ENVIRONMENT-BUSINESS: Product Enhancers Enjoy Corporate Boost

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Jun 11 1997 (IPS) - Corporations have long driven U.S. public health discussions on chemicals used to enhance such products as apples, gasoline, and soft drinks.

And though these chemicals are eventually taken off the U.S. market because they are deemed harmful to people, their sales continue in developing countries, researchers here say.

The magazine, Rachel’s Environment & Health Weekly, which has tracked scientific reports on the impact of toxins on human health for more than a decade, recalls that corporate manipulation kept leaded gasoline on the U.S. market for more than 60 years after a number of U.S. scientists largely agreed on its harmful effects.

Public health discussions about aspartame, the diet drink sweetener, and alar, used in the United States to enhance apples, have also been manipulated by corporate interests, according to Rachel’s, which is published in Maryland.

Rachel’s recently re-published excerpts of a 1925 conference to demonstrate the major role corporations have played in public health discussions.

Sales of leaded gasoline were temporarily suspended in the United States as the Public Health Service met for a day to determine the harm caused to human health through use of the product.

Speakers at the 1925 meeting explained that tetraethyl lead or “ethyl” lead was a potent, brain-damaging poison. When caged laboratory animals were dosed with automobile exhaust, the lead passed through the placenta and caused low-birth-weight babies, spontaneous abortion, and stillbirth among these animals.

But despite the general acceptance among scientists at the meeting that lead was indeed toxic, oil and chemical companies disagreed.

Insufficient evidence, said the companies.

“Because some animals die and some do not die in some experiments, shall we give this thing up entirely?” asked Frank Howard of the Ethyl Corporation. “I think it would be an unheard- of blunder if we should abandon a thing of this kind merely because of our fears.”

The companies prevailed. In just over a year, the suspension on leaded gasoline was lifted.

By the mid-1980s, however, the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) calculated that lead emission levels had risen some 700 times since the days of Christopher Columbus. The bulk of this pollution, it said, came from cars.

And by 1994, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that 37 percent of African-American children, most of whom live in poor, inner-city neighbourhoods, carried lead levels in their blood that were considered unsafe.

The manufacture of leaded gasoline was finally outlawed in the United States in 1989, and sales ceased in Dec. 1995.

According to Tom Hogarty of the American Petroleum Institute, leaded gasoline is still sold in the “vast majority” of Third World states. “It’s gone from the United States, and we think that’s fine. But we don’t tell other countries what to do,” he says.

Peter Montague, editor of Rachel’s, says the public health discussions of a variety of other chemicals share a similar history.

Fifteen years ago, the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) suspended sales of the chemical aspartame, which is manufactured by the pharmaceutical company, G.D. Searle. The additive, better known as Nutrasweet or Equal, is used as a sweetener in some diet drinks. Several FDA scientists had suspected that the chemical caused brain cancer.

A government-appointed expert commission concluded in October 1980 that, “the evidence suggested that aspartame might induce brain tumors” in laboratory rats. The commission recommended that aspartame “should not be approved for marketing until further animal testing was conducted to resolve the brain tumor issue.”

The FDA revoked Searle’s license to sell aspartame in 1981. But later that year, Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., the new head of the FDA appointed by President Ronald Reagan, reversed the decision and licensed the use of aspartame as a sugar substitute. Hayes extended Searle’s aspartame license in 1983 to include its use as a sweetener in soft drinks.

A study published last November by John Olney of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri shows a correlation between the steep increases in brain cancer among people in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s and exposure to aspartame.

Montague reports that a similar tale can be told of the chemical Alar, a growth regulator that prevents fruit from dropping to the ground too early.

Alar, manufactured by the Connecticut-based Uniroyal corporation, allows apple growers to harvest their crop all at once, and it makes apples more resistant to bruises. The chemical also prolongs the shelf life of the fruit and darkens the red in apples, giving Alar-sprayed fruit a cosmetic advantage.

Alar is manufactured by combining succinic anhydride with 1,1,dimethylhydrazine (UDMH), a toxic component of rocket fuel. It degrades back into UDMH when it is heated. This could happen when apples are cooked or sterilised or when Alar is digested.

Following a variety of studies which show that Alar causes cancer in laboratory animals, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced in 1984 that it was investigating the lifetime cancer risks among people who ate apples and peanuts sprayed with Alar.

In a finding issued Feb. 1, 1989, the EPA said that 45 people in a million risked getting cancer from alar.

A 1989 report by the New York-based Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) said that, among 22 million U.S. pre-school children, 4,700 to 6,000 would eventually get cancer from exposure to Alar/UDMH.

The report provoked an immediate reaction from the apple industry, which paid more than a million dollars to the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to design and run advertisements that said one would have to eat a train-car load of apples a day to be harmed by Alar.

Uniroyal voluntarily took Alar off the U.S. market in November 1989 in response to public outrage. In the meantime, Uniroyral developed export markets in 71 developing countries.

“If a few workers or children must be sacrificed to return a profit to Uniroyal’s investors, then those workers and children will be sacrificed,” concludes Montague. “This is just the way it is after a sovereign people has allowed the corporate (charter) to usurp its sovereignty, to dominate its government.”