Published today, Tuesday, Nov 14th, in Independent Science News, the English translation of “Years Before Vietnam, the Chemical Industry Knew About Dioxins” was first published in German by Petra Sorge in BuzzFeed.
Synopsis: Decades before the herbicide 2,4,5-T was pulled from the US market for containing dioxins, the global chemical giants Dow, BASF, Monsanto, and others, had extensive discussions amongst themselves of whether to sell dioxin-contaminated chemicals. These discussions ranged from chemical analysis of each other’s products to comments on their safety and whether to inform governments that their products contained contaminants of “extraordinary danger”.
This article is a translation from the German. The internal discussions reported in it are now available to the public for the first time thanks to The Poison Papers Project (www.poisonpapers.org). Released in July 2017, by The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy, the Poison Papers represent 3.5 tons, over 20,000 documents, showing unprecedented concealment by industry and regulators of chemical hazards stretching back to the 1920s. Most of these documents were obtained and preserved by Carol Van Strum, an Oregon mother and activist.
