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“Poison Papers” Documents Now at UCSF Industry Documents Library
Thousands of previously internal industry documents called the “Poison Papers” are now freely available for public review and research in University of California, San Francisco’s Industry Documents Library (IDL).
The “Poison Papers” include approximately 5,000 digitized copies of materials gathered primarily by Carol Van Strum, who reportedly collected over 100,000 documents from her battles with Dow, Monsanto, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Forestry Service, and others over PCBs, dioxin, and the aerial spraying of herbicide 2,4,5-T in the forest where she lived. The chemical dioxin, a serious pollutant of chemical and pulp and paper manufacturing, was a contaminant in Agent Orange, which the U.S. military sprayed in Vietnam and was linked to serious health problems, including birth defects.
“I collected these papers over decades and am so thrilled that they will be freely accessible to activists, lawyers, community groups, and anyone who is working to challenge the chemical industry’s poisoning of people and our homes,” said Van Strum who gathered and stored the papers over a 40-year period. Additional documents were gathered by journalists Peter von Stackelberg and Eric Coppolino, and environmentalist Diane Hebert, who helped to preserve the documents and make them available to the public.
What did companies know and when did they know it?
PRHE helped to secure the collection for inclusion in the IDL to provide free public access to anyone who is interested in investigating chemical industry behavior or corporate cover ups.
“One of the best ways to hold industry accountable is transparency and I urge policymakers to review these papers to inform systemic changes so that we stop poisoning people first and asking questions later,” said Tracey J. Woodruff, PhD, MPH, professor and director of PRHE, the new Center to End Corporate Harm at UCSF, and co-author of “The Devil They Knew,” an analysis of internal industry documents donated by attorney Rob Billot from his litigation against 3M and Dupont, which hid the health harms of PFAS chemicals for decades.
Growing Industry Documents Collections
The “Poison Papers” documents add to the UCSF Industry Documents Library, established in 2002 with the groundbreaking Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, which has fostered scientific and public health discoveries shaping tobacco policy in the U.S. and around the world. The Tobacco collection was followed by archives of documents from other industries including chemical, opioid and other drugs, fossil fuels, and food. All collections have document-level indexing and are cross-searchable, enabling researchers to identify common patterns and links between industries and to study their effects on public health.
“Public archives promote transparency and accountability,” said Kate Tasker, MLIS, Director of the UCSF Industry Documents Library. “Adding the ‘Poison Papers’ to our Library preserves these materials in a centralized and fully searchable database to make this information freely and openly available to the public.”
The Bioscience Resource Project, along with the Center for Media and Democracy, the Park Foundation, and the late Rosalind Peterson provided funding to digitize the documents and contributed the digitized copies to the IDL for long-term preservation and public access.
“The Poison Papers are an incredible document collection. They contain unique and compelling proof of high-level malfeasance and coordinated deception by chemical industry multinationals,” said Bioscience Resource Project Executive Director Jonathan Latham, PhD. “But more, some of its most troubling documents show deep complicity on the part of government regulators, including the EPA and other government agencies. In this they make a spectacular but also unsettling trove.”
Text of this post comes from the website of PRHE (Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment).
Global Civil Society: The Dire Consequences of Secretive Biotech Regulation
In Testimony, Robert Garry Declines To Rule Out That Researchers Brought Ebola To West Africa In 2014
The Future of the Lab Leak Theory
The American Chestnut Foundation Bails as GE Chestnut Develops Growth and Fertility Problems and Fails to Resist the Blight
Synopsis: On December 8th, 2023, The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) revealed it was withdrawing its support for the Darling 58 GE blight-resistant chestnut (D58). The Darling 58 Chestnut is a genetically engineered tree variety being developed by the State University of New York Forestry School (SUNY-ESF). It is intended to resist the chestnut blight fungus that almost eradicated the American Chestnut. Currently, the D58 chestnut is the subject of a petition for deregulation by USDA. TACF is withdrawing its support because the GE trees given to them by SUNY-ESF were not Darling 58 but Darling 54, a different GE event, but primarily because the trees they were given failed to thrive even in the absence of the blight. According to documentation on the TACF website the GE trees were stunted, often chlorotic (yellow), and often developed brown leaves. Moreover, the GE chestnuts did not effectively resist the blight fungus. The onus is now on SUNY-ESF to withdraw the GE Chestnut petition or for USDA to reject it, as the introduction of genetically inferior GE trees represents a danger to surviving non-GE Chestnuts.
Transgenic Rice Once Again Proposed as Solution to Bacterial Blight Outbreaks, This Time in Africa
(GRAIN is a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems).
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT:
Exposing the Toxic Secrets of Corporations and Regulators
Independent Science News
- Global Civil Society: The Dire Consequences of Secretive Biotech Regulation February 25, 2025
- In Testimony, Robert Garry Declines To Rule Out That Researchers Brought Ebola To West Africa In 2014 January 25, 2025
- The Future of the Lab Leak Theory March 17, 2024
- The American Chestnut Foundation Bails as GE Chestnut Develops Growth and Fertility Problems and Fails to Resist the Blight December 15, 2023
- Transgenic Rice Once Again Proposed as Solution to Bacterial Blight Outbreaks, This Time in Africa September 14, 2023
- The Great Raccoon Dog Mystery June 29, 2023
- Children from Gamete-like Cells: Dishing up a Eugenic Future June 19, 2023
- Did West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak of 2014 Have a Lab Origin? October 25, 2022
- Fauci’s COVID Origin SWAT Team Versus the Mojiang Miner Passage Theory May 23, 2022
- Delete, Deny, and Destroy: Chinese and Western Strategies To Erase COVID’s Origin Are Being Exposed By Independent Research April 21, 2022