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Bioscience Resource Project News and Views
Monsanto sold banned chemicals for years despite known health risks, archives reveal
“Monsanto continued to produce and sell toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs for eight years after learning that they posed hazards to public health and the environment, according to legal analysis of documents put online in a vast searchable archive.”
The Poison Papers archive has been analyzed by Bill Sherman, the assistant attorney general for the US state of Washington. Washington state and various west coast cities are suing Monsanto for PCB contamination. Sherman is quoted as saying that Poison Paper documents provide “damning evidence” that was previously unknown to the state.
Due to their extreme toxicity to human and environmental health, by 1979 PCBs were banned in many countries.
“Yet a decade earlier, one Monsanto pollution abatement plan in the archive from October 1969, singled out by Sherman, suggests that Monsanto was even then aware of the risks posed by PCB use.”
To learn more about what Monsanto knew and hid about PCB toxicity read the full article “Monsanto sold banned chemicals for years despite known health risks, archives reveal” by Arthur Neslen on The Guardian (10 August 2017) go to: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/09/monsanto-continued-selling-pcbs-for-years-despite-knowing-health-risks-archives-reveal.
The Swamp: Newly Released Monsanto and Government Documents Show Why Toxic Pesticides Stay on the Market
Evaggelos Vallianatos worked at the EPA and knew Adrian Gross, whose letter exposing the fraudulence of 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.”
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
Radio Interview: Newly Released Documents Shed Light on Years of Environmental Lies
Todd Zwillich of WNYC interviews Dr Jonathan Latham on the meaning of the Poison Papers
The UK’s Royal Society: a Case Study in How the Health Risks of GMOs Have Been Systematically Misrepresented
Published Monday 14th August, 2017 in Independent Science News: “The UK’s Royal Society: a Case Study in How the Health Risks of GMOs Have Been Systematically Misrepresented” was written by Steven Druker (Author of Altered Genes, Twisted Truth)
Synopsis: Eminent scientists and scientific institutions routinely claim that genetically modified foods are safe. Through the perceived authority of their pronouncements, most government officials and members of the media have believed them. But when the arguments these scientists employ to support their claims are subjected to scrutiny, it becomes clear that important facts have invariably been misrepresented — either deliberately or through substantial negligence.
Read the full article “The UK’s Royal Society: a Case Study in How the Health Risks of GMOs Have Been Systematically Misrepresented” at: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-uks-royal-society-how-the-health-risks-of-gmos-have-been-systematically-misrepresented/
‘Poison Papers’ Snapshot: HOJO Transcript Illustrates EPA Collusion With Chemical Industry
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/
100,000 Pages of Chemical Industry Secrets Gathered Dust in an Oregon Barn for Decades — Until Now
The Poison Papers, a joint project of the Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has been written up in The Intercept.
“100,000 Pages of Chemical Industry Secrets Gathered Dust in an Oregon Barn for Decades — Until Now” by Sharon Lerner was published yesterday, to coincide with the launch of The Poison Papers.
Excerpt:
“For decades, some of the dirtiest, darkest secrets of the chemical industry have been kept in Carol Van Strum’s barn. Creaky, damp, and prowled by the occasional black bear, the listing, 80-year-old structure in rural Oregon housed more than 100,000 pages of documents obtained through legal discovery in lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the Air Force, and pulp and paper companies, among others.
As of today, those documents and others that have been collected by environmental activists will be publicly available through a project called the Poison Papers. Together, the library contains more than 200,000 pages of information and “lays out a 40-year history of deceit and collusion involving the chemical industry and the regulatory agencies that were supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,” said Peter von Stackelberg, a journalist who along with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project helped put the collection online.”
Read the full article at The Intercept at: https://theintercept.com/2017/07/26/chemical-industry-herbicide-poison-papers/
Read more about the project and access the documents at: https://www.poisonpapers.org/
Exposing the Toxic Secrets of Corporations and Regulators
Independent Science News
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