Copyright: Forever Less One Day and Hypersounds

'Catastrophic Threat' of Antibiotic-Resistant 'Superbugs

Monday, March 11, 2013 by Common Dreams
UK's chief medical officer warns of deadly threat of untreatable infections in face of mutated bacteria
- Lauren McCauley, staff writer


Antibiotic resistant "superbugs" pose a "catastrophic threat" as untreatable infections may prove lethal, Britain's top health official warned in a new report published Monday.

Interaction of MRSA (green bacteria) with a human white cell. The bacteria shown is strain MRSA252, a leading cause of hospital-associated infections in the United States and United Kingdom. (Photo: NIAID via Flickr) "Antimicrobial resistance poses a catastrophic threat. If we don't act now, any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that can't be treated by antibiotics," cautioned Sally Davies, England's chief medical officer.

"Routine operations like hip replacements or organ transplants could be deadly because of the risk of infection," she added.

The pervasiveness of antibiotics—due to over-prescription, the systemic abuse of the drugs in industrial food supplies and subsequent leaching into the environment—is causing increased resistance, challenging bacteria to mutate and leaving current drugs ineffective against these new bacterial diseases.

Davis' statement comes less than a week after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced an alarming rise in antibiotic resistant, deadly "nightmare bacteria," carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE).

The Guardian reports, "there has been an alarming increase in other types of bacteria including new strains of E coli and Klebsiella, which causes pneumonia."

Reuters adds:

One of the best known superbugs, MRSA, is alone estimated to kill around 19,000 people every year in the United States - far more than HIV and AIDS - and a similar number in Europe.

And others are spreading. Cases of totally drug resistant tuberculosis have appeared in recent years and a new wave of "super superbugs" with a mutation called NDM 1, which first emerged in India, has now turned up all over the world, from Britain to New Zealand.

Last year the WHO said untreatable superbug strains of gonorrhoea were spreading across the world.

During her statement, Davies calls for international "anti-biotic stewardship," which includes increased surveillance of drug-resistant superbugs, prescribing fewer antibiotics and making sure they are only prescribed when needed. She added that, with no new antibiotics in the "pipeline," there is an urgent need for research and development to fill a drug "discovery void," to counter the swift rise of these emerging, mutating infections.

Wombania

The War on Drugs is Lost (3 articles)

Saturday, June 4, 2011 by Reuters
Failed: The War on Drugs and a Milestone Critique
by Bernd Debusmann

The war on drugs is a waste of time, money and lives. It cannot be won. The world’s drug warriors are out of ideas.

The war on drugs President Richard Nixon launched 40 years ago has failed. Fresh thinking is of the essence. Governments should consider legalizing drugs to take profits out of the criminal trade.

Filling prisons with drug users does nothing to curb the billion-dollar illicit business, one of the world’s richest. Drug use is a public health problem, not a crime. Arresting small-time dealers does little but create a market opportunity for other small fry. Destroy drug crops in one region and cultivation moves to another. Cut a supply route in one place and another one opens up.

By one group or another, each of the above points has been made about long-running drug policies that bring to mind Albert Einstein’s famous definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

But never before has such criticism come from an international panel of establishment figures with such high profiles as the Global Commission on Drug Policy which presented a devastating assessment of the drug war in New York on June 2. Its 19 members include former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, three former Latin American presidents (of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia), former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, Richard Branson, the flamboyant billionaire chairman of the Virgin group, and Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou.

Other commission members of impeccable mainstream respectability: George Shultz, U.S. Secretary of State during the Reagan administration; Louise Arbour, a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and now president of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank; former Swiss president Ruth Dreifuss; Javier Solana, former European Union foreign affairs chief; Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel literature laureate, and Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes.

Whether their report will bring about change remains to be seen but it looks like a milestone on a long road toward reforms that some see as inevitable. “Today is the day when we start to end the war on drugs,” Branson said at the commission’s New York news conference.

The commission’s report does not mince words:

“The global war on drugs has failed. When the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs came into being 50 years ago and when President (Richard) Nixon launched the U.S. government’s war on drugs 40 years ago, policymakers believed that harsh law enforcement action against those involved in drug production, distribution and use would lead to an ever-diminishing market in … drugs such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis and the eventual achievement of a ‘drug-free world.’”

“In practice, the global scale of illegal drug markets – largely controlled by organized crime – has grown dramatically over this period.”

A KIND OF ARMS RACE

So has bloodshed and violence as government forces and drug trafficking organizations engage in what the report calls “a kind of arms race” – tougher crackdowns prompt criminal mafias to respond with greater force.

Exhibit A for this arms race is Mexico, where at least 36,000 people have died since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon declared war on his country’s drug cartels and unleashed the Mexican army to fight them. The death toll has mounted year by year, the army is not winning, and there is no end in sight.

“Poorly designed drug law enforcement practices can actually increase the level of violence, intimidation and corruption associated with drug markets,” notes the report. It echoes many of the points made in a 2009 by a commission that focused on Latin America but did not go as far as recommending that governments debate and seriously consider “models of legal regulation” of all drugs, not only marijuana.

The driving force in the Global Commission, a private initiative launched in Geneva in January, is former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who also led the 2009 Latin American group together with former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo and former president Cesar Gaviria of Colombia.

Latin America is the world’s largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana, largely to the insatiable U.S. market, and a major supplier of opium and heroin. Around the world, drug producing countries are vulnerable to what Moises Naim, a scholar at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Venezuelan trade minister calls “the politicization of criminals and the criminalization of politicians.” It’s a process that has given birth to “narco states,” a label that has been used for countries as far apart as Venezuela and Afghanistan.

There is reason to be skeptical about the prospect of change within years rather than decades and the commission alluded to it – “a built-in vested interest” in continuing with policies that focus on enforcement, interdiction and eradication. It is an entrenched anti-drug establishment that provides employment for thousands of people, from narcotics agents and intelligence analysts to prison wardens.

One of the essential elements required to change that system is spelt out in the first of the commission report’s 11 recommendations: “Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won.”

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Sunday, June 5, 2011 by the Guardian/UK
The War on Drugs War is Lost. Now It's Time for a Rational Response
Politicians are too scared to propose legalisation and controlled use, but without radical changes many more lives will be destroyed or ruined
by Ian Birrell

Four decades ago, Richard Nixon was casting around for a new enemy to shore up support for his unique brand of uncompassionate conservatism. Having risen to national prominence as an anti-communist campaigner, then turned his attention to crime, he found a new foe in the counterculture.

The media were full of stories of clean-cut young men returning from Vietnam as wrecked junkies, while intellectuals such as Timothy Leary were promoting the use of LSD. So Nixon, elected on a wafer-thin margin and desperate to turn back the tide of permissiveness, declared war on drugs. "America's public enemy number one is drug abuse," he thundered.

While the Vietnam conflict has faded into history, thousands are dying and millions of lives are still being destroyed in his insane struggle. Fittingly, since it was launched by a president who turned out to be a crook, the biggest beneficiaries have been the most murderous gangsters on the globe as they rip apart country after country. Yet our leaders limp on in this self-defeating, $100bn-a-year war. Last week saw the latest salvo in the struggle when a host of distinguished names gathered under the banner of the Global Commission on Drug Policy to urge a truce. Their thoughtful report pointed out a series of obvious truths underlying how the war backfired so terribly and called for policies based on treatment rather than prosecution.

Look at the rise in drug use. In 1998, the United Nations committed member states to achieve a "drug-free world", pledging to eliminate or "significantly reduce" use of opium, cannabis and cocaine by 2008. Instead, global opiate use rose by more than one-third over that time, with big rises also for cocaine and cannabis. It is estimated almost 5% of the world's adults take illegal drugs.

Worse is the damage done by gangs fighting over the huge profits created by the illegality of this trade. We have all heard tales of headless bodies littering the landscape of Mexico. But the world's most violent region away from active war zones is further south – Guatemala and Honduras, for instance, both have more murders than the 27 countries of the European Union combined. Now the cancer is working its way through west Africa.

The trade is so lucrative that in several countries – some signed up to those sanctimonious UN pledges – drug gangs have bought or fought their way to power. Kosovo has a prime minister linked to drug smuggling, as are the leaders of Afghanistan, Burma, Guinea, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Then there are cases such as South Africa, where the police chief turned out to be the head of a crime syndicate.

There are so many arguments against current policies it is hard to believe anyone who is not stoned still signs up to Nixon's war. The vast costs, the crime waves, the racial dimensions, the stigmatisation, the futility. Then there is the dreadful hypocrisy of politicians who use and tax the lethal drug of alcohol then jail others who enjoy less damaging relaxants such as marijuana and ecstasy.

The key question is why? After all, we live in a world in which grandparents took acid or smoked pot while listening to the Grateful Dead and many parents were the people who dropped ecstasy at outdoor raves. The current occupant of the White House has confessed to taking cocaine, while several of our cabinet ministers admitted smoking weed. Drug use is no longer that big a deal, while it is clear many of the problems and much of the misery are byproducts of banning.

The Global Commission is a valiant effort, but it is noticeable that signatories include 11 former presidents, politicians and diplomats, but just one in office – the Greek prime minister, who presumably needs any extra revenue he can find. This is the fundamental problem: serving politicians lack the bottle to take the obvious remedial actions.

As the report rightly states:

"Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem and the war on drugs cannot be won."

This failure of nerve is particularly acute in Britain. One cabinet minister who has admitted smoking cannabis in his youth said politicians were scared to act, despite knowing they should, since they would be slaughtered by rivals and the media for every drug-related death following liberalization. "You may think it is absurd regulation and it may cost more lives but deregulation is impossible in our political climate."

Sadly, he is right. Witness the infantile response – especially from local Labour parties, as the campaign group Transform will testify – to any politician standing for election who has dared suggest saner drug laws. They should listen to the admirable Bob Ainsworth, who had a Damascene conversion while a home office minister: "The public are in a far more progressive place on this issue than most politicians and sections of the press."

Recent polling proves he is correct. One survey last year found 70% of Britons favoured the regulated sale of cannabis, with smaller majorities supporting legally available heroin, ecstasy and cocaine. Curiously, the groups most in favour were Conservative voters, middle-aged women and readers of mid-market tabloids. And just think how tax proceeds would help the public spending crisis.

Politicians say they fear drug use would rise if prohibition is lifted. Evidence from abroad shows they are wrong. Look at Scandinavia, where the tough Swedes and more liberal Norwegians have similar addiction rates. Or Switzerland, where heroin demand and crime fell sharply following new policies based on public health rather than legality. Or Portugal, where heroin use fell by half after decriminalization.

These are places where there have been tentative steps forward. There are even signs the US, which remains the bastion of bigotry on this issue, is slightly shifting its stance under Barack Obama. It has, for example, permitted its blood-soaked neighbor Mexico to loosen cannabis laws.

Meanwhile, the tone of debate in Britain serves only to highlight the immaturity of our public discourse, with too many politicians lost in the fog of this foolhardy war. So here is a suggestion for our three main party leaders, who are all young enough to know better: why not hoist the white flag and work out a unified way to end a struggle that does so much more harm than good?

The alternative is to carry on fighting like generals in the First World War, ignoring the deaths, the devastation and the wastelands created around the world in a battle than can never be won.

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Drug Control Imperialism
Marijuana, Psychosis and the Failed War on Drugs
By PATRICK COCKBURN

In 2002 my elder son Henry was diagnosed with schizophrenia. His final breakdown came when he tried to swim Newhaven estuary in mid-winter fully clothed and was lucky to be rescued by some fishermen before he died of cold.  He spent the next eight years in and out of mental hospitals, though more recently has shown strong signs of recovery.

Henry later said that between the ages of 14 and 19 he had taken marijuana almost every day. He did so because it made him feel less shy with other people and his generation of teenagers all did so too. The music-scene, of which he wanted to be part, was drug orientated. “It would have been better if I hadn’t,” he says now, “but about half the people I knew in Canterbury [where he lived] were smoking dope.”

At the time I knew little about cannabis and nothing about mental illness. Henry was very intelligent, charming and passed all his exams.  I was at Oxford in the late 1960s and early 1970s when cannabis smoking was becoming popular, but I had probably puffed at a joint about twice in my life. I never knew about the dangers involved.

The risks are quite specific in the case of cannabis and tend to be masked by blanket disapproval or disapproval of the drug. Not everybody taking it is vulnerable to the same degree, but numerous scientific studies show that cannabis can be the precipitating factor for the sizeable minority of the population, perhaps 20 per cent, with a genetic pre-disposition to psychosis.

The evidence for this has been mounting for decades. A study of 1,900 people between the ages of 14-24 published in the British Medical Journal this year, who at the start of the survey had not taken cannabis, were reassessed at three and eight year periods. Those who took to smoking cannabis had a higher risk of developing psychosis. Sir Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry, said “this study adds a further brick to the wall of evidence showing that use of traditional cannabis is a contributory cause of psychoses like schizophrenia.”

The conclusion mirrors my own experience. When Henry first showed symptoms of mental disorder I was amazed to discover how many friends, many of whom I had known well for years, had a close relative disabled by schizophrenia whom they had never told me of. Again and again the common feature in these tragedies was that the victim had taken cannabis in significant quantities at a young age.

It is this failure to take adequately on board the dangers of cannabis which is a serious failing of an otherwise impressive report by the Global Commission of Drug Policy published last week which is signed by luminaries such as the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker. All agree that the 40-year-old “war on drugs” has been a failure at every level and suggest other approaches such as decriminalization, education and treatment to replace incarceration.

The report was predictably rejected, despite its high level endorsement, by politicians across the world who learn from the cradle that a policy of “being tough on drugs” however counter-effective is invariably popular. But there is a second, less mindless reason why a well-researched report like this has less impact than it should. This has because supporters of decriminalization in the media and among the intelligentsia in general see cannabis as harmless and discount opposition to it as ill-informed prejudice. 

Even in a well-informed report like this there are repeated signs of an underestimation of the dangers of some drugs. For instance it blithely reproduces a chart published in Lancet drawn by “independent experts” claiming that cannabis carries a lower risk to the consumer than alcohol and cigarettes. They fail to make clear that for people genetically susceptible to psychosis the risks involved in taking cannabis may be lethally high. Cigarettes and alcohol, whatever harm they cause, do not, at a young age, send you mad. The report would carry more political punch if it underlined that its proposed “experiment in decriminalization” does not imply that cannabis is less harmful than was once believed. It may, indeed, be much more dangerous.

It is not as if there were only a small number of people at risk. An estimated 51 million people worldwide, including 2.2 million in the US and 250,000 in the UK, are estimated to suffer from schizophrenia, which may have been precipitated or hastened as to the time it manifests itself by cannabis, so the potential casualty list from ill-judged experimentation is large. 

The proponents of current drug policies, largely devised and propagated by the US, scarcely bother to justify them in rational terms. The present demagogic approach is usually attributed to President Nixon, though it was first used as a political weapon by his Republican rival the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. As with “red-baiting” in the US in the 1940s and 1950s and “the war on terror” post 9/11, the “war on drugs” was always a means of manipulating and exaggerating public fears as a means of winning political power and as Nixon put it privately to his aide Haldeman, essentially aimed at America’s blacks.
   
The results, as the Global Security’s report cogently explains, have been devastating. Demand and profits will always be so high that arrests of dealers, punishment of consumers, crop eradication, highly publicized seizures of drug shipments, have no overall effect. Where an obstacle to the drug trade appears, the trade simply flows through different people and countries. States with weak security systems like Mexico and the Central American states or, increasingly, West Africa, do not have the strength to combat the hordes of gunmen which drug money can pay for.

Security agencies justify their bloated budgets as participants in the “war on drugs” despite its manifest failure. Cheaper and demonstrably more effective methods are under-funded or neglected. For instance, provision of clean syringes to heroin users in UK and Germany has kept HIV prevalence among people who inject drugs to below five per cent while in Russia and Thailand, where there is no such provision, it is over 35 per cent.

The war on drugs incorporates and exacerbates racial and social conflict. Of the 2.3 million people in jail in the US about a million are there for non-violent offences, mostly to do with drugs, and of these half are African-Americans and a quarter Latinos. Despite ruining the lives of so many non-criminal consumers, imprisonment has not reduced drug consumption or dented the profits to be made.

None of this is going to change while the US plays the predominant role in determining the drugs policies of the rest of the world. The “war on drugs” is too politically attractive in the US to be abandoned as futile. The report rather daringly denounces this as ‘drug control imperialism’ that lands the rest of the world with a failed American policy while more successful drug policies tested successfully in European countries are ignored.

Medical Cannabis and Its Impact on Human Health

Weighing Safety of Weed Killer in Drinking Water, EPA Relies Heavily on Industry-Backed Studies

Agency Says Company's Evidence 'Scientifically More Robust' than Independent Research
by Danielle Ivory, Huffington Post Investigative Fund

Thursday, July 8, 2010 

Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide’s health risks, records of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine’s safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review.

Meanwhile, some independent studies documenting potentially harmful effects on animals and humans are not included in the body of research the EPA deems relevant to its safety review, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund has found. These studies include many that have been published in respected scientific journals.

Even so, the EPA says that it would be “very difficult for someone to put a thumb on the scale” to slant the outcome.

Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides in the U.S. An estimated 76 million pounds of the chemical are sprayed on corn and other fields in the U.S. each year, sometimes ending up in rivers, streams, and drinking water supplies. It has been the focus of intense scientific debate over its potential to cause cancer, birth defects, and hormonal and reproductive problems. As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported in a series of articles last fall, the EPA failed to warn the public that the weed-killer had been found at levels above federal safety limits in drinking water in at least four states. Some water utilities are suing Syngenta to have it pay their costs of filtering the chemical.

Now the EPA is re-evaluating the health risks of atrazine, which was banned in the European Union in 2004 due to a lack of evidence to support its safe use. That ban includes Switzerland, where atrazine’s manufacturer, Syngenta, is headquartered. The EPA expects to announce results of its re-examination of the herbicide in September 2010. It could take action ranging from restrictions on its use on crops to an outright ban. Or it could permit continued use without additional restrictions.

The company, one of the world’s largest agribusinesses, says the chemical has been used safely for decades and restrictions could prove devastating to farmers who are heavily dependent on the inexpensive herbicide. Atrazine poses “no harm” to the general population or to drinking water supplies, said company spokesman Steven Goldsmith.

EPA records obtained by The Huffington Post Investigative Fund show that at least half of the 6,611 studies the agency is reviewing to help make its decision were conducted by scientists and organizations with a financial stake in atrazine, including Syngenta or its affiliated companies and research contractors.

More than 80 percent of studies on which the EPA are relying have never been published. This means that they have not undergone rigorous “peer review” by independent scientists, a customary method to ensure studies are credible and scientifically sound before they can be published in major journals.

At the same time several prominent studies by independent academic scientists in well-respected scientific journals – showing negative reproductive effects of atrazine in animals and humans – are absent from the EPA’s list.

That finding may raise concerns about how the agency is doing its work. Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees environmental regulators, told the Investigative Fund, “it’s critically important that EPA use all of the information at its disposal.”

Agency scientists may review studies not on the list, but EPA senior policy analyst William Jordan said that the 6,611 studies are those considered “relevant to the assessment of atrazine.”

‘Not Just Atrazine’

EPA spokeswoman Betsaida Alcantara said the list was not exhaustive and that some studies may not be on the list because they were not given an eight-digit “master record identification number,” which the agency uses to keep track of studies. There is “no uniform practice” for assigning numbers to studies submitted by people other than those working for herbicide, fungicide or pesticide manufacturers, she added.

EPA officials said that with a limited budget the agency must rely heavily on research sponsored by parties with a stake in the outcome. The agency’s “test guidelines” governing how experiments are conducted – the types and number of lab animals to be used, for instance. These provide sufficient safeguards against skewed results, officials said.

“Companies have a very strong incentive to follow the guidelines,” said EPA senior analyst Jordan. “We hope and think that we have written the guidelines with enough detail that it would be very difficult for someone to put a thumb on the scale, as it were, to slant the outcome, [or] to make something look safer than it is.”

Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist specializing in health issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council, argues that relying on a company to test the safety of its own product – an “inherent conflict” of interest – is part of a larger pattern at the EPA. “It’s not just happening with atrazine,” she said.

Hundreds of herbicides, pesticides, and other chemicals are regulated by the EPA, whose decisions can have significant implications for public health and on the abilities of an array of multinational companies to earn billions of dollars in the U.S.

By law, industry influence often is built into the regulatory process of the federal government. At the Food and Drug Administration, for instance, clinical trials conducted by pharmaceutical companies are used to determine whether pills and devices work and are safe. Makers of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides also must pay for studies on their products. If they meet agency rules for conducting the testing, the EPA must accept them.

The ‘Funding Effect’

But is industry-funded research always reliable? A pair of scientists funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the EPA scrutinized a Syngenta-funded Canadian study – one that is not on the EPA’s list. The scientists said they found numerous inaccuracies and misleading statements.

The scientists who questioned the study, University of South Florida biologists Jason Rohr and Krista McCoy, published their critique in the March 2010 issue of the journal Conservation Letters. In all, they tallied what they said were 122 inaccurate and 22 misleading statements, of which 96.5 percent appeared to support atrazine’s safety. The widely cited study focused on the herbicide’s effects on fish and other aquatic creatures.

Rohr and McCoy also asserted that the Canadian study, which was done in 2008, misrepresented more than 50 other studies. For example, it incorrectly suggested that only one scientist had demonstrated the chemical’s gender-altering effects on frogs. In fact, several other scientists demonstrated such effects.

The study dismissed one of Rohr’s papers as invalid, noting wrongly that the researcher had filtered atrazine out of a water tank while trying to assess the chemical’s effect on the aquatic organisms in the tank.

The Canadian study also misrepresented results, figures, and conclusions of other studies, according to the University of South Florida biologists.

Rohr, who served on an EPA advisory panel examining atrazine last year, told the Investigative Fund that he felt compelled “to set the record straight given the potential policy and environmental implications of these misconceptions and inaccuracies.”

The author of the Canadian study, University of Guelph (Ontario) biologist Keith Solomon, declined to respond to questions from the Investigative Fund about his financial ties to Syngenta, the company’s influence, or the inaccuracies and mischaracterizations the South Florida biologists said they had uncovered. Solomon noted that other scientists had come to similar conclusions, and that governments in the U.S. and Australia had not found any significant risk to creatures living in water.

While the critiqued study is not on the EPA’s list, several other studies by Solomon are.

Wendy Wagner, an expert in environmental policy at the University of Texas law school, said that the criticism of the Canadian study demonstrates a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “the funding effect.”

“It is next to impossible to squeeze all of the discretion out of a researcher, and when he has a strong incentive to find a particular result, the result can be unreliable and badly biased research,” said Wagner, an authority on the influence of politics and special interests on science. “There is compelling evidence that bias still pervades sponsored pesticide research – research that presumably is done in accord with EPA’s guidelines.”

Meanwhile, some independently-funded academic research published in major scientific journals is missing from the list of papers the EPA is using to make its decisions on atrazine. Absent are studies published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Environmental Health Perspectives, and Nature. Many works by independent academic scientists such as Tyrone Hayes and Rohr – who have demonstrated a range of potential reproductive and hormonal effects of the chemical – are not on the list.

Some peer-reviewed studies from prestigious journals fail to meet the agency’s standards, said EPA analyst Jordan, citing as an example work by scientists such as Hayes, who recently found that low doses of atrazine could turn male frogs into female frogs.

Jordan explained that the agency couldn’t rely on Hayes’ and the other scientists’ research in part because the government lacked protocols for testing chemicals on frogs. So the EPA developed those guidelines and asked Syngenta to study the issue. The company’s researchers reported that they were unable to replicate Hayes’ findings. Jordan said the Syngenta study “superceded” Hayes’ and the other scientists’ studies. The EPA, on its Website, currently states that atrazine causes no such adverse effects on frogs and that “no additional testing is warranted” to address the issue.

Environmental groups have in the past criticized the EPA for allowing chemical companies to wield disproportionate influence over regulatory decisions. While evaluating the safety of atrazine in 2003, the EPA allowed representatives from Syngenta to participate in closed-door negotiations with the agency, according to documents obtained by the NRDC in 2004.

Missing Evidence

Dale Kemery, an EPA spokesman, defended the practice of omitting some studies. The agency’s safety “review may not include every study that has been conducted, since some may not meet the standards that are appropriate for a regulatory setting or they may not be on target for the issues to be assessed.”

The EPA considers industry-sponsored studies “scientifically more robust than are the studies generated by people in academia,” said Jordan, the agency's senior policy analyst. “That’s generally because companies spend more money on their studies and can attend to details that are potentially important that people in academia just can’t afford to do.”

Jordan added that agency oversight of the thousands of unpublished studies on the list is just as rigorous as a peer-review by scientists prior to publication in a scientific journal. “I know that people might not agree with this proposition, but I believe that the scientists at EPA constitute a peer-review,” he said. “Our scientists go over the studies with a fine tooth comb.”

EPA officials said they were not able to provide a list of all omitted research.

A spokeswoman for CropLife America, the Washington D.C.-based trade association that represents pesticide and herbicide manufacturers, said EPA oversight is thorough, regardless of whether studies have appeared in peer-reviewed journals.

“Whether or not they have been published, the studies submitted to EPA for registration support of pesticide products are subject to scientific review by EPA scientists that is equally, if not more, rigorous and demanding than the pre-publication peer review conducted by any scientific journal,” said spokeswoman Mary Emma Young.

Some people are skeptical about the rigor of the EPA’s scrutiny. “What worries me,” said the University of Texas’ Wagner, “is the possibility that there isn’t time or energy within EPA to give a lot of oversight to this unpublished, industry-funded research, especially when the number of unpublished studies for a chemical like atrazine are in the thousands.”

A former EPA official, epidemiologist Lynn Goldman, said it is normal and necessary for the agency to accept unpublished and industry-funded studies, most of which would not be interesting enough to publish in scientific journals.

“This is the way that the system was built by Congress. It could be changed but the EPA does not have the authority to turn the system upside down,” said Goldman, a former assistant administrator for toxic substances during the Clinton administration.

The existence of a list of relevant research for EPA review has played a prominent role in public arguments for the herbicide’s safety. Journalists, scientists, and advocates for atrazine have frequently cited the “6,000” studies.

In 2005, Anne Lindsay, then a top official in the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, brought up the number of studies during congressional testimony. “Atrazine is one of the most well-examined pesticides in the marketplace,” she said, noting that “there are nearly 6,000 studies in EPA files on the human health and environmental effect of atrazine.”

Syngenta now cites the number in its press materials and on its website – not merely as a tally of studies but as proof of its safety. “Atrazine passes the most stringent, up-to-date safety requirements in the world,” said spokesman Paul Minehart. “In 2006, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) re-registered atrazine in 2006 based on the overwhelming evidence of safety from nearly 6,000 studies.”

EPA's List of Scientific Studies on Atrazine

Health - We Are Water

I can sum up this video in one word: wow...

Why A Salad Costs More Than A Big Mac

Why A Salad Costs More Than A Big Mac

By Ben Popken on March 4, 2010 11:14 AM

(PCRM)