OSHA has failed to act on this urgent request, further information been published in the peer-reviewed literature linking occupational diacetyl exposure to severe lung disease.
The country is now acutely aware of the hazards of breathing diacetyl, thanks to the case of “popcorn lung” in a popcorn consumer, first reported here at The Pump Handle earlier this week. The airborne diacetyl levels in the home of Wayne Watson, the Colorado furniture salesman with the disease, were comparable to those found in locations in microwave popcorn factories where sick workers had been employed. This led almost immediately to the major popcorn manufacturers pledging to eliminate diacetyl from their artificial butter recipes.
Today, unions and scientists have sent another letter to Secretary Chao to bring the Department of Labor’s attention to the new developments and renew their call for emergency action to protect workers.
What’s changed since the unions petitioned OSHA on diacetyl? Employers in the flavor industry now support an OSHA standard as well. Now, it’s even clearer than before that responsible employers and trade groups need OSHA’s help, and the agency’s continuing inaction only allows irresponsible companies who care little about health and safety to expose their employees to diacetyl. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
Earlier this week, we broke the story of the first case of “popcorn lung” occurring in person whose exposure to diacetyl was not workplace-related. Now more details are coming out, including an interview with Wayne Watson, the Colorado furniture salesman with disease. In today’s AP article, P. Solomon Banda writes that
“When Dr. Rose told me, she said: `Mr. Watson, there is a chemical in butter flavored microwave popcorn called diacetyl and it has been known to cause lung disease of this nature, with your symptoms.’ I went, `friggin unbelievable.’”
In many ways, Mr. Watson was very fortunate. By luck, he had been referred to Dr. Cecile Rose, chief occupational and environmental health physician at National Jewish Medical and Research Center. Dr. Rose is one of perhaps a dozen or two physicians in the entire country who have seen cases of popcorn lung. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
Updated Below
For the past several years, news articles and Congressional hearings have reported on a deadly, irreversible lung disease – bronchiolitis obliterans – that is caused by workers’ exposure to food flavoring chemicals, and more specifically by exposure to a butter-flavoring chemical called diacetyl. So far, attention has focused on worker exposure, rather than on possible health problems affecting consumers who pop popcorn in their microwave ovens. That focus may be changing, however, with a warning sent by one of the country’s leading lung disease experts.
The CDC, FDA, OSHA, EPA – federal agencies charged with protecting public health – each received a letter in July alerting them to the possible serious respiratory hazard to consumers who breathe in fumes from their artificially butter-flavored microwave popcorn. The warning should have resulted in some action by these agencies, but instead, they’ve done virtually nothing.
It appears that the Bush Administration’s efforts to destroy the regulatory system are succeeding; the agencies seem unable to mount a response to information that a well-functioning regulatory system would immediately pursue. The agencies aren’t even trying to connect the dots.
In July, Dr. Cecile Rose, the chief occupational and environmental medicine physician at National Jewish Medical and Research Center, the most prestigious lung disease hospital in the country, wrote to the FDA, CDC, EPA and OSHA, informing the agencies of a patient she had recently identified
“with significant lung disease whose clinical findings are similar to those described in affected workers, but whose only inhalational exposure is as a heavy, daily consumer of butter flavored microwave popcorn.”
This letter is a red flag, suggesting that exposure to food flavor chemicals is not just killing workers, but may also be causing disease in people exposed to food flavor chemicals in their kitchens. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
The media has been buzzing (see here and here and here) about the announcement by the Pop Weaver Company that they will soon be marketing a butter flavored microwave popcorn that doesn’t use diacetyl in the butter flavor. As readers of this blog know, diacetyl (a component of artificial butter flavor) has been implicated in dozens of cases of terrible lung disease in workers who manufacture, mix and apply flavorings. (We’d like to know if the chemicals that have replaced diacetyl are safe – but that will be the subject of a later post).
We still don’t know if exposure to diacetyl at home is dangerous. A year ago, we asked the EPA to release the results of a study of the airborne materials that are released when bags of microwaved popcorn are opened, but the agency has refused, although the agency acknowledged it has given the results to the popcorn industry. Now, it appears that the still secret findings helped convince Pop Weaver to drop diacetyl.