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Bioscience Resource Project News and Views
How an Oregon activist’s barn produced the ‘Poison Papers’ that aids in a lawsuit against Monsanto
St. Louis Public Radio has published a new article about The Poison Papers and Carol Van Strum. Van Strum is an activist who collected the documents during her past 40 years involved in lawsuits against chemical companies and the federal government. Making the Poison Papers available to the public on DocumentCloud is a project of The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy.
“It began in the early 1970s, when Van Strum’s family saw an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle and moved to a farm in the Siuslaw National Forest.
Soon after, she said, they were sprayed by a helicopter with 2,4,5-T — a component of Agent Orange — that was meant to treat a timber crop on nearby public land.
She banded together with neighbors, sued and won an injunction to stop the spraying.”
The hope is that the newly digitized Poison Papers will aid in current efforts to protect the public from toxic exposure.
“Bill Sherman, assistant attorney general for the state of Washington, said he was reviewing the new documents and expected they would be involved in the state’s lawsuit against Monsanto.
‘They confirm that Monsanto was aware of the harms that their PCBs were causing and continued to sell them without telling the public or their customers,” Sherman said of the documents.’”
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/
Exposing the Toxic Secrets of Corporations and Regulators
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