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Public Health Experts Rally to Keep EPA From Easing Asbestos Risk Rules
 

Posted by Andrew Schneider at July 20, 2008 1:33 p.m.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/secretingredients/archives/143926.asp

From top doctors and scientists to widows, public health experts are mustering to try to keep the EPA from watering down regulations determining the cancer-causing danger of asbestos exposure.

At a meeting in Washington tomorrow, the EPA's Superfund cops – the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency – will take testimony on the agency's plans to change the way it estimates potential cancer risk to those who inhale fibers of asbestos.

The scientific debate boils down to a conflict between the public health community and corporations that have used or still market asbestos containing products or material.

The debate hasn't changed for decades and won't tomorrow.

Scientists paid by the automotive and chemical industry and miners of sand, tale, taconite and gravel contaminated with asbestos, argue that whichever type of asbestos they use "can't be harmful" because the size, shape or chemical composition of their asbestos fiber is benign. On the other side, physicians who have treated thousands of asbestos victims, and scientists who have documented the public health toll, just point to the graveyards.

It's not as if the hazard from asbestos hasn't been studied. It has for more than a century and the conclusions are always identical. Asbestos kills.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer declared asbestos a human carcinogen 30 years ago. The World Health Organization and scores of other public health bodies, including the EPA and OSHA, agree there is no known level of exposure that is safe.

Yet, industry continues to fight this battle and spend millions of dollars funding "research" to show that their products could not have harmed or killed anyone.

It's logical to ask why. But I'm sure you won't be shocked when I tell you the motivation is money.

W.R. Grace and company announced last month that it will pay $3 billion to those harmed from exposure to the tremolite asbestos from their now-closed vermiculite mine in Libby. Montana.

"The personal injury asbestos litigation in the US is projected to reach $140-200 billion or more in the coming years, in addition to sums already paid," Barry Castleman, an international authority on medical and legal issues surrounding asbestos, said in comments submitted to the EPA panel.

"Defendant corporations have gone to extraordinary lengths to reshape the scientific literature to defend these cases," and his testimony cites chapter and verse. Castleman has testified in scores of asbestos trials

Can Castleman, who has written what is called the definitive work on asbestos and corporate shenanigans, be saying that men and women in white lab coats, sweating over hot microscopes, will accept money to produce bogus science?

Dr. Michael Silverstein, a clinical professor and occupational health specialist at the University of Washington's Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences has submitted a 29-page report signed by 83 of the nation's leading public health authorities which, in part, shows the harm to this science-for-hire practice.

In the evaluation of EPA's asbestos risk assessment process, Silverstein wrote: "There have been no significant new studies or data since 2003 that would provide a compelling basis for another risk assessment proposal."

He also cited the work of David Michaels, whose new book "Doubt Is Their Product," discusses in detail the work of those paid to publish "product defense" scientific papers.

Michaels, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Energy for Environment, Safety and Health, documents how this bogus science is conducted on behalf of manufacturers and users of not just asbestos, but of benzene, beryllium, chromium, methyl tertiary-butyl ether, perchlorates, phthalates, and virtually every other toxic chemical in the news today.

"Their business model is straightforward. They profit by helping corporations minimize public health and environmental protection and fight claims of injury and illness," wrote Michaels, the director of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy at the George Washington School of Public Health.

There will be someone testifying that will put a human face on the painful results of this corporate and government intrigue. Linda Reinstein lost her husband to mesothelioma and she is now the executive director of a victim's group called the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

She will tell the EPA that the human toll from these preventable diseases is staggering and its efforts to focus on differences of cancer potency of different types of asbestos and particle size sow a high disregard for public health.

"As a widow, I am appalled to see public health risk analysis translated to math formulas that negate the progress science has made towards ending this disaster. Consider the rage of Americans, if we opened discussions about various types of tobacco leaves and their "cancer potency factors," she wrote in remarks to be submitted.

She says EPA should be using science to prevent exposure to these carcinogenic fibers, not construct a new risk model that build a larger maze of confusion and deception.

"You must prevent disease with regulations and legislation that protect public health not industry. One life lost to asbestos disease is tragic, hundred of thousands of lives lost is unconscionable."

Do I believe all this effort by these public health authorities, many of whom who have fought this battle for decades, will do anything to force EPA to do what's best for the public?

Not a chance.

EPA leaders won't even listen to their own experts, who say there is an urgency by industry's lobbyists to get this new risk assessment on the books before there is a new occupant in the White House and before agency Administrator Steve Johnson moves on to be a well-paid spokesman for the pesticide or chemical industry.

Remember, this is the same agency that, in its "Value of a Statistical Life," just lowered its official estimate of life's value, from about $8.04 million to about $7.22 million.

Mother Jones, the legendary fighter for worker's safety and health in the 1920s wrote "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living."

*** POSTED JULY 22, 2008 ***