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TransCanada Asks US to Suspend Keystone Pipeline Application
Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post
Eilperin writes: "The company sponsoring the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline Monday asked the State Department to suspend the review of its federal permit application, a request that could push a final decision on the pipeline beyond President Obama's tenure in office."
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Warrantless Stingray Surveillance Could Soon Be Illegal
Jeff Stone, International Business Times
Stone writes: "It could soon be illegal for police to deploy stingray surveillance technology, which sweeps up cell phone metadata and voice information, without a warrant. A new House of Representatives bill would make any violations to that policy punishable with up to 10 years in prison."
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World's Biggest Tech Companies Get Failing Grade on Data-Privacy Rights
Matthew Broersma, TechWeekEurope UK
Broersma writes: "Major web and telecommunications companies, including Google, Twitter, Facebook, Vodafone and Orange, have scored poorly on a new index intended to track how companies protect users' privacy and freedom of expression."
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Paul Ryan Won't Work With Obama on Immigration
Al Jazeera America
Excerpt: "The newly elected leader of the Republican-controlled House said in several interviews Sunday that he will not work with Obama saying he went around Congress with an executive order announced last November but put on hold by the courts, that would shield millions of people from deportation."
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Feds Make Watershed Decision for Transgender Rights Over Locker Room Case
Herbert G. McCann, Associated Press
Excerpt: "The U.S. Department of Education said Monday that a suburban Chicago school district is violating the rights of a transgender student by refusing to allow her the use of a girls' locker room."
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Broken System Lets Problem Officers Jump From Job to Job
Nomaan Merchant and Matt Sedensky, Associated Press
Excerpt: "Law enforcement officers accused of sexual misconduct have jumped from job to job - and at times faced fresh allegations that include raping women - because of a tattered network of laws and lax screening that allowed them to stay on the beat."
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aw enforcement officers accused of sexual misconduct have jumped from job to job — and at times faced fresh allegations that include raping women — because of a tattered network of laws and lax screening that allowed them to stay on the beat
A yearlong Associated Press investigation into sex abuse by cops, jail guards, deputies and other state law enforcement officials uncovered a broken system for policing bad officers, with significant flaws in how agencies deal with those suspected of sexual misconduct and glaring warning signs that go unreported or get overlooked.
The AP examination found about 1,000 officers in six years who lost their licenses because of sex crimes that included rape, or sexual misconduct ranging from propositioning citizens to consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse. That number fails to reflect the breadth of the problem, however, because it measures only officers who faced an official process called decertification and not all states have such a system or provided records.
In states that do revoke law enforcement licenses, the process can take years, enabling problem officers to find other jobs. And while there is a national index of decertified officers, contributing to it is voluntary and experts say the database, which is not open to the public, is missing thousands of names.
Some officers are permitted to quietly resign and never even face decertification. Others are able to keep working because departments may not be required to report all misdeeds to a state police standards commission, or they neglect to. Agencies also may not check references when hiring, or fail to share past problems with new employers.
In 2010, a woman sued the Grand Junction Police Department in Colorado, insisting the department erred in hiring officer Glenn Coyne and then failed to supervise him. Coyne was fired, and killed himself days after he was arrested on suspicion of raping the woman in September 2009.
That was sexual assault accusation No. 3, court records show.
While Coyne was still with the Mesa County Sheriff's Office, another woman accused him of subjecting her to a strip search and groping her. The complaint came after Grand Junction had completed its background check, and Mesa County officials — who declined comment — did not investigate or inform Coyne's new employer, according to court records.
Grand Junction police were aware of one other complaint against Coyne, however: The agency had put him on probation and cut his pay after a woman accused him of sexual assault in December 2008. The district attorney's office declined to prosecute, but Coyne was still on probation when the third accusation was lodged, working under a new supervisor unaware of why he was punished.
A federal judge considering the civil lawsuit found no deliberate indifference by police in employing Coyne. An appeals court upheld the ruling but noted the "handling of Officer Coyne could and should have been better."
Grand Junction Police Chief John Camper said a subsequent evaluation of hiring procedures found them to be sound, but added that "it's safe to say that we're more thorough than ever." Prospective officers must sign a form allowing the department to review previous personnel records, and it's considered a red flag if employers don't respond.
"If an agency won't speak with us, or seems reticent to supply details, we'll either dig further into other sources or we just won't consider the applicant any further," Camper said.
Problems at multiple police agencies didn't keep Charles Hoeffer from finding work in Florida, a review of about 1,000 pages of his personnel files found.
Hoeffer has been on paid leave from the Palm Beach Shores Police Department for nearly 20 months while investigators examine a woman's allegations that he twice raped her in 2014. Palm Beach Shores is Hoeffer's third police job, despite complaints dating back more than two decades.
He resigned from his first job with the Delray Beach Police amid a probe into whether he struck his wife with a boot, fracturing her nose, and then lied about it to investigators. Before that investigation was complete, Hoeffer was hired in 1991 by the Riviera Beach Police and left blank a job application question asking if he'd ever been the subject of a police probe. Delray Beach ultimately sustained the accusations against Hoeffer, though no criminal charges were filed, and in 1993 the state police standards agency temporarily suspended Hoeffer's license for assault.
In 1995, Riviera Beach fired Hoeffer after a woman accused him of raping her in a hotel room. An investigation did not lead to any criminal charges, and his termination was reversed by an arbitrator, who found Hoeffer exercised poor judgment by being in the intoxicated woman's room but had not broken department rules. During arbitration, Riviera Beach said Hoeffer had been the subject of several other internal affairs investigations related to women — accusations ranged from harassment to improper touching during an arrest; the charges were never substantiated.
In 2008, Hoeffer moved on to the Palm Beach Shores department. Allegations followed there, too: A woman claimed he made suggestive comments to her during a domestic dispute call, two female dispatchers accused him of sexual harassment, and another woman who went on a date with Hoeffer said he groped her. Once again, no charges. Then came the current rape investigation.
Hoeffer did not return calls from the AP but, under police questioning, he has denied wrongdoing. His attorney, Gary Lippman, said it's not uncommon for officers to have complaints in their files but that no compelling evidence has emerged and the women's claims are rife with contradictions.
Resigning or being fired does not mean an officer loses the ability to work in law enforcement.
Police standards agencies in 44 states can revoke the licenses of problem officers, which should prevent a bad cop from moving on to police work elsewhere. But the process is flawed, said Roger Goldman, a professor emeritus at Saint Louis University School of Law who has studied decertification for three decades.
Six states, including New York and California, have no decertification authority over officers who commit misconduct. And in states with decertification powers, virtually every police standards agency relies on local departments to investigate and report misconduct, with reporting requirements varying, Goldman said. About 20 states decertify an officer only after a criminal conviction.
Consider the variations between Pennsylvania and Florida. In Pennsylvania, the state agency responsible for police certification reported just 20 revocations from 2009 through 2014, none for sex-related crimes or misconduct. Florida decertified 2,125 officers in those six years, some 162 for sex-related misconduct.
The difference: Florida is automatically notified when an officer is arrested and requires local departments to report any time an officer is found to have committed misconduct involving "moral character." Pennsylvania relies on law enforcement agencies to report when an officer has committed a crime or misconduct.
Records provided to the AP from 2009 through 2014 did not include any decertification for former Pittsburgh police officer Adam Skweres, who pleaded guilty in 2013 to extorting sexual favors from five women and is serving up to eight years in prison. Allegations against Skweres dated to 2008, yet he remained on the job until a victim complained to the FBI; he was arrested in 2012.
Another concern is the length of the decertification process.
In Texas, Michael John Nelson was accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old neighbor while working for the Hardeman County Sheriff's Office. The local district attorney told the AP he did not prosecute in exchange for Nelson relinquishing his law enforcement license, an agreement reached with the victim and her family. Yet by the time his decertification was final in 2011 — a year after he left the sheriff's office — Nelson had already worked briefly as a reserve deputy in the town of Bayou Vista.
Nelson said he told his new boss when he learned he was under investigation and turned in his badge once charges were filed.
Paul Odin, who was not familiar with the case but replaced the Bayou Vista police chief who hired Nelson, said background checks often are limited by a department's size and budget, and that "a lot of agencies, a lot of cities — to avoid lawsuits — won't disclose anything negative."
A National Decertification Index contains the names of nearly 20,000 officers who have lost their licenses for problems that include sex abuse. But contributing is voluntary, and only 39 states do so.
Former Georgia State Patrol officer Terry Payne wouldn't be found in the index, because Georgia doesn't contribute. That state had more than 2,000 decertifications in six years, and officials said it would be too labor-intensive. Payne was fired in 2008 — and lost his license two years later — for having sex on duty with a subordinate, the daughter of a fellow officer, according to his decertification records. He nevertheless landed three new police jobs in Arkansas; he was certified there before his Georgia license was stripped.
Perry County, Arkansas, Sheriff Scott Montgomery told the AP he did not know Payne had been decertified in Georgia before hiring him in 2011. He said he asked the Georgia State Patrol why Payne was fired but was told only that he wasn't eligible for re-hire. Montgomery ultimately fired Payne for failing to follow an order to stop associating with a woman separated from her husband after the husband complained.
The AP sent written questions to an address associated with Payne but did not receive any response; several listed phone numbers did not work. Payne's certification to work in Arkansas law enforcement was scheduled to lapse in late October, at which point he would have to request a reinstatement. The state police standards agency said he is not currently employed as an officer.
There have been calls since 1996 to require states to log the names of decertified officers into a national database. As recently as May, a White House task force on policing — formed after police shootings in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere — recommended that the U.S. Justice Department partner with the group that maintains the index to expand it to all states.
Beyond its voluntary nature, the index also contains only limited information: an officer's name, agency, date of decertification and a basic reason for the license revocation.
Goldman, the decertification expert, said he believes every state should license and ban officers the same as they do other professionals, such as doctors and teachers. He supports the creation of a mandatory databank to track problem officers, similar to the congressionally mandated National Practitioner Data Bank for health care professionals.
But Matthew Hickman, a Seattle University professor and expert on law enforcement decertification, predicts a federal mandate would fail because of the country's "long history of local control" of law enforcement. The fix, he said, must come at the local and state level.
Even then, union resistance can cause roadblocks.
In California, union pressure led the Legislature to approve a bill in 2003 that diminished the power of that state's police standards agency, Goldman said. The agency can issue licenses but, unless the license was obtained by fraud, it cannot be revoked. Officials in California said they require local law enforcement agencies to report any time an officer is convicted of a felony crime so they can note that in an officer's file and potentially disqualify him or her from future police work. But they do not track such convictions or how often they disqualify officers.
Police union officials in California and nationally questioned whether decertification is necessary when departments can fire officers and prosecutors can pursue criminal charges. Ultimately, they said, policing the corps is the job of a chief.
"You've got to start at the beginning," said Jim Pasco, director of the Fraternal Order of Police. "Did the process fail when they hired these people? ... And that's a problem that shoots through a whole myriad of issues, not just sexual crimes."
Michael Ragusa — now serving a 10-year prison sentence after being convicted of sexually assaulting three women — admitted during the hiring process with the Miami Police Department that he'd solicited a prostitute, committed theft, sold stolen property and abused a relative. He also was flagged by a psychologist as having impulse control issues.
Still, Ragusa was hired, and he remained on the force for more than three years. Officials later said that the investigator in charge of his background check had himself been disciplined 26 times and was once arrested for falsifying documents.
Changes have resulted from the Ragusa case, according to Miami Police Major Delrish Moss. Psychological assessments of prospective officers have been revised and applications are reviewed more carefully and go through at least five levels of officials, rather than just two.
Barbara Heyer, an attorney who represented one of Ragusa's victims, said departments big and small have no excuse for not weeding out bad hires, considering today's technology.
"To say they don't have the wherewithal ... given the Internet and everything else, that's just a crock," she said.
Heyer said that the victim she represented left the country, unable to escape the terror instilled by the rape. Ragusa had threatened the woman's child, Heyer said, and "she was always fearful he would get out and come look for her."
"She just couldn't get past the fact that this was a police officer."
Why the United States Leaves Deadly Chemicals on the Market
Valerie Brown and Elizabeth Grossman, In These Times
Excerpt: "A 6-month investigation finds that the revolving door between government and the chemical industry has led the EPA to rely on easily manipulated research. The result? Toxic substances remain in everyday products."
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A 6-month investigation finds that the revolving door between government and the chemical industry has led the EPA to rely on easily manipulated research. The result? Toxic substances remain in everyday products.
cientists are trained to express themselves rationally. They avoid personal attacks when they disagree. But some scientific arguments become so polarized that tempers fray. There may even be shouting.
Such is the current state of affairs between two camps of scientists: health effects researchers and regulatory toxicologists. Both groups study the effects of chemical exposures in humans. Both groups have publicly used terms like “irrelevant,” “arbitrary,” “unfounded” and “contrary to all accumulated physiological understanding” to describe the other’s work. Privately, the language becomes even harsher, with phrases such as “a pseudoscience,” “a religion” and “rigged.”
The rift centers around the best way to measure the health effects of chemical exposures. The regulatory toxicologists typically rely on computer simulations called “physiologically based pharmacokinetic” (PBPK) modeling. The health effects researchers—endocrinologists, developmental biologists and epidemiologists, among others— draw their conclusions from direct observations of how chemicals actually affect living things.
The debate may sound arcane, but the outcome could directly affect your health. It will shape how government agencies regulate chemicals for decades to come: how toxic waste sites are cleaned up, how pesticides are regulated, how workers are protected from toxic exposure and what chemicals are permitted in household items. Those decisions will profoundly affect public health: the rates at which we suffer cancer, diabetes, obesity, infertility, and neurological problems like attention disorders and lowered IQ.
The link from certain chemicals to these health effects is real. In a paper published earlier this year, a group of leading endocrinologists concluded with 99 percent certainty that environmental exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals causes health problems. They estimate that this costs the European Union healthcare system about $175 billion a year.
Closer to home, Americans are routinely sickened by toxic chemicals whose health effects have been long known. To cite one infamous example, people exposed to the known carcinogen formaldehyde in FEMA trailers after Hurricane Katrina suffered headaches, nosebleeds and difficulty breathing. Dozens of cancer cases were later reported. Then there are workplace exposures, which federal government estimates link to as many as 20,000 cancer deaths a year and hundreds of thousands of illnesses.
“We are drowning our world in untested and unsafe chemicals, and the price we are paying in terms of our reproductive health is of serious concern,” wrote the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics in a statement released on October 1.
Yet chemical regulation in the United States has proceeded at a glacial pace. And corporate profit is at the heart of the story.
That the chemical industry exerts political influence is well documented. What our investigation reveals is that, 30 years ago, corporate interests began to control not just the political process but the science itself. Industry not only funds research to cast doubt on known environmental health hazards; it has also shaped an entire field of science— regulatory toxicology—to downplay the risk of toxic chemicals.
Our investigation traces this web of influence to a group of scientists working for the Department of Defense (DOD) in the 1970s and 1980s—the pioneers of PBPK modeling. It quickly became clear that this type of modeling could be manipulated to minimize the appearance of chemical risk. PBPK methodology has subsequently been advanced by at least two generations of researchers—including many from the original DOD group—who move between industry, government agencies and industry-backed research groups, often with little or no transparency.
The result is that chemicals known to be harmful to human health remain largely unregulated in the United States—often with deadly results. For chemicals whose hazards are just now being recognized, such as the common plastics ingredient bisphenol A (BPA) and other endocrine disruptors, this lack of regulation is likely to continue unless the federal chemical review process becomes more transparent and relies less heavily on PBPK modeling.
Here we lay out the players, the dueling paradigms and the high-stakes health consequences of getting it wrong.
The dawn of PBPK simulation
The 1970s and 1980s saw a blizzard of environmental regulation. The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Toxic Substances Control Act, along with the laws that established Superfund and Community Right-to-Know Programs, for the first time required companies— and military bases—using and producing chemicals to account for their environmental and health impacts. This meant greater demand for chemical risk assessments as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began to establish safety standards for workplace exposures and environmental cleanups.
In the 1980s, the now-defunct Toxic Hazards Research Unit at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Basein Dayton, Ohio, was investigating the toxicity and health effects of chemicals used by the military. Of particular concern to the DOD were the many compounds used by the military to build, service and maintain aircraft, vehicles and other machinery: fuels and fuel additives, solvents, coatings and adhesives. The military is responsible for about 900 of the approximately 1,300 currently listed Superfund sites, many of which have been contaminated by these chemicals for decades.
In the mid-1980s, scientists at the Wright-Patterson Toxic Hazards Research Unit began using PBPK simulations to track how chemicals move through the body. Known as in silico (in computers) models, these are an alternative to testing chemicals in vivo (in live animals) or in vitro (in a test tube). They allow scientists to estimate what concentrations of a chemical (or its breakdown products) end up in a particular organ or type of tissue, and how long they take to exit the body. The information can then be correlated with experimental data to set exposure limits—or not.
PBPK simulations made testing faster and cheaper, something attractive to both industry and regulators. But the PBPK model has drawbacks. “It tells you nothing about effects,” says Linda Birnbaum, director of both the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and National Toxicology Program (NTP). Observational studies and laboratory experiments, on the other hand, are designed to discover how a chemical affects biological processes.
Even regulatory toxicologists who support PBPK acknowledge its limitations: “[PBPK models] are always going to be limited by the quality of the data that go into them,” says toxicologist James Lamb, who worked for the NTP and EPA in the 1980s and is now principal scientist at the consulting firm Exponent.
The late health effects researcher Louis Guillette, a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina famous for studies on DDT’s hormonedisrupting effects in Florida alligators, put it more bluntly: “PBPK? My immediate response: Junk in, junk out. The take-home is that most of the models [are] only as good as your understanding of the complexity of the system.”
Many biologists say PBPK-based risk assessments begin with assumptions that are too narrow, and thus often fail to fully capture how a chemical exposure can affect health. For example, a series of PBPK studies and reviews by toxicologist Justin Teeguarden of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., and his colleagues suggested that BPA breaks down into less harmful compounds and exits the body so rapidly that it is essentially harmless. Their research began with certain assumptions: that BPA only mimics estrogen weakly, that it affects only the body’s estrogen system, and that 90 percent of BPA exposure is through digestion of food and beverages. However, health effects research has shown that BPA mimics estrogen closely, can affect the body’s androgen and thyroid hormone systems, and can enter the body via pathways like the skin and the tissues of the mouth. When PBPK models fail to include this evidence, they tend to underestimate risk.
Because of its reliance on whatever data are included, PBPK modeling can be deliberately manipulated to produce desired outcomes. Or, as University of Notre Dame biologist Kristin Shrader-Frechette, who specializes in human health risk assessment, says: “Models can offer a means of avoiding the conclusions derived from actual experiments.” In other words, PBPK models can be customized to provide results that work to industry’s advantage.
That’s not to say PBPK itself is to blame. “Let’s not throw the baby out completely with the bathwater,” says New York University associate professor of environmental medicine and health policy Leo Trasande. “However, when you have biology telling you there are basic flaws in the model, that’s a compelling reason that it’s time for a paradigm shift.”
A handy tool for industry
That PBPK studies could be used to make chemicals appear safer was as clear in the 1980s as it is now. In a 1988 paper touting the new technique, Wright-Patterson scientists explained how their modeling had prompted the EPA to stop its regulation process for a chemical of great concern to the military: methylene chloride.
Methylene chloride is widely used as a solvent and as an ingredient in making plastics, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and other industrial products. By the 1990s, the U.S. military would be the country’s second greatest user. Methylene chloride was—and remains—regulated under the Clean Air Act as a hazardous air pollutant because of its carcinogenic and neurotoxic effects.
Between 1985 and 1986, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimated that about 1 million workers a year were exposed to methylene chloride, and the EPA classified the compound as a “probable human carcinogen.” A number of unions, including United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers, also petitioned OSHA to limit on-the-job exposure to methylene chloride.
In 1986, OSHA began the process of setting occupational exposure limits. Stakeholders were invited to submit public comments.
Among the materials submitted was a PBPK study by Melvin Andersen, Harvey Clewell—both then working at Wright-Patterson—and several other scientists, including two employed by methylene chloride product manufacturer Dow Chemical. Published in 1987, this study concluded, “Conventional risk analyses greatly overestimate the risk in humans exposed to low concentrations [of methylene chloride].”
Later that year, the EPA revised its previous health assessment of methylene chloride, citing the Wright-Patterson study to conclude that the chemical was nine times less risky than previously estimated. The EPA “has halted its rulemaking on methylene chloride [based on our studies],” wrote Wright-Patterson scientists in 1988.
OSHA, too, considered the Wright-Patterson study in its methylene chloride assessment—and its rulemaking dragged on another 10 years before the agency finally limited exposure to the chemical.
The usefulness of PBPK modeling to industry did not escape the Wright-Patterson researchers. “The potential impact,” wrote Andersen, Clewell and their colleagues in 1988, “is far reaching and not limited to methylene chloride.” Using PBPK models to set exposure limits could help avoid setting “excessively conservative”—i.e., protective— limits that could lead to “unnecessary expensive controls” and place “constraints on important industrial processes.” In other words, PBPK models could be used to set less-stringent environmental and health standards, and save industry money.
So far, they’ve been proven right. The work done at Wright-Patterson set the stage for the next 30-plus years. Results obtained using PBPK modeling—especially in industry-funded research, often conducted by former Wright-Patterson scientists—have downplayed the risk and delayed the regulation of numerous widely used and commercially lucrative chemicals. These include formaldehyde, styrene, tricholorethylene, BPA and the pesticide chlorpyrifos. For many such chemicals, PBPK studies contradict what actual biological experiments conclude. Regulators often defer to the PBPK studies anyway.
A web of influence
At the time that PBPK modelling was being developed, the chemical industry was struggling with its public image. The Bhopal, India, disaster—the methyl isocyanate release that killed and injured thousands—happened in 1984. The following year, a toxic gas release at a West Virginia Union Carbide plant sent about 135 people to hospitals.
In response to these incidents, new federal regulations required companies to account for the storage, use and release of hazardous chemicals. The minutes from a May 1988 Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) meeting show industry was feeling the pressure. Noting the federal scrutiny and the growing testing requirements, the CMA recommended that industry help “develop exposure data” and “explore innovative ways to limit required testing to that which is needed.”
Industry had already begun to do this by founding a number of research institutes such as the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT), a nonprofit toxicology research institute (renamed the Hamner Institutes in an act of linguistic detoxification in 2007). This period also saw the rise of for-profit consulting firms like Environ (1982), Gradient (1985), ChemRisk (1985) and K.S. Crump and Company (1986), with which industry would collaborate advantageously in the following decades.
“Our goal was to do the science that would help the EPA and other regulatory bodies make the policies,” explained William Greenlee, Hamner president and CEO, in an interview for a business website. Indeed, over the past 30 years, Hamner and these consultancies have produced hundreds of PBPK studies, often with the support of chemical companies or trade groups. Overwhelmingly, these studies downplay or cast doubt on chemicals’ health effects—and delay regulation.
“I have seen how scientists from the Hamner Institutes can present information in a way that carefully shapes or controls a narrative,” says Laura Vandenberg, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She explains that Hamner scientists often use narrow time windows or present data in a limited context, rejecting information that does not conform to their models. “These are the kinds of tactics used to manufacture doubt,” she says.
A close look at the authors of studies produced by these industry-linked research groups reveals a web of influence traceable to Wright-Patterson (see chart on following page). At least 10 researchers employed at or contracted by Wright-Patterson in the 1980s went on to careers in toxicology at CIIT/Hamner, for-profit consulting firms or the EPA. About half have held senior positions at Hamner, including the co-authors of many of the early Wright-Patterson PBPK studies: Melvin Anderson, now a chief scientific officer at Hamner, and Harvey Clewell, now a senior investigator at Hamner and principal scientist at the consulting firm ENVIRON. “I’m probably given credit as the person who brought PBPK into toxicology and risk assessment,” Andersen told In These Times.
A revolving door between these industry-affiliated groups and federal regulators was also set in motion. More than a dozen researchers have moved from the EPA to these for-profit consultancies; a similar number have gone in the other direction, ending up at the EPA or other federal agencies.
Further blurring the public-private line, CIIT/Hamner has received millions of dollars in both industry and taxpayer money. The group stated on its website in 2007 that $18 million of its $21.5 million annual operating budget came from the “chemical and pharmaceutical industry.” Information about its corporate funders is no longer detailed there, but Hamner has previously listed as clients and supporters the American Chemistry Council (formerly the CMA, and one of the most powerful lobbyists against chemical regulation), American Petroleum Institute, BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow, ExxonMobil, Chevron and the Formaldehyde Council. At the same time, over the past 30 years, CIIT/Hamner has received nearly $160 million in grants and contracts from the EPA, DOD and Department of Health and Human Services. In sum, since the 1980s, these federal agencies have awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to industry-affiliated research institutes like Hamner.
But the federal reliance on industry-linked researchers extends further. Since 2000, the EPA has signed a number of cooperative research agreements with the ACC and CIIT/ Hamner. All involve chemical toxicity research that includes PBPK modeling. And in 2014, Hamner outlined additional research it will be conducting for the EPA’s next generation of chemical testing—the ToxCast and Tox21 programs. Over the past five years, Hamner has received funding for this same research from the ACC and Dow.
Meanwhile, the EPA regularly contracts with for-profit consultancies to perform risk assessments, assemble peer review panels and select the scientific literature used in chemical evaluations. This gives these private organizations considerable sway in the decision-making process, often with little transparency about ties to chemical manufacturers. The upshot: Experts selected to oversee chemical regulation often overrepresent the industry perspective.
These cozy relationships have not gone unnoticed; the EPA has been called to task by both its own Office of Inspector General and by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. “These arrangements have raised concerns that ACC or its members could potentially influence, or appear to influence, the scientific results that may be used to make future regulatory decisions,” wrote the GAO in a 2005 report.
Asked for comment by In These Times, the EPA said these arrangements do not present conflicts of interest.
Decades of deadly delay
PBPK studies have stalled the regulation of numerous chemicals. In each case, narrowly focused models developed by industry-supported research concluded that risks were lower than previously estimated or were not of concern at likely exposure levels.
Take, for example, methylene chloride, the subject of the 1987 paper Wright-Patterson scientists bragged had halted the EPA’s regulatory process. Despite the chemical being identified as “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the U.N. International Agency for Research on Cancer, a “reasonably anticipated” human carcinogen by the U.S. National Toxicology Program, and an “occupational carcinogen” by OSHA, the EPA has yet to limit its use. EPA researchers noted this year that the 1987 PBPK model by the Wright-Patterson scientists remains the basis for the agency’s risk assessment.
Today, methylene chloride remains in use—to produce electronics, pesticides, plastics and synthetic fabrics, and in paint and varnish strippers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, OSHA and NIOSH have issued health warnings, and the FDA bars methylene chloride from cosmetics— but no U.S. agency has totally banned the chemical. The EPA estimates that some 230,000 workers are exposed directly each year.According to OSHA, between 2000 and 2011, at least 14 people died in the United States of asphyxiation or heart failure after using methylene chloride-containing products to refinish bathtubs. The Center for Public Integrity reports that methylene chloride exposure prompted more than 2,700 calls to U.S. poison control centers between 2008 and 2013.
Another telling example of industry-funded PBPK studies’ influence is formaldehyde. This chemical remains largely unrestricted in the United States, despite being a well-recognized respiratory and neurological toxicant linked to nasal cancer and leukemia, as well as to allergic reactions and skin irritation. The EPA’s toxicological review of formaldehyde, begun in 1990, remains incomplete, in no small part because of delays prompted by the introduction of studies—including PBPK models conducted by CIIT/Hamner—questioning its link to leukemia.
If that link is considered weak or uncertain, that means formaldehyde—or the companies that employ the sickened workers—won’t be held responsible f