Bioscience Resource Project News and Views

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)

The UK’s Royal Society: a Case Study in How the Health Risks of GMOs Have Been Systematically Misrepresented

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/

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/

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/

The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy today are releasing a trove of rediscovered and newly digitized chemical industry and regulatory agency documents stretching back to the 1920s. The documents are available at PoisonPapers.org.

Together, the papers show that both industry and regulators understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press. These papers will transform our understanding of the hazards posed by certain chemicals on the market and the fraudulence of some of the regulatory processes relied upon to protect human health and the environment.

“These documents represent a tremendous trove of previously hidden or lost evidence on chemical regulatory activity and chemical safety. What is most striking about these documents is their heavy focus on the activities of regulators. Time and time again regulators went to the extreme lengths of setting up secret committees, deceiving the media and the public, and covering up evidence of human exposure and human harm. These secret activities extended and increased human exposure to chemicals they knew to be toxic,” said Dr. Jonathan Latham, Executive Director of the Bioscience Resource Project. read more…

Published today (Monday, 26th June) by Independent Science News, “Illegal GE Bacteria Detected in An Animal Feed Supplement,” written by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

Synopsis: Genetically engineered (GE) bacteria have been found in riboflavin vitamin supplements intended for animal feed use, according to newly published EU tests. Contamination of any supplements with GE bacteria is illegal in the European Union. Through culturing and DNA sequencing, EU biosafety agencies were able to show that this illegal GE strain was itself a deliberate or inadvertent contaminant since it did not correspond to any strains that the manufacturer claimed to be using.

The findings, just published in the journal Food Chemistry, were made by regulators from Germany and Italy who were sampling Chinese imports.

Read the full news story at: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/illegal-ge-bacteria-detected-in-animal-supplement/

Reference: