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- Using “Junk Science” to Justify Polluters
- Industry-sponsored “toxicity” studies
The silence of NCI with regard to primary
prevention is in large measure responsible for the continued
denial of the public’s
fundamental Right-to-Know of avoidable carcinogenic exposures,
and for the faulty science on the basis of which regulatory decisions
have become subverted by special interests. A battery of industry-funded
and promoted think tanks, notably the Cato, Hudson, and International
Life Sciences Institute, support industries responsible for avoidable
carcinogenic exposures. They claim that particular carcinogens
do not pose significant hazards. Additionally responsible are indentured
academics and academic think tanks, notably the Harvard Center
for Risk Analysis, whose past Director, Dr. John Graham, is now
the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
of the Office of Management and Budget. These claims are based
on a complex of "risk management" models, "risk
benefit analysis", and highly questionable "risk assessment" of
individual carcinogens that ignore additive or possibly synergistic
interactions with other carcinogenic exposures. These claims are
also based on spurious challenges to the human relevance of rodent
carcinogenicity test data, and on the insistence on the commonality
of their mechanisms of action before such data can be extrapolated
to humans. Apart from longstanding contrary evidence, the December
2002 Mouse Genome Project findings are strongly supportive of the
human relevance of data from laboratory tests in mice (p. 17).
Guidelines developed by Graham, and incorporated in the December
2000 "Data Quality Act," effectively challenge and sharply
limit the regulation of carcinogens, as well as a wide range of
other public health hazards.
An equally ominous development is the growing
influence of industry-sponsored journals, notably Regulatory
Toxicology and Pharmacology (RTP),
published by the prestigious and reputable Elsevier/Academic Press.
RTP is owned by the powerful industry-sponsored International Society
of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology (ISRTP), sponsored by
major petrochemical and pharmaceutical companies and their trade
associations. Not surprisingly, RTP’s editorial board is
dominated by industry-affiliated lawyers and scientists, including
former senior NCI staffers. RTP’s “peer-reviewed” publications
are biased, and trivialize or dismiss the scientific evidence on
the causal relation between avoidable exposures to industrial carcinogens
and the escalating incidence of cancer. They also emphasize policies
based on “risk management” rather than risk prevention.
NCI’s silence has become even more serious since the current
Administration has appointed prominent industry consultants to
key federal advisory committees dealing with environmental health,
testing synthetic chemicals, and evaluating exposures to industrial
carcinogens (35). Illustrative is the August 2002 appointment of
Dr. Roger McLellan to a new 16-member National Center for Environmental
Health Committee. McLellan, past Director of the Chemical Industry
Institute for Toxicology, has made a career trivializing evidence
for the carcinogenicity of proven carcinogens, including more recently
diesel exhaust. Further illustrative is the broad restructuring,
by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy Thompson, of
Federal scientific and regulatory advisory committees, such as
those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP).
Thompson has eliminated those committee members failing the Administration’s
political litmus test and low priority for environmental concerns,
and replaced them with handpicked candidates closely associated
with industry stakeholders, whose goal is “regulatory paralysis--rather
than the application of honest balanced science” (35). More
ominous is the unprecedented political interference with the National
Institutes of Health peer-review scientific study sections, which
are also advisory committees under Federal law, by stacking them
with members favorable to industry interests. All these concerns
are exacerbated by the well-developed defensive strategies of the
chemical industry, and by its major victories in recent Congressional
races (Appendix IX).
In late October, 2002, Cong. Henry Waxman (D-CA)
and 11 other members of Congress wrote to HHS Secretary Thompson,
expressing strong
concerns about "a pattern of events … suggesting that
scientific decision making is being subverted by ideology and that
scientific information that does not fit the Administration's political
ideology is being suppressed." Thompson's reply was unresponsive.
More surprisingly, a recent publication has
documented evidence that, since 1994, strong direct and indirect
corporate pressures,
conflicts of interest and procedural non-transparency have seriously
jeopardized the independence and integrity of the World Health
Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)
programs for the evaluation of human carcinogenic risks. "Evidence
for carcinogenicity provided by results of experimental bioassays
has been disregarded on the basis of unproven mechanistic hypotheses,
. . .very serious consequences for public health may follow"(36).
Excerpted from Stop
Cancer Before it Starts: How to Win the War on Cancer,
2003 by Samuel S. Epstein M. D.
CONTACT:
Cancer Prevention Coalition
University of Illinois at Chicago
School of Public Health
2121 W. Taylor St., MC 922
Chicago, IL 60612
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