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Secrets And Lies
T
IMING IS EVERYTHING IN LIFE, AND
the timing couldn't have been worse for me last week. I had been invited to speak at my grandson's high school about attracting the best and the brightest students into careers in chemistry. Unfortunately, my talk came on the heels of a damning indictment of the chemical industry in the form of a Bill Movers PBS special titled "Trade Secrets" (see page 9). This 90-minute program, followed by a 30-minute roundtable discussion, contained excruciating detail about the serious health hazards associated with vinyl chloride and industry's attempts, decades ago, to hide the hazardfrom—indeedto lie to—its employees. In the Moyers report, we learn about chemical industry workers who died from exposure to chemicals. We see one of these workers, Dan Ross, die—through photographs taken of him after he was diagnosed with brain cancer linked to his exposure to vinyl chloride. We hear his widow, Elaine, tellMoyers: "They hurt somebody that meant more to me than my whole life. I would have gladly taken his place to die. Gladly " Ross sued her husband's employer, Conoco. The lawsuit uncovered boxes of "secret" industry documents which show clearly that individual chemical companies and the chemical industry's trade association—now called the American Chemistry Council (ACQ—covered up the health effects of exposure to a variety of chemicals. We see documents dating back as far as 1959, and as recently as the early 1990s, in which the industry makes statements that are seemingly aimed at undennining its workers' and, ultimately, the general public's health. I don't have space to tell you eveiything about this program or the roundtable discussion, which was the chemical industry's only opportunity to respond to Moyers' allegations. Ifyou missed the program, PBS has an extensive website (http://www pbs.org/tradesecrets/), where you can access the entire transcript of both the program and roundtable. ACC also has a website rebutting the program (http:// wwwabouttradesecrets.corn/0.1 urge readers to visit both websites. But I do have space for a few observations. The program dealt largely with decades-old information. It identified practices concerning employee health
that, I sincerely hope, by the chemical industry. It rehashed information that had been covered in a 1998 series of articles in the Houston Chrmicle mdinC&ENmthe 1970s. And it did not ask anyone from industry to comment in the program itself, because, as Moyers explained during the roundtable, "investigative journalism is not a collaboration between the journalist and the subject." ACC's representative on the roundtable made matters worse by initially attacking Moyers rather than leading with the eventual positive message that the chemical industry has corrected the problems and that chemicals and the chemical industry have made life better for people. The program has severely damaged the chemical industry's reputation. I know this because the parents and kids at my grandson's school told me so. Indeed, who could miss the message of this program? Here are Moyers' closing words: "Half a century into the chemical revolution, there is alot we don't know about the tens of thousands of chemicals all around us. What we do know is that breast cancer has risen steadily over the last four decades ... brain cancer among children is up by 26% ... testicular cancer among older teenage boys has almost doubled... infertility amongyoung adults is up, and so are learning disabilities in children. We don't know why. But by the industry's own admission, very little data exist to prove chemicals safe. So we areflyingblind. Except the laboratory mice in this vast chemical experiment are the children. They have no idea what's happening to them. And neither do we." This is a breathtaking non sequitur— extrapolating from unacceptable chemical exposure of workers decades ago to the conclusion that chemicals today are killing all of us and irrevocably damaging our children. The only real answer to a program of this kind is for industry to admit that its past practices were egregious and that there is still much to be learned about the safety of chemicals. The industry must continue to test chemicals and make public the resulting health data. There must be no more secrets and lies.
Editor-in-chief
Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS C & E N / A P R I L 2, 2 0 0 1
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