atz
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/15 tag, possibly silly b/c already a syngnta tag</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">is atrazine a way into _?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Richard A Brain (3)</font></div><div>Syngenta</div><div>Ronald J. Kendall</div><div>Ronald J. Kendall (3)</div><div>Texas Tech University</div><div>Alan Hosmer</div><div>Alan Hosmer (2)</div><div>Syngenta</div><div>Todd Alan Anderson</div><div>Todd Alan Anderson (2)</div><div>Texas Tech University</div><div>Michael Winchell</div><div>Michael Winchell (1)</div><div>Stone Environmental Inc</div><div>
</div><div>Richard A Brain (8)</div><div>Syngenta</div><div>Keith R Solomon</div><div>Keith R Solomon (8)</div><div>University of Guelph</div><div>Glen Van Der Kraak</div><div>Glen Van Der Kraak (7)</div><div>University of Guelph</div><div>Werner Kloas</div><div>Werner Kloas (7)</div><div>Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries</div><div>Ilka Lutz</div><div>Ilka Lutz (5)</div><div>Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">PORTAL</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Portal:Atrazine_Exposed</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Center for Media and Democracy has analyzed the emails, invoices, and other PR documents unsealed by the court. Read more by clicking the articles below published in CMD's PRWatch:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syngenta PR’s Weed-Killer Spin Machine: Investigating the Press and Shaping the "News" about Atrazine, by Beau Hodai and Lisa Graves</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syngenta's Paid Third Party Pundits Spin the "News" on Atrazine, by Sara Jerving</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Atrazine: A "Molecular Bull in a China Shop", by Rebekah Wilce</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syngenta Celebrates Earth Day by Ladling on the Pesticides, by Rebekah Wilce</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beyond Pesticides, "Common Herbicide May Increase Risk of Rare Disorder in Infants," (October 2, 2012).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Clare Howard, "EPA Oversight: Weighing the Parts, Ignoring the Whole," 100 Reporters (Feb. 15, 2012).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Clare Howard, "Pitchfork Rebels: Organic Farmers Take on Big Ag," 100 Reporters (Feb. 15, 2012).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Clare Howard, "Downwind: The Second-Hand Smoke of Big Agriculture," 100 Reporters (Feb. 14, 2012).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Clare Howard, "Coming Clean: Water Companies Call Industry to Account," 100 Reporters (Feb. 14, 2012).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rachael Moeller Gorman, "Glass half empty: Is your tap water safe?," MSNBC and Good Housekeeping (Feb. 14, 2012).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Penelope Jasessar Chaffer, "Tyrone Hayes + Penelope Jagessar Chaffer: The toxic baby?," TED, Ideas Worth Sharing (Feb. 14, 2012) (video).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John Sundquist, "Let’s stop aerial spraying of poison on forestland Guest viewpoint ," Register Guard (Feb. 10, 2012) (op-ed).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Paul Fattig, "Pesticide rallies intended to spread concerns," Mail Tribune (Feb. 9, 2012).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scholars & Rogues, "Steve Milloy is still a fact fighter for hire," ScholarsandRogues.com (Feb. 9, 2012).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jeff Mapes, "Behind the PR curtain: Oregon firm played part in effort to counter attacks on herbicide," The Oregonian (Feb. 8, 2012).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steve Myers, "Firm investigated HuffPost reporter’s motivations for critical stories," Poynter (Feb. 7, 2012).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jon Entine, "Over-Regulation Fever at the White House," Forbes (Feb. 9, 2012) (Entine is one of the people mentioned in the unsealed documents as a potential "third party" spokesperson for atrazine, as noted in the PRWatch article available here.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rich Keller, "Smear campaign against atrazine and Syngenta," Ag Professional (op-ed) (This is a trade magazine that promotes information from Syngenta press releases; this online magazine includes a promo ad that says, "Ag Professional, sponsored by Syngenta.")</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><ul style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" f="F" e="E" a="A" csvg="Csvg" http="http" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" ccircle="Ccircle" cx="cx" cy="cy" r="r" fill="fill" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_Ivory_Dossier_and_NRC_PANNA_Tides_all.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Dossier on Huffington Post reporter Danielle Ivory</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_response_to_HuffPo.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Emails in response to queries from Danielle Ivory</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_2009_PR_Request_for_Proposal.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">The Solicitation for PR help in the period August/September 2009 when the New York times, NRDC, and Huffington Post were documenting spikes in atrazine levels in drinking water.</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_Need_Someone_at_HuffPo.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Emails about wanting someone pro-atrazine to write on Huffington Post</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_NYT_Toxic_Waters.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Emails about the New York Times story</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_Responding_to_NYT_Duhigg_on_NPR_Fresh_Air.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Emails about how to respond to the New York Times reporter's public radio interview</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_Whelan_criticizes_Duhigg.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Emails showing coordination between ACSH's Whelan and Syngenta</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_Counter_Duhigg_interview.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Emails about countering the New York Times</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_ACSH_Is_Great_Weapon.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Emails about the PR Team's view of ACSH</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_ACSH_Whelan_Say_Syngenta_Is_Financial_Lifeblood.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Email from ACSH about Syngenta's funding level</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_ACSH_financial_proposal.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">The proposal for more money from the American Council on Science and Health</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_Talking_Points_for_Milloy.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Email from Steve Milloy seeking Syngenta's talking points</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_Email_Milloy_Asking_for_Grants.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Emails about payments to Steve Milloy, a pundit who has appeared on Fox</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_SAP_Third_Party_Plan_Milloy_and_Avery.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Plans to deploy Milloy and Avery as "Third Parties"</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Atrazine_Strategy_SAP_June_2003.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Strategy plans around 2003 SAP</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_Q_A_Kloas_SAP_Contract.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Q & A about contracts regarding the EPA's Scientific Advisory Panel</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_Spreadsheet_HudsonInstitute_Avery_Payments.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Payments from Syngenta to Hudson Institute's Avery Family</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_JTA_Q_A_Draft_Triazine_Funding.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Q & A Draft from Jayne Thompson & Associates on Syngenta funding Triazine Network</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_Ghostwrite_Atrazine_Chapter_for_AEI.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Emails about Syngenta's top scientist ghostwriting a chapter in a book about atrazine for the American Enterprise Institute</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_plan_get_investigative_reporter_rattle_cages_at_EPA.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Emails about plans to hire an investigative reporter to rattle cages at the EPA</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_WHWG_Roundup_memo.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Emails about the PR Team's "third party" tactics</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_email_Coursey_Fee_35000.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Email about the fee for a single paper from a University of Chicago professor</a>
</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=File:Syn_Spreadsheet_Fawcett.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 16px; background-image: url(" http="http" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" background-attachment="background-attachment" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Spreadsheets showing payments to Richard Fawcett from Syngenta</a></li></ul></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><ul style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" f="F" e="E" a="A" csvg="Csvg" http="http" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" ccircle="Ccircle" cx="cx" cy="cy" r="r" fill="fill" line-height="line-height" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Portal:Atrazine_Exposed" title="Portal:Atrazine Exposed" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Atrazine Exposed</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Alex_Avery" title="Alex Avery" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alex Avery</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Council_on_Science_and_Health" title="American Council on Science and Health" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">American Council on Science and Health</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Atrazine" title="Atrazine" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Atrazine</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Portal:Atrazine_Exposed/Intro" title="Portal:Atrazine Exposed/Intro" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Atrazine Exposed/Intro</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/CropLife_America" title="CropLife America" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CropLife America</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/David_Morgan" title="David Morgan" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Morgan</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Dennis_Avery" title="Dennis Avery" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dennis Avery</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Elizabeth_Whelan" title="Elizabeth Whelan" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Elizabeth Whelan</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hudson_Institute" title="Hudson Institute" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hudson Institute</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Talk:Hudson_Institute" title="Talk:Hudson Institute" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hudson Institute</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Huntingdon_Life_Sciences" title="Huntingdon Life Sciences" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Huntingdon Life Sciences</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_Martin_Taylor" title="John Martin Taylor" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John Martin Taylor</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/JunkScience.com" title="JunkScience.com" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JunkScience.com</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Michael_Mack" title="Michael Mack" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michael Mack</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Peter_Thompson" title="Peter Thompson" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Peter Thompson</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pierre_Landolt" title="Pierre Landolt" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pierre Landolt</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Steven_J.Milloy" title="Steven J. Milloy" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steven J. Milloy</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Syngenta" title="Syngenta" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syngenta</font></a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Syngenta_Crop_Protection,Inc." title="Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc." style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc.</font></a></li></ul></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">atrazine timeline</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">also 12/15 backup of main</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">cf wapo http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/daily/graphics/regs_081604.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">aug 6 2004</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">THE FINE PRINT</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Policy Puts Science on Trial</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'Data Quality' Law is Nemesis of Regulation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Rick Weiss</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Washington Post Staff Writer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wapo http://thecre.com/post/index.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">whinny horner http://thecre.com/post/page2.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">atrazine TIMELINE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1958 approved US</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1972 out of DoD RMN Tozzi starts at OMB</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1980 OIRA at some pt Tozzi #2 dep OMB appt by Reagan</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1983 Tozzi leaves OMB, sets up MBS (Milloy?)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1986 Tozzi est Federal Focus (CSE Koch)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1989 Hayes grad harv, UCB PhD 1993, 1994 hired.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1992 Tozzi works for PM (Lyons Gray EFAB)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1994 Tozzi youth smoking PM: when the U.S. Surgeon General was addressing the effects of smoking and tobacco smoke on the young. The strategy was to emphasize the death rate of youth from other factors like accidents and alcohol.[3</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1994-5 Triazine network (tozzi). Fawcett $500K till 2011. Mitchell?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1997/8? Hayes recruited by EcoRisk; he thot wd find 0. Novartis did not allow publ, (class action 6 states?) . mid 99 escorisk stalls.He raised $ to contine research.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1999: Mr. Hayes finds that atrazine inhibits development of the larynx in male frogs at low doses.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Quit 11/7/2000.ecorisk</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">June 2000 SAP cancer in rats, not hu.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2000 Syngenta spun off.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2000 Hayes "breakthru paper" entine. wrong?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/21/2000 Clinton signs omnibus bill with Tozzi's 2 sent (Shelby)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2001 John G heads OIRA From 2001 to March 2006, OIRA was headed by John D. Graham, who departed to accept the deanship of the Pardee RAND Graduate School. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jan 2001 toxicity in wildlife. nasty mtg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Summer 2001 NRDC finds out about syngenta employee prostate cancer; forces data release to EPA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fall 2001 Graham formulates the rules to implement.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2002 Hayes nature paper april PNAS?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">April 2002 EPA revised estimate evidence endo disrupt.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">June 2 NRDC asks EPA to 86 atz. syng claims 3 univ study do not rep hayes (none peer rev Carr?).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oct 02 Hayes paper EHP</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Avery A, Frog Sex-Change Claims Flawed, Center for Global Food Issues, October 30, 2002.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nov 2002 Ctr Regulatory Effectiveness/TOZZI Data Q act pet says EPA wrong on endo.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Milloy S, Freaky Frog Fraud, FoxNews.com, November 8, 2002.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2003 Hayes PNAS paper. 2/03 Carr supports.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hayes full prof 2003</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MR 2003 EPA says endo there, but can't be basis of reg (b/c of DQA) thus approve?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">June 2003: The EPA Scientific Advisory Panel considers the two studies by Mr. Hayes, 12 by Ecorisk scientists, and three others, and concludes that the research shows that atrazine interferes with the sexual development of frogs. But the panel also says that many of the studies had serious design or methodological flaws, and recommends further study.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">July 2003 ERA SAP says atr can't be ruled out in syng prost cancer.August 2003 report from the EPA's independent scientific advisory panel noted that atrazine exposure could not be ruled out as the cause of cancers observed in studies of the chemical.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">October 31, 2003: Deadline for the EPA to issue its final recommendations on atrazine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oct 2003 atraz rereg thus OK.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">11/03 NRDC FOIA WH (got Dole doc)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2004 Dole lobbies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">May 2004 Nat Tox Pgm nominates Atz for rev on hu cancer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">July 2004 CRE kibosh NTP .</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/04 Milloy asked 15K$.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Europe bans atz 2004</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2005, Anne E. Lindsay, then deputy director of EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs, testified before the Minnesota House of Representatives: “Dr. Hayes claims not only that his laboratory has repeated the findings many times in experiments with thousands of frogs, but that other scientists have also replicated his results. EPA, however, has never seen either the results from any independent investigator published in peer-reviewed scientific journals or the raw data from Dr. Hayes' additional experiments …”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">April 2005 Sherry Ford Syng plots to get Hayes, judge, oppo res.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9/05 B2 noms Lyons Gray CFO EPA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr 06 JG leaves OIRA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2006 ATZ repproved. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2006 Heartland op-ed says no atz, no food (~ Holiday Shores class action)[fought supoena to ill sup ct to hide 2012 1st amend]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2006 Jayne Thompson on job (spies to TH talks?)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2006 Syng claims to have finished 12 yr rev of ATZ, no harm to ppl (vs workers?).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Apr 2006 Ford pays Coursey for bogus econ paper (prsented 2010 at Nat Press Club)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[NOTE HOLE: dqa 2002-3</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On July 31, 2006, President Bush nominated Dudley to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On April 1, 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that President Bush "has renominated three people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President Bush first nominated Dudley to serve as the OIRA Administrator on July 31, 2006. The Senate Governmental Affairs and Homeland Security Committee held a hearing on Ms. Dudley’s nomination on November 13, but did not hold a vote to confirm her. Bush re-nominated Dudley on January 9, 2007; appointed her to serve as a senior advisor at OIRA on January 30, 2007; and gave her a recess appointment as OIRA Administrator on April 4, 2007. On January 6, 2009, the recess appointment expired and Bush designated Dudley as Acting Administrator of OIRA until his term of office ended on January 20, 2009.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From 1998 through January 2007, Dudley ALSO?! worked at the non-profit Mercatus Center ]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no one/acting? OIRA for 8 mos till</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The OIRA Administrator from September 2009 to August 21, 2012 was Cass Sunstein, who was succeeded by Acting Director Boris Bershteyn.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aug 2008/9 Last August, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) introduced a bill (H.R.3399), prohibiting the use, production, sale, importation, or exportation of any pesticide containing atrazine. It died in the health subcommittee last September.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aug 08 Milloy asks 25K$ more. fox aug 7</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KLOAS study 2008 other studies ignored?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9/2009 Rohr ~ EPA. Sunstein OIRA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10/2009 Boxer staff meet w/ EPA (Env and PW comm). EPA SAP WATERSHED</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10/09 1st Strike Team: J Thomp hired; warns planted Op-ed too similar by WHWG (ACSH/Whelan paid to hit Duhigg NYT Toxic water series Aug 09)[ACSH had already been enlisted (PDF) by the Syngenta PR team to attack the New York Times article by Charles Duhigg, "Debating How Much Weed Killer Is Safe in Your Water Glass," before the story was even published on August 22, 2009, and she responded right away] MSNBC interv</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/3/09 syng PG ~ NYT; pvt dick to look at EPA; 3rd party talking to AEI/Entine for ghost chapter</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Coursey for bogus econ paper (presented 2010 at Nat Press Club)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2010, Donald Brady, director of the Environmental Fate and Effects Division, reinforced this sentiment in a letter to an Illinois legislator, saying the EPA “could not properly account for the sample sizes and study design reportedly used by the Berkeley researchers.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3/10 Sci am http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/common-herbicide-turns-male-frogs-into-females/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3/10 march 2 D Ivory asks questions. Maverick Strag opps res to QTPA; syng hides infro from water utilities</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">03/18/10 06:12 AM ET The Environmental Protection Agency today reversed its stance [vs B2 admin] on the potential hazards of atrazine, one of the most commonly-used herbicides in the country, saying it will re-examine how the chemical affects human health. Hayes testified at hearings (own dime?)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9/2010 ATZ rev due by EPA [predicted by syng? normal renewal date?]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kaleita A, Environmentalist turns to e-bullying, Washington Times, August 11, 2010.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Avery A, Tyrone Hayes—A Frog in His Throat, Center for Global Food Issue, September 16, 2010.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2010-1 WHRGp big bucks 1.6m$</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syng ethics complaint ~ TR hiphop emails, dismissed. Torpedo Duke job.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2/11 Hayes published</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Class action lawsuit settled in 2012 after eight years; did not admit guilt, paid 105 million dollars for filtration costs in more than a thousand communities in six Mid-western states. 33 mil americans exposed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aug 2012 Sunstein leaves OIRA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> On April 25, 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama nominated Howard A. Shelanski of Pennsylvania to the U.S. Senate for confirmation as the next permanent Director.[8]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8/13 Entine Forbes hit on Hayes</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1215 main save</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/environment/senates-first-biotech-hearing-decade-was-lopsided-pro-industry-affair</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Central to the hearing is the the issue of labeling food products containing GE crops. Senator Stabenow called for the adoption of legislation on GE food labeling, presumably with language that will preempt the authority of states to adopt more stringent labeling standards. Senator Stabenow said that she wants labeling that “doesn’t stigmatize biotechnology.” The GE food industry is urging Congress to act to override state labeling before the Vermont label lawgoes into effect in July 2016.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RELATED: How Monsanto Solicited Academics to Bolster Their Pro-GMO Propaganda — Using Taxpayer Dollars</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The committee heard government and industry witnesses on the federal regulation of agriculture biotechnology, with limited input from consumer critics. Two panels (one representing agencies, the other industry) received questions from the 20 committee members on GE crops, biotechnology, ad labeling. The agency panel represented “business as usual,” discussing administrative procedures at length, while the industry panel stressed the science of GE. The Just Label It group, a coalition of organizations advancing labeling, called for the public’s right to know. Environmental groups not invited to testify criticized the lopsided hearing and the government’s opposition to GE labeling of food.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While Senators spent two of the three hours questioning agency officials on their regulatory procedures of GE crops and biotechnology, no answers were given that address scientific studies needed to ensure their safety. When asked by Senator John Hoeven (R-ND) if there was anything that made GE crops harmful to the environment, all of the members of the regulatory panel said “no,” despite impacts of GE crop production on the environment, reliance on hazardous weed killers in herbicide-tolerant crops, and the associated decline of monarch butterflies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">EPA’s Office of Pesticide Program indicated that it registers “plant incorporated protectants” (PIPs) in 86 GE crops and acknowledged pest resistance problems. Insects that are the target of the engineered plant, incorporated with a pesticide, develop resistance, putting farmers’ crops at risk because of their dependency on the technology. Organic agriculture identifies genetic engineering as an “excluded method” and prohibits its use in certified organic production.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the GE technology advances, farmers are increasingly threatened with crop loss, as was the argument made by Texas cotton farmers last year when 3 million acres of GE cotton was threatened by weed resistance to Monsanto’s herbicide-tolerant Roundup. The state of Texas, on behalf of the farmers, requested that EPA allow the use of a triazine herbicide not registered for use on cotton under an emergency exemption (Section 18 of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act), but EPA denied the request because it said that exposure to triazines, linked to hermaphroditism in frogs, “already show[s] unacceptable risk levels.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RELATED: Orwellian Nightmare: Congress May Block States from Requiring GMO Labeling</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2012, Washington State University researcher Charles Benbrook, Ph.D. found that the use of herbicides in the production of three genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant crops (cotton, soybeans and corn) has increased, contrary to industry claims that biotechnology will reduce pesticide applications. According to a series of studies in the journal Weed Science, at least 21 different species of weeds Monsanto’s “Roundup-Ready” crops, which leads to an increased pesticide use to try to combat resistance, escalating the pesticide treadmill effect. The latest herbicide tolerant GE corn and soybean plants are engineered to be used with the herbicide 2,4-D, one-half of the mixture of Agent Orange and linked to non Hodgkins lymphoma. Experts expect increased public exposure to 2,4-D through the food supply and in the environment, leading to weed resistance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the Agriculture Committee hearing, the first panel included of officials from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Center for Food Safety and FDA’s Director of Applied Nutrition, Susan Mayne, Ph.D., took opposing positions on GE labeling with the government witness arguing that mandatory labeling is unnecessary because the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) does not recognize a “material” difference between GE and conventional crops. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), a long-time member of the committee, cited the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s interpretation of GE crops as “novel for patent purposes” and asked the panel why agencies were in disagreement about the differences between GE and conventional crops. Dr. Mayne responded that, if there were a material difference in the food safety and nutrition between GE and conventional crops, FDA would support labeling.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The second panel consisted of five members of the agricultural, production, and consumer industry. Joanna Lidback, producer and farmer from the Farm at Wheeler Mountain, voiced her concerns about the costs associated with GE crops used to feed her dairy cows. She calculated an increase of $48,000 per year on her farm if GE feed was ever banned, but no calculations for the costs of the proposed GE label. With economic hardships in mind, organic farmers are threatened with adverse economic impact due to the contamination from GE pollen drifting onto their crops. Organic farmers also report losses due to a need to establish buffer zones.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In opposing labeling Daryl Thomas, Senior Vice President of Herr Foods, Inc., stated, “Mandatory labels on food products are reserved for critical information about nutrition and safety. GMO ingredients don’t change the nutritional profile or safety of our products.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/environment/male-fish-north-carolina-rivers-found-have-female-parts</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ackerman poisoned for pennies http://books.google.com/books?id=PYgmcdklVVUC</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">fawcett study bogus?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">100 reporters:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In one case, Syngenta paid $100,000 to the nonprofit American Council on Science and Health for support that included an Op-Ed piece criticizing the work of journalist Charles Duhigg of the New York Times, who wrote a story on atrazine as part of its Toxic Waters series in 2009. Without disclosing this financial support from Syngenta, president and founder Elizabeth Whelan derided the New York Times article on atrazine as, “All the news that’s fit to scare.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ACSH is a nonprofit that advocates against what it considers government’s over-regulation of issues related to science and health.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ACSH $100,000 dollar campaign (p. 1)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Dear Syngenta friends,” began a 2009 email from Gilbert Ross, a physician at ACSH, thanking Syngenta for its payments and financial support over the years. “Such general operating support is the lifeblood of a small nonprofit like ours, and is both deeply appreciated and much needed,” wrote Ross.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">timeline http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/daily/graphics/regs_081604.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3733-2004Aug15_5.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">THE FINE PRINT | A Policy Puts Science on Trial</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'Data Quality' Law Is Nemesis Of Regulation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">very good chart http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/graphics/dataQualityChart_081704.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ctr reg eff, cei, acc, last 2 together on pthalates, mic, cei 4x, dow, asbestos, 3 sen v epa 3/7/03 oil gas on stormwater, perc, ranch, USCoC, public employees for environmental responsibiltyPEER good guys, EWG</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Rick Weiss</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Washington Post Staff Writer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A01</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Second of three articles</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Things were not looking good a few years ago for the makers of atrazine, America's second-leading weedkiller. The company was seeking approval from the Environmental Protection Agency to keep the highly profitable product on the market. But scientists were finding it was disrupting hormones in wildlife -- in some cases turning frogs into bizarre creatures bearing both male and female sex organs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last October, concerns about the herbicide led the European Union to ban atrazine, starting in 2005. Yet that same month, after 10 years of contentious scientific review, the EPA decided to permit ongoing use in the United States with no new restrictions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[An Agency Takes a Turn</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under President Bush, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has made sometimes subtle changes in regulations that carry large consequences for workers and employers. Across the government, the Bush administration has started fewer regulations and killed more of the proposals Bush inherited than two predecessors. TB]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A last-minute addition to an unrelated piece of legislation has created a tool for attacking the science used by federal agencies as a basis for new regulations. Industry has embraced the Data Quality Act to challenge 32 major proposals, including a successful assault on efforts to restrict the use of the herbicide atrazine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Herbicide approvals are complicated, and there is no one reason that atrazine passed regulatory muster in this country. But close observers give significant credit to a single sentence that was added to the EPA's final scientific assessment last year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hormone disruption, it read, cannot be considered a "legitimate regulatory endpoint at this time" -- that is, it is not an acceptable reason to restrict a chemical's use -- because the government had not settled on an officially accepted test for measuring such disruption.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those words, which effectively rendered moot hundreds of pages of scientific evidence, were adopted by the EPA as a result of a petition filed by a Washington consultant working with atrazine's primary manufacturer, Syngenta Crop Protection. The petition was filed under the Data Quality Act, a little-known piece of legislation that, under President Bush's Office of Management and Budget, has become a potent tool for companies seeking to beat back regulation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Data Quality Act -- written by an industry lobbyist and slipped into a giant appropriations bill in 2000 without congressional discussion or debate -- is just two sentences directing the OMB to ensure that all information disseminated by the federal government is reliable. But the Bush administration's interpretation of those two sentences could tip the balance in regulatory disputes that weigh the interests of consumers and businesses.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John D. Graham, administrator of the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), who has directed implementation of the Data Quality Act, said the law will keep the federal government hewing to "sound science." He said the act, which allows people and companies to challenge government information they believe is inaccurate, is equally accessible to "a wide diversity of interests, both in the business community and in the consumer, environmental and conservation communities."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But many consumers, conservationists and worker advocates say the act is inherently biased in favor of industry. By demanding that government use only data that have achieved a rare level of certainty, these critics maintain, the act dismisses scientific information that in the past would have triggered tighter regulation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Washington Post analysis of government records indicates that in the first 20 months since the act was fully implemented, it has been used predominantly by industry. Setting aside the many Data Quality Act petitions filed to correct narrow typographical or factual errors in government publications or Web sites, the analysis found 39 petitions with potentially broad economic, policy or regulatory impact. Of those, 32 were filed by regulated industries, business or trade organizations or their lobbyists. Seven were filed by environmental or citizen groups. Some environmental groups are boycotting the act, adding to the imbalance in its use.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Among the petitions:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• The American Chemistry Council and others challenged data used by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) as it sought to ban wood treated with heavy metals and arsenic in playground equipment.[see appendiz, acsh?]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• Logging groups challenged Forest Service calculations used to justify restrictions on timber harvests.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• Sugar interests challenged the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration over dietary recommendations to limit sugar intake.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• The Salt Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce challenged data that led the National Institutes of Health to recommend that people cut back on salt.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• The Nickel Development Institute and other nickel interests challenged a government report on the hazards of that metal.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers petitioned the CPSC to retract data that ranked the risk of lint fires in various clothes dryers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Environmental and consumer groups say the Data Quality Act fits into a larger Bush administration agenda. In the past six months, more than 4,000 scientists, including dozens of Nobel laureates and 11 winners of the National Medal of Science, have signed statements accusing the administration of politicizing science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The White House's heavy editing of a key global-warming report, its efforts to emphasize abstinence rather than condoms in the war against AIDS and its alleged stacking of scientific advisory committees have drawn particular ire. But many scientists and public advocates believe that far more is at stake with the Data Quality Act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From their perspective, the act is shifting the authority over the nation's science into the politicized environment of the OMB -- a change, they say, that will favor big business.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'Data Quality' Law Is Nemesis Of Regulation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"It's a tool to clobber every effort to regulate," said Rena Steinzor, a professor of law and director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland. "In my view, it amounts to censorship and harassment."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That's a view that Christopher C. Horner of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute -- which has used the act repeatedly to challenge scientific information -- brushed off as "whiny."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Hey, you're making me be accurate," he mocked. "I have no sympathy for that."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Horner said the act, if anything, has proved less useful than anticipated to groups such as his that seek to minimize government regulation. And figures from the OMB confirm that agencies have in many cases resisted challenges to their scientific findings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of the 39 Data Quality Act petitions in The Post's analysis, five have resulted in at least some of the changes sought -- all of them filed by industry interests. Five were denied, five were diverted by the agencies to other bureaucratic avenues, and 24 are pending.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet there are signs, Graham acknowledged, that petitioners are becoming more innovative in their use of the act. And petitioners are homing in on agencies whose mission is to protect the environment and public health. The most heavily petitioned are the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Institutes of Health, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Studying Atrazine </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nearly 80 million pounds of atrazine are sprayed on tens of millions of U.S. acres every year, mostly on corn. It is, according to the EPA, the most prevalent herbicide in ground and surface water, remaining stable and toxic for decades in some environments.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is also a major source of revenue for Syngenta, a Swiss company with U.S. headquarters in Greensboro, N.C., that sells hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of the chemical every year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It has been nearly five decades since atrazine was first "registered" -- meaning it was approved for use under certain conditions. Over the years, as more was learned about the chemical's potential toxicity to wildlife and humans, it came under increasing federal scrutiny and regulatory restriction. The number of pounds that farmers can legally apply per acre has progressively been reduced, and users have been required to keep the chemical farther and farther away from wells, lakes and reservoirs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For decades, the main concern was cancer. The chemical clearly causes cancer in rats, and male workers in Syngenta's production facility in Louisiana have experienced much higher rates of prostate cancer than other men statewide. But studies supported by Syngenta recently convinced the EPA that the mechanism by which atrazine causes cancer in rats probably does not occur in people. (The company said the only reason for the high rate of prostate cancer in its workers is that it has an aggressive screening program that finds cases that would otherwise go undetected.) Studies are ongoing, but the EPA has for now backed off atrazine's cancer threat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hermaphrodite frogs, however, have been more difficult to dismiss.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For years, evidence has accumulated suggesting that atrazine may scramble hormones in frogs and other animals. The European Union has officially declared the chemical an endocrine disrupter. Given those concerns, Syngenta's predecessor company -- Novartis Agribusiness -- decided early in the EPA's review not to leave the question up to government scientists. In 1998, it hired a private risk-assessment service, EcoRisk Inc. of Ferndale, Wash., to arrange experiments on atrazine's environmental impacts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">EcoRisk, whose past clients include the Chlorine Chemistry Council, Dow Chemical and Ciba-Geigy Corp., in turn hired Tyrone B. Hayes, a professor of integrative biology and an expert in frog development at the University of California at Berkeley. Hayes holds a biology degree from Harvard and a doctorate in amphibian development from Berkeley, where he was tenured at age 30 and became the university's youngest full professor.[almost]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As part of a team of scientists assembled by EcoRisk, Hayes tested the effects of atrazine on tadpoles of African clawed frogs, a popular "lab rat" species for scientists. Male tadpoles raised with no atrazine in the water developed normally. But those exposed to atrazine were "demasculinized." They had smaller larynxes (voice boxes), their testosterone levels were one-tenth of normal levels, and many grew up as hermaphrodites, with a mix of male and female traits. Moreover, the effects appeared with very small exposures -- just 0.1 parts per billion, or the equivalent of one drop of atrazine in 5,000 40-gallon barrels of water. That's one-thirtieth the level currently allowed in U.S. drinking water.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Hayes sought to publish his work and have the data considered by the EPA, the company told him to run the tests again, said Hayes and Tim Pastoor, a Syngenta vice president. When repeated studies confirmed the worrisome link, Hayes was reminded that his contract forbade him to publish without Syngenta's approval. He was told that his data ought to be passed to a company-selected statistician for double-checking.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hayes quit EcoRisk and repeated his experiments on his own, expanding his work to include other frog species. In one follow-up study of 200 leopard frogs caught in the wild, he found that 100 percent of males in areas that had been treated with atrazine had abnormal sex organs. No such problems were seen in frogs from untreated regions. He published his results in two prestigious journals, Nature in 2002 and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. That ensured the EPA would consider his findings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"We showed that these animals are chemically castrated," Hayes said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ernest Smith, a developmental biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and a member of the EcoRisk team, denied that EcoRisk or Syngenta tried to bury Hayes's results.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I think there were some communications breakdowns," he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Smith noted that studies conducted by the other team members had contradicted Hayes's data. Some showed health effects only at higher atrazine doses, while others found no effect at all.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A special EPA science panel would eventually level stinging criticisms at those studies for their poor design and sloppy implementation. Still, the conflicting results left the atrazine question at a standoff. That is when the company turned to the Data Quality Act -- and Jim J. Tozzi.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'Working the Regulatory Process' </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syngenta could not have found a better advocate. Tozzi wrote the Data Quality Act and arranged for its congressional passage after the 2000 elections.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today he is a Washington lobbyist and head of the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, a watchdog group that specializes in data quality. Tozzi does not reveal his center's contributors, and the atrazine petition he filed does not have Syngenta's name on it. The petition names only the Kansas Corn Growers Association and theTriazine Network, a coalition formed in 1995 to defend atrazine and related herbicides. But Pastoor, Syngenta's head of human safety, said the company helped finance the petition process through contributions to another of Tozzi's businesses, a lobbying firm called Multinational Business Services.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tozzi is "the master craftsman when it comes to working the regulatory process," said Ken Cook of the Washington-based Environmental Working Group. "He knows where the sensitive spots are and where to press and leave no fingerprints."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Once a self-described "bottom-tier" musician on the steamy New Orleans jazz circuit, Tozzi earned a degree in economics and rose to OMB deputy administrator under Ronald Reagan. Under his directorship, the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs was the gatekeeper for virtually all proposed regulations dealing with public health and safety. It quickly became known as a bureaucratic "black hole," where proposed regulations went in for review and never came out, said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tozzi was at the OMB when evidence arose in the 1980s that giving aspirin to children with flu symptoms increased the risk of Reye's syndrome, a potentially fatal complication. A federal health agency recommended that aspirin containers bear warnings, but Tozzi said he was not satisfied the evidence was good enough. It took years for activists and Congress to force the labeling issue -- years in which almost 200 children died of Reye's. Today, with labeling, the syndrome is extremely rare.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After leaving the government, Tozzi helped Philip Morris fight mounting evidence of the dangers of secondhand cigarette smoke. That is when he pioneered the tactic of attacking the science behind proposed regulations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The argument that it costs too much to protect people does not sell," said Thomas O. McGarity, a professor at the University of Texas Law School in Austin and president of the Washington-based Center for Progressive Regulation, a network of academics that supports regulatory action to protect health, safety and the environment. "But what does sell is this idea that the science is not good."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Science is ever evolving and often hobbled by uncertainty, but policymakers have long recognized this and relied on weight-of-evidence arguments in making regulations, according to McGarity, other activists and Clinton administration officials. They point out that DDT was banned despite lingering doubts about its role in the decline of birds. Many other substances, including vinyl chloride and asbestos, also were regulated before their full effects were known.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tozzi, believing that the regulatory bar was too low, tried repeatedly to get Congress to pass legislation that would make it easier to challenge the science used to underpin regulations. Then, unable to receive broad congressional support, he crafted legislative language himself and gave it to Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.), a former lobbyist and onetime deputy director of communications for the National Republican Congressional Committee. The wording -- two sentences of 32 short lines -- directed the OMB to issue guidelines "ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information . . . disseminated by Federal agencies."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Emerson slipped the sentences into the 712-page Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act, which became the coming year's omnibus spending bill. Under pressure to wrap up the long-delayed budget, President Bill Clinton signed the huge bill on Dec. 21, 2000, nine days after the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush was to be the next president. It is not clear whether anyone in Congress other than Emerson and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) knew about the buried language.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"We sandwiched this in between Jerry Ford's library and something else," Tozzi said. "Was it something that did not have hearings? Yes. Is it something that keeps me awake at night? No. Is it something that I would do again, exactly? Yes, you bet your ass I would. I would not even think about it, okay? Sometimes you get the monkey, and sometimes the monkey gets you."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tozzi found even more reason to rejoice as Bush made a pivotal appointment to head the OIRA, Tozzi's old domain within OMB that would now handle data quality: John Graham, a risk-assessment specialist with a history of close ties to regulated industries.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"John Graham came in, and he did an unbelievable job," Tozzi said. "Better than I could have done had I been there myself."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Politicizing the Process </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Graham had been the head of Harvard's Center for Risk Analysis, an institution funded primarily by contributions from more than 100 industry and trade association donors. While there, he had amassed a reputation as a skilled critic of the cost of regulation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In one analysis, conducted with funding from the auto industry, he concluded that it would be a mistake to require side air bags in cars because they would cost $400,000 for every year of life saved. Independent experts reviewing his work found that the figure was actually about $60,000, and Graham had to rewrite his article -- and change his conclusion -- before it could be published in a prestigious medical journal.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Bush nominated Graham to head the OIRA, many citizen and environmental groups vehemently objected and more than one-third of the Senate voted no. In his first few months, Graham sent many near-final regulations back to the agencies that had proposed them, often saying he was not convinced they were worth the cost.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then he turned to the job of implementing the Data Quality Act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By the fall of 2001, Graham's office had published detailed guidelines for implementing the act. A year later, federal agencies started accepting petitions requesting that they withdraw information that allegedly did not meet OMB standards for "quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Individual agencies are responsible for reviewing the challenged data and deciding whether they are indeed reliable. But the OMB, a part of the White House, oversees the process closely -- through involvement in the agencies' deliberations and by demanding annual reports describing how agencies dealt with each petition.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OMB staff members have been providing "extensive assistance to agencies in preparing responses to correction requests," Graham acknowledged. "OMB oversight is critical to make sure that agencies handle these requests in a diligent and consistent manner," he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Graham said the OMB's unprecedented foray into science is justified in part because the data in question often serve as a foundation for costly regulation, which the OMB oversees. To fulfill the new role, Graham hired the OMB's first nine career scientists, including six with PhDs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">he Data Quality Act, or at least something like it, "was absolutely needed," said Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet Steinzor, the Maryland environmental lawyer, and other critics complain that the OMB's involvement politicizes the process. The expertise of the handful of scientists hired by Graham, they say, cannot match that of the thousands of experts on agency staffs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And while Graham said the OMB still supports weight-of-the-evidence analyses, Steinzor and others contend that the Data Quality Act inherently focuses on individual snippets of data -- each of which is inevitably open to criticism -- instead of on overarching bodies of evidence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"You can get lost in the minutiae, and that's exactly where they want you to go," Steinzor said. "They just pick, pick, pick, until you're so addled you can't protect people or the environment."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Tool for Decreasing Regulation </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A few environmental and public interest groups have tried to use the Data Quality Act. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a Washington-based group that helps federal scientists who believe their data are being suppressed, has filed three petitions under the act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One challenged the credibility of a Defense Department document supporting a proposed Army Corps of Engineers project; one contended that the Fish and Wildlife Service had made selective use of data to conclude that hunters should be allowed to shoot rare trumpeter swans; and one charged that Fish and Wildlife had used unsound science to develop "an inadequate recovery plan" for the Florida panther.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I'm not sure it is the sharpest tool in the environmental toolbox, but at least it is a tool," said executive director Jeff Ruch, adding that the swan petition lost and the other two are still under review.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many citizen groups and environmental activists believe the Data Quality Act will always be more useful to those seeking to decrease government regulation. Newly proposed regulations must be justified with evidence, they note, and the act is designed specifically to challenge such evidence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"What it really can do best is slow the regulatory process," said Sean Moulton, a senior policy analyst with OMB Watch, a government watchdog group. "And even a simple delay of a rule can mean a huge financial windfall for an industry."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the first 20 months, a handful of petitions -- all from industry -- have been at least partly successful. In one, the Competitive Enterprise Institute had wording added to a multi-agency federal climate change report stating that the report's findings did not meet Data Quality Act standards.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In another, a law firm with corporate clients in asbestos litigation got the EPA to agree to make changes in its booklet that offers warnings and safety advice to brake mechanics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet another, filed by a group that receives funding from the conservative Scaife Foundation, succeeded in getting the National Institutes of Health to downgrade warnings about the effects of smokeless tobacco. And then there was the atrazine challenge.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'Manufacturing Uncertainty' </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That petition, filed by Tozzi, made a two-pronged attack on the effort to regulate atrazine more stringently. The first was to claim that the evidence for atrazine's gender-bending effects in frogs was not fully reproduced by other Syngenta-funded EcoRisk scientists. The second was to claim that the EPA did not have the proper test to prove atrazine had ill effects.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tozzi said reliance on irreproducible results would violate the Data Quality Act because information that is not reproducible is "not accurate, reliable or useful."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As evidence of irreproducibility, he pointed to the dozen or so studies sponsored by Syngenta in addition to Hayes's study. An independent panel of experts convened by the EPA had already expressed exasperation over the conflicting results and mistakes they found in the design and implementation of those studies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In at least two of the studies the "control" frogs that were supposed to be atrazine-free were later found to have been in water contaminated with atrazine, an error the scientists said was unintentional. Another set of Syngenta studies was found to be unreliable because 80 to 90 percent of the animals died, apparently as a result of inadequate care.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Essentially what Syngenta-funded scientists did "was produce a number of studies that were purposefully flawed and misleading, and that changed the weight of the evidence," Hayes said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the EPA review also found some flaws in Hayes's studies, his conclusions have been echoed by at least four other independent research teams in three countries.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"What a coincidence that everybody can find an effect of atrazine on gonads," Hayes said, "except [those] funded by Syngenta."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Michaels, a professor of occupational and environmental health at George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, said even a good study will appear "not reproducible" if enough bad studies are thrown into the mix.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I call this 'manufacturing uncertainty,' and there is a whole industry to do this," said Michaels, who was the Energy Department's assistant secretary for environment, safety and health under Clinton. "They reanalyze the data to make [previously firm] conclusions disappear -- poof. Then they say one study says yes and the other says no, so we're nowhere."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pastoor of Syngenta said there was no conspiracy to create conflicting data.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I don't think it's extending things too far to say atrazine may be one of the best studied chemicals on the face of the earth," he said. "Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on how you look at it," other EcoRisk team members "could not replicate what Tyrone had done."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Hayes was not the only team member who at least privately agreed that atrazine was having some effect on frogs. Team member James Carr of Texas Tech told Hayes in an e-mail in February 2003: "I agree with you that the important issue is for everyone involved to come to grips with (and stop minimizing) the fact that independent laboratories have demonstrated an effect of atrazine on gonadal differentiation in frogs. There is no denying this."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The second prong of Tozzi's attack was that the EPA had not designated tests that would serve as the gold standard of proof of hormone disruption in frogs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EPA does have certain "guideline tests" that can automatically trigger regulation, including some that measure certain health effects of chemicals on wildlife. But not for hormone disruption.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jennifer Sass, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Tozzi's position flies in the face of decades of regulatory science. She said the evidence on atrazine's effects was more than convincing by traditional standards. The act, she said, has "hamstrung EPA's ability to express anything that it couldn't back up with a mountain of data. It basically blocked EPA scientists from expressing an expert opinion."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hayes said he supports efforts at the EPA to create a gold standard test. However, he said, "when we discover a pattern like this, we know we have a problem. Yes, we should work to validate it perfectly. But in the meantime, let's not keep using 80 million pounds of atrazine per year while we figure it out."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Avoiding Tighter Restrictions </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EPA ultimately agreed with Tozzi that the lack of such a test prevented it from regulating atrazine as a hormone disruptor -- a concession many environmentalists found surprising.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">No one claims that Syngenta's Data Quality Act petition was single-handedly responsible for giving atrazine's renewed approval the green light. But coming at the end of an arduous 10-year review, the data quality challenge was "the final one-two-three punch," said Sass of the NRDC, which has sued the EPA repeatedly on atrazine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">She and others said that once the EPA conceded that it could not regulate atrazine as a hormone disrupter, Syngenta was free to reach the regulatory finish line.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In closed meetings -- details of which the EPA has declined to release -- company representatives and EPA officials worked out a plan to avoid tighter restrictions. Instead, the plan calls for Syngenta to track atrazine levels in 40 U.S. watersheds over the next three years to see how farmers are doing in their efforts to minimize contamination. If concentrations rise above a level that the company agrees is "of concern," then the company will work with the farmers to try to reduce the levels.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The company will also fund more studies on frogs [kloas?]and reanalyze its data on employee cancers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The resolution, Sass said, was "basically negotiated instead of going with a scientific rationale."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Asked why other stakeholders, such as environmental groups or outside scientists, were not allowed to be part of the negotiations as they were in earlier stages of atrazine's review, James Jones, director of the EPA's office of pesticide programs, said opening the meetings "would be incredibly complicated and would create a disincentive for the company to come to the table."[//range resources frack?]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Exempting Atrazine </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In June, Tozzi filed his latest Data Quality Act petition.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This time it was directed at the National Toxicology Program. That is a part of the National Institutes of Health that reviews chemicals to see if they cause cancer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The program had announced in the Federal Register that atrazine was among a long list of chemicals that it was considering for examination. In his petition, Tozzi seized on a few sentences from the program's description of its chemical review procedures. He claimed that those sentences contained discrepancies that violated the Data Quality Act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Therefore, he wrote, the program should be barred from reviewing the cancer-causing potential of any chemicals. In particular, the petition noted, atrazine.[ WTF?]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Researchers Lucy Shackelford and Julie Tate contributed to this report.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3733-2004Aug15_5.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">----</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/13296/title/Debating-Shelby/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Debating Shelby</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Intersex Fish Found in Three Pennsylvania Rivers Linked to Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beyond Pesticides | July 7, 2014 9:23 </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The sources of estrogenic chemicals are most likely complex mixtures from both agricultural sources, such as animal wastes, pesticides and herbicides, and human sources from wastewater treatment plant effluent and other sewage discharges,” said Dr. Blazer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://ecowatch.com/2014/07/07/intersex-fish-pennsylvania-endocrine-disrupting-chemicals/2/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Jere has played a key role in the Triazine Network. I don't know if many people appreciate what he has accomplished on this issue," Pine said. "I think it's fair to say if it had not been for Jere's work with the Triazine Network we probably wouldn't have atrazine available to control weeds today."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sen. Pat Roberts participated in the retirement recognition provided a videotaped greeting for White.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Your ability to represent growers' interests combined with your outstanding humor is a genuine talent that is true to your Kansas upbringing," Roberts said. "The strength and drive you have shown over the last two years only confirms what we have known all along. You are a fighter."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">White is a former member of the Kansas Corn Commission and is a past board member of the U.S. Meat Export Federation. He served on the National Corn Growers Association Biotechnology Working Group, the U.S. Grains Council's Board of Directors and the Agricultural Business Council of Kansas City. Since the 1970s, Jere has been active in promoting feedgrains and their uses, especially the livestock and ethanol industries.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">White was a founder and the chairman of the Triazine Network, a national coalition of growers involved with the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of the triazine herbicides, atrazine and simazine. In the past 20 years, he has played a pivotal role in representing growers in these issues.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bush Administration Refused to Restrict Toxic Herbicide Atrazine, Despite Health Threat</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">White House documents obtained by NRDC reveal that industry influenced the decision.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EPA decided in 2003 not to limit one of the nation's most widely used weed-killers, a chemical that, according to several recent studies, threatens human health and the environment. The October 2003 decision -- which the EPA was required to make under a court-approved consent decree reached with NRDC in 2001 -- allows Syngenta, the main manufacturer of atrazine, and other companies to continue to sell the chemical in the United States with no significant restrictions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To determine whether industry played a role in shaping the EPA's decision, NRDC filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests with the White House and the EPA, which failed to produce relevant documents. In November 2003, NRDC filed a lawsuit charging that the Bush White House and the agency were violating the freedom of information law by withholding documentary evidence. The following month, the White House released 22 documents, with most of their contents blacked out, including a memo from former senator Bob Dole to a high-level White House official urging the EPA not to restrict the hazardous weed-killer despite the environmental risks. The White House continued to withhold more than 80 other relevant documents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a lawsuit filed in August 2003, NRDC charged the EPA with failing to protect endangered species from atrazine, despite having acknowledged that the weed-killer might cause widespread harm to endangered species. NRDC has since been calling on the EPA to fulfill its obligations under the Endangered Species Act and ban atrazine from the market. NRDC has also asked Syngenta to hand over to the EPA, and to make readily available to the public, any other data it may have on atrazine's health effects.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In announcing its October 2003 decision not to restrict atrazine use, the EPA said it found that atrazine is not likely to cause cancer in humans. However, an August 2003 report from the EPA's independent scientific advisory panel noted that atrazine exposure could not be ruled out as the cause of cancers observed in studies of the chemical.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Several recent studies show that atrazine causes sexual abnormalities in frogs, and another revealed elevated levels of prostate cancer in workers at an atrazine manufacturing plant. Some of the findings resulted from research funded by the manufacturer itself. In at least one case, when the data's damning implications became clear, the company repeatedly insisted on new tests. Indeed, the frog data only became public after the scientist conducting the research ended his contract with the manufacturer -- a company formed by the merger of Novartis and Zeneca and now called Syngenta -- and re-ran his experiment independently.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Because of atrazine's risks, the European Union banned the chemical in 2004. In America, though, farmers continue to spray the weed-killer heavily on corn, sugarcane and other crops throughout the country. As a result, some portion of the more than 60 million pounds of atrazine applied annually makes its way into streams, rivers, lakes and drinking water supplies. The problem is at its worst in the spring, when atrazine is applied most heavily, then washed by rain into waterways.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">EPA Cut Private Deal with Manufacturers</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under the deal, the EPA adopted no regulatory restrictions on atrazine use, and more than 96 percent of the streams that the EPA identified as being at highest risk from atrazine contamination remain untested by Syngenta. The EPA has found that atrazine is toxic to some species in water at levels as low as 2.16 parts per billion (ppb). Under the agreement, however, Syngenta was only required to take additional steps, such as increased monitoring, when a stream exceeds a "level of concern" -- apparently a range from 10 to 20 ppb -- over a vaguely defined "prolonged period," and only then for the most contaminated of the 40 monitored streams....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.nrdc.org/health/pesticides/bushatrazine.asp</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see portal at syngenta http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Portal:Atrazine_Exposed</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">eg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Each year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gives the green light for a score of agricultural chemicals to come to market. But the chemicals the EPA registers for use have little connection with the frequently more toxic substances sold by the millions of pounds to unsuspecting American consumers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dr. Warren Porter, a professor of zoology and environmental toxicology at the University of Wisconsin, likens the EPA’s process for registering chemicals to “bait and switch” sales tactics. Pesticide makers win approval for specific active ingredients, and then mix those chemicals with a number of other ingredients. The result is a far different formulation that has bypassed government safety reviews and is then sold to the public.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It’s like releasing molecular bulls in a china shop,” Porter said. “Virtually no pesticide is registered by the EPA. The EPA only registers the active ingredient.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Atrazine has been found to damage sexual development in frogs. Here two male frogs copulate, and one will lay eggs. / Photo courtesy of Dr. Tyrone Hayes</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Porter and other scientists have found that once the EPA registers a specific chemical for use, the manufacturer then combines it with a number of other solvents, surfactants and inert ingredients that were never part of the registration process. The goal in formulating pesticides, often, is to increase toxicity and facilitate penetration of the toxin through the cell wall where it then kills mitochondria and damages DNA.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even ingredients labeled “inert” are proving to alter the properties of the approved active ingredients, a growing number of scientists are finding. The result, their research suggests, is a chemical time bomb with significantly increased toxicity, and often with a longer half-life in the environment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The EPA is registering one thing and something very different is being sold to the public,” Porter said....http://100r.org/2012/02/epa-oversight-weighing-the-parts-ignoring-the-whole/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">from entine: But what caught my eye about Entine's post in the first place is that his name had shown up in a recent report by the Center for Media and Democracy (part one [5], part two [6]) about the efforts of Syngenta, the globe's largest agribusiness firm and the maker of atrazine, to protect its lucrative chemical from possible regulatory action by the Environmental Protection Agency. EPA is currently reviewing the herbicide's registration. Last year, a panel of independent scientists convened by the EPA recommended that the agency revise its assumption that atrazine is "unlikely to cause cancer." [7] Pointing to what it called "strong" epidemiological evidence linking atrazine to thyroid cancer, the panel states that the agency is currently acting with "inadequate information to assess carcinogenic potential." The European Union banned atrazine in 2004, based mainly on its tendency to run off into drinking water. A similar move by the EPA would cut into Syngenta's profits in the United States, where atrazine sells briskly [8] as an herbicide for our massive corn crop.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The CMD's report is based on Syngenta documents that show how the company's PR operation has tried to influence news coverage—while also keeping tabs on journalists who have reported on atrazine's potential health risks. These internal documents, according to CMD, expose the company's campaign "to influence the media, potential jurors, potential plaintiffs, farmers, politicians, scientists, and the Environmental Protection Agency." One Syngenta document [9] reveals that in 2009, the company toyed with the idea of obtaining "the services of a well-know [sic] investigative reporter to probe around the EPA…At the very minimum to utilize the advice of an Investigative Reporter to council [sic] us on what buttons to push and cages to rattle."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Story of Syngenta & Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Price of Research</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Berkeley Scientist Says a Corporate Sponsor Tried to</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bury his Unwelcome Findings and Then Buy His Silence </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK / The Chronicle of Higher Education v.50, i.10, 31oct03</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read Dr. Hayes' Research</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Atrazine-Induced Hermaphroditism at 0.1 PPB in American Frogs (Rana pipiens): Laboratory and Field Evidence</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Story of Syngenta & Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley: The Price of Research: A Berkeley Scientist Says a Corporate Sponsor Tried to Bury his Unwelcome Findings and Then Buy His Silence GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK / The Chronicle of Higher Education v.50, i.10, 31oct03</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Berkeley, CA—Tyrone Hayes wasn't all that concerned about who was signing the checks when he agreed to do some consulting on one of the most widely used pesticides in the country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And when the early studies from his laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley began producing hints that the product, the herbicide atrazine, might be inhibiting the sexual development of male frogs, he was excited. Maybe, he thought, his research would lead to some breakthrough findings. He never imagined just how unenthusiastic his research sponsors—and others with a financial stake in atrazine—would be about his discovery.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Six frustrating years later, Mr. Hayes and his defenders say they know only too well the lengths to which those companies will go to undermine his findings that atrazine may be harmful. This week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to make its final ruling on the reapproval of atrazine. Mr. Hayes and some other scientists believe that the campaign to discredit him will have played a part in helping the herbicide's primary manufacturer, a company called Syngenta, win that approval.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">His colleagues here at Berkeley and around the country say the story is a classic example of the subtle and not-so-subtle tactics that companies sometimes use to influence the outcome of university research that they pay for.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Hayes maintains that Ecorisk Inc., the consulting company that hired him and several other academic scientists to study atrazine on behalf of Syngenta, stalled and delayed his research progress once he began finding that the substance had damaging effects on frogs. It turned out that in the contracts covering Mr. Hayes's work and that of many of the other researchers, Syngenta and Ecorisk retained final say over what and whether the scientists could publish.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even after he quit working as an Ecorisk consultant, in November 2000, he asserts, the company tried to buy his silence: He says the Ecorisk consultant in charge of the atrazine studies told him that it would arrange with Syngenta to provide him with as much as $2-million in lab support if he would continue his research "in a private setting," unencumbered by the academic ethos that promotes publication of results.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Ecorisk consultant, Ronald J. Kendall, of Texas Tech University, says the charge is "absolutely" untrue.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Whatever the truth of that allegation, what happened next is undisputed: Freed from the contractual constraints on publication and confidentiality, Mr. Hayes repeated and expanded upon the original frog studies. He continued to find damaging effects of atrazine at low levels.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">His work, which has appeared in Nature and other journals, has been attacked by Syngenta and a host of other critics—including the Kansas Corn Growers Association, a Fox News [Milloy?]commentator known for minimizing the potential threat of global warming, and the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, an organization based in Washington that is challenging the use of academic studies in federal rule making.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As part of its rebuttal of Mr. Hayes's work, Syngenta cited studies by three other teams of university scientists, working for the company through Ecorisk, who could not replicate his findings showing the same effects at low doses. Several of those academics, contacted by The Chronicle, said that Syngenta did not influence the outcome of their work. They also take pains to describe their differences with Mr. Hayes as an example of the kind of scientific disagreement that is typical of academe. If the debate is heated, they say, that is largely because the stakes are so high. Atrazine, an important product for Syngenta, is widely used by farmers to kill weeds.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Hayes says some of those studies are flawed, and he has gone public with allegations that Ecorisk was interested only in bending its panel of scientists to benefit Syngenta.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"It's very directly involved with the hubris of corporations that think, 'We can fund the research we want,'" says Sheldon Krimsky, a professor at Tufts University who studies conflicts of interest in academe. "Corporations think they can fund academic science in their own interests. Hayes is a case where they made a miscalculation. For every miscalculation, how many accurate ones are out there?"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Man Who Knew Frogs</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The case is not the first in which Berkeley scientists have found themselves entwined in a controversy involving Syngenta. This is the same university that was pilloried, sometimes unjustly, for an unusually close $25-million research relationship with another arm of Syngenta that began in 1998. But that association, which involved biologists from another college in the university, had nothing to do with the Hayes research. Swiss-based Syngenta was formed in November 2000 from the merged agriculture operations of two other companies, Novartis and Zeneca.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Hayes says he probably never would have begun looking at atrazine had Ecorisk not approached him. He knew very little about the herbicide at the time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Tyrone B. Hayes knew frogs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He has been fascinated with the creatures since his childhood in South Carolina. A trim man with a compact frame and an easygoing manner, Mr. Hayes, now 36, has passed that enthusiasm on to the students who work with him. "My lab works 24 hours a day, and it's not because I pay anybody to work 24 hours a day," he says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hired at Berkeley in 1994, he had already published 10 peer-reviewed papers on amphibian development when he was asked by Ecorisk, on behalf of Syngenta, to review the available scientific literature on atrazine's effects on amphibians. The company was collecting the information as part of its application for a required reapproval of atrazine by the EPA.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A year later, in 1998, Ecorisk invited Mr. Hayes to join a panel of scientists who would be examining atrazine's impact on the development of fish, frogs, and other animals, with a focus on hormonal systems that control development. The group was called the Atrazine Endocrine Disruption Panel. Syngenta, through its crop-protection division, in North Carolina, says it provided about $2-million to Ecorisk for the scientists' studies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By 1999, working with African clawed frogs that he had raised in his lab, Mr. Hayes began to see indications that doses of atrazine in concentrations as low as one part per billion would inhibit the growth of the larynxes of male frogs. He says he shared the information with colleagues on the Ecorisk panel and with Syngenta. The findings were noteworthy, he says, because under EPA guidelines, atrazine is considered safe in drinking water as long as it is found in levels no greater than three parts per billion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Panel members asked for additional confirmation of his findings, but Mr. Hayes says they would not provide payment or approve guidelines for the additional work. By controlling the money, "they had control over the pace of the work," he says. By mid-1999, "I started to feel like they were stalling progress." He agreed that analyses of additional samples were necessary, but was frustrated that the money for the work was not forthcoming. He says he eventually did the additional analysis with his own funds.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By early 2000, Mr. Hayes was eager to begin a second round of analyses, but he still could not get approvals for the financing or the research protocols. By September, he says, he was growing so impatient that he decided to begin that work on his own, assuming that Ecorisk and Syngenta would eventually reimburse him for his costs. He paid for some of the work with money from grants from his department and from awards he had won. His rapport with his students helped. Many of them volunteered their time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The new studies looked not only at the larynxes but also at the sex organs of the frogs treated with atrazine. Mr. Hayes says that by early fall, he began seeing signs that the effects of atrazine on the sex organs of male frogs were occurring at levels as low as 0.1 parts per billion—a concentration a tenth of that affecting the larynxes. "The testes essentially start changing," he says, because atrazine triggers production of estrogen. "They grow ovaries and eggs."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'Trying to Buy the Data'</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his lab, amid shelves crammed with jars and beakers containing dead frogs suspended in a sickly-looking green preservative, Mr. Hayes explains why atrazine's effects on frogs concern him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a developmental endocrinologist in Berkeley's department of integrative biology, Mr. Hayes looks at how hormones promote development. In frogs and humans, "the hormones are the same, the mechanisms are the same," he explains. So if atrazine seems to be feminizing frogs by increasing the production of estrogen, it might also be having the same effect over the production of estrogen in people. High levels of estrogen, he notes, have been linked to breast cancer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Hayes says that he kept the Ecorisk panel informed of his work through the fall of 2000. But by early November, still waiting for the panel to approve money for the work he had already begun, he decided to quit and complete the work on his own.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his November 7, 2000, resignation letter, sent to Syngenta and several Ecorisk panel members, Mr. Hayes said the panel was not interested in pursuing his proposals to study the effects of low concentrations of atrazine. He also expressed his concern about the panel's plan to hold off on publishing the results of his and others' work until the following year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"It will appear to my colleagues that I have been part of a plan to bury important data," he wrote. "This fear will be particularly realized when independent laboratories begin to publish data similar to data that we (Novartis and my laboratory) produced together as early as 1999."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The letter was part of a cache of documents and e-mail exchanges obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Freedom of Information Act by the Natural Resources News Service, which provided them to The Chronicle and other news organizations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was after he quit the panel, Mr. Hayes says, that Mr. Kendall, the Texas Tech professor who was directing the Ecorisk panel, approached him about continuing to work on atrazine not as a Berkeley scientist, but under the auspices of a start-up company owned by Mr. Hayes's wife.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Ron Kendall said he was going to take me to Syngenta and we were to make a proposal, and they would give me enough money to continue the work in a private setting," Mr. Hayes says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Hayes says he found the timing puzzling. "Right after I left, I told them I had repeated the work and intended to go ahead with publication," he recalls. "What is it that they were trying to purchase?"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He has a theory. Mr. Hayes says that several members of the panel knew what his research showed. "They were trying to buy the data."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Kendall, who directs the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech, says the panel did ask Mr. Hayes to do additional studies, but only because the initial results he found on the larynxes were unexpected. "We felt it prudent, as a panel, that the experiment be repeated," Mr. Kendall says. "That's just good science."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If there were delays, he says, they were the result of the panel's trying to agree on the conditions for additional studies. As for the $2-million offer, Mr. Hayes has it wrong, Mr. Kendall says, explaining that he had no authority to pay anyone. "I had no discussion with Syngenta authorizing that money," he says. "I had no discussions with Ecorisk to authorize that money."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Kendall says he did make entreaties to Mr. Hayes during that period, but says they were on behalf of the panel, which hoped that Mr. Hayes would reconsider his resignation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an e-mail message in December 2000 to Mr. Kendall and to the president of Ecorisk, Mr. Hayes mentions his findings on the effects on atrazine on the frogs' sex organs. But Mr. Kendall says he had not been shown any data backing that up. "And I don't believe something until I see it," he says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Robert Bruce, president of Ecorisk, which is based in Ferndale, Wash., did not respond to several telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment. A spokeswoman for Syngenta says both it and Ecorisk "have consistently acted in a straightforward and ethical manner."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'Anything but Collegial'</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Any thought of further collaboration between Mr. Hayes and the panel would all but vanish by the end of January 2001 after a contentious meeting he had at Berkeley with several of the panel members and Syngenta officials. Some of Mr. Hayes's students attended, as did a few of his faculty mentors and deans. One of them was Paul Licht, who has been a professor and dean at Berkeley for 40 years and now runs the university's botanical garden.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to minutes of the meeting prepared by Ecorisk, Mr. Hayes again accused the panel of trying to keep his data out of public view. Mr. Kendall and the other panel members said that was not true, arguing that the panel "was and still is unsure of the findings in his investigations." They also said his data contained errors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A letter from an Ecorisk consultant working at the University of Florida, who could not attend the meeting, was then read aloud, reminding Mr. Hayes that the work he was doing "is much different than a research grant" and that it carried confidentiality requirements and other restrictions. "I am in the same situation and have always understood that this is contract research and therefore not simply my property," wrote Tim S. Gross. "The strict critical review by the panel is not a negative nor to hinder progress or diminish results or their impacts, rather it is to ensure the highest quality and at a high level and high quality of peer review."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ernest Smith, another professor at Texas Tech who coordinated the scientific studies for the panel, says the letter was not an indication of the panel's desire to control Mr. Hayes's research but a reminder that its members had a right to approve what would be presented publicly, since they all shared responsibility for designing the studies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Neither I nor Mr. Smith nor any panel member attempted to bury his data," concurs Mr. Kendall.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Hayes, who by then was already preparing a manuscript describing the findings from his second round of frog studies—conducted with his own resources—says the panel's concerns about high-quality science were disingenuous.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Later that day he presented the completed findings from his first study, on atrazine's effects on frogs' larynxes. A statistician hired by Syngenta then offered his own interpretation of Mr. Hayes's data. He reported that in his analysis, he found many instances in which the data did not match Mr. Hayes's findings. Mr. Hayes, who says he had never been told of such a problem with his data, disputed the conclusion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Licht says that the tone of the meeting and, in particular, the appearance of the statistician as a sort of "surprise witness" was unlike any academic presentation he had ever attended, and that it was anything but collegial.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"What I saw was an attempt at character assassination," he says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">War of Words</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Hayes and the panel went their separate ways. But Mr. Hayes did not go quietly.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With new financing, including money from the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, and the National Science Foundation, he set out to repeat the atrazine studies and publish them. His first article appeared in the April 2002 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The article did not go unnoticed. Two months later the Natural Resources Defense Council petitioned the EPA to withdraw atrazine from the market, citing Mr. Hayes's study and another that linked the herbicide with cases of prostate cancer among factory employees working with the substance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syngenta, too, took notice. That same June the company posted a news release on its Web site announcing that "three separate studies by university scientists have failed to replicate" Mr. Hayes's findings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The release cited research by three teams of academics working for Ecorisk. None of the studies had been reported in a peer-reviewed journal. Since then, one of them, led by James A. Carr of Texas Tech, was published in the journal of the Society of Environmental Toxicology, in February 2003, after being presented at a meeting in August 2002. The other studies were led by John P. Giesy, of Michigan State University, and Louis du Preez, of Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, in South Africa.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Hayes has argued to the EPA and in public forums that the Carr study is flawed and that its researchers understated the effects of atrazine in their analysis and in the way they applied the dosages. It was as if two people had each been given 25 jars of cough syrup for the sick children in their houses, he says, "but his house has 16 times more kids in it than mine."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What's more, many of the frogs in the Carr study died before the effects of atrazine could be assessed, Mr. Hayes notes. But even so, he says, the study does show that atrazine affects the sexual development of frogs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Carr says that his research speaks for itself, and that he is not responsible for how Syngenta chooses to characterize it. "I don't think it contradicts Hayes," he says. "I think it shows that we weren't able to find a low-dose effect. We weren't able to find an effect in the larynx."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Restricted Research</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the company's submissions to the EPA, Syngenta said Mr. Carr's study "was conducted under the direction and auspices of an independent scientific panel." But documents show otherwise. The Ecorisk contract with Texas Tech, covering more than $600,000 worth of research, states that all research data and analyses belong to Ecorisk "and/or its client."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The university says the contract is actually an improvement over what Ecorisk first proposed. The final version includes an added sentence stating that Ecorisk intends the research for publication in scientific journals, although only with "appropriate review and written permission by Ecorisk."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was the best the university could get, says Robert M. Sweazy, vice president for research, graduate studies, and technology transfer. "In our estimation," he says, "this is not a real favorable contract." (Ecorisk's restrictions initially covered Mr. Hayes because his first atrazine studies were conducted under a contract between Ecorisk and his wife's company, which then subcontracted with Berkeley for the lab work.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although Ecorisk designed the studies, Mr. Carr says his findings were not influenced by either company.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But copies of a February 2003 e-mail exchange between Mr. Carr and Mr. Hayes, made available by Mr. Hayes, suggest that Mr. Carr did have some reservations about how the panel was interpreting data from other studies. Mr. Carr wrote: "My differences with other panel members have to do with how the new data are being interpreted. (I am a biologist, others will be using statistics to minimize the impact of the new data sets.)"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Asked about the comment last week, Mr. Carr played down its significance. He says those analyses were prepared for the studies that Ecorisk was submitting to the EPA, and were among many standard statistical analyses that the scientists used. He adds that Ecorisk also supplied the agency with the raw data. "If there was something in the raw data that we missed, the EPA would have picked it up in their independent analyses," he says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New Salvo</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In October 2002, Mr. Hayes made news again, when his follow-up research, including additional information on American leopard frogs taken from field studies in the Midwest, was published online in Environmental Health Perspectives. A shorter version appeared in Nature.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The research was promptly questioned by members of the Ecorisk atrazine panel, including the three lead investigators in the studies trumpeted in June, and by Mr. Gross, the Florida scientist whose letter had reminded Mr. Hayes that the Ecorisk-sponsored work was not independent research. The critique appeared on a Web site that promotes the use of pesticides. The Web site is run by an arm of the Hudson Institute, an Indianapolis-based organization that promotes free-market economy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Criticism of Mr. Hayes's new study also appeared on the Fox News Web site, where the commentator Steven Milloy said he'd "rather kiss a frog" than trust the professor's peer-reviewed studies. Mr. Milloy is founder of a Web site he calls Junk Science, on which he mocks studies he says are used by "lawsuit-happy trial lawyers, the 'food police,' [and] environmental Chicken Littles."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More seriously, Mr. Hayes's work was now being challenged in Washington, where the Environmental Protection Agency was nearing the final stages of its review of atrazine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In November 2002, the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, the Kansas Corn Growers Association, and the Triazine Network, petitioned the EPA to ignore Mr. Hayes's studies in considering the scheduled reapproval of atrazine, arguing that the studies did not conform with the 2001 Data Quality Act, which prohibits federal agencies from using scientific findings for which there are no established standards. They said that since Mr. Hayes's studies could not be replicated by the Ecorisk panel, and there were no such standards, his work should be excluded from consideration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Triazine Network, named for the class of herbicides that includes atrazine, is an organization of about 1,000 growers and herbicide makers. It was formed after the EPA announced in 1994 that it would seek re-registration of several triazines. Jere White, director of that group and the corn growers association, says it has received some financial support from Syngenta, mostly for events designed to keep members apprised of the status of atrazine at the EPA.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. White says the organizations challenged Mr. Hayes's data because they found it unfair to impose new restrictions on atrazine when the EPA itself did not have any standards against which to assess his findings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Corn growers and other farmers like using atrazine, he says, because it works as a general herbicide and improves the efficacy of other herbicides when used in combination with them. This year a Kansas farmer using atrazine would probably get a yield of about 130 bushels of corn per acre, worth about $260, of which at least $20 would be attributable to atrazine, Mr. White says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. White says he doesn't question Mr. Hayes's integrity but wonders about his objectivity in analyzing what he finds. "I have a hard time believing there's anything as dramatic as Dr. Hayes is saying" about atrazine, he says. "After almost 50 years of using it, if these were real-world effects, you'd be able to go out and see them."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Harassment by Innuendo?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Hayes has his defenders, too, most notably on a Web site called Our Stolen Future. John Peterson Myers, the former director of the foundation that provided $5,000 to Mr. Hayes in 2001, helps run the site. After an EPA scientific advisory panel met in June 2003 to consider the studies by Mr. Hayes, Ecorisk, and others, the Web site took the company to task, saying it had used misleading news releases against Mr. Hayes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hiring academic scientists and portraying them as an independent panel is the kind of tactic that "creates this aura of scientific respectability," says Mr. Myers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The site also raised questions about Mr. Kendall's role, noting that he had served as a member of the EPA's main scientific advisory board until 2002, a period that overlapped with the time he was coordinating the atrazine panel for Syngenta as it sought reapproval for atrazine. He also has been an editor of the toxicology journal where the Carr study was published. (The journal's chief editor says Mr. Kendall took no part in publication decisions related to atrazine. Mr. Kendall says he recused himself from discussions on atrazine while serving on the agency panel.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rena Steinzor, a professor of law and director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland School of Law, says the Data Quality Act challenge against Mr. Hayes's studies is part of a broader assault on academic freedom, amounting to harassment. "It's the innuendo that surrounds a data-quality petition," she says. "This is a very well-funded campaign that serves not the quality of science but serves industry self-interest."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ultimately, the EPA did consider Mr. Hayes's studies, along with 15 others. Twelve of them were produced by Ecorisk, including the one by Mr. Carr's group that has been published. (Mr. Kendall says other Ecorisk studies will be published soon.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Based on what it found, the EPA preliminarily recommended further studies on the effects of atrazine on amphibians.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In June, the agency's scientific advisory panel concurred. "Sufficient data were available to establish the hypothesis" that atrazine interferes with the sexual development of frogs," it concluded. But the panel also found that many of the studies had serious flaws of design or methodology.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In its final ruling, scheduled to be released this week, the EPA is expected to reapprove atrazine, while also requiring Syngenta to conduct further studies on its effects on amphibians.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Natural Resources Defense Council says such a ruling would be inadequate because it includes no trigger for further restricting atrazine's use, even if the new research finds negative effects. Syngenta says it will involve Ecorisk to help with the additional studies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sticking With His Cause</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Hayes says he never set out to be a folk hero of the "keep industry out of academe" crowd. Even now, he says, he would still work for companies, though only under the right circumstances.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He recognizes that his persistence in defending his studies to the EPA and to others against his critics might lead some observers to question his motives.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But, he says, he does not have the luxury of sitting back and letting the debate play out as a simple controversy among scientists. "The truth is, we get this effect" in frogs, he says. "My responsibility—as a scientist, as an academic, as a citizen—wouldn't allow me not to care."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He has not given up on studying atrazine either. Soon to be named a full professor, and with a new $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in hand, Mr. Hayes, together with the students in his lab, continues to examine how the herbicide affects frogs' development. Now he is expanding the work. Along with atrazine, he is studying how atrazine affects frogs in combination with S-metolachlor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">S-metolachlor, as it happens, is another herbicide sold by Syngenta.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">HOW A RESEARCH PROJECT BECAME A CORPORATE CONFLICT</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">August 1997: Tyrone Hayes, a scientist at the U. of California at Berkeley, is retained by Ecorisk, on behalf of Syngenta, to analyze published studies on frogs and atrazine, a widely used herbicide.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1998: Mr. Hayes is retained by Ecorisk to test the effects of atrazine on African clawed frogs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1999: Mr. Hayes finds that atrazine inhibits development of the larynx in male frogs at low doses.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2000: Mr. Hayes finds that atrazine, at even lower doses, feminizes male frogs by altering the testes so they will produce eggs. He proposes further studies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">November-December 2000: Mr. Hayes resigns from the Ecorisk panel of consultants studying atrazine, questioning the panel's willingness to pursue certain avenues of study and accusing it of trying to bury his findings. According to Mr. Hayes, the director of the Ecorisk panel offers him substantial financial support from Syngenta to pursue his research "in a private setting."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">January 15, 2001: Syngenta reports Mr. Hayes's findings concerning atrazine's effects on frogs' larynxes to the Environmental Protection Agency, but says that aspects of the study "prevented clear conclusions" from being drawn.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">January 26, 2001: At a meeting in Berkeley, Mr. Hayes accuses Ecorisk of trying to delay release of his work because he has turned up negative findings about atrazine. Ecorisk reminds Mr. Hayes that his work is confidential. Syngenta analysts say Mr. Hayes's studies were flawed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">April 2002: Mr. Hayes's lab research on the effects of atrazine and frogs, financed and conducted without Ecorisk involvement after he quit, is published in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">June 2, 2002: The Natural Resources Defense Council petitions the EPA to withdraw atrazine from the market, citing Mr. Hayes's research and another study.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">June 20, 2002: Syngenta and Ecorisk issue a news release announcing that "three separate studies by university scientists have failed to replicate" Mr. Hayes's findings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">October 2002: Mr. Hayes's follow-up research, including additional data from new research on frogs taken from field studies in the Midwest, is published online in "Environmental Health Perspectives." A shorter version of the study appears in "Nature."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">November 2002: The Kansas Corn Growers Association and two other groups petition the EPA to ignore Mr. Hayes's studies in considering the reapproval of atrazine, claiming the studies do not conform to the 2001 Data Quality Act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">June 2003: The EPA Scientific Advisory Panel considers the two studies by Mr. Hayes, 12 by Ecorisk scientists, and three others, and concludes that the research shows that atrazine interferes with the sexual development of frogs. But the panel also says that many of the studies had serious design or methodological flaws, and recommends further study.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">October 31, 2003: Deadline for the EPA to issue its final recommendations on atrazine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SOURCE: Chronicle reporting</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ABOUT ATRAZINE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What it is: Atrazine, a white, crystalline, solid organic compound, is the second-most heavily used herbicide in the United States.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Where it's used: According to its main manufacturer, the Swiss corporation Syngenta, atrazine is used on two-thirds of all cornfields and sorghum fields in the United States and on 90 percent of sugar-cane fields. It is also used on residential lawns, golf courses, and Christmas-tree farms. More than 76 million pounds of atrazine are applied annually, mostly in the Midwest and Southeast. It is applied to the soil before planting to control broadleaf weeds and some grassy weeds.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An ingredient: Atrazine is sold on its own or as an ingredient in about 130 other products. It was first approved for use as an herbicide in the United States in 1958 and is now nearing reapproval by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Effect on humans: Atrazine has been detected in groundwater, surface water, and in water systems. People exposed to unsafe levels of the compound may develop diarrhea, eye or skin irritation, and stomach pain. Experts disagree on whether atrazine causes cancer; the EPA recently determined that it is "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Effect on animals: In animals, a number of studies show that atrazine disrupts the endocrine system, and that it has a noticeable effect on the production of hormones that control sexual development. Most of those studies have focused on frogs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sales: Syngenta does not release information about atrazine sales but reports that its overall revenues from "nonselective herbicides," including atrazine, exceeded $1.6-billion in 2002, more than one-quarter of its total revenues. Atrazine is one of the company's five biggest-selling herbicides in the United States.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Restricted in Europe: Although popular with farmers in the United States, atrazine is either banned or severely restricted in several countries in Europe. This month the European Union announced that it would withdraw its approval of atrazine for European use because of health and environmental concerns.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 50, Issue 10, Page A26</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">source: http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i10/10a02601.htm 31oct03</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/2003/Syngenta-Tyrone-Hayes31oct03.htm</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">rfk2: </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">atrazine #1 in US, tho problems found in 80's; frog deform at 1/30th eap level; lawsuit forced gov to look into. Gov hired Syngenta, a mfger 92</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">hayes in frontline in thin green linehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBbkwlGM7X0 salinas valley CA 31 use of pesticides</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">at least they are up front:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AtrazineFacts.com, a resource for people who want to learn the facts behind the class-action lawsuits facing atrazine, is produced by Syngenta, a manufacturer of atrazine and a defendant in all of the Illinois lawsuits against atrazine. AtrazineFacts.com is the website of record for atrazine litigation. It’s a site where growers, bloggers, journalists, or anyone else can find and share the truth. All information on this site is public and we invite you to connect with atrazine litigation, regulation, science, and related coverage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For more information visit www.atrazine.com</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">google ads take up a lot of space, including http://www.atrazinefacts.com/ which has CENTER FOR MEDIA & DEMOCRACY</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Click here to learn more about The Center for Media & Democracy.video by avery ~ hayes CGFIs Alex Avery discusses the flawed research claims on atrazine and frogs made by Dr. Tyrone Hayes. Learn more atrazine facts at www.cgfi.org/atrazine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">says frogs thrive in midwest, more fem frogs in urban areas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John P. Giesy: Ensuring that good science doesn’t stand in the way of America’s #1 pesticide. Giesy is a leading apologist for atrazine, the most common pesticide used in the United States, and an endocrine disruptor so dangerous that it has been banned in Europe. When University of California toxicologist Tyrone Hayes linked tiny amounts of atrazine to deformities and infertility in frogs, Sygenta, atrazine’s manufacturer, hired Giesy to dispute Hayes’ research. Despite running faulty studies and misinterpreting the results, Giesy’s research was widely used by Sygenta and other pro-industry lobbyists to force EPA to back away from plans to tighten regulations on atrazine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MSU michigan and saskat reivew supeerfund appl 2004</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.msu.edu/giesy/about.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Portal:Atrazine_Exposed</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syngenta tries to cover up [http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Portal:Atrazine_Exposed Atrazine contamination] of water supply, including by collecting information to try to [http://www.prwatch.org/node/11277 intimidate reporters]. PBS Newshour [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/july-dec12/forests_09-12.html video segment on use in forests] 9/12.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">cf</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Correspondent Ingrid Lobet reports for the Center for Investigative Reporting. http://www.loe.org/shows/shows.html?programID=12-P13-00018#feature3</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">----</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">sourcewatch "watchdog" related to atrazine?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.judicialhellholes.org/2012/01/31/sourcewatch-exposedwebsite-backed-by-organic-food-industry-scrambles-to-take-down-court-documents-after-being-caught-in-the-act/?gclid=CLrP64rI27ECFWVvQgodT34A0A</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">January 31st, 2012</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">‘SourceWatch’ Exposed: Website Backed by Organic Food Industry Scrambles to Take down Court Documents after Being Caught in the Act</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As briefly reported here late last week, WikiLeaks wannbe “SourceWatch.org” had recently begun posting previously unsealed, proprietary documents provided during discovery by Syngenta, the defendant in a long-running, if meritless, class action in Madison County, Illinois. But now, caught in the act by Judicial Hellholes reporters, SourceWatch operatives are scrambling to pull down those documents, particularly the ones that suggest a direct link between the website and the plaintiffs’ attorneys.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not only is SourceWatch feverishly pulling down documents it had posted earlier, it’s erasing online records of those deletions, presumably in hopes of covering its tracks. So much for all that “transparency” that SourceWatch’s sponsor, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), hypocritically insists is always in short supply when it comes to all those big, bad corporations that just happen to employ tens of millions of Americans. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SourceWatch’s nascent document-dump webpage, “Atrazine Exposed,” funded in large part by the organic farming industry, is perhaps designed to undermine Syngenta — the manufacturer of atrazine, a safe and widely used weed killer — in the eyes of future jurors, or otherwise to help pressure the chemical company into a costly settlement with the plaintiffs. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In any case, CMD and SourceWatch routinely rant and rave about corporations’ efforts to influence politics, public policy and the law, but apparently they have no qualms about trying to do so themselves. A victory for the plaintiffs in the atrazine class action, slowly playing out in longstanding judicial hellhole Madison County since 2004, will make conventional farming more costly and thus could make organic farming marginally more competitive. So who’s trying to exercise influence now?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">About</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since its inception in 2002, the American Tort Reform Foundation’s Judicial Hellholes® program has documented in annually published reports various abuses within the civil justice system, focusing primarily on jurisdictions where courts have been radically out of balance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Traditionally, Judicial Hellholes have been considered places where judges systematically apply laws and court procedures in an unfair and unbalanced manner, generally against defendants in civil lawsuits. Now, as both technology and the liability-expanding strategies of the nation’s formidable litigation industry evolve, the Judicial Hellholes program must evolve, too. Though it remains focused on judges and the courts, Judicial Hellholes reporting will occasionally expand its focus to the legislative and executive branches’ growing influence on the courts, while moving to a year-round online format that will offer real-time updates and analyses of civil justice developments as they occur.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course, most judges do a diligent and fair job for modest pay. Even in Judicial Hellholes jurisdictions, including some that have received national attention, the clear majority of judges are fair, and the negative publicity can be blamed on a few bad apples. Because judges generally set the rules in personal injury lawsuits, and those rulings weigh so heavily on the outcomes of individual cases, it may only take one or two judges who stray from the law to sully the reputation of an entire jurisdiction.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Though entire states may occasionally be cited as Hellholes, it is usually only specific counties or courts in a given state that warrant this citation. And, importantly, jurisdictions discussed in this report and online are not the only Judicial Hellholes in the United States; they are simply among the worst.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To the extent possible, ATRF is specific in explaining how and why particular courts, laws or regulations can produce unfair civil justice outcomes in the jurisdictions cited. These cities, counties or judicial districts are frequently identified by members of the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) and other individuals familiar with the litigation. But because sources for Judicial Hellholes information may fear lawsuits or other retaliation in these jurisdictions, they sometimes prefer to have their names and cases kept out of the program’s reporting.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ATRF annually surveys ATRA members and others with firsthand experience in Judicial Hellholes jurisdictions as part of its research process. Because the program has become widely known, ATRF also continually receives and gathers information provided by a variety of additional sources. After interviewing such sources, Judicial Hellholes reporters work to confirm the information with independent research of publicly available court documents, judicial branch statistics, press accounts, and various studies. As the Judicial Hellholes program goes online, it also invites visitors to provide additional firsthand leads and inside information.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">(The Judicial Hellholes program considers only civil litigation; it does not reflect in any way on the criminal justice system.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">* * *</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The American Tort Reform Foundation (ATRF) is a District of Columbia nonprofit corporation, founded in 1997. The primary purpose of the Foundation is to educate the general public about how the American civil justice system operates; the role of tort law in the civil justice system; and the impact of tort law on the private, public and business sectors of society.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Judicial Hellholes” is a registered trademark of ATRA used by ATRF under license.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div>