ENVIRONMENT-HEALTH: Chemical Industry Gears Up For Fight

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 24 1996 (IPS) - Chemical companies are quietly preparing their defence of synthetic substances — the ones used by industry that have been linked to falling sperm counts and rising cancer rates.

The U.S. government will soon publish a series of investigations into studies which show that many common synthetic chemicals could be major culprits in a number of new and serious health problems.

Alarm bells went off four months ago when Penguin books published ‘Our Stolen Future’. The book warned that humans, “in their relentless quest for dominance over nature, may be inadvertently undermining their own ability to reproduce or to learn and think.”

It addressed findings that synthetic chemicals cause a 50 percent fall in male sperm counts in many countries and startling increases in cancer rates.

Written by Theo Colborn of the World Wildlife Fund, Pete Myers of the W. Alton Jones Foundation and Dianne Dumanoski of the Boston Globe, the book focuses on such common chemicals as atrazine and DDT, as well as lesser known chemicals like dioxin, which is a by-product of certain industrial processes.

‘Our Stolen Future’ says that doses as low as one part in a trillion of these chemicals could be disrupting the endocrine system, including the hormones which govern reproduction and development.

The White House is to coordinate studies by eight government agencies on the impact of the chemicals. Coordination will proceed through a new body called the Endocrine Disruptor Research Coordination Committee.

The eight agencies that have studied the issues are the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Biological Survey, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the Department of Defence, the National Science Foundation, and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

In the meantime, industry is gearing up to repel any new attacks.

Researchers from Dow Chemical and Shell Oil recently published studies which show that the use of more complex statistical models could lead to the conclusion that sperm count has been increasing — not decreasing — among men in cities like New York during the past 20 years.

Industry-backed scientists say the effects of synthetic chemicals are minuscule.

Stephen Safe of Texas A & M University, whose work is partly funded by the Chemical Manufacturers Association, has published papers which say synthetic chemicals amount to less than one- thousandth of one percent of the amount of naturally occurring chemicals that have similar effects.

He told reporters here that a ban on synthetic chemicals could be dangerous to the economy.

“You could be talking about thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to get rid of some of these chemicals, all because of something that we have no compelling reason to believe is really a threat,” he said.

By some accounts, industry began to gear up for battle about three years ago.

The action was in response to a 1992 report by the International Joint Commission (IJC), a government body set up by Canada and the United States to study pollution in the Great Lakes. The report called for all chlorine-based chemicals to be phased out, and the appeal was endorsed by the American Public Health Association the next year.

Industry fought back.

The Chemical Manufacturers Association set up the Chlorine Chemistry Council (CCC) in Washington in 1993, which in turn hired Jack Mongoven of the public relations firm Mongoven, Biscoe and Duchin to target environmental groups.

According to Peter Montague, editor of Rachel’s Environment and Health Weekly at the Environmental Research Foundation in Maryland, Mongoven’s long-term strategy was to characterise the “phase-out-chlorine” position as a violation of industry’s Constitutional right to do what they choose.

Noting that environment activists have used children’s and women’s organisations to publicise the dangers posed by industrial chemicals, Mongoven has suggested that the CCC try to counter the phase out.

“It is especially important to begin a programme directed to pediatric groups throughout the country to counter activist claims of chlorine-related health problems in children,” Mongoven wrote in a memo to the organisation.

Industry efforts are now being coordinated by CCC and by the organisation, Endocrine Issues Coalition, which consists of the American Crop Protection Association, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, and the Society of Plastics Industry.

Another industry-funded organisation working on these matters is the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, which has just launched a three-year, five-million-dollar research effort into how natural and synthetic chemicals affect the human hormone system.

Cancer toxicology research — which traditionally took up two- thirds of its programme — is now making way for the study of non- cancer effects such as neurotoxicity and endocrine effects.

CIIT is funded by dues from about 40 member chemical companies, including DuPont, Dow Chemical, Exxon Chemical, General Electric, and Hoechst Celanese.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the powerful European chemical industry is also reacting. Players that have promised to research this matter include the European Chemical Industry Council’s Endocrine Modulating Steering Group, which says it will spend up to four million dollars in the next three years on the matter.

The organisation intends to focus on “defining the extent to which observed health effects like declining sperm counts may be due to lifestyle factors, such as diet, rather than chemicals.