hormesis

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see calabrese (enstrom?) milloy merce art robinson

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 foundPM 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.

2020

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:{:{}:

AAPS BS

Lacking access to treatment, Americans are being subjected to unprecedented, draconian restrictions on their freedom. Dr. Orient observes that such measures were never contemplated for past epidemics, which were far more deadly, including the 1958 "Asian flu" and the 1968 "Hong Kong flu." There is scant evidence for the effectiveness of masks, lockdowns, and "social distancing," although there is devastating harm.

In addition to hydroxychloroquine, other promising modalities are either ignored or dismissed by organized medicine and the media. Dr. Orient mentions vitamin D, high-dose intravenous vitamin C, ivermectin, zinc and ionophores that help it enter cells, hyperbaric oxygenation, and low-dose radiation.

Dr. Orient concludes that: "The pretext of 'science' and 'evidence-based medicine' is masking authoritarianism that disregards, discredits, and attempts to cancel methods that could save thousands of lives threatened not just by COVID-19, but by many other diseases, both old and emerging."

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EPA Adopts Fringe Science Claim That Small Doses of Pollution Are Healthy 2/19 see Chemicals.

omfg

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

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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

Jessica Lovering is a Fellow at Energy for Growth. She was the Director of Energy at Breakthrough.

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shillenberger

Fake scientists and radiation quackery

EP's UK director John Lindbergis described as an "expert on radiation" on the EP website.38 In fact, he has no scientific qualifications whatsoever let alone specialist qualifications regarding the health effects of ionizing radiation. Likewise, a South Korean article39 reposted on the EP website (without correction) falsely claims that Shellenbergeris a scientist; in fact, he has a degree in cultural anthropology.

Lindberg is an 'Associate Member' of Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information (SARI)40, a group comprised mostly of quacks, cranks, non-scientists and conspiracy theorists whose views are directly at odds with those of scientific associations such as UNSCEAR.

SARI is at war with the linear, no-threshold (LNT) model ‒ the group's short 'Charter & Mission' insists three times that LNT is "misinformation".41 Yet LNT enjoys heavy-hitting scientific support. For example the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation states that "the risk of cancer proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and … the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans."34 Likewise, a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences states: "Given that it is supported by experimentally grounded, quantifiable, biophysical arguments, a linear extrapolation of cancer risks from intermediate to very low doses currently appears to be the most appropriate methodology."42

A 2010 UNSCEAR report isn't sold on the linear part of LNT but it is at odds with SARI (and EP) on the question of a threshold. The UNSCEAR report states that "the current balance of available evidence tends to favour a non-threshold response for the mutational component of radiation-associated cancer induction at low doses and low dose rates."43By contrast, SARI promotes hormesis‒ the discredited view that low-dose radiation exposure is beneficial to human health.44

Attacking environment groups

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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

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.

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.

EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Associated Press)]

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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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]

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