Edward Calabrese pow
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2/19 evil feck
13 tags
hackademic exon tobacco chem corps
see hormesis
pal of
PAT MICHAELS:}:
CATO HAD NO JUICE W/ TRUMP Admin?
see TURNING PT FORK DECISION
lancaster revelle, zuck
~ Mann hockey stick, ~ Hansen, models
covid BS
Cato shut its sci shop (lindzen)
one of few hacks w/ legit creds, but gov asked him to stop calling himself delaware state climatologist?
:{:{pal of Happer}:
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see below
But Enstrom finally got the paper in print by reaching out to Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts, who had submitted a letter in support of Enstrom during his fight with UCLA.
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yikes
Current advances and future trends of hormesis in disease | npj Aging
Distribution by journals
:{:{The visual analysis examined the active and influential journals in hormesis research based on published articles and co-citation patterns. According to Supplementary Dataset 4 and Fig. 5a, the journal with the highest number of publications is Dose–Response (170), followed by Human and Experimental Toxicology (111), Science of the Total Environment (95), and several other journals with fewer than 80 publications.}:
Among the top 10 journals in hormesis research, six are categorized as Q1 in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR2022), indicating their high impact and influence in the field. Additionally, six of these journals have an impact factor (IF) of over 548, further highlighting their significance....
The first three citation bursts in the field of hormesis research began in 2003 (Fig. 8b). The most prominent burst, with a strength of 37.59, occurred in a paper titled “How does hormesis impact biology, toxicology, and medicine?” published in npj Aging and Mechanisms of Disease by Calabrese E.J., Edward J. in 2017, with citation burst from 2017 to 2021. Another article with a similar burst strength is “Hormesis: Why it is important to Toxicology and Toxicologists (strength=37.59)” in 2008 and “Hormetic Mechanisms (strength = 37.32)” in 2013, and these three papers share the same authors. According to the findings, 2008 had the highest citation bursts, followed by 2004. Notably, five references are still in the burst....
The scientific community’s understanding of the dose–response model in hormesis could be more precise. It began with Muller’s establishment of the linear non-threshold (LNT) model for low-dose risk estimation63, and later Hugo Schulz proposed the biphasic dose–response model64. To this day, research on the dose–response model in hormesis continues to deepen. We now recognize that hormesis is essentially an “adaptive” regulatory response characterized by a biphasic dose–response curve59, and understanding the characteristics of this curve holds critical practical implications for applications in toxicology, pharmacology, and clinical medicine. One of the most significant quantitative features of this biphasic dose–response curve is the No-Observed-Adverse-Effect Level (NOAEL), which represents the highest dose at which the dose–response curve intersects with the control-response line, dividing the curve into two parts65. The left side of the NOAEL represents adaptive responses induced by low doses or sublethal effects. Hormesis can maintain homeostasis and enhance subsequent tolerance within this range66. In the long term, such responses improve organismal functions67,68. The right side of the NOAEL represents toxicity responses caused by excessive stress, where doses within this range lead to irreversible damage or even death. This observation is considered the most prominent and fundamental characteristic of hormesis induced by various stressors in the hormesis database established by Calabrese E.J. and Blain69, referred to as “a low dose stimulation and a high dose inhibition”70. Low-dose stimulation inspires the exploration of new measures for preventing and treating various diseases. At the same time, high-dose inhibition can be used for the removal of harmful substances both inside and outside organisms. For example, it can be utilized in developing novel herbicides through phytotoxicity, optimization of insecticides, or eradicating cancer cells.
2017 paper How does hormesis impact biology, toxicology, and medicine? | npj Aging
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Reimagining agrochemical pollution mitigation: Leveraging hormesis for sustainable environmental solutions
- November 2024
- The Science of The Total Environment 949:175165
DOI:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.175165
Authors:
[
](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Evgenios-Agathokleous?_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7ImZpcnN0UGFnZSI6InByb2ZpbGUiLCJwYWdlIjoicHVibGljYXRpb24iLCJwcmV2aW91c1BhZ2UiOiJwcm9maWxlIn19)
[](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Raul-Narciso-Guedes?_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7ImZpcnN0UGFnZSI6InByb2ZpbGUiLCJwYWdlIjoicHVibGljYXRpb24iLCJwcmV2aW91c1BhZ2UiOiJwcm9maWxlIn19)
Emerging evidence reveals that low doses of stress stimulate, and high doses suppress, organism responses - a phenomenon known as hormesis. Here, we propose a framework for harnessing hormesis principles to optimize agrochemical use and mitigate pollution. We discuss how hormesis can be applied in agrochemical context and highlight challenges and needs beyond scientific research, offering a perspective for sustainable environmental solutions.
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it’s really A trADE GP?!
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[### Michael Lewandowski - NCRP | Bethesda, MD
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https://ncrponline.org › albdesign_popup_cpt=michael-...](https://ncrponline.org/?albdesign_popup_cpt=michael-lewandowski)
Apr 8, 2021 — Michael Lewandowski is the corporate Radiation Safety Officer and radiation protection team manager at 3M's global headquarters in Maplewood, Minnesota.
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burk: Comprehensive Scientific Association Management and Event Planning
lobbyist
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https://www.theconnollygrp.net › About-Our-Staff](https://www.theconnollygrp.net/About-Our-Staff.html)
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stubby?
==
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/how-much-radiation-is-too-much
How Much Radiation Is Too Much?
An Interview with Edward Calabrese
Apr 20, 2016
{Everyone knows that the dose is critical when you are taking a prescription medication: a small amount can provide significant benefit, but a large dose can kill you. This “non-linear” effect is taken for granted in pharmaceuticals, but is not generally adopted for regulating the risks of radiation. Dr. Edward Calabrese is a professor and toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Department of Environmental Health Sciences. He has spent his career studying non-linear effects in different carcinogens. From hundreds of studies, he has concluded that radiation should be treated more like pharmaceuticals, and regulators needs to change how they think about radiation risks and harm.
What’s the history of the linear-no-threshold, or LNT, framework, and how did it come to be the standard?
The rise of LNT theory was really the result of a political motivation by a group of radiation geneticists. I’m sure they believed that dose response was linear, but they also wanted to scare the hell out of society to increase their stature and grant funding for their research, and they wanted people to think they were the only ones who could save the world from the harms of atomic weapons testings, etc. It was a paternalistic behavior.
We know it’s the dose that makes the poison, but is it also the dose that makes the benefit? Or are some substances simply benign or have no effect at low doses?
It depends on how you define “low” and how you define “benign.” Essentially everything has a dose response relationship, meaning everything is harmful at high enough doses, but then we get into some complexity. A lot of things are essential, like minerals and vitamins, and it may well be that radiation is essential at low doses. Most agents are going to be toxic at high doses, but we’ve found that most agents have a biphasic relationship.
How do regulatory bodies like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or International Atomic Energy Agency set dose limits for radiation?
They have a long history, and they make use of their long history. When you regulate carcinogens, you assume that the dose response in linear. If it’s a non-cancer endpoint, you assume there’s a threshold. If you’re dealing with radiation, you have much more stringent controls. The buy-in to linear dose response has a huge effect on industry. And this decision to go linear, which was made in the 1950s, was the most impactful environmental regulatory change in the modern world.
What’s the evidence that LNT is not the right model, can you give a concrete example?
From 1985 on, I began to study this and tried to take a look at alternative models, including the hormetic dose response model,which was marginalized and neglected. I found that this phenomenon occurs quite widely. The EPA’s default models, for example, are arbitrary. Numerous studies are cited in my publications that support the hormesis model. The reader simply has to read the literature and get educated. While this is not an easy exercise, it is necessary in order to understand the breadth and significance of the hormesis database and its impact on toxicology and risk assessment. Such an assessment will show that the hormesis phenomenon is far more common than previously recognized and outcompetes the LNT and threshold models in head-to-head competition. This is documented in the peer-reviewed literature.
How do you determine the threshold between beneficial and harmful?
You have to do this through study, and that’s what we’ve done. There’s a lot of historical clinical research that does exist which we have now summarized and evaluated in the biomedical literature. If people wanted to use this, the dosages are pretty well worked out. This country needs to overcome its often irrational fear of radiation to take a more informed approach to exposure and use the newly assessed information for clinical benefit.
What’s been the experience of others who had tried to replicate your results?
I have a long experience conducting my own lab experiments. But I have also done a large amount of research assimilating the work of others. My laboratory work is very replicable. In the general world of hormesis, these studies are more challenging than most. In the traditional work of toxicology, you’re looking for the dose that produces harm. In hormesis, the beneficial effects are very constrained. You have to have enough doses and replications of your findings to ensure that your results are reproducible and real.
If regulators shifted from relying on an LNT model to a hormetic dose model, how much would limits actually change?
Getting rid of regulations based on the LNT theory would result in an increase in the acceptable dosage by at least several hundred fold. And that would have a huge impact. This would have a positive effect on human health as well as save billions and billions and billions of dollars. The regulatory agencies are kind of a cult, but they don’t know they’re part of a cult.
One challenge with low dose radiation, is that certain radioisotopes accumulate in the food supply or in certain organs. If we had higher limits for radio-isotope releases, would we need to pair that with better monitoring of food or personal doses, making sure that individuals don’t exceed the threshold and go into high dose range?
Well, I think that that would be true. They’d have to look at every situation. The optimal dose is very close to the level where it crosses over into being harmful. And there are personal differences as well, what’s optimal for you might be different for another person. But it’s an important challenge, you have to solve the problem differently now. We can’t just keep saying “lower is always better.”
For vaccines we know the mechanism for how they work, what’s the mechanism for the benefits of low-dose radiation.
Our understandings of hormetic mechanisms in the last decade have really exploded. We’ve learned a lot about signaling pathways and so many different components for the mechanisms have been identified. I can’t say that the mechanisms are fully understood, but we can tell which receptor and cell signaling pathways are involved in mitigating or promoting a certain effect.
Finally, it seems like there has been some movement at NRC to revisit and maybe revise LNT, have you been involved in this effort and what’s your prognosis?
I submitted comments during the review process. I never thought I’d live to see the day where a regulatory agency would take our efforts seriously. I hoped they would, but I never imagined it would happen. They opened it up for four months of comments. I read all of them, most comments weren’t serious. About 60% of those that were serious were in support of the change. There’s little question that the science is on the hormesis side. You know, we use hormesis in the whole pharmaceutical industry, and if the NRC is taking any of these medical drugs they are already relying on hormetic science.
Jessica Lovering is a Fellow at Energy for Growth. She was the Director of Energy at Breakthrough.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22052020/contrarian-science-james-enstrom-epa-climate-change
no lnx many no pix graf
How a Contrarian Scientist Helped Trump’s EPA Defy Mainstream Science
James Enstrom’s work on particle pollution’s health effects contradicts the findings of dozens of studies, but that hasn’t stopped the agency from relying on it.
By Marianne Lavelle
MAY 28, 2020
In March 2017, a scientist named James Enstrom rattled many public health experts by publishing a study concluding that there was no link between fine soot air pollution and premature death.
The finding was drastically at odds with the consensus of medical researchers and with the evidence from nearly three decades of previous research.
But it was in line with arguments that Enstrom, a physicist-turned-epidemiologist, had been making for years. His dissent had played an essential role in his ascendance as a folk hero to far-right conservatives who oppose most environmental protection policies in the United States, especially those put in place by the Obama administration.
Enstrom argued that his analysis refuted one of the most influential papers in environmental health science: a 1995 study by the American Cancer Society showing that fine particulate matter pollution—or PM 2.5, as it is known—is associated with early death. PM 2.5 is produced primarily through the burning of oil, coal and wood.
Enstrom, 76, said he based his study on long-hidden cancer society data from an inside source whom he did not name. Throughout the article, which appeared in thejournal Dose-Response, he took jabs at institutions that he believed had long marginalized him, including the cancer society (ACS), leading scientific journals, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other health researchers, who, he wrote, "need to promptly address my findings." He hinted at scientific malfeasance and suggested that there was a conspiracy of silence against minority views like his.
Big-name journals, Enstrom wrote in the article, were biased against publishing results showing no association between air pollution and mortality, adding that seven other peer-reviewed scientific journals had rejected his study. In an unusual footnote, he also included a link to the rejection letters.
Over the next months, Enstrom's paper drew fierce criticism. The cancer society said it could not confirm his data's authenticity. The scientists whose work he had critiqued—includingsome of the world's renowned experts in air pollution health science—published a withering point-by-point take-down of Enstrom's methods and analysis.
James Enstrom
But in at least one realm, his paper won acceptance. Eight weeks before the study was published, President Donald Trump took office. And in an administration disdainful of scientific consensus and intent on dismantling restraints on the fossil fuel industry, Enstrom found a receptive audience.
When, last month, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced the agency's decision that it would not raise the standards for air pollution because the science of PM 2.5 was too uncertain to justify doing so, he was relying in part on Enstrom's work. Enstrom's research was among the studies cited by Wheeler's hand-picked committee of science advisers to raise doubts about the PM 2.5 consensus.
More broadly, Enstrom's work has helped provide the underpinning for the Trump administration's wide-ranging assault on environmental protection policy, from its retreat on climate change to its current effort to restrict the type of science used by the EPA by disqualifying studies that critics say are some of the most important in human health science.
In a way, Enstrom's journey from outsider to influencer is the story of the Trump administration's monumental campaign to remake the rules of scientific evidence, and how that effort could shape U.S. environmental protection for years to come.
"These are changes that could have very major impacts on human health and on the environment itself," said Bernard Goldstein, dean emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Health. "All of the laws we passed that cleaned up the environment so well—even with the challenges we still have—these have all been science-based. Well, if you knock the science out of the process, you can base the decisions on politics."
Goldstein, who served as EPA's assistant administrator for research and development under President Ronald Reagan, recently wrote that the leadership of the scandal-ridden agency in the early Reagan years "did nothing that even came close to the assault on the independence and expertise of the scientific advisory processes carried out by Wheeler and his predecessor, Scott Pruitt."
'Everything's Been Turned on its Head'
Critics often call the Trump administration "anti-science," but in fact, its retreat on climate change and public health and safety has only been possible with the help of science—the work of contrarians like Enstrom who have devoted themselves to challenging the mainstream consensus.
Trump's appointees have found justification for their actions in the work and ideas of this stable of scientists, most of them industry aligned, who for years have provided ammunition to foes of federal regulation.
These contrarians have helped make the case in agencies, in Congress and in the courts, for coal, oil and other industries intent on maintaining their way of doing business in the face of increasing attention to the threats posed by climate change, and the growing imperative for cleaner air and cleaner energy.
President Trump has made clear decisions to upend environmental policy, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, but he has also made more subtle moves, like the purging of experts from science advisory committees, limiting the science that can be used by the EPA and the relying on contrarian studies like Enstrom’s work on PM 2.5. Credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
Fossil fuel companies were losing ground in this battle when Trump entered the White House: The Obama administration's actions on global warming seemed as if they might presage the industry's last stand. To change course, the Trump administration has sought to change fundamentally how science is evaluated in environmental decision-making.
Trump's grand moves to upend environmental policy, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, are well known. But his legacy may be sealed more deeply in scores of arcane changes deep in the bureaucratic process, like the purging of experts from science advisory committees; the overhaul of cost-benefit analyses; the effort to limit the science that can be used by the EPA; and the reliance on contrarian studies like Enstrom's work on PM 2.5.
"Everything's been turned on its head by EPA, so that the consultants are considered the good guys and the academics are all biased," said Goldstein.
Carol Browner, board chairwoman of the League of Conservation Voters, who was EPA administrator under President Bill Clinton and climate adviser to President Barack Obama, puts it this way: "What they're doing in this whole line of insidious actions is to dismantle and fundamentally change how the agency does its business."
A Plan to Discredit Pollution Science
A number of the actions have been aimed at neutralizing the power of one of the most important findings in environmental health science: The science showing that air pollution kills.
In the 1990s, two large, long-term studies, by the American Cancer Society and Harvard researchers, showed that breathing higher levels of PM 2.5—microscopic particles 2.5 microns in diameter or less that spew into the air when something is burned—was associated with premature death.
Virtually everyone is exposed to the PM 2.5 because it is produced by the burning of coal, oil and wood.
PM 2.5 Explainer
Groups allied with the fossil fuel and tobacco industries led an effort to discredit the science, but a reanalysis of the data by the Boston-based Health Effects Institute (HEI), a nonprofit research organization funded by the EPA and the auto industry, affirmed the findings. Since then, dozens of studies, including more than 30 long-term human health studies in North America, have documented the link between PM 2.5 and premature death.
Based on the science, Clinton enacted the first national air quality standards on PM 2.5 in 1997.
Even more important, the large-scale studies of PM 2.5 allowed policy makers to quantify the benefits of cleaner air in a way that had not been possible before. The EPA, after peer-reviewing the science, began using the number of lives saved from reduced PM 2.5 exposure in the cost-benefit analysis it was required to perform to justify new cuts in pollution from cars, trucks and power plants.
In 2011, the EPA estimated that the benefits yielded by U.S. air pollution rules from 1990 to 2020 at $2 trillion, a figure that outweighed the costs of the regulation by 30-to-1, savings primarily attributable to reduced PM 2.5. In addition, the Clean Power Plan, Obama's signature climate initiative, was to result in PM 2.5 reductions that would account for up to 60 percent of the plan's projected $34 billion to $54 billion in benefits, far outweighing its $8.4 billion in costs.
That lopsided calculus stood in the way of what Trump said was his plan to "quickly, very quickly" end U.S. climate policy and other restraints on the oil and coal industries. This was well understood by appointees like Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, and William Wehrum, Trump EPA's assistant administrator for air pollution policy until 2019.
In 2014, Wehrum, a former industry lawyer, led an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to overturn the Obama EPA's PM 2.5 standards, by invoking the work of contrarian scientists like Enstrom. But a federal court disagreed. "Petitioners simply have not identified any way in which EPA jumped the rails of reasonableness in examining the science," wrote then-U.S. District Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
Still, that loss pointed to an avenue for a future attack on PM 2.5 science. And soon after taking office, Trump's appointees followed that path, overhauling EPA's science advisory boards and replacing every member of its legally mandated Clean Air Science Advisory Committee or CASAC, which had sided with the mainstream consensus on PM 2.5.
By last year, the reshaped CASAC made clear that it had a far different view of the risks posed by PM 2.5. In a key review, the committee not only disputed EPA's staff scientists on the need to act on new evidence of PM 2.5 health risks, the CASAC members were divided on the long-standing consensus that PM 2.5 caused premature death.
One of the studies the committee cited in its final report raising doubts about the science on PM 2.5 was Enstrom's 2017 research report. It had taken a long time for Enstrom to have his work recognized, and he expressed his satisfaction when he called into a public teleconference of a CASAC meeting last December.
"This is a tremendous group, and I don't believe it's ever been done better in the 50-year history of EPA," Enstrom said of the committee.
A Turning Point
In the Trump era, Enstrom may be a scientific influencer, but he has spent much of the last two decades as an outsider vocal about feeling unfairly maligned.
The point in his life when mainstream scientists turned against him, he believes, came 17 years ago, when he published a paper in the British Medical Journal challenging the scientific consensus that second-hand tobacco smoke causes heart disease and cancer.
The American Cancer Society condemned the study, funded by the tobacco industry through its now-defunct Center for Indoor Air Research, saying it misrepresented the cancer society's data. The data Enstrom based his research on was from an early ACS long-term study group, whose members were recruited in the 1950s. But at that time, smoking was so ubiquitous that it was impossible to conduct a valid study comparing people who'd been exposed to second-hand smoke with people who hadn't, the ACS argued in rebutting Enstrom's study.
The Anti-Scientists
A host of other scientists also joined in: The medical journal published 10 letters disputing Enstrom's method, findings and the conflict of interest they said was created by the industry sponsorship.
But Enstrom insisted that the work was sound. "This was peer-reviewed, and there's not been one error identified in my paper," he said in an interview with InsideClimate News.
As for the conflict of interest, Enstrom said he saw no difference between his acceptance of funding from a group controlled by tobacco executives and the practice of accepting research money from state cigarette tax funds and tobacco legal settlement money, as his scientist critics had. Both, he said, "originated with" the tobacco industry.
In Enstrom's eyes, he was the target of relentless persecution, smears that had all but obscured the early achievements of his career.
"Up until 2003, I basically had a third of a century where I had a perfect record of integrity," said Enstrom. Since then, he said, "my entire career has been under attack and the attack has never let up."
'If I Didn't Fight I Could Have Disappeared'
Enstrom grew up in a middle class home in southern California, part of a wave of aspiring young Cold War-era scientists inspired by stories of the physicist Albert Einstein and Russia's launch of Sputnik, the first manmade satellite.
Enstrom's father, Elmer, was a courtroom clerk who longed to argue cases instead of swear in witnesses. Elmer Enstrom taught himself law and passed the California bar at 41, eventually serving as a U.S. Magistrate Judge in San Diego. But he became best known for his pro bono legal work in retirement, representing residents who were fighting court-ordered busing in the San Diego public schools.
The younger Enstrom said he learned the value of perseverance from his father's example.
As a student at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, a then-new institution aiming to nurture the technological talent the United States needed for the space race, Enstrom was co-valedictorian of the class of 1965. He went on to obtain a Ph.D. in physics at Stanford, where his dissertation adviser was Melvin Schwartz, who later won the Nobel Prize. Enstrom's post-doctoral work at what is now known as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was carried out under another luminary, Luis W. Alvarez, also a Nobelist and a veteran of the Manhattan Project.
Physics, Enstrom recalled recently, was "exciting, exhilarating, because you're on the very forefront of science." But his studies left him unfulfilled.
"If you're doing elementary particle physics, you're basically doing something that's not really that understandable to most people," he said.
Through a college friend, Enstrom met Lester Breslow, California's top health official in the 1960s, who promoted a healthy diet and abstention from smoking as key to a long life. Enstrom became so drawn to the study of human health that he switched fields, working with Breslow, the dean of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles, for many years on a multi-part study on the longevity of Mormons, work supported by the American Cancer Society.
But Enstrom, who obtained a master's degree in epidemiology, was not on a tenure track at UCLA, and he relied on grant money to maintain his research position.
Over the next years, after public health advocates began blasting his work as suspect, Enstrom struck back. He accused those who questioned his integrity of liberal bias, and repeatedly clashed with his previous sponsors, colleagues, other scientists and government officials.
Among those Enstrom said were biased was a colleague, John Froines, a professor in UCLA's environmental health sciences department. Froines was a science adviser to California regulators, and had supported strong air pollution rules.
Politically, the two men could not have been further apart. While Enstrom spent the Vietnam War studying in a defense-related field, Froines was one of the "Chicago Seven," anti-war activists arrested during the riots outside of the Democratic National Convention in 1968.
In 2009, Enstrom helped initiate a lawsuit by a conservative legal group charging that Froines had overstayed his tenure on California's air pollution science review panel. Amid the controversy, Froines was temporarily removed from the board, but later reinstated. Froines, contacted by email, declined comment for this story.
In 2010, UCLA gave Enstrom notice that he was being terminated. His research, the university said, was "not aligned" with the school's academic mission and his research output and ability to secure continued funding did not meet the department's minimum requirements.
Enstrom sued UCLA, charging that his termination, which came after a confidential vote by his department's faculty, was in retaliation for his activism and his "whistleblowing" regarding Froines.
The case was eventually settled, with UCLA denying Enstrom's allegations. UCLA "vigorously supports the principles of academic freedom," the university said in an emailed statement. "Enstrom's presence as a researcher for decades, despite his minority positions defending diesel emissions and tobacco, demonstrates that fact." In the settlement, UCLA paid Enstrom $140,000 and gave him continued access to university resources, as well as permission to use the title "retired researcher."
Enstrom told UCLA's student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, that he was not entirely satisfied with the settlement, but thought it was the best compromise that could have been reached in the case.
"I am a good scientist, a very honest scientist," Enstrom said. "If I didn't fight I could have disappeared."
A War Over PM 2.5
For Enstrom, a major battleground has always been his home state of California, which historically has led the way in U.S. air pollution regulation. Thousands of pages documenting his advocacy against air pollution regulations are collected at the website of the Scientific Integrity Institute, a nonprofit organization he founded in Los Angeles.
In the 1990s, while he was still at UCLA, he began consulting for the tobacco industry, a role that would lead eventually to his study on second-hand smoking and his rift with the American Cancer Society.
Around the same time, Enstrom was contacted by Frederick Lipfert, a consultant for the industry-funded Electric Power Research Institute, who had seen Enstrom's work with the early ACS research cohort.
Lipfert asked if Enstrom could delve into the cancer society data to explore a question of crucial importance to the operators of the nation's power plants, more than half of which were fired by coal at the time: Were the invisible particles that their operations released into the air deadly?
With that, Enstrom joined the war over PM 2.5.
The buildings of downtown Los Angeles are partially obscured by smog at midday on Nov. 5, 2019. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images
He soon became a one-man exemplar of the wide-ranging and high-stakes conflict over the pollutant. He testified before California state regulators, advised a Congressional committee, and filed a lawsuit over the makeup of EPA's science advisory boards.
In 2005, Enstrom published a study funded by the Electric Power Research Institute that found no association between PM 2.5 and premature death in Californians from 1983 to 2002. That finding again put him at odds with the cancer society because it purported to shed doubt on the ACS's influential PM 2.5 work. It had the flavor of personal payback, as well: A co-author of the cancer society's PM 2.5 study was Michael Thun, then ACS's vice president for research, the same scientist who had condemned Enstrom's tobacco research two years earlier.
But at the time, Enstrom's findings did not gain traction with government regulators.
For the EPA, the decisive flaw in Enstrom's study was his reliance on county-level air pollution data. Rates of premature death in lightly polluted rural areas could skew the rates in heavily polluted cities in the same county, especially in a state like California, with some of the largest counties in the nation.
The original ACS study in 1995 also had inexact exposure estimates, based on urban census tracts that in some cases encompassed several counties. But the ACS researchers had recently published a follow-up study that used smaller zip code areas in Los Angeles and found an even stronger association between PM 2.5 and deadly health effects. The correlation between the pollutant and harmful health effects also was holding up in research that had begun to use satellite remote sensing to pinpoint PM 2.5 pollution levels in the vicinity of individual people's homes.
So regulators gave little weight to Enstrom's study in comparison with the original Harvard and ACS studies; the reanalysis of that data; the cancer society's follow-ups; as well as research on the effects of PM 2.5 carried out in other places, using different groups of subjects and different methodologies. These studies were augmented by work in lab animals that provided evidence of how PM 2.5 can disturb the cardiovascular system. In 2009, the EPA concluded that a broad body of evidence affirmed PM 2.5's deadly toll.
"The evidence that combustion-related fine particle pollution contributes to both respiratory and cardiovascular diseases is just pretty compelling," said C. Arden Pope, an economist at Brigham Young University and a co-author of both the original Harvard and ACS studies and follow-up studies.
"There are probably no two studies in environmental health that have been more independently reanalyzed," Pope said. "They have been scrutinized in really remarkable ways and have held up."
A Campaign Against 'Secret Science'
Enstrom, however, was convinced that the findings of the Harvard and ACS studies were biased and politically motivated, carried out by scientists who favored more U.S. government regulation.
"What I'm watching is the descent of epidemiology from what used to be a legitimate public health science into just pure activism," he said.
The legal battle with UCLA had earned Enstrom stature on the right. The libertarian publication Reason Magazine produced an online video on his mistreatment at the hands of what it called "the Green Regulation Machine." The conservative American Freedom Alliance honored Enstrom as a "Hero of Conscience," along with his wife, Marta Villanea, an administrative law judge, who supported him throughout his trials.
"All I did is what a good wife should do," Villanea said in her acceptance speech.
Enstrom joined the board of trustees of the American Council on Science and Health, an industry and Libertarian-funded group that describes itself as a "a pro-science consumer advocacy organization," although critics note that its advocacy invariably takes the form of battling government regulation.
Enstrom also became a science advisor to the Heartland Institute, the conservative think tank that has long supported and promoted work that disputes the science on climate change.
Steve Milloy, a former tobacco and coal industry adviser who had been leading attacks on PM 2.5 science from the beginning, said that Enstrom brought to the fight a "personal story of persecution."
"It's hard for people to understand what's going on unless you've been really intimately involved in this saga, and Jim has been," said Milloy. "He's actually had his career damaged by it, and so he feels it very personally."
Milloy, working with a fossil fuel-industry funded legal advocacy group, represented Enstrom in a lawsuit against EPA in 2016, alleging bias in the choice of scientists who served on its scientific advisory boards.
Enstrom also began advising U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who after becoming chairman of the House Science Committee in 2013 took up the cause of discrediting the science on PM 2.5.
Smith derided the ACS and Harvard studies as "secret science," adopting a line of attack launched two decades earlier by industry foes of regulation who characterized the studies' routine protections of patients' confidential medical data as nefarious.
Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, during the House Judiciary oversight hearing with U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on the Department of Justice. Credit: Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images
Smith pelted the EPA with subpoenas seeking the raw data, and continued his efforts even after he was reminded that the studies had already been re-analyzed. However, he said he knew one legitimate researcher whose request for access to the raw data had been turned down by the American Cancer Society: James Enstrom.
The EPA ultimately complied with Smith's subpoena, but Smith did nothing further with the data. Instead, he sponsored a "secret science" bill seeking to bar the EPA in the future from relying on studies that used confidential data in regulatory decision-making. Critics said it would bar the public health agency from using some of the most important human health science. The legislation, first introduced in 2014, passed three times in the GOP-led House, but was never taken up by the closely divided Senate.
By the time of the last vote in March 2017, however, Trump was in the White House, and the prospects for Smith's proposal suddenly improved.
The Trump administration was in a position both to enact limits on the EPA's use of mainstream science and to give more weight to contrarian work of scientists like Enstrom, who had just published his new study challenging the foundations of PM 2.5 science.
Enstrom's 'Odd Man Out' Study
Enstrom's study almost wasn't published. "I have never read a paper that so willfully ignored the breadth of scientific evidence and attacked a specific study/group of investigators," said a reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the scientific journals that rejected the manuscript.
But Enstrom finally got the paper in print by reaching out to Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts, who had submitted a letter in support of Enstrom during his fight with UCLA.
Calabrese was a founder of the International Dose Response Society,an organization that holds that exposure to low doses of toxic agents can be beneficial—a position embraced by many industry groups and rejected by many advocates of strong environmental protection policies.
He was also the editor of the society's journal, Dose-Response. Aware of the controversy Enstrom's study would stir, Calabrese agreed to publish, but warned Enstrom he would give the authors Enstrom challenged a chance to respond. "I said you'll have to take your whacks by the people you're going to hit, and they're formidable people," Calabrese recalled.
In fact, the authors of the original ACS study and the Health Effects Institute (HEI) reanalysis soon published a detailed response, citing a litany of problems they had identified in Enstrom's work.
The most significant fault, they wrote, was Enstrom's use of old, county-level PM 2.5 readings instead of employing newer methods now widely used to estimate exposure more precisely. The authors of the critique had just published their latest follow-up study of the ACS cohort, using seven different methods of estimating pollution, including satellite remote sensing, and finding even more significant associations between PM 2.5 exposure and premature death.
Enstrom rejected the critiques of his study—in fact, in an interview last year, he refused to accept that the substance of his work had been called into question at all.
"This is an old tactic that's used by people who don't want to address fundamental issues," Enstrom said. "Instead of addressing what I did, they use the tactic of looking at what I didn't do, and which they know I can't do. It's a miracle that I was able to do what I did do, because of all the efforts to stop me, and the fact that this data is not available outside their little clique."
Changing the Rules
Enstrom's study was well-timed to figure into U.S. air pollution policy decision-making. As Trump took office, the EPA was already launching its re-assessment of the state of current science on PM 2.5, as the law requires the agency to do every few years for key pollutants to ensure that Clean Air Act regulations are adequate.
This time around, there was major new science on PM 2.5 to consider, including one of the largest studies ever, a Harvard analysis of the health records of 60 million Medicare recipients. It indicated that lowering PM 2.5 pollution nationwide by just 1 microgram per cubic meter would save 12,000 American lives annually. The research found the risk of premature death for African Americans in the study was three times as great as that for the general population.
But how the EPA weighed the science was affected profoundly by the changes made at the agency by Trump's team, who borrowed the ideas and rhetoric that industry foes of regulation had honed in the 25-year battle over PM 2.5. Several members of Trump's transition team, including Milloy, were longtime warriors in the campaign to discredit the science.
Trump's first EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, accelerated the schedule for considering the adequacy of the national PM 2.5 science by two years, so that the review could be concluded by the end of Trump's first term in office. And in the name of "sound science" and "independence," Pruitt barred recipients of EPA grants from serving on agency science advisory boards. Since the EPA is one of the largest funders of environmental science, the move had the effect of knocking prominent experts off the committees.
To replace them, Pruitt and his successor, Wheeler, named industry-friendly state regulators and consultants for regulated industries, who faced no similar conflict-of-interest bar.Wheeler eliminated altogether a separate 20-person expert panel on particulate matter. It was precisely the sort of overhaul that Milloy and Enstrom had sought in their 2016 lawsuit against the EPA.
The agency's rank and file was still staffed with scientists who predated Trump, and they gave Enstrom's paper little weight when they considered it against the bulk of evidence on PM 2.5. The staff scientists cited more than 2,600 scientific studies in a nearly 2,000-page analysis finalized on Dec. 31, 2019. It affirmed the EPA's long-standing conclusion that PM 2.5 was a cause of early death. In a separate analysis, EPA staff recommended a stricter national standard for fine particulate matter pollution.
But the Trump administration's revamped six-member Clean Air Science Advisory Committee saw things differently. Chaired by statistician Louis Anthony Cox, a Denver consultant for the American Petroleum Institute and other industry groups, the CASAC urged that the agency require a much higher burden of proof for assessing pollution's health harms.
Enstrom's 2005 study was included in the list of studies that the committee said raised doubt about the link between PM 2.5 and premature death. And one CASAC member, Sabine Lange, a toxicologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, wrote in a separate attachment that Enstrom's 2017 study could be an effective challenge to the seminal American Cancer Society research.
"The Enstrom study had a finer resolution, so one would guess that it had less exposure error and therefore possibly a greater effect estimate, or one with narrower confidence intervals," she wrote.
Last month, when the EPA announced it would not strengthen the pollution standard, Wheeler cited the committee's report and the doubts about the PM 2.5 science to justify the decision. "We've identified a lot of uncertainties," he said.
Andrew Wheeler, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, arrives for a House Appropriations Committee hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on March 4, 2020.
Currently, Wheeler is moving forward with an initiative to change how the agency weighs science in the future. The proposal, called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science," is essentially the idea that Smith attempted to move through Congress three years ago, barring the EPA from basing decisions on studies that rely on patients' confidential medical data, as the original ACS and Harvard Six Cities PM 2.5 studies did.
A wide array of health, medical and science organizations oppose Wheeler's decision not to raise the PM 2.5 standard decision. On April 14, 19 health and medical organizations, led by the American Lung Association, said in a statement that the Trump EPA had employed a "deeply flawed" process and ignored "powerful, overwhelming evidence" that the current PM 2.5 standard is inadequate.
Scientists and health organizations are also fighting the so-called "transparency" rule—critics say even the name has an Orwellian ring to it, because the proposed regulation is not transparent about its purpose.
The public comment period on the proposed rule ended May 18, while the deadline for the public to weigh in on the PM 2.5 standard is June 29. "The way I see it, now, all the pieces are falling into place" in the Trump administration's plan for weakened regulation, said Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Union of Concerned Scientists' Center for Science and Democracy.
She said the purge of the science advisory boards, the appointments of industry consultants to the advisory committee and other changes to the process have helped obscure the strong scientific consensus around the risks of PM 2.5, while elevating the importance of the work of scientists like Enstrom.
"These contrarian scientists really have the ear of the EPA in ways they never had before," Goldman said. "People like Enstrom provide the appearance of an independent scientist weighing in, and It all works together to get where we are—a rule that does not protect health with an adequate margin of safety."
H. Christopher Frey, a professor of environmental engineering at North Carolina State University, who was a member of the particulate matter expert panel that Wheeler disbanded, said that the changes made under the Trump administration amounted to a rigging of the process. "If I wanted to design a science review that would have a predetermined outcome favorable to the regulated industries, I would get rid of the real experts," he said.
Members of the disbanded panel, in fact, felt so strongly about the issue that they met on their own and submitted a report to EPA endorsing the agency staff's finding that the PM 2.5 standard needed to be strengthened.
Frey said Enstrom's argument—that his study has refuted the 1995 ACS study, and therefore, the EPA's PM 2.5 standard should be withdrawn—reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the process.
"The standards are not set based on a single study, and they're not withdrawn based on a single study," Frey said. "It's the overall body of evidence that is important."
'A Journey Almost Impossible to Comprehend'
Enstrom said recently that although he thinks there is no need for a PM 2.5 standard at all, he is gratified by Wheeler's decision to maintain the current standard and to move forward with the "transparency" rule.
"It shows the value of persistence in terms of believing in honest science and trying to penetrate what seems like an impenetrable wall of dishonesty and deception," he said. His struggle to be recognized, he added, was "a journey that is almost impossible to comprehend. It's just been incredibly contentious and for what purpose I'm not sure I know, other than just deliberate power, power and ego."
During a recent phone interview, Enstrom detoured frequently into speculation about "the other side" in the air pollution science debate.
He complained that air pollution studies authored by"activist Canadians" should not be the basis for U.S. environmental regulations. And he noted that a Chinese businessman's family foundation has helped fund the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and that Chinese doctoral students were co-authors on the school's air pollution studies.
"Do you see any of these Harvard people going over to China or central Africa where you do have air pollution problems?" Enstrom asked. "No. Their only goal is to force more regulation on Americans."
Enstrom expressed particular outrage about a pre-publication study recently released by a Harvard group that found PM 2.5 levels in the United States to be associated with higher death rates from Covid-19. (The researchers have since revised their findings to reflect a lower, but still significant, association). Enstrom has published his own calculations of the pandemic's effects in the conservative Heritage Foundation's publication, The Daily Signal. Averaging counts of total mortality in the United States by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the five weeks ending April 4, early in the pandemic, he concluded that deaths were no higher than expected. And based on those numbers, Enstrom wrote, "It's possible that the lethality of Covid-19 is no greater than that of the seasonal flu."
Since then, the CDC's weekly death counts have been as much as 36 percent higher than expected, and the agency estimates that Covid-19 is at least 10 times more deadly than the flu. Enstrom said he remains convinced that the impact in the U.S. is limited geographically, primarily to New York, and that public officials have overreacted. Although the loss of life was significant in the flu pandemic of 1917-1918, Enstrom said, "The country dealt with it. It was terrible, but it was not something to shut down the entire economy."
Recently, Enstrom has sent personal emails to scientists and public interest groups who have criticized the Trump administration's review of PM 2.5 science, asking them to discuss his evidence that "there is NO causal relationship between PM 2.5 and total mortality in the U.S."
So far, he lamented recently, no one has responded.
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EPA Adopts Fringe Science Claim That Small Doses of Pollution Are Healthy 2/19 see Chemicals.
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Sam Nickerson
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in April 2018 proposed relaxing standards related to how it assesses the effects of exposure to low levels of toxic chemicals on public health.
Now, correspondence obtained by the LA Times revealed just how deeply involved industry lobbyists and a controversial, industry-funded toxicologist were in drafting the federal agency's proposal to scrap its current, protective approach to regulating toxin exposure.
The proposed change came just two weeks after atop EPA official contacted toxicologist Ed Calabrese, whose claim that low doses of carcinogens and radiation are healthy stressors akin to physical exercise that activate the body's repair mechanisms has been panned by more mainstream researchers.
"I wanted to check to see if you might have some time in the next couple of days for a quick call to discuss a couple of items … "EPA deputy assistant administrator Clint Woods wrote to Calabrese.
The EPA's proposed regulation, signed by then-Administrator Scott Pruitt and published in the U.S. Government's Federal Register, copied Calabrese's recommendations to Woods almost verbatim.
Calabrese, who was also quoted in the EPA's press release for the proposal, celebrated the announcement in an email to former coal and tobacco lobbyist Steve Milloy, who served on President Donald Trump's EPA transition team.
"This is a major big time victory," Calabrese wrote. Milloy, who is also a Fox News commentator, replied that it was "YUGE."
The EPA's proposal is a departure from its long-time "linear no-threshold" approach to regulating the study of toxins: once a substance is found to be harmful at one level, the danger applies at all levels. In other words, there can be no safe level of radiation exposure.
Calabrese argues this approach is overly cautious and a financial detriment to industry. The new rule would require that regulators look at "various threshold models across the exposure range" for pollutants.
Low doses of otherwise toxic chemicals can be beneficial to human health in specific clinical situations, the LA Times noted, but experiments have produced mixed results and experts say it would be a risk to apply the findings to regulation for the general public.
"There is no way to control the dose a person gets from an industrial or agricultural chemical," David Jacobs, a professor of public health at the University of Minnesota, told the newspaper. "It's not being doled out in pills and monitored by a physician who can lower it if the patient isn't responding well."
The EPA has not announced a date for when it will make a decision on the rule proposal.
Health experts believe that if the EPA does adopt the rule, it could lead to wholesale changes to the agency's standards for regulating toxic waste, pesticides, and air and water quality.
"Industry has been pushing for this for a long time," George Washington University professor of environmental and occupational health David Michaels told the LA Times. "Not just the chemical industry, but the radiation and tobacco industries too."
Calabrese has long been connected to these industries and has received funding from tobacco firm R.J. Reynolds, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil and others, the LA Times reported.
Calabrese's role in the EPA's proposal illustrates how the Trump administration has pursued environmental policy recommendations from industry lobbyists based on research running counter to mainstream science.
According to the LA Times, Calabrese first emailed Milloy about whether it would be possible to get the EPA to abandon the linear no-threshold model in September 2017, not even nine months after Trump was sworn into office.
EPA Adopts Fringe Science Claim That Small Doses of Pollution Are Healthy 2/19 see Chemicals.
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ref
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-secret-science-20190219-story.html
Scientist says some pollution is good for you — a disputed claim Trump’s EPA has embraced
By SUSANNE RUST
FEB 19, 2019
Scientist says some pollution is good for you — a disputed claim Trump’s EPA has embraced
Water samples are taken for testing from a canal in the Cawelo Water District near Bakersfield in 2015. A researcher who has suggested that exposure to toxic chemicals can be good for humans is helping to shape Environmental Protection Agency policies. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)]
In early 2018, a deputy assistant administrator in the EPA, Clint Woods, reached out to a Massachusetts toxicologist best known for pushing a public health standard suggesting that low levels of toxic chemicals and radiation are good for people.
“I wanted to check to see if you might have some time in the next couple of days for a quick call to discuss a couple items …,” Woods wrote to Ed Calabrese.
Less than two weeks later, Calabrese’s suggestions on how the EPA should assess toxic chemicals and radiation were introduced, nearly word for word, in the U.S. government’s official journal, the Federal Register.
“This is a major big time victory,” Calabrese wrote in an email to Steve Milloy, a former coal and tobacco lobbyist who runs a website, junkscience.com, that seeks to discredit mainstream climate science.
“Yes. It is YUGE!” wrote Milloy, in response.
It was a glorious moment for Calabrese, who had been snubbed for decades by mainstream public health scientists because of his controversial research and theories.
Massachusetts toxicologist Ed Calabrese (University of Massachusetts)]
It also signified the major shift the EPA has taken under the Trump administration. More than any before it, this White House has actively sought out advice from industry lobbyists and the scientists they commission in setting pollution rules.
Denouncing the Obama-era EPA as an agency beholden to environmental extremists, the administration has not only dismissed mainstream science but embraced widely discredited alternatives that critics say are not consistent with the agency’s focus on improving public and environmental health.
Calabrese’s role illustrates a different side of this shift: the potential removal of longstanding public health practices and the incorporation of industry-backed and disputed science into federal environmental policy.
Calabrese spent decades advancing his ideas, facing skepticism and criticism from peers in the toxicology community while winning funding from companies whose bottom lines conformed with his views.
He says most of the pushback he receives comes from left-of-center toxicologists who see him as “the devil incarnate” for accepting industry funding and challenging their ideology. He maintains his science is solid and will be vindicated in time.
“These environmental regulatory people are very closed-minded,” he said. They won’t reconsider their standards, [note trumpian pop psych] and see that some of the agents they call harmful “actually can induce adaptive responses,” Calabrese said.
This view — that pollution and radiation can be beneficial — has many experts worried. The fact that such a position may become EPA policy, they say, portends a future in which corporate desires outweigh public and environmental health.
“Industry has been pushing for this for a long time,” said David Michaels, former assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration who’s a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University. “Not just the chemical industry, but the radiation and tobacco industries too.”
If the EPA ultimately adopts Calabrese’s proposed new regulations, researchers say it could change decades of standards and guidelines on clean air, water and toxic waste. It could also fundamentally alter the way the government assesses new chemicals and pesticides entering the marketplace.
“This is industry’s holy grail,” said Michaels.
If the EPA ultimately adopts Ed Calabrese’s proposed new regulations, researchers say it could change decades of standards and guidelines on clean air, water and toxic waste, such as those that apply to PBF Energy's Torrance Refining Co.
If the EPA ultimately adopts Ed Calabrese’s proposed new regulations, researchers say it could change decades of standards and guidelines on clean air, water and toxic waste, such as those that apply to PBF Energy's Torrance Refining Co. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)]
Can pollution be healthy?
For decades, federal agencies charged with investigating and regulating carcinogens, toxic chemicals and radiation have been guided by the assumption that if a substance is dangerous at some level, it is harmful at any level. The higher the exposure, the more harm done. The lower the dose, the less. And the risk doesn’t entirely disappear until the substance is removed.
This is known as the linear no-threshold model, and industry dislikes it because it generally assumes that there is no level, or threshold, of exposure that can be considered totally safe.
But research done on low exposures to toxins has been less than definitive. Experiments designed to test carcinogens and radiation at low levels often produce conflicting results — with, for example, some studies of a chemical showing harm, other studies showing no effect, and a few suggesting a net benefit. In other cases, there is no information at all to guide regulators.
In the face of such uncertainty, the EPA and other agencies have taken a cautious approach by relying on the linear no-threshold model. Where data are absent or uncertain, they assume some level of risk.
It is an imperfect but protective approach, say many public health specialists. They argue that in a human population that varies widely in age, health and levels of chemical exposures, it is imperative that the agency cast a wide, conservative and protective net.
For decades, national and international scientific bodies have upheld this approach. It has been reviewed and re-reviewed dozens of times, including most recently by the congressionally chartered National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the EPA.
At the same time, industry has funded scientists to conduct and promote research designed to poke holes in the linear no-threshold model.
And that is where Calabrese comes in. He has long argued that regulators “erred on the side of being protective” at the cost of billions of dollars per year to industry.
Calabrese is a proselytizer of hormesis, the idea that dangerous chemicals and radiation are beneficial at low doses. He says they have a stimulating effect.
Polluting industries have promoted hormesis as an alternative to linear no-threshold for decades, but they had gotten little traction until the EPA embraced it last April.
“It’s clearly not mainstream,” said Thomas Burke, professor and director of the Risk Sciences Institute at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Burke and other experts say there are clearly scenarios where toxic chemicals can have beneficial effects in clinical and pharmacological settings, such as in the case of tamoxifen, which at low doses is effective at preventing and treating breast cancer but at higher doses can lead to blood clots, stroke and uterine cancer.
But, they say, what happens in a clinical setting can’t and shouldn’t be immediately applied to a regulatory, public health setting.
In the clinical case, “you have a doctor controlling and administering the medication to an individual,” said David Jacobs, a professor of public health at the University of Minnesota, who has published studies showing hormetic effects in some industrial pollutants. “The doctor can pull the medication at any time.”
“There is no way to control the dose a person gets from an industrial or agricultural chemical,” he said. “It’s not being doled out in pills and monitored by a physician who can lower it if the patient isn’t responding well.”
Therefore, Jacobs said, it would be dangerous to use hormesis as a framework for protecting public and environmental health.
“It really doesn’t pass the sniff test” when applying it to public health, Burke said, while allowing for its place in the forum of ideas. “I always teach my classes that there are other theories. It’s like any part of science, there are different points of view. Whether it’s about climate change or low doses.”
But he also teaches that one needs to know who has skin in the game. And in the case of hormesis, he said, that’s industry.
Big Tobacco embraces disputed research
In the early 1980s, Calabrese was a tenured professor at the University of Massachusetts, stringing together public agency and industry-funded grants to study chemicals in drinking water and the effects of ozone on mice.
His funders included the EPA, the state of Massachusetts, the Hoffman-LaRoche pharmaceutical company and semiconductor giant Digital Corp.
Then in 1985, he reached out to the Council for Tobacco Research, the research arm of the tobacco industry, seeking a grant to examine “a possible inherited and metabolic susceptibility to lung cancer in smokers.” His proposal was declined.
Sheldon Sommers, a physician at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital and scientific director of the council, wrote in response to the grant application that Calabrese’s proposal “...is a mad hatter’s tea party sort of epidemiologic approach, and a total $2.1 million plus would likely be frittered away in my opinion,” according to documents from the UC San Francisco Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive.
But by the 1990s, Calabrese had solidly established himself as a trusted scientist with the tobacco industry. He found they were interested in research that questioned the methods that regulatory agencies use to assess risk.
In a 1994 proposal to R.J. Reynolds, Calabrese offered to investigate a new kind of smokeless cigarette for the company, but also incorporate into his research “the loss of current benefits associated with smoking, such as protection from certain types of cancers and other illnesses…”
It was when he began his work on hormesis that Calabrese got attention from a broader range of industries.
With seed money from R.J. Reynolds, Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble and others, as well as the EPA, Calabrese established a hormesis working group at the University of Massachusetts, which he called the Biological Effects of Low Level Exposures, or BELLE. Minutes from a 1990 advisory board meeting show the group chose not to use the word “hormesis” in its official name.
According to documents, Calabrese and his funders also held off on pushing a hormesis regulatory agenda until they’d built a sizable base of published scientific research.
Between 1990 and 2013, Calabrese received more than $8 million from companies and institutions, including R.J. Reynolds, Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, General Electric, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force, to conduct research on hormesis.
Spokesmen from Exxon Mobil and the Air Force say they no longer fund Calabrese’s work.
Calabrese established his own scientific society, the International Dose Response Society, and his own hormesis journal — now called Dose Response — where he served as editor-in-chief.
He wrote hundreds of articles, in his own journal and in others (including “Should hormesis be the default model in risk assessment?” and “The importance of hormesis to public health”), organized dozens of conferences and delivered scores of talks.
And while his publication portfolio is vast, it is also broad. It includes not just studies of hormesis, but research on soil ingestion, opinion pieces on law and regulatory policy, historical treatise on science, and a few scathing, posthumous rebukes of revered scientists, such as Herman Muller, a Nobel prize-winner and supporter of linear no-threshold.
Calabrese insists his funding does not influence his work.
“My job involves finding financial support to do studies in my field,” said Calabrese. “I seek support from the private and public sectors. The University independently evaluates each of these for compliance with the rules.”
Not all of his money comes from industry or government agencies with extensive toxic waste sites. Between 2000 and 2013, Calabrese received $50,000 from the EPA to hold a conference on soil ingestion, and $50,000 from CalEPA for a reference database he built on cancer publications. He also received a $750,000 joint grant from the EPA and the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s trade group, to study soil ingestion by construction workers.
Yet, despite his prolific career, he has instigated criticism and rebuke from many of his peers for his push on public and environmental health policy. He has been described as a “prominent industry consultant,” having “outlying views,” whose science is “way out there.”
For years he failed to get regulatory agencies to take him seriously.
Then Donald Trump was elected president.
President Trump and former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt
President Trump and former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt (Associated Press)]
‘We are winning’
On Sept. 5, 2017, nearly nine months after Trump was sworn in as president and seven months after Scott Pruitt was confirmed as head of the EPA, Calabrese wrote an email to Milloy, the former coal lobbyist who is a Fox news commentator. The Los Angeles Times obtained the emails through a public records request to the University of Massachusetts.
“I wanted to connect with you on whether and how it may be possible to get the EPA to consider changing the LNT [linear no-threshold model] to something far better,” Calabrese wrote.
Milloy had served on Trump’s EPA transition team and was still in touch with high-ranking officials in Pruitt’s agency.
A few months later, Calabrese wrote to Milloy again, letting him know that he’d corresponded with Ryan Jackson, Pruitt’s chief of staff, and sensed interest in a move against linear no-threshold.
Not long after Woods, the EPA’s deputy assistant of the Office of Air and Radiation, emailed Calabrese asking if he wanted to talk about “default linear assumptions” and other items.
The two arranged a call, and on April 19, 2018, Woods sent Calabrese draft language for a small section in the EPA’s proposed new ruling on transparency, called “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science.”
“It is good what you have but you need a little more,” wrote Calabrese, who then suggested a line, which he altered twice, in email exchanges with Woods, before settling on this: “EPA shall also incorporate the concept of model uncertainty when needed as a default to optimize low dose risk estimation based on the major competing models (LNT, Threshold, and Hormesis).”
In other words, if the EPA is uncertain about a particular chemical’s impacts at low doses, it would abandon linear no-threshold as a default, and try other models instead, including hormesis.
On April 25, Milloy sent Calabrese the final wording for the draft proposal, which included Calabrese’s line nearly word for word.
“I am almost passing out with surprise and euphoria… ” Calabrese wrote Milloy after seeing the document.
The rule was posted for comment in the Federal Register on April 30, although a final ruling has not been announced.
John Konkus, an EPA spokesman, said the input and perspective from “the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Dose Response” was welcomed, and reflected the perspective of “a wide variety of scientific experts” the agency reached out to when drafting the proposal.
Public health specialists outside the agency say that if the final language is adopted, it is likely to tie the EPA up in knots as it tries and then debates all the alternative models. It could also have profound effects on current and future standards for drinking water, air and toxic waste sites.
“EPA tries to be conservative in its setting of risks,” said Jan Beyea, a retired radiation physicist who has worked with the National Academies of Science. “Calabrese and collaborators think that most pollutants are good for you at low doses, so no need to be conservative.”
EPA spokeswoman Molly Block declined to speculate on whether the rule would be passed and how it would affect environmental rules that were set based on the linear no-threshold model.
Industry groups have praised the proposed change.
“We support moving away from over-reliance on the linear no -threshold default,” wrote a spokesman for the American Chemistry Council, the trade group for the chemical industry. It’s a method, he says that “frequently results in inflated health risk estimates and unwarranted, costly risk management decisions.”
Milloy also seemed pleased with the proposed ruling.
“The EPA should be open and transparent about how and what they are basing their decisions on,” he said, “and they should be using the best science available.”
In any case, he said, “we’re winning.”
Susanne Rust
CONTACT
Susanne Rust is an investigative reporter specializing in environmental issues. Before coming to the Los Angeles Times, she was the editor of Columbia University’s Energy & Environmental Reporting Project, where she oversaw several reporting projects, including a series that examined ExxonMobil’s understanding of climate science in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Rust started her career in 2003 as a science reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, and was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University in 2009, and the Center for Investigative Reporting’s environment reporter between 2010 and 2014.
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mojo sum
Susanne Rust of the LA Times brings us the latest fabulous news from the Trump adminstration:
In early 2018, a deputy assistant administrator in the EPA, Clint Woods, reached out to a Massachusetts toxicologist best known for pushing a public health standard suggesting that low levels of toxic chemicals and radiation are good for people….Less than two weeks later, [Ed] Calabrese’s suggestions on how the EPA should assess toxic chemicals and radiation were introduced, nearly word for word, in the U.S. government’s official journal, the Federal Register.
“This is a major big time victory,” Calabrese wrote in an email to Steve Milloy, a former coal and tobacco lobbyist who runs a website, junkscience.com, that seeks to discredit mainstream climate science. “Yes. It is YUGE!” wrote Milloy, in response.
We could stop right there if we wanted. Steve Milloy is one of the most prominent purveyors of crap science in the world. He’s a climate change denier with close ties to the tobacco industry and the author of (among others) Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them. If Calabrese and Milloy are buddies, that’s probably all you need to know.
And where has Calabrese’s funding come from? Do I even have to tell you?
By the 1990s, Calabrese had solidly established himself as a trusted scientist with the tobacco industry. He found they were interested in research that questioned the methods that regulatory agencies use to assess risk.
….It was when he began his work on hormesis that Calabrese got attention from a broader range of industries. With seed money from R.J. Reynolds, Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble and others, as well as the EPA, Calabrese established a hormesis working group at the University of Massachusetts, which he called the Biological Effects of Low Level Exposures, or BELLE….Between 1990 and 2013, Calabrese received more than $8 million from companies and institutions, including R.J. Reynolds, Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, General Electric, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force, to conduct research on hormesis.
There you have it. As usual, the tobacco industry is the root of all scientific evil, and their approach long ago caught on with every other polluting industry out there. “Manufacturing doubt” is their goal, and abuse of research into processes like hormesis is their holy grail. It’s not that hormesis is impossible. There may well be a few isolated examples where it has application—and as far as polluting industries are concerned, one example is plenty. They can then fund research claiming to find it all over the place.
If you want to read the whole grim story, check out Rebecca Leber’s piece from last October about how Calabrese’s ideas became embedded in the EPA’s rulemaking process after Trump took office. It’s the Trump era in a nutshell.
ref oct 2018
for years, the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of radiation, carcinogens, and other toxic chemicals has been based on the cautious scientific reasoning that considers even slight exposure to toxins potentially risky to public health. From that premise, the EPA has assessed a wide range of pollution, including lung-clogging particulate matter, Superfund cleanup, water treatment, radiation exposure, and risk assessments for carcinogens like benzene.
That time-honored approach may be changing because of easy-to-overlook phrasing within a paragraph buried in the proposed “Strengthening Transparency In Regulatory Science Rule,” a regulation that will bar the EPA from considering a wide range of scientific studies in its rule-making. With a few sentences buried in the seven-page Federal Register text, the EPA is opening the door to a new scientific approach that—in a worst-case scenario—could further relax regulations because of the assumption that a little pollution is actually beneficial.
Some scientists have considered the implications of this paragraph and described a whole array of potential problems to Mother Jones. Because the paragraph is written in incredibly vague language, most scientists were unable to explain which pollutants or regulations were the prime targets. Moreover, the various examples of pollutants that it could affect were not based on the prevailing scientific literature.
“I was surprised to see it,” said Jonathan Levy, an expert in human health risks from the environment at Boston University who was one of the scientists warning of the implications from this passage. “The EPA looks at dozens upon dozens of toxins, and there are decisions based on exposure above and below a certain level, and cancer-risk above and below a certain level. This could be so sweeping to affect almost any chemical under consideration.”
“I was surprised to see it…This could be so sweeping to affect almost any chemical under consideration.”
Despite its potential importance, this change has attracted little attention. One likely reason is that with phrases citing the “growing empirical evidence of non-linearity in the concentration-response function,” the language is impenetrable for all but the most serious specialists. But the change has been noticed and celebrated by the chemicals industry, as well as EPA critics in conservative circles who have previously challenged the agency on everything from its acceptance of climate change science to the health costs of air pollution.
On Wednesday afternoon, a congressional hearing on the proposed rule will be held by a Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee. One of the witnesses will be an enthusiastic proponent of the change, University of Massachusetts environmental health scientist Edward Calabrese, who discloses that one of the funders for his research into toxicology is ExxonMobil. Calabrese has long argued that the science supports the argument that low levels of exposure to cancer-causing substances are actually beneficial—which is tantamount to saying that a little bit of it is good for you.
So, how could this have happened?
It all began with Scott Pruitt. A few months before his many controversies finally cost him his job, the EPA Administrator proposed a far-reaching rule that would have drastically limited the kinds of scientific studies that the EPA considers legitimate.
The response to the “Strengthening Transparency In Regulatory Science Rule” was immediate and overwhelmingly critical. During the three-month public comment period, which ended in August, scientists, environmentalists, and public health groups warned that the effect of this single political act would mean the EPA would ignore or dismiss the best available science in order to tilt its regulatory work in industry’s favor; they’ve taken to calling the rule a “censored science proposal.”
By requiring data to be made public, which researchers say is impossible when it comes to decades-old landmark studies based on sensitive medical records, the rule would effectively slash the body of research that underpins the EPA’s work. The primary target of the rule is the landmark air pollution studies that look at the health effects of fine particulate matter on the lungs, but it can touch virtually any rule relying on sensitive medical records, from lead poisoning to mercury.
In order to understand how this change could potentially unleash dangerous toxins into the public sphere, it’s important to understand how standards have been set historically. The model has long held that there is a direct relationship between the dose and the level of harm, which is known as the “linear no-threshold” (or LNT) risk-averse version. This model acknowledged there are still risks associated even with the lowest levels of exposure. Some people—babies, children, the sick and elderly—are more vulnerable than others, so there is no single threshold that can be considered safe.
Some people—babies, children, the sick and elderly—are more vulnerable than others, so there is no single threshold that can be considered safe.
No one is spared exposure to a mass of potentially dangerous substances such as lead, mercury, asbestos, formaldehyde, and fine particulate matter. A growing body of epidemiological evidence shows how even the tiniest exposure of some of these substances for fetuses and children can have profound effects on their development. Radiation, too, may be everywhere, but the risks rise with higher exposure, such as near a Superfund cleanup site or for workers at a nuclear plant. The consensus model adopts a risk-averse approach, suggesting a linear relationship between risk and exposure.
A small community of scientists and interests, some funded by the chemical and fossil fuel industries, has argued for years that the EPA should replace its existing standards with more flexible ones. Instead of the “linear no-threshold” risk-averse version, some would prefer one that could raise the threshold at which the EPA considers exposure dangerous.
In fact, they argue, there are benefits to low doses of radiation, lead, and other toxic exposures. The Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, an EPA critic and climate skeptic, cheered the departure from LNT as a paradigm change in ablog post: “The LNT model isn’t just wrong—nature actually works opposite to it. Small amounts of exposure to things that are toxic in large amounts can actually be beneficial.”
“Small amounts of exposure to things that are toxic in large amounts can actually be beneficial.”
That line of reasoning also appeared in the EPA press release when Pruitt announced the regulation, giving a hint of what was really buried in the rule. Among the supporters, which included a handful of Republican politicians, were three scientists who lent their scientific weight supporting the new rule.
One of them was Edward Calabrese, who wrote in his statement for the EPA in April, “The proposal represents a major scientific step forward by recognizing the widespread occurrence of non-linear dose responses in toxicology and epidemiology for chemicals and radiation, and the need to incorporate such data in the risk assessment process.” His endorsement was surprising for many reasons, not the least of which was because the word “radiation” does not appear anywhere in the rule.
Calabrese is one of the leading scientists who advocate moving towards a model known as hormesis. Proponents argue hormesis is preferable to the LNT model because some exposure is actually good for public health—a little bit of the toxin inoculates you from its greater dangers. “The question is how does the EPA find a way out of this regulatory quagmire of using the historically corrupt and scientifically flawed LNT model?” he wrote. “The EPA proposal should be accepted and implemented across all programs involving risk assessment as soon as possible.”
Levy responded to Calabrese’s argument that the EPA’s best course of action is to find a “regulatory sweet spot” that combined various models, some of which assume that some exposure is actually good for you. It could make a major difference for the most vulnerable if the EPA operates under the assumption that very low doses could be good for you instead that they can be harmful. “He is basically saying that the risk levels considered by EPA to be unacceptable are fine,” Levy says, “because it would be hard to detect the effects.”
Calabrese declined several requests to be interviewed, pointing instead to his work, “which speaks for itself.”
Steve Milloy, who has made a career out of contesting the science around tobacco’s health effects, also supports the new rule. He has a long record of denying climate change and the dangers of air pollution and blogs on personal website JunkScience. A few days after the announcement, Milloy wrote a brief obituary for the “linear no-threshold” model: “The LNT model was born in fraud, caused great harm, during its lifetime and will die in ignominy. We will bury it via the opportunity provided by the Trump EPA science transparency initiative.”
The EPA is now claiming—without supplying the evidence—that there is a growing scientific consensus that supports loosening the agency’s longstanding approach in which even low levels of exposure to cancer-causing chemicals and radiation are considered to be harmful. All this flies in the face of 40 years of scientific study that has explored the uncertainty surrounding these models. The National Academy of Sciences, the National Regulatory Commission, and the EPA’s independent science advisory board have looked in recent years at whether the LNT default model is still the best approach. (The EPA has contested the Associated Press‘s reporting on this approach to loosening its radiation rules; you can read its reply here.)
The EPA, in fact, strongly came out against the last time a regulatory body attempted to review its LNT model. The NRC in 2015 looked at the debate in 2015when it considered reviewing its radiation standards, and the EPA wrote at the time: “Over the last half century, numerous authoritative national and international bodies have convened committees of experts to examine the issue of LNT as a tool for radiation regulation and risk assessment. Again and again, these bodies have endorsed LNT as a reasonable approach to regulating exposures to low dose radiation.”
Now, environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and independent scientists charge that even without the proof of empirical evidence, the EPA is likely to adopt the kind of models favored by Milloy and Calabrese. Politics has trumped careful scientific review.
John Bachmann, who retired from the EPA office of air and toxics, stressed the implications for the overall costs and benefits for the agency’s rules, which tabulate the lives saved in dollar-value from reducing fine particulate matter. “It has really broad implications for setting regulations for carcinogens or lawsuits to roll them back,” Bachmann says. “It has implications for doing cost-benefit analysis of all pollutants, even [particulate matter] pollutants, the biggest driver of all pollutants.”
“It has really broad implications for setting regulations for carcinogens or lawsuits to roll them back.”
Once the scientific assessments are undermined, so too are the policies that are supposed to protect people. “This is a situation analogous to having global warming deniers in charge at the EPA,” said Jan Beyea, a nuclear physicist with Consulting in the Public Interest. He compared it to the tiny world of scientists who charge that climate change is exaggerated, propped up by the same industries that benefit from muddying the waters in the public’s eye.
The rule is the most recent example of the Trump administration undermining science. It has already reorganized the EPA’s independent science advisory boards and disbanded the position of the EPA chief science adviser. “The only thing left standing at the end of this scorched-earth anti-science series of policies,” NRDC’s senior scientist Jennifer Sass says, “would be the industry-sponsored studies, because they adhere to these guidelines for the purpose of getting regulatory approval.”
It is unclear how the language in the EPA rule may be implemented, or if the EPA’s acting administrator Andrew Wheeler intends to follow through with a plan that was first put in motion by Pruitt. But if it is implemented, it could potentially leave children, elderly, and the ill—typically the most vulnerable to environmental pollution—more vulnerable to the effects of increasing toxins. A family living near a cleaned-up Superfund site could be faced with potentially higher levels of radiation and toxins, while consuming treated water from a nuclear plant containing higher levels of radiation, or breathing in more fine particulate matter that’s now considered less harmful.
Meanwhile the government would justify its policies by claiming that science considers this exposure could benefit public health. By changing the underlying science, the EPA would make it easier to justify deregulation in the courts. The best option, Beyea notes, would be for the EPA to “look at this in an objective way, and not do it based on a small minority theory” that happens to support the industry position for less regulation.
What’s ultimately at stake, Beyea told Mother Jones, is the “levels which the population will be exposed to in the future of various chemicals, whether they be pesticides or radiation in certain cases of relief and accident, like a Fukushima. At what level do you start to run away from the plant, at what level do you start to relocate? These are difficult questions. There’s no easy answer for them.”
---
ref congr testi
claims NAS asked him for data on bhopal 1x exposire?!
https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/sites/default/files/attachments/calabrese_testimony_pdf.pdf
---
==ggl 12 24
[### Trump's EPA is moving to weaken regulation on radiation ...
PBS
https://www.pbs.org › newshour › nation › trumps-epa-...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/trumps-epa-is-moving-to-weaken-regulation-on-radiation-exposure)
Oct 2, 2018 — The government's current, decades-old guidance says that any exposure to harmful radiation is a cancer risk. The Trump administration already ...
[### Meet Ed Calabrese, Who Says a Little Pollution Can Be ...
Mother Jones
https://www.motherjones.com › kevin-drum › 2019/02](https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/02/meet-ed-calabrese-who-says-a-little-pollution-can-be-good-for-you/)
Feb 19, 2019 — A Massachusetts toxicologist best known for pushing a public health standard suggesting that low levels of toxic chemicals and radiation are good for people.
[### Making 'Fringe' Scientist Who Argues Exposure Good for ...
Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org › News › children](https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/10/03/making-fringe-scientist-who-argues-exposure-good-people-key-witness-trumps-epa-moves)
Oct 3, 2018 — The EPA sent toxicologist Edward Calabrese, who has argued that loosening radiation regulations could have positive health effects on humans, as ...
[### Scientist says some pollution is good for you — a disputed ...
Los Angeles Times
https://www.latimes.com › local › california › la-me-sec...](https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-secret-science-20190219-story.html)
Feb 19, 2019 — In setting pollution rules, the Trump administration has actively sought out advice from industry lobbyists and the scientists they employ.
[### Radiation? Chemicals? No big deal, says the Trump ...
Montgomery Advertiser
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com › 2018/10/17](https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/opinion/2018/10/17/radiation-chemicals-no-big-deal-says-trump-administration/1675346002/)
Oct 17, 2018 — "The EPA is pursuing rule changes that experts say would weaken the way radiation exposure is regulated, turning to scientific outliers who ...
[### How the Trump Administration Pulled Back on Regulating ...
Yale E360
https://e360.yale.edu › features › how-trump-administra...](https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-trump-administration-has-pulled-back-on-regulating-toxic-chemicals)
Feb 12, 2019 — The Trump administration has halted bans on toxic chemicals that are known to cause serious health threats.
Missing: calabrese | Show results with: calabrese
[### EPA Administrator Pruitt Proposes Rule To Strengthen ...
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (.gov)
https://www.epa.gov › archive › epa › newsreleases › e...](https://www.epa.gov/archive/epa/newsreleases/epa-administrator-pruitt-proposes-rule-strengthen-science-used-epa-regulations.html)
Apr 24, 2018 — The rule will ensure that the regulatory science underlying Agency actions is fully transparent, and that underlying scientific information is publicly ...
[### Why Has the E.P.A. Shifted on Toxic Chemicals? An ...
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › 2017/10/21 › trump-epa-ch...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/us/trump-epa-chemicals-regulations.html)
Oct 21, 2017 — A scientist who worked for the chemical industry now shapes policy on hazardous chemicals. Within the E.P.A., there is fear that public ...
Missing: calabrese | Show results with: calabrese
[### Trump's EPA May Be Weakening Chemical Safety Law
Scientific American
https://www.scientificamerican.com › article › trump-rsq...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-rsquo-s-epa-may-be-weakening-chemical-safety-law/)
Aug 16, 2017 — Asbestos, trichloroethylene, pigment violet 29—these are just three of thousands of chemicals the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is ...
Missing: calabrese | Show results with: calabrese
[### Dana Milbank: Radiation? Chemicals? No big deal, says ...
The Salt Lake Tribune
https://www.sltrib.com › Opinion › Commentary](https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2018/10/04/dana-milbank-radiation/)
Oct 4, 2018 — New regulations floated by the Environmental Protection Agency are set to increase Americans' exposure to radiation — because, according to ...
wiki
Edward J. Calabrese is an American toxicologist and professor in the department of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.[1] He is the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Dose-Response.[2]
Contents
Education
Calabrese grew up in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.[3] He received his B.S. from Bridgewater State College in 1968 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1972 and 1973, respectively.[1]
Academic career
Calabrese began working at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1976.[4]
Research
Early in his career, Calabrese conducted research on carcinogens.[3][4] However, he is best known for his research into, and championing of, hormesis,[3][4][5] which he has called "the fundamental dose-response model".[6] In 2003, Calabrese told the Wall Street Journal that the view that there is a threshold of dose below which substances have no adverse effects, as has been stated in scientific textbooks, was "an error of historic proportions."[7]
He credits his interest in hormesis to an experiment he performed as an undergraduate in 1966. In the experiment, his instructor told Calabrese and his classmates to treat a peppermint plant with a growth-inhibiting substance, Phosfon,[4] but when they did so, the plant responded by growing approximately 40% taller and leafier than plants not treated with the substance,[7] the opposite of what had been expected.[3] The class later discovered that they had accidentally used a highly diluted form of Phosfon.[3]
He will be lead witness at a congressional hearing Wednesday, October 3, 2018 on the Trump Administration's EPA proposal to allow more radiation to be released. If his "outlier" science is wrong, his testimony could lead to the illness, or death of thousands, or perhaps millions.
^[8]
References
"Edward Calabrese". University of Massachusetts Amherst. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
"Dose-Response". Sage Publications. Retrieved 30 October 2016.
O'Carroll, Christopher (Spring 2004). "The Power of Poison". UMass Amherst Magazine. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
Winters, Dan (December 2002). "Is Radiation Good For You?". Discover. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
Crok, Marcel (18 October 2011). "Attack on Radiation Geneticists Triggers Furor". Science Insider. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
"Drug model may be wrong for low doses". UPI. 27 December 2006. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
Begley, Sharon (19 December 2003). "Scientists Revisit Idea That a Little Poison Could Be Beneficial". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
- "Edward Calabrese". University of Massachusetts Amherst. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
- "Dose-Response". Sage Publications. Retrieved 30 October 2016.
- O'Carroll, Christopher (Spring 2004). "The Power of Poison". UMass Amherst Magazine. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
- Winters, Dan (December 2002). "Is Radiation Good For You?". Discover. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
- Crok, Marcel (18 October 2011). "Attack on Radiation Geneticists Triggers Furor". Science Insider. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
- "Drug model may be wrong for low doses". UPI. 27 December 2006. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
- Begley, Sharon (19 December 2003). "Scientists Revisit Idea That a Little Poison Could Be Beneficial". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epa-says-little-radiation-may-be-healthy/
- American toxicologists
- Living people
- People from Bridgewater, Massachusetts
- University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty
- Bridgewater State University alumni
- University of Massachusetts Amherst alumni
==
sound sci
https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2018/10/oversight-of-the-environmental-protection-agency-s-implementation-of-sound-and-transparent-science-in-regulation
video does not plaY?
https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/2/c/2c4d2aef-0077-4aca-80a7-f62c8ab1e449/F6E0DAF2C9442C882959F2EE31918EB0.spw-100318.pdf
Professor
University of Massachusetts at Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences
Calabrese Testimony 10.03.2018.pdf (46.9 KBs)
Visiting Professor
Oxford University Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
Hahn Testimony 10.03.2018.pdf (94.6 KBs)
Chief Executive Officer
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Holt Testimony 10.03.2018.pdf (85.8 KBs)
Related Files
- SPW 100318.pdf (161.0 KBs)
Permalink: https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2018/10/oversight-of-the-environmental-protection-agency-s-implementation-of-sound-and-transparent-science-in-regulation
...
STATEMENT OF EDWARD J. CALABRESE, PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF
MASSACHUSETTS AT AMHERST SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH AND HEALTH
SCIENCES
[uses the term secret sci, vs booker, hahn and holt]}:
Mr. Calabrese. Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, Chairman Rounds, Ranking Member Booker, and
distinguished members of the Committee. My name is Edward
Calabrese, and I am a Professor of Toxicology at the University
of Massachusetts School of Public Health, Amherst, Mass. I am
pleased to share with you my views on the EPA risk assessment
transparency proposal.
Briefly, I have been at UMass for 42 years, teaching and
researching in the areas of toxicology and risk assessment. I
have authored nearly 900 papers in the peer-reviewed literature,
about a dozen books, served on multiple National Academy
committees such as the Safe Drinking Water Committee and the Air
Cabin Safety Committee, which recommended to the FAA to
eliminate smoking on commercial aircraft, a recommendation that
was quickly adopted.
For the past 20 years, I have been funded by the Air Force
For the past 20 years, I have been funded by the Air Force
Office of Scientific Research to assess the nature of the dose
response of toxic substances in the low dose zone in order to
protect the health and the wellbeing of Air Force personnel.
These activities have led to a major dose-response revolution in
15
the area of biology, medicine, toxicology, and risk assessment.
The USEPA has proposed a general framework to strengthen
its regulatory science procedures via enhancing transparency in
multiple ways. I applaud EPA for this proposal as it is not
only timely but requires scientific and administrative
accountability. The proposal is broad, requiring the Agency to
... While this is an excellent start, the Agency
should also commit to providing detailed explanations and public
access to data that the Agency considered and decided not to use
for regulation.
In addition, most EPA scientific decisions are based on
multiple assumptions, some of which are frequently hidden,
obscured, and often silent drivers of regulatory action, for
example, the use of highly susceptible and often poorly
predictive animal models. These assumptions need to be fully
described, documented, and justified. This process should also
include the basis for why EPA chose not to adopt the use of
other or different approaches and/or assumptions. Thus, EPA’s
transparency proposal is excellent as far as it goes, but it
needs to be expanded; it also requires an explanation of what
was considered and why it was rejected.
Multiple high-profile controversies exist over the lack of
availability of data sets used by EPA for regulatory decisions.
...
Senator Rounds. I would ask unanimous consent to include in the record several articles written by Dr. Calabrese and a letter in support of the proposed science transparency rule from the American Chemistry. Senator Booker. He has published 900 articles. Are you putting them all in the record? Senator Rounds. Five hundred. Senator Booker. Just no requirement that I read them, please.
...
==
Trump administration is quietly moving to weaken U.S. radiation regulations, turning to scientific outliers who argue that a bit of radiation damage is actually good for you—like a little bit of sunlight.
The government's current, decades-old guidance says that any exposure to harmful radiation is a cancer risk. And critics say the proposed change could lead to higher levels of exposure for workers at nuclear installations and oil and gas drilling sites, medical workers doing X-rays and CT scans, people living next to Superfund sites and any members of the public who one day might find themselves exposed to a radiation release.
The Trump administration already has targeted a range of other regulations on toxins and pollutants, including coal power plant emissions and car exhaust, that it sees as costly and burdensome for businesses. Supporters of the EPA's new radiation guidance argue the government's current no-tolerance rule for radiation damage forces unnecessary spending for handling exposure in accidents, at nuclear plants, in medical centers and at other sites.
"This would have a positive effect on human health as well as save billions and billions and billions of dollars," Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts, said in 2016. He was to be the lead witness at a congressional hearing Wednesday on EPA's push for what it calls transparency in science.
The proposed rule would require regulators to consider "various threshold models across the exposure range" when it comes to dangerous substances.
While it does not specify that it's addressing radiation and chemicals, an EPA news release on the rule quotes Calabrese as saying it would: "The proposal represents a major scientific step forward by recognizing the widespread occurrence of non-linear dose responses in toxicology and epidemiology for chemicals and radiation and the need to incorporate such data in the risk assessment process."
The comment period for the science regulation has ended and the agency is currently reviewing the comments. There's no specific date for final action by the administration. The EPA declined to make an official with its radiation-protection program available.
Radiation is everywhere, from potassium in bananas to the microwaves popping our popcorn. Most of it is benign. But what's of concern is the higher-energy, shorter-wave radiation, like X-rays, that can penetrate and disrupt living cells, sometimes causing cancer.
As recently as this March, the EPA's online guidelines for radiation effects advised: "Current science suggests there is some cancer risk from any exposure to radiation."
"Even exposures below 100 millisieverts"—an amount roughly equivalent to 25 chest X-rays or about 14 CT chest scans—"slightly increase the risk of getting cancer in the future," the agency's guidance said.
But that online guidance—separate from the rule-change proposal—was edited in July to add a section emphasizing the low individual odds of cancer: "According to radiation safety experts, radiation exposures of ...100 millisieverts usually result in no harmful health effects, because radiation below these levels is a minor contributor to our overall cancer risk," the revised policy says.
Calabrese and his supporters argue that smaller exposures of cell-damaging radiation and other carcinogens can serve as stressors that activate the body's repair mechanisms and can make people healthier. They compare it to physical exercise or sunlight.
Mainstream scientific consensus on radiation is based on deceptive science, says Calabrese, who argued in a 2014 essay for "righting the past deceptions and correcting the ongoing errors in environmental regulation."
EPA spokesman John Konkus said in an email that the proposed rule change is about "increasing transparency on assumptions" about how the body responds to different doses of dangerous substances and that the agency "acknowledges uncertainty regarding health effects at low doses" and supports more research on that.
The radiation regulation is supported by Steven Milloy, a Trump transition team member for the EPA who is known for challenging widely accepted ideas about manmade climate change and the health risks of tobacco. He has been promoting Calabrese's theory of healthy radiation on his blog.
But Jan Beyea, a physicist whose work includes research with the National Academies of Science on the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, said the EPA science proposal represents voices "generally dismissed by the great bulk of scientists."
The EPA proposal would lead to "increases in chemical and radiation exposures in the workplace, home and outdoor environment, including the vicinity of Superfund sites," Beyea wrote.}:
At the level the EPA website talks about, any one person's risk of cancer from radiation exposure is perhaps 1 percent, Beyea said.
"The individual risk will likely be low, but not the cumulative social risk," Beyea said.}:
"If they even look at that—no, no, no," said Terrie Barrie, a resident of Craig, Colorado, and an advocate for her husband and other workers at the now-closed Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant, where the U.S. government is compensating certain cancer victims regardless of their history of exposure.
"There's no reason not to protect people as much as possible," said Barrie.
U.S. agencies for decades have followed a policy that there is no threshold of radiation exposure that is risk-free.
The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements reaffirmed that principle this year after a review of 29 public health studies on cancer rates among people exposed to low-dose radiation, via the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan in World War II, leak-prone Soviet nuclear installations, medical treatments and other sources.
Twenty of the 29 studies directly support the principle that even low-dose exposures cause a significant increase in cancer rates, said Roy Shore, chief of research at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, a joint project of the United States and Japan. Scientists found most of the other studies were inconclusive and decided one was flawed.
None supported the theory there is some safe threshold for radiation, said Shore, who chaired the review.
If there were a threshold that it's safe to go below, "those who profess that would have to come up with some data," Shore said in an interview.}:
"Certainly the evidence did not point that way," he said.}:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates electronic devices that emit radiation, advises, broadly, that a single CT scan with a dose of 10 millisieverts may increase risks of a fatal cancer by about 1 chance in 2,000.
Supporters of the proposal say it's time to rethink radiation regulation.
"Right now we spend an enormous effort trying to minimize low doses" at nuclear power plants, for example, said Brant Ulsh, a physicist with the California-based consulting firm M.H. Chew and Associates. "Instead, let's spend the resources on minimizing the effect of a really big event."
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-10-epa-healthy.html#jCp
https://phys.org/news/2018-10-epa-healthy.html
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-10-epa-healthy.html#jCp
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a
pril 20, 2016 | Jessica Lovering
https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/issues/nuclear/how-much-radiation-is-too-much
Everyone knows that the dose is critical when you are taking a prescription medication: a small amount can provide significant benefit, but a large dose can kill you. This “non-linear” effect is taken for granted in pharmaceuticals, but is not generally adopted for regulating the risks of radiation.Dr. Edward Calabrese is a professor and toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Department of Environmental Health Sciences.He has spent his career studying non-linear effects in different carcinogens. From hundreds of studies, he has concluded that radiation should be treated more like pharmaceuticals, and regulators needs to change how they think about radiation risks and harm.
What’s the history of the linear-no-threshold, or LNT, framework, and how did it come to be the standard?
The rise of LNT theory was really the result of a politicalmotivation by a group of radiation geneticists. I’m sure they believed that dose response was linear, but they also wanted to scare the hell out of society to increase their stature and grant funding for their research, and they wanted people to think they were the only ones who could save the world from the harms of atomic weapons testings, etc. It was a paternalistic behavior.
We know it’s the dose that makes the poison, but is it also the dose that makes the benefit? Or are some substances simply benign or have no effect at low doses?
It depends on how you define “low” and how you define “benign.” Essentially everything has a dose response relationship, meaning everything is harmful at high enough doses, but then we get into some complexity. A lot of things are essential, like minerals and vitamins, and it may well be that radiation is essential at low doses. Most agents are going to be toxic at high doses, but we’ve found that most agents have a biphasic relationship.
How do regulatory bodies like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or International Atomic Energy Agency set dose limits for radiation?
They have a long history, and they make use of their long history. When you regulate carcinogens, you assume that the dose response in linear. If it’s a non-cancer endpoint, you assume there’s a threshold. If you’re dealing with radiation, you have much more stringent controls. The buy-in to linear dose response has a huge effect on industry. And this decision to go linear, which was made in the 1950s, was the most impactful environmental regulatory change in the modern world.
What’s the evidence that LNT is not the right model, can you give a concrete example?
From 1985 on, I began to study this and tried to take a look at alternative models, including thehormetic dose response model, which was marginalized and neglected. I found that this phenomenon occurs quite widely. The EPA’s default models, for example, are arbitrary. Numerous studies are cited in my publications that support the hormesis model. The reader simply has to read the literature and get educated. While this is not an easy exercise, it is necessary in order to understand the breadth and significance of the hormesis database and its impact on toxicology and risk assessment. Such an assessment will show that the hormesis phenomenon is far more common than previously recognized and outcompetes the LNT and threshold models in head-to-head competition. This is documented in the peer-reviewed literature.
How do you determine the threshold between beneficial and harmful?
You have to do this through study, and that’s what we’ve done. There’s a lot of historical clinical research that does exist which we have now summarized and evaluated in the biomedical literature.If people wanted to use this, the dosages are pretty well worked out.[what are they?] This country needs to overcome its often irrational fear of radiation to take a more informed approach to exposure and use the newly assessed information for clinical benefit.
What’s been the experience of others who had tried to replicate your results?
I have a long experience conducting my own lab experiments. But I have also done a large amount of research assimilating the work of others. My laboratory work is very replicable. In the general world of hormesis, these studies are more challenging than most. In the traditional work of toxicology, you’re looking for the dose that produces harm. In hormesis, the beneficial effects are very constrained. You have to have enough doses and replications of your findings to ensure that your results are reproducible and real.
If regulators shifted from relying on an LNT model to a hormetic dose model, how much would limits actually change?
Getting rid of regulations based on the LNT theory would result in an increase in the acceptable dosage by at least several hundred fold. And that would have a huge impact. This would have a positive effect on human health as well as save billions and billions and billions of dollars.The regulatory agencies are kind of a cult, but they don’t know they’re part of a cult.
One challenge with low dose radiation, is that certain radioisotopes accumulate in the food supply or in certain organs. If we had higher limits for radio-isotope releases, would we need to pair that with better monitoring of food or personal doses, making sure that individuals don’t exceed the threshold and go into high dose range?
Well, I think that that would be true. They’d have to look at every situation. The optimal dose is very close to the level where it crosses over into being harmful. And there are personal differences as well, what’s optimal for you might be different for another person. But it’s an important challenge, you have to solve the problem differently now. We can’t just keep saying “lower is always better.”
For vaccines we know the mechanism for how they work, what’s the mechanism for the benefits of low-dose radiation.
Our understandings of hormetic mechanisms in the last decade have really exploded. We’ve learned a lot about signaling pathways and so many different components for the mechanisms have been identified. I can’t say that the mechanisms are fully understood, but we can tell which receptor and cell signaling pathways are involved in mitigating or promoting a certain effect.
Finally, it seems like there has been some movement at NRC to revisit and maybe revise LNT, have you been involved in this effort and what’s your prognosis?
I submitted comments during the review process. I never thought I’d live to see the day where a regulatory agency would take our efforts seriously. I hoped they would, but I never imagined it would happen. They opened it up for four months of comments. I read all of them, most comments weren’t serious. About 60% of those that were serious were in support of the change. There’s little question that the science is on the hormesis side. You know, we use hormesis in the whole pharmaceutical industry, and if the NRC is taking any of these medical drugs they are already relying on hormetic science.
---
J
essica Lovering is Director of Energy at Breakthrough. She coauthored the report, How to Make Nuclear Cheap, as well as many analyses on nuclear energy policy including:
- "Next Nukes,"November 16th, 2012
- "Cost of German Solar is Four Times Finnish Nuclear," May 14th, 2013
- "Frequently Asked Questions About Nuclear Power," May 22nd, 2013
- "Germany's Energiewende Shows Why We Need Nuclear," July 9th, 2013
- "Trash, Trees, and Taxes," September 13, 2013
Jessica earned an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, where her studies focused on energy policy. During her last year of school, Jessica created a graduate course in nuclear energy, which she co-taught in the Spring of 2012 with a nuclear physics professor. The course was an interdisciplinary look at all aspects of nuclear power including social, environmental, financial, security, and legal issues. In 2011, Jessica was a Breakthrough Generation Fellow, researching energy access.
In an earlier life, Jessica received a BA in Astrophysics from the University of California Berkeley and an MS in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado. She also worked for two years on NASA's New Horizonsmission, which will fly by Pluto in July 2015. In her free time, she enjoys dystopian fiction, ballet, and enjoying the great outdoors.
---
https://www.wonkette.com/trumps-epa-rethinking-that-whole-radiation-is-bad-for-you-thing
:{Not content with giving the USA the gifts of more toxic pesticides and filthy coal-mine runoff, the Environmental "Protection" Agency is moving to embrace the idea that some level of exposure to radiation is perfectly safe, and maybe even good for you. (Attention kids: do not try Trump Science at home.)
Needless to say, some in the nuclear industry, as well as fringe scientists, fans of radiation, and those hoping to become mutant superheroes, are awfully receptive to the proposal. Honestly, now that we've decided science is just a matter of who shouts loudest, why the hell not?}:
The Associated Press explains this rad new idea:
Supporters of the EPA's new proposal argue the government's current no-tolerance rule for radiation damage forces unnecessary spending for handling exposure in accidents, at nuclear plants, in medical centers and at other sites.
"This would have a positive effect on human health as well as save billions and billions and billions of dollars," said Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts who is to be the lead witness at a congressional hearing Wednesday on EPA's proposal.
Calabrese, who made those remarks in a 2016 interview with a California nonprofit, was quoted by EPA in its announcement of the proposed rule in April.
The article explains that radiation is everywhere, but this proposal involves the nasty stuff, "higher-energy, shorter-wave radiation, like X-rays, that can penetrate and disrupt living cells" -- the stuff you're not supposed to play with or use to paint clock dials anymore.
Already, this radiation-friendly thinking has penetrated -- like gamma gays! -- the EPA's online guidance on radiation exposure safety. In March of this year, the site warned, "Current science suggests there is some cancer risk from any exposure to radiation." That's still there, but in July, another part of the site added this reassurance:
According to radiation safety experts, radiation exposures of ...100 millisieverts usually result in no harmful health effects, because radiation below these levels is a minor contributor to our overall cancer risk.
Further revisions next year are expected to recommend hurling spent nuclear fuel rods at Prius drivers because it'll really piss off the libs.
Calabrese, the guy who loves radiation so much he wants you to marry it, is very passionate about people becoming more laid back about radiation, because just think of all the money to be saved!
Calabrese and his supporters argue that smaller exposures of cell-damaging radiation and other carcinogens can serve as stressors that activate the body's repair mechanisms and can make people healthier. They compare it to physical exercise or sunlight.
Mainstream scientific consensus on radiation is based on deceptive science, says Calabrese, who argued in a 2014 essay for "righting the past deceptions and correcting the ongoing errors in environmental regulation."
Fans of the book Merchants of Doubt (or its film adaptation), may recognize the name of one of the Trumpers pushing this fun new approach:
The radiation regulation is supported by Steven Milloy, a Trump transition team member for the EPA who is known for challenging widely accepted ideas about manmade climate change and the health risks of tobacco. He has been promoting Calabrese's theory of healthy radiation on his blog.
Yup, Milloy is part of the same wrecking crew of corporate shills who have sought to undermine science for DECADES. And now, after insisting the jury was out on whether smoking causes cancer, he'd like you to stop bitching about itty bitty nuclear spills, please.
Not mentioned by the AP: One of the biggest fans of the notion that a little radiation isgood for you is billionaire nutjob Robert Mercer, who helped buy Donald Trump an election and whose daughter remains the biggest financial backer of Dead Breitbart's Home For White Resentment, yes, even after Mercer's divorce from Steve Bannon last year.
Mercer finds the whole idea simply enchanting, and apparently picked it up from Arthur Robinson, the crazy rightwing Oregon doctor and sheep rancher who wants to collect everyone's urine and find the secret of NIMH, or at least immortality. In addition to filling his ranch with Mercer-donated freezers (which in turn are filled not with Indianas Jones, but with 14,000 pee samples), Robinson fills the minds of dumb billionaires with fake science, as this lovely Jane Mayer profile of Mercer discussed in 2017. Mercer, you see, likes to
:{:{downplay the dangers posed by nuclear war. Mercer, speaking of the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, argued that, outside of the immediate blast zones, the radiation actually made Japanese citizens healthier. The National Academy of Sciences has found no evidence to support this notion. Nevertheless, according to the onetime employee, Mercer, who is a proponent of nuclear power, "was very excited about the idea, and felt that it meant nuclear accidents weren't such a big deal." [...]}:
Robinson appears to be the source of Robert Mercer's sanguine view of nuclear radiation: in 1986, Robinson co-authored a book suggesting that the vast majority of Americans would survive "an all-out atomic attack on the United States." Robinson's institute dismisses climate change as a "false religion."}:
Well OF COURSE it does. We know of no evidence Mercer or Robinson directly influenced the new EPA thinking, but obviously those kooks are part of the anti-science deregulatory machine surrounding Trumpworld. Part of the background radiation, if you will.
If this Stop Worrying And Learn To Love The Bomb stuff all sounds a little nutty, that's because most scientists and doctors are in on the fakery, you see, insisting there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation.
Jan Beyea, a physicist whose work includes research with the National Academies of Science on the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, said the EPA proposal on radiation and other health threats represents voices "generally dismissed by the great bulk of scientists."
The EPA proposal would lead to "increases in chemical and radiation exposures in the workplace, home and outdoor environment, including the vicinity of Superfund sites," Beyea wrote.
She noted that while individual risk from radiation may be small, more radiation in the environment would increase the total risk in the population, with corresponding increases in cancers and medical costs. Which is really a socialist way to think about health, because the only meaningful unit of measure is the individual, now isn't it?
Still, scientists seem not to recognize that in our brave new world, it's every lifeform's individual responsibility to just not bathe in radiation. One researcher, Roy Shore, told the AP a recent review of public health studies still supports the conclusion that there's no "healthy" amount of radiation exposure:
If there were a threshold that it's safe to go below, "those who profess that would have to come up with some data," Shore said in an interview.
"Certainly the evidence did not point that way," he said.
If'n you want further discussion of why the current, conservative (as in careful, not rightwing loonypants) model of radiation risk holds up, see this here fine Twitter thread.
Heck, maybe if itty tiny amounts of radiation are no big, folks like Arthur Robinson, Robert Mercer, Edward Calabrese, and Steven Milloy would be willing to set up homesteads, with their children and grandchildren of course, somewhere in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. They could boldly laugh every day at fools who think that might be a bad idea. Just think what a great reality TV show that would be!
We are kidding of course. Not only would that be cruel, but if anyone in their family did get cancer, they'd blame vaccines.
[AP / New Yorker / New Republic]
---
WA
SHINGTON (AP) — In an early version of a story Oct. 2 about EPA regulation of radiation, The Associated Press reported erroneously in a headline that EPA says a little radiation may be good for you. As the story made clear, that assessment came from scientific outliers, including one quoted by EPA in a news release. The headline was changed in later versions of the story.
A corrected version of the story is below:
Experts say Trump’s EPA moving to loosen radiation limits
Experts say Trump’s EPA is moving to loosen radiation limits
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The EPA is pursuing rule changes that experts say would weaken the way radiation exposure is regulated, turning to scientific outliers who argue that a bit of radiation damage is actually good for you — like a little bit of sunlight.
The government’s current, decades-old guidance says that any exposure to harmful radiation is a cancer risk. And critics say the proposed change could lead to higher levels of exposure for workers at nuclear installations and oil and gas drilling sites, medical workers doing X-rays and CT scans, people living next to Superfund sites and any members of the public who one day might find themselves exposed to a radiation release.
The Trump administration already has targeted a range of other regulations on toxins and pollutants, including coal power plant emissions and car exhaust, that it sees as costly and burdensome for businesses. Supporters of the EPA’s proposal argue the government’s current model that there is no safe level of radiation — the so-called linear no-threshold model — forces unnecessary spending for handling exposure in accidents, at nuclear plants, in medical centers and at other sites.
At issue is Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule on transparency in science.
EPA spokesman John Konkus said Tuesday: “The proposed regulation doesn’t talk about radiation or any particular chemicals. And as we indicated in our response, EPA’s policy is to continue to use the linear-no-threshold model for population-level radiation protection purposes which would not, under the proposed regulation that has not been finalized, trigger any change in that policy.”
But in an April news release announcing the proposed rule the agency quoted Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts who has said weakening limits on radiation exposure would save billions of dollars and have a positive impact on human health.
The proposed rule would require regulators to consider “various threshold models across the exposure range” when it comes to dangerous substances. While it doesn’t specify radiation, the release quotes Calabrese calling the proposal “a major scientific step forward” in assessing the risk of “chemicals and radiation.”
Konkus said the release was written during the tenure of former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. He could not explain why Calabrese was quoted citing the impact on radiation levels if the agency does not believe there would be any.
Calabrese was to be the lead witness at a congressional hearing Wednesday on the EPA proposal.
Radiation is everywhere, from potassium in bananas to the microwaves popping our popcorn. Most of it is benign. But what’s of concern is the higher-energy, shorter-wave radiation, like X-rays, that can penetrate and disrupt living cells, sometimes causing cancer.
As recently as this March, the EPA’s online guidelines for radiation effects advised: “Current science suggests there is some cancer risk from any exposure to radiation.”
“Even exposures below 100 millisieverts” — an amount roughly equivalent to 25 chest X-rays or about 14 CT chest scans — “slightly increase the risk of getting cancer in the future,” the agency’s guidance said.
But that online guidance — separate from the rule-change proposal — was edited in July to add a section emphasizing the low individual odds of cancer: “According to radiation safety experts, radiation exposures of ... 100 millisieverts usually result in no harmful health effects, because radiation below these levels is a minor contributor to our overall cancer risk,” the revised policy says.
Calabrese and his supporters argue that smaller exposures of cell-damaging radiation and other carcinogens can serve as stressors that activate the body’s repair mechanisms and can make people healthier. They compare it to physical exercise or sunlight.
Mainstream scientific consensus on radiation is based on deceptive science, says Calabrese, who argued in a 2014 essay for “righting the past deceptions and correcting the ongoing errors in environmental regulation.”
EPA spokesman Konkus said in an email that the proposed rule change is about “increasing transparency on assumptions” about how the body responds to different doses of dangerous substances and that the agency “acknowledges uncertainty regarding health effects at low doses” and supports more research on that.
The radiation regulation is supported by Steven Milloy, a Trump transition team member for the EPA who is known for challenging widely accepted ideas about manmade climate change and the health risks of tobacco. He has been promoting Calabrese’s theory of healthy radiation on his blog.
But Jan Beyea, a physicist whose work includes research with the National Academies of Science on the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, said the EPA science proposal represents voices “generally dismissed by the great bulk of scientists.”
The EPA proposal would lead to “increases in chemical and radiation exposures in the workplace, home and outdoor environment, including the vicinity of Superfund sites,” Beyea wrote.
At the level the EPA website talks about, any one person’s risk of cancer from radiation exposure is perhaps 1 percent, Beyea said.
“The individual risk will likely be low, but not the cumulative social risk,” Beyea said.
“If they even look at that — no, no, no,” said Terrie Barrie, a resident of Craig, Colorado, and an advocate for her husband and other workers at the now-closed Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant, where the U.S. government is compensating certain cancer victims regardless of their history of exposure.
“There’s no reason not to protect people as much as possible,” said Barrie.
U.S. agencies for decades have followed a policy that there is no threshold of radiation exposure that is risk-free.
The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements reaffirmed that principle this year after a review of 29 public health studies on cancer rates among people exposed to low-dose radiation, via the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan in World War II, leak-prone Soviet nuclear installations, medical treatments and other sources.
Twenty of the 29 studies directly support the principle that even low-dose exposures cause a significant increase in cancer rates, said Roy Shore, chief of research at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, a joint project of the United States and Japan. Scientists found most of the other studies were inconclusive and decided one was flawed.
None supported the theory there is some safe threshold for radiation, said Shore, who chaired the review.
If there were a threshold that it’s safe to go below, “those who profess that would have to come up with some data,” Shore said in an interview.
“Certainly the evidence did not point that way,” he said.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates electronic devices that emit radiation, advises, broadly, that a single CT scan with a dose of 10 millisieverts may increase risks of a fatal cancer by about 1 chance in 2,000.
Supporters of the proposal say it’s time to rethink radiation regulation.
“Right now we spend an enormous effort trying to minimize low doses” at nuclear power plants, for example, said Brant Ulsh, a physicist with the California-based consulting firm M.H. Chew and Associates. “Instead, let’s spend the resources on minimizing the effect of a really big event.”
---
DC
m batasch pow
- reported Tuesday that EPA was weakening radiation regulations.
- AP then backpedaled on the claim and issued a major correction.
- ‘[S]top the spread of alarming misinformation,” EPA said in a statement on the correction.
The Associated Press issued a major correction Wednesday to a story claiming the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said “a little radiation may be healthy.”
EPA officials said The AP’s story “was not only wrong, but contrary to information provided to the reporter by the EPA press office in response to her inquiries.” EPA officials welcomed the correction and said media outlets who parrotedThe AP should do the same.
“If you used AP’s inaccurate reporting from October 2nd on EPA’s radiation standards you should want to immediately correct your stories to stop the spread of alarming misinformation,” EPA said in an emailed statement sent Wednesday.
The AP published a story Tuesday claiming EPA was moving to “weaken U.S. radiation regulations” by changing a “decades-old guidance says that any exposure to harmful radiation is a cancer risk.”
This change, The AP noted, “could lead to higher levels of exposure for workers at nuclear installations.” The news organization admitted that while the policy change did not explicitly mention “radiation,” it quoted University of Massachusetts toxicologist Edward Calabrese. (RELATED: Trump Officials Say There’s ‘A Major Problem’ With The UN’s Upcoming Climate Report, Leaked Comments Show)
Calabrese is a critic of EPA’s use of the linear no-threshold model championed by environmental interests. Calabrese’s research has called into question this modeling when it comes to radiation, and he’s suggested that low levels of radiation may even bring some health benefits.
The AP, in part, based its story on an EPA news release that quoted Calabrese. However, 20 hours after initially publishing its piece it issued a correction:
“In an early version of a story Oct. 2 about EPA regulation of radiation, The Associated Press reported erroneously in a headline that EPA says a little radiation may be good for you. As the story made clear, that assessment came from scientific outliers, including one quoted by EPA in a news release. The headline was changed in later versions of the story.”
But that was after it made waves across the media.
The AP story was picked up by NBC News, which still has the uncorrected version on its website as of Wednesday afternoon. PBS News also re-published the AP article, but still hadn’t corrected it.
Esquire magazine repackaged The AP story with the sassy headline: “Getting Radiation Poisoning to Own the Libs.” The magazine’s summary of The AP’s article still has no correction.
EPA said it “provided numerous statements to the AP reporter regarding her inquiries on the subject and made abundantly clear that the regulation she was referencing did not even include the word ‘radiation’ in its almost 5,000 words.”
:{:{The AP’s report is actually referring to a transparency rule EPA proposed earlier in 2018 that would require the agency to include a wider range of public health models when crafting regulations. It would not eliminate linear no-threshold modeling as The AP’s initial reporting implied.[BS SIX CITIES HARVARD STUDY]}:
}:
This isn’t the first time media outlets claimed EPA was weakening radiation standards. Bloomberg News reported in 2017 EPA was “weakening radiation safety levels” based on documents unearthed by an environmental group.
However, the document Bloomberg relied on in its report was a planning document, not a regulatory one, that drew on guidance released in the final days of the Obama administration.
==
duckduck 10/18
Edward** J. **Calabrese** - Home | UMass Amherst
Dr. Calabrese has researched extensively in the area of host factors affecting susceptibility to pollutants, and is the author of over 750 papers in scholarly journals, as well as more than 10 books, including Principles of Animal Extrapolation; Nutrition and Environmental Health, Vols.
https://umass.edu/sphhs/person/faculty/edward-j-calabrese
Edward** J. **Calabrese** | Cato Institute
Edward Calabrese is a Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, specializing in toxicology. His voluminous work, including over 750 professional papers, has the potential to revolutionize — and rationalize — the global paradigm of environmental regulation.
https://cato.org/people/edward-calabrese
Edward** J. **Calabrese** | **University of Massachusetts** Amherst, MA ...
Edward J. Calabrese of University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA (UMass Amherst) with expertise in: History of Science, Neuroscience and Cell Biology. Read 612 publications, and contact Edward J ...
https://researchgate.net/profile/Edward_Calabrese
Edward** J. **Calabrese** | Mercatus Center
Edward J. Calabrese is a professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's School of Public Health and Health Sciences. Calabrese has done extensive research in the area of host factors affecting susceptibility to pollutants and is the author of over 750 papers in scholarly journals, as well as more than 10 books.
https://mercatus.org/edward-j-calabrese
Edward Calabrese** - Wikipedia
Edward J. Calabrese is an American toxicologist and professor in the department of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Dose-Response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_J._Calabrese
Calabrese** says mistake led to adopting the LNT model in ...
Edward Calabrese, the University of Massachusetts Amherst environmental toxicologist who has long been a critic of the current linear no-threshold (LNT) approach to risk assessment for radiation ...
https://phys.org/news/2017-01-calabrese-lnt-toxicology.html
UMass **toxicologist** expected to be lead witness on Trump's EPA ...
But in an April news release announcing the proposed rule the agency quoted Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts who has said weakening limits on radiation exposure ...
telegram.com/news/20181003/umass-toxicologist-expected...
EDWARD** J. **CALABRESE**, PH.D. CURRICULUM VITAE August, 2013
Professor of Toxicology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst since 1976. Board Certified in general toxicology by the Academy of Toxicological Sciences since 1982. Over 750 publications in peer-reviewed journals. Over 600 invited presentations at major conferences and University seminars. Author or Co-Author of 26 books.
https://umass.edu/sphhs/sites/default/files/CV_Calabrese_Au...
Hormesis hypothesis may be acknowledged by US regulatory action
When environmental toxicologist Edward Calabrese in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst heard recently that the U.S. National Regulatory ...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-07-hormesis-hypothesis-acknowle...
---
secret sci lettter:
Charles A. Ager, PhD Founder and Chairman, Nanominerals Corp Dr. Ralph B. Alexander, PhD Former Associate Professor, Physics, Wayne State University Mr. Robert A. Ashworth Chemical Engineer Dr. Charles R. Anderson, PhD President and Principal Scientist, Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc. Dr. J. Scott Armstrong, PhD Professor, Marketing, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania Dr. James R. Barrante, PhD Professor Emeritus, Physical Chemistry, Southern Connecticut State University Dr. Charles Battig, M.D. President, Piedmont Chapter, Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment Dr. Denis Beller, PhD Research Professor, Nuclear Engineering, University of Nevada Las Vegas Dr. David J. Benard, PhD Physicist (ret.) Dr. Michael A. Berry, PhD Former Deputy Director, National Center for Environmental Assessment, USEPA (ret.) and Research Professor, Environmental Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Dr. Charles A. Berst, PhD Emeritus Professor, English, University of California, Los Angeles Dr. William M.Briggs, PhD Statistical Consultant and Adjunct Professor of Statistical Science, Cornell UniversityDr. Edward Calabrese, PhD Professor, Environmental Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst 3 Dr. Angelo J. Campanella, PhD Principal, Campanella Acoustics Dr. Alan Carlin, PhD Senior Operations Research Analyst, USEPA (ret.) Dr. Lawrence M. Cathles, PhD Professor, Geological Sciences, Cornell University Dr. Charles R. Christensen, PhD Research Physicist, Retired from Weapon Sciences Directorate, US Army Aviation and Missile Command. Dr. Dustin Chambers, PhD Associate Professor, Economics, Salisbury University Dr. Michael S. Coffman, PhD President, Environmental Perspectives, Inc. Dr. Roger Cohen, PhD Fellow, American Physical Society Dr. William F. Condon, PhD Emeritus Professor, Chemistry, Southern Connecticut State University Dr. Louis Anthony Cox, Jr., PhD Chief Sciences Officer, Next Health Technologies; Clinical Professor, Biostatistics and Informatics, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center; and President, Cox Associates Dr. James Crosswell, MD Physician Dr. Tim Davis, PhD Licensed Specialist Clinical Social Worker Dr. Ulrich Decher, PhD Adjunct Faculty, University of Hartford Dr. Arthur Desrosiers, ScD Environmental Health Physicist 4 Dr. Pamela C. Dodds, PhD Registered Professional Geologist Dr. Harold H. Doiron, PhD Chairman, The Right Climate Stuff Research Team Dr. Nicholas Drapela, PhD Former Professor, Chemistry, Oregon State University Mr. John Droz, Jr. Physicist and Executive Director of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions Mr. John Dale Dunn, MD, JD Consultant Emergency Services/Peer Review, Civilian Faculty, Emergency Medicine Residency, Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center, Fort Hood Dr. James E. Enstrom, PhD Researcher (ret.), School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles and President, Scientific Integrity Institute Dr. Dan Ervin, PhD Professor, Finance, Perdue School of Business, Salisbury University Dr. Irvin H. Forbing, DDS Dentist Dr. Patrick Frank, PhD Research Chemist Dr. Gordon J. Fulks, PhD Astrophysicist Dr. Laurence I. Gould, PhD Professor, Physics, University of Hartford Dr. Shawn Grannell, PhD Inventor 5 Dr. William M. Gray, PhD Professor Emeritus, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University Dr. Tim Groseclose, PhD Professor, American Politics and Public Policy, University of California, Los Angeles Dr. WilliamHapper, PhD Professor, Physics, Princeton University Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, PhD Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution at Stanford University Dr. Doug L. Hoffman, PhD Former Research Professor, Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Dr. Albert Kris Huber, PhD Electrical Engineer Dr. W. Reed Johnson, PhD Professor Emeritus, Nuclear Engineering, University of Virginia Dr. Jason S. Johnston, PhD Professor of Law, University of Virginia Mr. Brian T. Kennedy President, The Claremont Institute Dr. E. Christian Kopff, PhD Associate Professor, Classics, University of Colorado, Boulder Dr. Patricia A. Lapoint, PhD Professor, Management, McMurry University Dr. Lubert Leger, PhD Former Assistant Chief, Materials Division, Engineer Directorate, Johnson Space Center, NASA Dr. Jay Lehr, PhD Science Director, The Heartland Institute 6 Dr. Jonathan A. Lesser, PhD President, Continental Economics Dr. Richard E. Lindstrom, PhD Professor Emeritus, University of Connecticut Dr. Anthony Lupo, PhD Professor, Atmospheric Science, University of Missouri Dr. Matthew A. Malkan, PhD Professor, Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles Dr. Martin J. Mangino, PhD Professor, Surgery, Virginia Commonwealth University Dr. Calvin Luther Martin, PhD Associate Professor of History (ret.), Rutgers University Dr. John Martinis, PhD Professor, Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara Dr. Robert J. Michaels, PhD Professor, Economics, California State University, Fullerton Dr. Henry I. Miller, M.D. Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy, Hoover Institution at Stanford University Dr. Ferenc M. Miskolczi, PhD Former Senior Principal Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center Dr. Dennis M. Moltz, PhD Owner, High Desert Nuclear Technologies Dr. Michael Newton, PhD Professor Emeritus, Forest Ecology, Oregon State University Dr. Helen Schwiesow Parker, PhD Licensed Clinical Psychologist 7 Dr. Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD Former Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Colombia University; currently a pediatrician in private practice Dr. Jerry L. Punch, PhD Professor Emeritus, Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Michigan State University Dr. Forrest J. Remick, PhD Emeritus Professor, Nuclear Engineering, and Emeritus Associate Vice President, Research, The Pennsylvania State University; and Commissioner (Retired), US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Dr. James H. Rust, PhD Professor of Nuclear Engineering (ret.), Georgia Tech Mr. Donald F. Shaw, Sr. Senior Engineering Advisor Dr. Thomas Sheahen, PhD, PE Physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer, PhD Professor Emeritus, Environmental Science, University of Virginia, and Director, Science and Environmental Policy Project Dr. Thomas L. Steepy, PhD Plant Pathologist Dr. Gary Steinberg, DMD Dentist Dr. Glenda Tannahill, PhD CEO/CFO, Good Samaritan Dr. George S. Taylor, PhD Director, Palmetto Energy Institute Dr. David E. Thompson, PhD Founder and President, Metric Echo, Inc, and Dean Emeritus, College of Engineering, University of Idaho 8 Dr. Marc Trachtenberg, PhD Professor, Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles Dr. Michael Trigoboff, PhD Instructor, Computer Science, Portland Community College Dr. Stanley W. Trimble, PhD Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography, UCLA Dr. Kirby Tyndall, PhD Environmental Toxicologist Dr. James Wanliss, PhD Associate Professor, Physics, Presbyterian College Dr. Robert Whitsett, PhD Former Staff Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Dr. Charles Wolf, Jr., PhD Distinguished Chair in International Economics, RAND Corporation and Professor, Pardee RAND Graduate School Dr. George T. Wolff, PhD Principal Scientist, Air Improvement Resource, Inc.; Former Chair, EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee Dr. Peter W. Wood, PhD President, National Association of Scholars Dr. Steven B. Young, PhD Former Professor of Biology, Middlebury University Dr. S. Stanley Young, PhD Assistant Director for Bioinformatics, National Institute of Statistical Sciences cc: Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ranking Member, House Committee on Science, Space, an
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