enstrom 2

main recover: guard UK glitch

see RICO tobacco poster boy, ironical if Particulate Holo BS led to GW RICO

A search of his name in the Tobacco Industry Documentsdatabase returns over 500,000 results. An LA Times article notes that Enstrom became “Exhibit A” in the fight between the tobacco industry and anti-smoking activists, a prime example of how the tobacco industry funded friendly studies for PR and lobbying purposes.

Enstrom, J

promoted to primary 3/15, evil b/c attack academics oreskes; FIRE

aha he's a two-fer: pinko liberals silence academic brave whistleblower who stands for truth ~ PC; science is corrupt/PC when his story actually proves the reverse

see DR Jane Orient aaps demon dream sex?

see main ddp

https://www.jpands.org/vol17no4/arnett.pdf

Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 17 Number 4 Winter 2012

Politicized Science: the Case of Dr. James Enstrom v. Powerful Environmental Activists Jerome C. Arnett, Jr., M.D

enstrom

Dr. James Enstrom, a respected epidemiologist and research

professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)

Fielding School of Public Health, has a stellar international

reputation. He has made major contributions to our

understanding of the health effects of ambient air pollution and

its implications for environmental regulation.

He has been a UCLA faculty member since 1976, a Fellow of

the American College of Epidemiology since 1981, and president

of the Scientific Integrity Institute since 2005. His research

addresses human health risk assessment. Specifically, it disproves

the studies used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

(EPA) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to justify their

economically disastrous small-particle air pollution regulations.

In 2003 (with Dr. Geoffrey Kabat), Dr. Enstrom published the

world’s first major, long-term study of the effects of second-hand

smoke (SHS). It appeared in the .

The study found that SHS does not cause heart disease, lung cancer, or

premature death—a politically incorrect finding.

In 2005, in , Enstrom published a detailed

analysis of the relationship between fine-particulate air pollution

and mortality during 1973-2002 in the California Cancer

Prevention Study (CA CPS I) cohort. It was the most

comprehensive peer-reviewed study ever undertaken of

Californians exposed to fine-particulate (PM2.5) diesel matter.

The study found no increased mortality from exposure to

small-particle air pollution that includes diesel engine fuel

emissions—another politically incorrect finding.

The EPA, through its National Ambient Air Quality Standards

(NAAQS), regulates ambient levels of PM2.5 fine-particulate air

pollution, which originates from diesel engines, forest fires, other

sources of combustion, and dust.

The standards were established

in 1997 and were revised in 2006. They relied primarily on the

American Cancer Society’s 1982 Cancer Prevention Study that

examined PM2.5-related deaths during the 1980s and 1990s. It

found a very small positive association between PM2.5 and total

mortality. This association does not prove causation because

population studies can only suggest causation.

CARB, part of the California EPA, has been regulating air

pollution for 4 decades in California. In 2008, the agency approved

expensive new rules to reduce the diesel particulate matter

portion of fine-particle air pollution (PM2.5). Cost of the rules has

been estimated at more than $10 billion. [note no cite] The Agency cited a 2008

CARB-sponsored report that claimed that 18,000 “premature

deaths” per year in California were caused by breathing PM2.5,

with 3,500 of these due to diesel particulate matter.

...

Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 17 Number 4 Winter 2012

... confiscated his research fund accounts. He was forced to work

the following year without pay, and has had to spend the past

two years defending himself. In addition, he has not been

allowed to present his findings on air pollution and misconduct

of the CARB and its sponsored researchers on air pollution

human health effects to his peers at UCLA.

Since August 2010, FIRE has assisted him in his efforts to retain

his position. FIRE works to defend and sustain individual rights at

America’s colleges and universities, specifically: freedom of

speech and expression, religious liberty and freedom of

association, freedom of conscience, and due process and legal

equality on campus.

Then in June of this year Dr. Enstrom’s final termination was

announced. As a result, on Jun 13, with the help of the American

Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), Dr. Enstrom filed suit in federal

court against the University of California Regents and several top

UCLA officials for violating his civil rights, contending that his right

to free speech on matters of public concern, and his due process

rights, had been violated.

As David French, senior counsel of the ACLJ, noted, “UCLA

terminated a professor after 35 years of service simply because he

exposed the truth about an activist scientific agenda that was not

only based in fraud but violated California law, for the sake of

imposing expensive new environmental regulations on California

businesses. UCLA’s actions were so extreme that its own

Academic Freedom Committee unanimously expressed its

concern about the case.”

It can reasonably be concluded that there are no significant

adverse health effects from existing air pollution levels in

California. CARB’s expensive but ineffective emissions control

regulations, which adversely impact California’s already

depressed economy, are not scientifically or economically

defendable and will have no beneficial effects on health or

mortality in California.

Dr. Enstrom, as an internationally recognized epidemiologist,

can be considered a national treasure. He blew the whistle on the

scientific misconduct of powerful University of California

professors and other CARB-supported scientists, and exposed the

political misconduct of CARB bureaucrats. His moral integrity and

determination in the face of great personal risk and suffering

serve as a stellar example for others who face similar intimidation

because of their politically incorrect views at colleges and

universities all over the country.

This problem is not uncommon. Many careers have been

destroyed when faculty members challenge established

orthodoxy, while many other faculty members have been

intimidated from speaking freely. For example, in May of this year

Ohio State University chemistry professor Nicholas Drapela was

unexpectedly fired. A critic of man-made global warming, he

had worked for the University for 10 years. And during just the two

months prior to Dr. Enstrom’s firing, two other lawsuits were filed

against the University of California by other UCLA faculty

members, Dr. Christian Head and Dr. Robert Pedowitz, who claim

retaliation, discrimination, and defamation.

Dr. Enstrom has carefully documented his problems and

posted all relevant documents at: www.scientific

integrityinstitute.com. We all should strongly support him in his...

Arnett, Jr., M.D.

Disclosure:

, is a pulmonologist who lives in Helvetia, W.Va.

Contact: jerry.arnett@gmail.com.

Dr. Enstrom is a friend of the author.

1 Enstrom JE, KabatGC. Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related

mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-98. 2005;326:1057-

1061.

2 Enstrom JE. Fine-particulate air pollution and total mortality among elderly

Californians, 1973-2002. 2005;17:803-816.

3 Pope CA III, Thun MJ, Namboodiri MM, et al. Particulate air pollution as a

predictor of mortality in a prospective study of U.S. adults.

1995;151:669-674.

4 CARB. Statewide Truck and Bus Regulations. Available at:

www.arb.ca.gov/regact/2008/truckbus08/truckbus08.htm. Accessed Oct 7,

2012.

5 Miller HI, Enstrom JE. California diesel regulations are hot air. , Jun 9,

2010. Available at: www.forbes.com/2010/06/08/california-diesel-regulationpollution-opinions-columnists-henry-i-miller-james-e-enstrom.html.

Accessed Oct 7, 2008.

6 CARB Staff Report. Methodology for Estimating Premature Deaths Associated

with Long-term Exposure to Fine Airborne Particulate Matter in California, Oct

24, 2008. Available at: www.scientificintegrityinstitute.org/CARBPMFinal

102408.pdf. Accessed Oct 7, 2012.

7 CARB. Notice of Adverse Action against Hien T. Tran Regarding

Misrepresentation of Ph.D. Degree, Apr 9, 2009. Available at: http://

www.scientificintegrityinstitute.org/tran040909.pdf. Accessed Oct 7, 2012.

8 Environmental NewsStand. Cal/EPA eyes changes to science panel despite

legal backing in case. , Oct 9, 2009. Available at: http://

www.scientificintegrityinstitute.org/Hyatt100909.pdf. Accessed Oct 7, 2012.

9 EPA. Health Assessment Document for Diesel Engine Exhaust (final 2002).

Available at: cfpub.epa.gov/ncea/cfm/recordisplaycfm?deid=29060.

Accessed Oct 7, 2012.

10 CARB Symposium: Estimating Premature Deaths from Long-term Exposure to

PM2.5, Feb 26, 2010. Available at: www.arb.ca.gov/research/health/pmmort/pm-mort-ws_02-26-10.htm. Accessed Oct 7, 2012.

11 Jerrett M, et al.

. State of

California Air Resources Board, Contract # 06-332. Available at:

www.arb.ca.gov/research/apr/past/06332.pdf. Accessed Oct 7, 2012.

12FIRE.Whistleblowing scientist who challenged environmental regulation sues

UCLA. Press Release. Available at: www.thefire.org/article/14576.html.

Accessed Oct 7, 2012.

13 Kabat GC. Why UCLA’s firing of a lone dissenting voice should worry us. NAS

Article. National Association of Scholars, Dec 5, 2011. Available at:

www.nas.org/articles/why_uclas_firing_of_a_lone_dissenting_voice_should_

worry_us. Accessed Oct 7, 2012.

14American Center for Law and Justice.ACLJ files suit against UCLA after

professor is fired for blowing whistle on junk science. Press Release. Available

at: http://aclj.org/free-speech-2/lawsuit-against-ucla-after-professor-firedfor-blowing-whistle-on-junkscience. Accessed Nov 11, 2012.

15 Dunn JD. Letter to Research Screening Committee Members, California Air

Resources Board, Jun 8, 2011. Available at: http://www.scientific

integrityinstitute.org/Dunn060911.pdf. Accessed Oct 7, 2012.

16 Arnett J Jr. Shades of EPA: the flawed human health effects epidemiology in

the California Air Resources Board’s Diesel Truck Emissions Rule. Heartland

Institute Policy Brief, March 2012. Available at: www.heartland.org/sites/

default/files/04-0212_arnett_carb_diesel_with_corrections.pdf. Accessed

Oct 7, 2012.

17 Professor fired after expressing climate change skepticism. , Jun

20, 2012. Available at: www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/19/professorfired-after-expressing-climate-change-skepticism/. Accessed Oct 7, 2012.

18 Demby G. Christian Head, black UCLA medical school doctor, files lawsuit after

alleged gorilla depiction. , May 18, 2012. Available at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/18/christian-head-black-uclaprof-gorillalawsuit_n_1528297.html. Accessed Nov 11, 2012.

no lnx

James Enstrom vs. UCLA: Terminating Environmental Debate

Citation metadata

Author: Peter Bonilla

Date: Dec. 2017

From: Academic Questions(Vol. 30, Issue 4)

Publisher: Springer Author(s): Peter Bonilla 1

Author Affiliations:

(1) Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), grid.479209.1, , 510 Walnut Street, Suite 1250, 19106, Philadelphia, PA, USA

In the grand scheme of whistleblowing settlements, the $140,000 that epidemiologist James Enstrom received in 2015 from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) to settle his 2012 wrongful termination lawsuit was fairly modest. Add another zero to the sum and then multiply it by four or five, and you've got an above-the-fold story, but Enstrom's dropped to footnote status fairly quickly. Those reading about Enstrom's case may have noted that his research evaluated levels of diesel particulate matter in the air, said, "Good for him," on the settlement, and moved on to the next story. After all, how does this particular issue stand to affect me?

By quite a lot, it turns out. In this instance, for Californians it's their money, after all, that goes into paying such settlements-and public money dispensed to settle whistleblower cases is money that could almost by definition have been put to better use. Also, while it's easy to gloss over this, the issues at play in Enstrom's case have implications well beyond the proverbial ivy-covered gates of his institution. The scientific consensus that Enstrom felt obliged to oppose in light of his own research findings has significant influence over state clean air policies, which affect not only public health but also the welfare of multimillion-dollar industries-and the many workers these businesses employ. James Enstrom is therefore a case study in why protecting academic freedom, often viewed from outside the academy as a quaint, esoteric concept, truly does serve the public interest.

Controversy

Enstrom had been a researcher in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences (EHS) at UCLA's School of Public Health since 1976, nearly thirty years, when the journal Inhalation Toxicology published "Fine Particulate Air Pollution and Total Mortality among Elderly Californians, 1973-2002," a paper based on the results of his long-term research.1 The 2005 paper fell squarely within EHS interests and was something of a shot across its bow.

Enstrom's research examined the long-term effects of particulate matter (the sum of all solid and liquid particles, many of which are hazardous, suspended in air) 2.5 micrometers (two millionths of a meter) or less in diameter, or PM2.5, to employ the scientific parlance. His findings, as he explained in his paper, "[did] not support a current relationship between fine particulate pollution and total mortality in elderly Californians, but they do not rule out a small effect, particularly before 1983."\2

This statement may seem perfectly anodyne to the nonexpert, but within Enstrom's community it was a controversial finding. Several of his EHS colleagues publicly supported a causal link between elevated PM2.5 levels and increased risk of mortality. One of them, John Froines, also served on the Scientific Review Panel (SRP) of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), a state agency that sets, among other controls, regulatory limits on diesel emissions-precisely the sort of emissions addressed in Enstrom's research. Froines...

Order in Enstrom v. Regents of the University of California, et al. Granting in Part and Denying in Part Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss

off he does name the student org:

President: Will Fitzgerald Internal Vice President: Sam Roth External Vice President: Cassandra Shand Outreach Director: Bailey Brusca Financial Director: Alexander Popovic Policy Director: Michelle Ohanian Administrative Director: Madi Elder Events Director: Mukil Pari Professor Advisors: Jim Enstrom Peter Felker

both oppose ethnic studies

https://amchainitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/145-Scholars-to-SBE-and-Gov-Newsom-3.12.21.pdf

lotta gmu? susan R. Trencher, PhD, Professor, George Mason University

Daniel Klein, PhD, Professor, George Mason University

John H. Riskind, PhD, Professor, George Mason University

Alvin Sokolow, PhD, Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

Darrell Long, PhD, Distinguished Professor, UC Santa Cruz

David Klieger, PhD, Distinguished Professor and Executive Vice Chancellor Emeritus, UC Santa Cruz

Ilan Benjamin, PhD, Distinguished Professor, UC Santa Cruz

John H. Riskind, PhD, Professor,George Mason University

John M. Ellis, PhD, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, UC Santa Cruz

Keith Whitaker, PhD, Chairman, National Association of Scholars Larry Alexander, LLB, Distinguished Professor, University of San Diego

Larry Clayton, PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of Alabama

Peter Felker, PhD, Professor, UCLAPeter Herman, PhD, Professor, San Diego State University Peter W. Wood, PhD, President, National Association of Scholars

-----

. Further details can be found in first ten minutes of this May 9, 2017 videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1qQqtuoRHg

prager u amb[ several donation asks]

intro warns ppl they will be ejected after warning?!

bkdrop capitalism is the only solution to poverty?

clarity > over agreement

i am not offended by free speech

alexis our prof and advisor ; shadow? bruin reublican put names on www

known dennis p for 20 years reads blurb? columbia school of int'l affairs fellow?

vienna --- conf reagan allen co fdr univ, all 5 min long

battle of ideology left v rt

latest communic prof ling?

sir edmund burke good men to do nothing

crowd goes wild

no ref to McNutt? confrmation?

vienna helsinki acords RR

bruinrepublicans www red ice ? hannity today show

columbia inst (grad st) fellow

keith sing? commun tsing?

intro end 4:15

big gov?

Q&A marry early? 1967 vn flipped 90's prager, medved rt radio

rubric for truth? post mod does not beleive in truth; world come to end b/c of co2; warming consensus but none on why and absol no for catastrophe alarm MO of left Leftism ... bk 11 hysterias all fraud...end

prager U

Watch Dennis Prager's LIVE speech at UCLA on the main differences between the left and right. Does UCLA have enough safe spaces to handle triggered students? DONATE today, because donations are how we get more PragerU videos to more young Americans.http://l.prageru.com/2oRDYjL PAYWALLThank you to the Bruin Republicans for hosting Dennis! If you're watching this speech, congratulations! That means you know how to get around the YouTube censors, who are restricting this video.

LI 2 22 James Enstrom

President, Scienific Integrity Institute & Faculty Advisor at UCLA

Los Angeles, California, United States215 connections

UCLA Student Organization

Personal Website

Personal WebsiteExternal link

About

Experience

UCLA Student Organization Graphic

Faculty Advisor

UCLA Student Organization

Jan 2012 - Present10 years 2 months

Greater Los Angeles Area

Since 2002 I have been involved with a courageous UCLA Student Organization that stands for principles that are in the extreme minority at UCLA. I have been educating these students on the importance of academic freedom and academic diversity at UCLA and supporting their efforts in this regard. Since 2012 I have been the primary faculty advisor of this important campus organization. Further details can be found in first ten minutes of this May 9, 2017 video…

Scientific Integrity Institute Graphic

President

Scientific Integrity Institute

Jul 2005 - Present16 years 8 months

Greater Los Angeles Area

The Scientific Integrity Institute was established in 2005 to complement the epidemiologic research conducted by Dr. James Enstrom at the UCLA School of Public Health and UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center from 1973 to 2012. Since 2012 Dr. Enstrom has continued to use academic resources at UCLA. The first role of the Institute is to conduct research on epidemiologic relationships, including weak and/or controversial relationships, with the highest level of scientific integrity. The…

UCLA

36 years

Research Professor/Researcher

Jul 2000 - Jun 201212 years

Los Angeles, CA

Dr. Enstrom conducted epidemiologic research at the UCLA School of Public Health and Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center from 1973 until 2012 and since 2012 he has conducted similar research using UCLA resources. In particular, he examined the influence of lifestyle and environmental factors on risk of cancer, other diseases, and total mortality in several well-defined populations within California and the United States. Since 2012 he has conducted his epidemiologic research through the…

Associate Research Professor/Associate Researcher

Jul 1981 - Jun 200019 years

Los Angeles, CA

Job description is the same as job description for Research Professor/Researcher position.

Assistant Research Professor/Assistant Researcher

Jul 1976 - Jun 1981 5 years

Los Angeles, CA

Job description is the same as job description for Research Professor/Researcher position.

Education

UCLAUCLA Graphic

UCLA

M.P.H.Epidemiology

1975 - 1976

UCLAUCLA Graphic

UCLA

PostDoc CertCancer Epidemiology

1973 - 1975

August 27, 1973 Nomination Letter for Celeste Durand Rogers Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cancer Research

(http://www.scientificintegrityinstitute.org/Detels082773.pdf)

October 11, 1973 Award Letter for Rogers Fellowship

(http://www.scientificintegrityinstitute.org/Young101173.pdf)

Stanford UniversityStanford University Graphic

Stanford University

Ph.D.Physics

1965 - 1970

Dissertation Advisor: Nobel Laureate Melvin Schwartz

Dissertation Publication: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/getdoc/slac-r-125.pdf

1970 Ph.D. Diploma: http://www.scientificintegrityinstitute.org/SUPHD100170.pdf

First (1967) Physics Paper: http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v19/i17/p987_1

Harvey Mudd CollegeHarvey Mudd College Graphic

Harvey Mudd College

B.S.Physics

1961 - 1965

Activities and Societies: June 1965 HMC YearBook Graduation Page (http://www.scientificintegrityinstitute.org/HMC1965.pdf)

Co-valedictorian, Class of 1965

View James’ full profile

[no one you've heard of linked to him]

https://:{insideclimatenews.org/news/2805**2020**:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:**/**contrarian-science-james-enstrom-epa-climate-change/

no lnx many

How a Contrarian Scientist Helped Trump’s EPA Defy Mainstream Science

James Enstrom’s work on particle pollution’s health effects contradicts the findings of dozens of studies, but that hasn’t stopped the agency from relying on it.

By Marianne Lavelle

May 28, 2020

In March 2017, a scientist named James Enstrom rattled many public health experts by publishing a study concluding that there was no link between fine soot air pollution and premature death.

The finding was drastically at odds with the consensus of medical researchers and with the evidence from nearly three decades of previous research.

But it was in line with arguments that Enstrom, a physicist-turned-epidemiologist, had been making for years. His dissent had played an essential role in his ascendance as a folk hero to far-right conservatives who oppose most environmental protection policies in the United States, especially those put in place by the Obama administration.

Enstrom argued that his analysis refuted one of the most influential papers in environmental health science: a 1995 study by the American Cancer Society showing that fine particulate matter pollution—or PM 2.5, as it is known—is associated with early death. PM 2.5 is produced primarily through the burning of oil, coal and wood.

Enstrom, 76, said he based his study on long-hidden cancer society data from an inside source whom he did not name. Throughout the article, which appeared in the journal Dose-Response, he took jabs at institutions that he believed had long marginalized him, including the cancer society (ACS), leading scientific journals, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other health researchers, who, he wrote, “need to promptly address my findings.” He hinted at scientific malfeasance and suggested that there was a conspiracy of silence against minority views like his.

Big-name journals, Enstrom wrote in the article, were biased against publishing results showing no association between air pollution and mortality, adding that seven other peer-reviewed scientific journals had rejected his study. In an unusual footnote, he also included a link to the rejection letters.

Over the next months, Enstrom’s paper drew fierce criticism. The cancer society said it could not confirm his data’s authenticity. The scientists whose work he had critiqued—including some of the world’s renowned experts in air pollution health science—published a withering point-by-point take-down of Enstrom’s methods and analysis.

But in at least one realm, his paper won acceptance. Eight weeks before the study was published, President Donald Trump took office. And in an administration disdainful of scientific consensus and intent on dismantling restraints on the fossil fuel industry, Enstrom found a receptive audience.

When, last month, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced the agency’s decision that it would not raise the standards for air pollution because the science of PM 2.5 was too uncertain to justify doing so, he was relying in part on Enstrom’s work. Enstrom’s research was among the studies cited by Wheeler’s hand-picked committee of science advisers to raise doubts about the PM 2.5 consensus.

More broadly, Enstrom’s work has helped provide the underpinning for the Trump administration’s wide-ranging assault on environmental protection policy, from its retreat on climate change to its current effort to restrict the type of science used by the EPA by disqualifying studies that critics say are some of the most important in human health science.

In a way, Enstrom’s journey from outsider to influencer is the story of the Trump administration’s monumental campaign to remake the rules of scientific evidence, and how that effort could shape U.S. environmental protection for years to come.

“These are changes that could have very major impacts on human health and on the environment itself,” said Bernard Goldstein, dean emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Health. “All of the laws we passed that cleaned up the environment so well—even with the challenges we still have—these have all been science-based. Well, if you knock the science out of the process, you can base the decisions on politics.”

Goldstein, who served as EPA’s assistant administrator for research and development under President Ronald Reagan, recently wrote that the leadership of the scandal-ridden agency in the early Reagan years “did nothing that even came close to the assault on the independence and expertise of the scientific advisory processes carried out by Wheeler and his predecessor, Scott Pruitt.”

‘Everything’s Been Turned on its Head’

Critics often call the Trump administration “anti-science,” but in fact, its retreat on climate change and public health and safety has only been possible with the help of science—the work of contrarians like Enstrom who have devoted themselves to challenging the mainstream consensus.

Trump’s appointees have found justification for their actions in the work and ideas of this stable of scientists, most of them industry aligned, who for years have provided ammunition to foes of federal regulation.

These contrarians have helped make the case in agencies, in Congress and in the courts, for coal, oil and other industries intent on maintaining their way of doing business in the face of increasing attention to the threats posed by climate change, and the growing imperative for cleaner air and cleaner energy.

President Trump has made clear decisions to upend environmental policy, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, but he has also made more subtle moves, like the purging of experts from science advisory committees, limiting the science that can be used by the EPA and the relying on contrarian studies like Enstrom’s work on PM 2.5. Credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

Fossil fuel companies were losing ground in this battle when Trump entered the White House: The Obama administration’s actions on global warming seemed as if they might presage the industry’s last stand. To change course, the Trump administration has sought to change fundamentally how science is evaluated in environmental decision-making.

Trump’s grand moves to upend environmental policy, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, are well known. But his legacy may be sealed more deeply in scores of arcane changes deep in the bureaucratic process, like the purging of experts from science advisory committees; the overhaul of cost-benefit analyses; the effort to limit the science that can be used by the EPA; and the reliance on contrarian studies like Enstrom’s work on PM 2.5.

“Everything’s been turned on its head by EPA, so that the consultants are considered the good guys and the academics are all biased,” said Goldstein.

Carol Browner, board chairwoman of the League of Conservation Voters, who was EPA administrator under President Bill Clinton and climate adviser to President Barack Obama, puts it this way: “What they’re doing in this whole line of insidious actions is to dismantle and fundamentally change how the agency does its business.”

A Plan to Discredit Pollution Science

A number of the actions have been aimed at neutralizing the power of one of the most important findings in environmental health science: The science showing that air pollution kills.

In the 1990s, two large, long-term studies, by the American Cancer Society and Harvard researchers, showed that breathing higher levels of PM 2.5—microscopic particles 2.5 microns in diameter or less that spew into the air when something is burned—was associated with premature death.

Virtually everyone is exposed to the PM 2.5 because it is produced by the burning of coal, oil and wood.

[PM 2.5 Explainer infograpic]

Groups allied with the fossil fuel and tobacco industries led an effort to discredit the science, but a reanalysis of the data by the Boston-based Health Effects Institute (HEI), a nonprofit research organization funded by the EPA and the auto industry, affirmed the findings. Since then, dozens of studies, including more than 30 long-term human health studies in North America, have documented the link between PM 2.5 and premature death.

Based on the science, Clinton enacted the first national air quality standards on PM 2.5 in 1997.

Even more important, the large-scale studies of PM 2.5 allowed policy makers to quantify the benefits of cleaner air in a way that had not been possible before. The EPA, after peer-reviewing the science, began using the number of lives saved from reduced PM 2.5 exposure in the cost-benefit analysis it was required to perform to justify new cuts in pollution from cars, trucks and power plants.

In 2011, the EPA estimated that the benefits yielded by U.S. air pollution rules from 1990 to 2020 at $2 trillion, a figure that outweighed the costs of the regulation by 30-to-1, savings primarily attributable to reduced PM 2.5. In addition, the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s signature climate initiative, was to result in PM 2.5 reductions that would account for up to 60 percent of the plan’s projected $34 billion to $54 billion in benefits, far outweighing its $8.4 billion in costs.

That lopsided calculus stood in the way of what Trump said was his plan to “quickly, very quickly” end U.S. climate policy and other restraints on the oil and coal industries. This was well understood by appointees like Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, and William Wehrum, Trump EPA’s assistant administrator for air pollution policy until 2019.

In 2014, Wehrum, a former industry lawyer, led an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to overturn the Obama EPA’s PM 2.5 standards, by invoking the work of contrarian scientists like Enstrom. But a federal court disagreed. “Petitioners simply have not identified any way in which EPA jumped the rails of reasonableness in examining the science,” wrote then-U.S. District JudgeBrett Kavanaugh.

Still, that loss pointed to an avenue for a future attack on PM 2.5 science. And soon after taking office, Trump’s appointees followed that path, overhauling EPA’s science advisory boards and replacing every member of its legally mandatedClean Air Science Advisory Committee or CASAC,which had sided with the mainstream consensus on PM 2.5.

By last year, the reshaped CASAC made clear that it had a far different view of the risks posed by PM 2.5. In a key review, the committee not only disputed EPA’s staff scientists on the need to act on new evidence of PM 2.5 health risks, the CASAC members were divided on the long-standing consensus that PM 2.5 caused premature death.

One of the studies the committee cited in its final report raising doubts about the science on PM 2.5 was Enstrom’s 2017 research report. It had taken a long time for Enstrom to have his work recognized, and he expressed his satisfaction when he called into a public teleconference of a CASAC meeting last December.

“This is a tremendous group, and I don’t believe it’s ever been done better in the 50-year history of EPA,” Enstrom said of the committee.

A Turning Point

In the Trump era, Enstrom may be a scientific influencer, but he has spent much of the last two decades as an outsider vocal about feeling unfairly maligned.

The point in his life when mainstream scientists turned against him, he believes, came 17 years ago, when he published a paper in the British Medical Journal challenging the scientific consensus that second-hand tobacco smoke causes heart disease and cancer.

The American Cancer Society condemned the study, funded by the tobacco industry through its now-defunct Center for Indoor Air Research, saying it misrepresented the cancer society’s data. The data Enstrom based his research on was from an early ACS long-term study group, whose members were recruited in the 1950s. But at that time, smoking was so ubiquitous that it was impossible to conduct a valid study comparing people who’d been exposed to second-hand smoke with people who hadn’t, the ACS argued in rebutting Enstrom’s study. [odd for guy who made his bones on MORMON STUDY?]

[ cf The Anti-Scientists series]

A host of other scientists also joined in: The medical journal published 10 letters disputing Enstrom’s method, findings and the conflict of interest they said was created by the industry sponsorship.

But Enstrom insisted that the work was sound. “This was peer-reviewed, and there’s not been one error identified in my paper,”he said in an interview with InsideClimate News.

As for the conflict of interest, Enstrom said he saw no difference between his acceptance of funding from a group controlled by tobacco executives and the practice of accepting research money from state cigarette tax funds and tobacco legal settlement money, as his scientist critics had. Both, he said, “originated with” the tobacco industry.

In Enstrom’s eyes, he was the target of relentless persecution, smears that had all but obscured the early achievements of his career.

“Up until 2003, I basically had a third of a century where I had a perfect record of integrity,” said Enstrom. Since then, he said, “my entire career has been under attack and the attack has never let up.”

‘If I Didn’t Fight I Could Have Disappeared’

Enstrom grew up in a middle class home in southern California, part of a wave of aspiring young Cold War-era scientists inspired by stories of the physicist Albert Einstein and Russia’s launch of Sputnik, the first manmade satellite.

Enstrom’s father, Elmer, was a courtroom clerk who longed to argue cases instead of swear in witnesses. Elmer Enstrom taught himself law and passed the California bar at 41, eventually serving as a U.S. Magistrate Judge in San Diego. But he became best known for his pro bono legal work in retirement, representing residents who were fighting court-ordered busing in the San Diego public schools.

The younger Enstrom said he learned the value of perseverance from his father’s example.

As a student at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont,California, a then-new institution aiming to nurture the technological talent the United States needed for the space race, Enstrom was co-valedictorian of the class of 1965. He went on to obtain a Ph.D. in physics at Stanford, where his dissertation adviser was Melvin Schwartz, who later won the Nobel Prize. Enstrom’s post-doctoral work at what is now known as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was carried out under another luminary, Luis W. Alvarez, also a Nobelist and a veteran of the Manhattan Project.

Physics, Enstrom recalled recently, was “exciting, exhilarating, because you’re on the very forefront of science.” But his studies left him unfulfilled.

“If you’re doing elementary particle physics, you’re basically doing something that’s not really that understandable to most people,” he said.

Through a college friend, Enstrom met Lester Breslow, California’s top health official in the 1960s, who promoted a healthy diet and abstention from smoking as key to a long life. Enstrom became so drawn to the study of human health that he switched fields, working with Breslow, the dean of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles, for many years on a multi-part study on the longevity of Mormons, work supported by the American Cancer Society.

But Enstrom, who obtained a master’s degree in epidemiology, was not on a tenure track at UCLA, and he relied on grant money to maintain his research position.

Over the next years, after public health advocates began blasting his work as suspect, Enstrom struck back. He accused those who questioned his integrity of liberal bias, and repeatedly clashed with his previous sponsors, colleagues, other scientists and government officials.

Among those Enstrom said were biased was a colleague, John Froines, a professor in UCLA’s environmental health sciences department. Froines was a science adviser to California regulators, and had supported strong air pollution rules.

Politically, the two men could not have been further apart. While Enstrom spent the Vietnam War studying in a defense-related field,Froines was one of the “Chicago Seven,” anti-war activists arrested during the riots outside of the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

In 2009, Enstrom helped initiate a lawsuit by a conservative legal group charging that Froines had overstayed his tenure on California’s air pollution science review panel. Amid the controversy, Froines was temporarily removed from the board, but later reinstated. Froines, contacted by email, declined comment for this story.

In 2010, UCLA gave Enstrom notice that he was being terminated. His research, the university said, was “not aligned” with the school’s academic mission and his research output and ability to secure continued funding did not meet the department’s minimum requirements.

Enstrom sued UCLA, charging that his termination, which came after a confidential vote by his department’s faculty, was in retaliation for his activism and his “whistleblowing” regarding Froines.

The case was eventually settled, with UCLA denying Enstrom’s allegations. UCLA “vigorously supports the principles of academic freedom,” the university said in an emailed statement. “Enstrom’s presence as a researcher for decades, despite his minority positions defending diesel emissions and tobacco, demonstrates that fact.” In the settlement, UCLA paid Enstrom $140,000 and gave him continued access to university resources, as well as permission to use the title “retired researcher.”

Enstrom told UCLA’s student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, that he was not entirely satisfied with the settlement, but thought it was the best compromise that could have been reached in the case.

“I am a good scientist, a very honest scientist,” Enstrom said. “If I didn’t fight I could have disappeared.”

A War Over PM 2.5

For Enstrom, a major battleground has always been his home state of California, which historically has led the way in U.S. air pollution regulation. Thousands of pages documenting his advocacy against air pollution regulations are collected at the website of the Scientific Integrity Institute, a nonprofit organization he founded in Los Angeles.

In the 1990s, while he was still at UCLA, he began consulting for the tobacco industry, a role that would lead eventually to his study on second-hand smoking and his rift with the American Cancer Society.

Around the same time, Enstrom was contacted by Frederick Lipfert, a consultant for the industry-funded Electric Power Research Institute, who had seen Enstrom’s work with the early ACS research cohort.

Lipfert asked if Enstrom could delve into the cancer society data to explore a question of crucial importance to the operators of the nation’s power plants, more than half of which were fired by coal at the time: Were the invisible particles that their operations released into the air deadly?

With that, Enstrom joined the war over PM 2.5.

He soon became a one-man exemplar of the wide-ranging and high-stakes conflict over the pollutant. He testified before California state regulators, advised a Congressional committee, and filed a lawsuit over the makeup of EPA’s science advisory boards.

In 2005, Enstrom published a study funded by the Electric Power Research Institute that found no association between PM 2.5 and premature death in Californians from 1983 to 2002. That finding again put him at odds with the cancer society because it purported to shed doubt on the ACS’s influential PM 2.5 work. It had the flavor of personal payback, as well: A co-author of the cancer society’s PM 2.5 study was Michael Thun, then ACS’s vice president for research, the same scientist who had condemned Enstrom’s tobacco research two years earlier.

But at the time, Enstrom’s findings did not gain traction with government regulators.

For the EPA, the decisive flaw in Enstrom’s study was his reliance on county-level air pollution data. Rates of premature death in lightly polluted rural areas could skew the rates in heavily polluted cities in the same county, especially in a state like California, with some of the largest counties in the nation.

The original ACS study in 1995 also had inexact exposure estimates, based on urban census tracts that in some cases encompassed several counties. But the ACS researchers had recently published a follow-up study that used smaller zip code areas in Los Angeles and found an even stronger association between PM 2.5 and deadly health effects.The correlation between the pollutant and harmful health effects also was holding up in research that had begun to use satellite remote sensing to pinpoint PM 2.5 pollution levels in the vicinity of individual people’s homes.

So regulators gave little weight to Enstrom’s study in comparison with the original Harvard and ACS studies; the reanalysis of that data; the cancer society’s follow-ups; as well as research on the effects of PM 2.5 carried out in other places, using different groups of subjects and different methodologies. These studies were augmented by work in lab animals that provided evidence of how PM 2.5 can disturb the cardiovascular system. In 2009, the EPA concluded that a broad body of evidence affirmed PM 2.5’s deadly toll.

“The evidence that combustion-related fine particle pollution contributes to both respiratory and cardiovascular diseases is just pretty compelling,” said C. Arden Pope, an economist at Brigham Young University and a co-author of both the original Harvard and ACS studies and follow-up studies.

“There are probably no two studies in environmental health that have been more independently reanalyzed,” Pope said. “They have been scrutinized in really remarkable ways and have held up.”

A Campaign Against ‘Secret Science’

Enstrom, however, was convinced that the findings of the Harvard and ACS studies were biased and politically motivated, carried out by scientists who favored more U.S. government regulation.

“What I’m watching is the descent of epidemiology from what used to be a legitimate public health science into just pure activism,” he said.

The legal battle with UCLA had earned Enstrom stature on the right. The libertarian publication Reason Magazine produced an online video on his mistreatment at the hands of what it called “the Green Regulation Machine.” The conservative American Freedom Alliance honored Enstrom as a “Hero of Conscience,” along with his wife, Marta Villanea, an administrative law judge, who supported him throughout his trials.

“All I did is what a good wife should do,” Villanea said in her acceptance speech.

Enstrom joined the board of trustees of the American Council on Science and Health, an industry and Libertarian-funded group that describes itself as a “a pro-science consumer advocacy organization,” although critics note that its advocacy invariably takes the form of battling government regulation.

Enstrom also became a science advisor to the Heartland Institute, the conservative think tank that has long supported and promoted work that disputes the science on climate change.

Steve Milloy,a former tobacco and coal industry adviser who had been leading attacks on PM 2.5 science from the beginning, said that Enstrom brought to the fight a “personal story of persecution.”

“It’s hard for people to understand what’s going on unless you’ve been really intimately involved in this saga, and Jim has been,” said Milloy. “He’s actually had his career damaged by it, and so he feels it very personally.”

Milloy, working with a fossil fuel-industry funded legal advocacy group, represented Enstrom in a lawsuit against EPA in 2016, alleging bias in the choice of scientists who served on its scientific advisory boards.

Enstrom also began advising U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who after becoming chairman of the House Science Committee in 2013 took up the cause of discrediting the science on PM 2.5.

Smith derided the ACS and Harvard studies as “secret science,” adopting a line of attack launched two decades earlier [JUNK SCI MILLOY?] by industry foes of regulation who characterized the studies’ routine protections of patients’ confidential medical data as nefarious.

Smith pelted the EPA with subpoenas seeking the raw data, and continued his efforts even after he was reminded that the studies had already been re-analyzed. However, he said he knew one legitimate researcher whose request for access to the raw data had been turned down by the American Cancer Society: James Enstrom.

The EPA ultimately complied with Smith’s subpoena, but Smith did nothing further with the data. Instead, he sponsored a “secret science” bill seeking to bar the EPA in the future from relying on studies that used confidential data in regulatory decision-making. Critics said it would bar the public health agency from using some of the most important human health science. The legislation, first introduced in 2014, passed three times in the GOP-led House, but was never taken up by the closely divided Senate.

By the time of the last vote in March 2017, however, Trump was in the White House, and the prospects for Smith’s proposal suddenly improved.

The Trump administration was in a position both to enact limits on the EPA’s use of mainstream science and to give more weight to contrarian work of scientists like Enstrom, who had just published his new study challenging the foundations of PM 2.5 science.

Enstrom’s ‘Odd Man Out’ Study

Enstrom’s study almost wasn’t published. “I have never read a paper that so willfully ignored the breadth of scientific evidence and attacked a specific study/group of investigators,” said a reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the scientific journals that rejected the manuscript.

But Enstrom finally got the paper in print by reaching out to Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts, who had submitted a letter in support of Enstrom during his fight with UCLA.

Calabrese was a founder of the International Dose Response Society, an organization that holds that exposure to low doses of toxic agents can be beneficial—a position embraced by many industry groups and rejected by many advocates of strong environmental protection policies.

He was also the editor of the society’s journal, Dose-Response. Aware of the controversy Enstrom’s study would stir, Calabrese agreed to publish, but warned Enstrom he would give the authors Enstrom challenged a chance to respond. “I said you’ll have to take your whacks by the people you’re going to hit, and they’re formidable people,” Calabrese recalled.

In fact, the authors of the original ACS study and the Health Effects Institute (HEI) reanalysis soon published a detailed response, citing a litany of problems they had identified in Enstrom’s work.

The most significant fault, they wrote, was Enstrom’s use of old, county-level PM 2.5 readings instead of employing newer methods now widely used to estimate exposure more precisely. The authors of the critique had just published their latest follow-up study of the ACS cohort, using seven different methods of estimating pollution, including satellite remote sensing, and finding even more significant associations between PM 2.5 exposure and premature death.

Enstrom rejected the critiques of his study—in fact, in an interview last year, he refused to accept that the substance of his work had been called into question at all.

“This is an old tactic that’s used by people who don’t want to address fundamental issues,” Enstrom said. “Instead of addressing what I did, they use the tactic of looking at what I didn’t do, and which they know I can’t do. It’s a miracle that I was able to do what I did do, because of all the efforts to stop me,and the fact that this data is not available outside their little clique.”

Changing the Rules

Enstrom’s study was well-timed to figure into U.S. air pollution policy decision-making. As Trump took office, the EPA was already launching its re-assessment of the state of current science on PM 2.5, as the law requires the agency to do every few years for key pollutants to ensure that Clean Air Act regulations are adequate.

This time around, there was major new science on PM 2.5 to consider, including one of the largest studies ever, a Harvard analysis of the health records of 60 million Medicare recipients. It indicated that lowering PM 2.5 pollution nationwide by just 1 microgram per cubic meter would save 12,000 American lives annually. The research found the risk of premature death for African Americans in the study was three times as great as that for the general population.

But how the EPA weighed the science was affected profoundly by the changes made at the agency by Trump’s team, who borrowed the ideas and rhetoric that industry foes of regulation had honed in the 25-year battle over PM 2.5. Several members of Trump’s transition team, including Milloy, were longtime warriors in the campaign to discredit the science.

Trump’s first EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, accelerated the schedule for considering the adequacy of the national PM 2.5 science by two years, so that the review could be concluded by the end of Trump’s first term in office. And in the name of “sound science” and “independence,” Pruitt barred recipients of EPA grants from serving on agency science advisory boards. Since the EPA is one of the largest funders of environmental science, the move had the effect of knocking prominent experts off the committees.

To replace them, Pruitt and his successor, Wheeler, named industry-friendly state regulators and consultants for regulated industries, who faced no similar conflict-of-interest bar. Wheeler eliminated altogether a separate 20-person expert panel on particulate matter. It was precisely the sort of overhaul that Milloy and Enstrom had sought in their 2016 lawsuit against the EPA.

The agency’s rank and file was still staffed with scientists who predated Trump, and they gave Enstrom’s paper little weightwhen they considered it against the bulk of evidence on PM 2.5. The staff scientists cited more than 2,600 scientific studies in a nearly 2,000-page analysis finalized on Dec. 31, 2019. It affirmed the EPA’s long-standing conclusion that PM 2.5 was a cause of early death. In a separate analysis, EPA staff recommended a stricter national standard for fine particulate matter pollution.

But the Trump administration’s revamped six-member Clean Air Science Advisory Committee saw things differently. Chaired by statistician Louis Anthony Cox, a Denver consultant for the American Petroleum Institute and other industry groups, the CASAC urged that the agency require a much higher burden of proof for assessing pollution’s health harms.

Enstrom’s 2005 study was included in the list of studies that the committee said raised doubt about the link between PM 2.5 and premature death. And one CASAC member, Sabine Lange, a toxicologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, wrote in a separate attachment that Enstrom’s 2017 study could be an effective challenge to the seminal American Cancer Society research.

“The Enstrom study had afiner resolution, [OPPOSITE TRUE?] so one would guess that it had less exposure error and therefore possibly a greater effect estimate, or one with narrower confidence intervals,” she wrote.

Last month, when the EPA announced it would not strengthen the pollution standard, Wheeler cited the committee’s report and the doubts about the PM 2.5 science to justify the decision. “We’ve identified a lot of uncertainties,” he said. DOUBT

Currently, Wheeler is moving forward with an initiative to change how the agency weighs science in the future. The proposal, called “StrengtheningTransparency in Regulatory Science,” is essentially the idea that Smith attempted to move through Congress three years ago, barring the EPA from basing decisions on studies that rely on patients’ confidential medical data, as the original ACS and Harvard Six CitiesPM 2.5 studies did.

A wide array of health, medical and science organizations oppose Wheeler’s decision not to raise the PM 2.5 standard decision. On April 14, 19 health and medical organizations, led by the American Lung Association, said in a statement that the Trump EPA had employed a “deeply flawed” process and ignored “powerful, overwhelming evidence” that the current PM 2.5 standard is inadequate.

Scientists and health organizations are also fighting the so-called “transparency” rule—critics say even the name has an Orwellian ring to it, because the proposed regulation is not transparent about its purpose.

The public comment period on the proposed rule ended May 18, while the deadline for the public to weigh in on the PM 2.5 standard is June 29. “The way I see it, now, all the pieces are falling into place” in the Trump administration’s plan for weakened regulation, said Gretchen Goldman, research director for theUnion of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy.

She said the purge of the science advisory boards, the appointments of industry consultants to the advisory committee and other changes to the process have helped obscure the strong scientific consensus around the risks of PM 2.5, while elevating the importance of the work of scientists like Enstrom.

“These contrarian scientists really have the ear of the EPA in ways they never had before,” Goldman said. “People like Enstrom provide the appearance of an independent scientist weighing in, and It all works together to get where we are—a rule that does not protect health with an adequate margin of safety.”

H. Christopher Frey, a professor of environmental engineering at North Carolina State University, who was a member of the particulate matter expert panel that Wheeler disbanded, said that the changes made under the Trump administration amounted to a rigging of the process. “If I wanted to design a science review that would have a predetermined outcome favorable to the regulated industries, I would get rid of the real experts,” he said.

Members of the disbanded panel, in fact, felt so strongly about the issue that they met on their own and submitted a report to EPA endorsing the agency staff’s finding that the PM 2.5 standard needed to be strengthened.

Frey said Enstrom’s argument—that his study has refuted the 1995 ACS study, and therefore, the EPA’s PM 2.5 standard should be withdrawn—reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the process.

“The standards are not set based on a single study, and they’re not withdrawn based on a single study,” Frey said. “It’s the overall body of evidence that is important.”

‘A Journey Almost Impossible to Comprehend’

Enstrom said recently that although he thinks there is no need for a PM 2.5 standard at all, he is gratified by Wheeler’s decision to maintain the current standard and to move forward with the “transparency” rule.

“It shows the value of persistence in terms of believing in honest science and trying to penetrate what seems like an impenetrable wall of dishonesty and deception,” he said. His struggle to be recognized, he added, was “a journey that is almost impossible to comprehend. It’s just been incredibly contentious and for what purpose I’m not sure I know, other than just deliberate power, power and ego.”

During a recent phone interview, Enstrom detoured frequently into speculation about “the other side” in the air pollution science debate.

He complained that air pollution studies authored by “activist Canadians”should not be the basis for U.S. environmental regulations. And he noted that a Chinese businessman’s family foundation has helped fund the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and that Chinese doctoral students were co-authors on the school’s air pollution studies.

“Do you see any of these Harvard people going over to China or central Africa where you do have air pollution problems?” Enstrom asked. “No. Their only goal is to force more regulation on Americans.”

Enstrom expressed particular outrage about a pre-publication study recently released by a Harvard group that found PM 2.5 levels in the United States to be associated with higher death rates from Covid-19. (The researchers have since revised their findings to reflect a lower, but still significant, association). Enstrom has published his own calculations of the pandemic’s effects in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s publication, The Daily Signal. Averaging counts of total mortality in the United States by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the five weeks ending April 4, early in the pandemic, he concluded that deaths were no higher than expected. And based on those numbers, Enstrom wrote, “It’s possible that the lethality of Covid-19 is no greater than that of the seasonal flu.”

Since then, the CDC’s weekly death counts have been as much as 36 percent higher than expected, and the agency estimates that Covid-19 is at least 10 times more deadly than the flu. Enstrom said he remains convinced that the impact in the U.S. is limited geographically, primarily to New York, and that public officials have overreacted. Although the loss of life was significant in the flu pandemic of 1917-1918, Enstrom said, “The country dealt with it. It was terrible, but it was not something to shut down the entire economy.”

Recently, Enstrom has sent personal emails to scientists and public interest groups who have criticized the Trump administration’s review of PM 2.5 science, asking them to discuss his evidence that “there is NO causal relationship between PM 2.5 and total mortality in the U.S.”

So far, he lamented recently, no one has responded.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/1503:{2019:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:/air-pollution-trump-epa-science-advisers-health-risk-fossil-fuel-chemical-tobacco-industry

For two years, the Trump administration has been planting seeds of change in the Environmental Protection Agency—installing allies of regulated industries onto its elite panels of science advisers. That effort now has borne fruit in dramatic fashion.

The EPA's new science advisers, sweeping aside decades of research on the grave health risks of fine particle air pollution, have launched a drive to force the agency to give greater weight to a handful of contrarian studies that dispute the harmful effects of soot.

Particulate matter is the pollution caused by combustion, a mixture of solid and liquid droplets that forms in the burning of fossil fuels or wood. The health risks of particulate matter have been an underpinning of the EPA's cost-benefit analysis of a number of air pollution regulations, including those meant to address climate change, like the Obama administration's Clean Air Act.

The science is well-established—the World Health Organizationestimates that there are 4.2 million premature deaths a year due to fine particle pollution, making it one of the leading environmental health risks globally. But allies of the fossil fuel industry have vigorously disputed the validity of fine particle pollution studies since they first emerged in the 1990s.

Significantly, the health damages from particle and other pollution coming from the combustion of fossil fuels have also been used by the EPA to justify controls on carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Controlling climate change has important co-benefits, the agency has reasoned. The Trump administration and its industry allies oppose this logic.

More Weight for 'Discordant' Claims?

The latest scientific dispute centers around the EPA's draft assessment of the science on particulate matter (PM), a comprehensive review that the agency is required by law to conduct every few years to update the state of the science on several key pollutants. EPA released its draft review last fall.

It affirmed the agency's previous findings that the science points consistently and overwhelmingly to a "causal relationship" between PM pollution and premature deaths. The assessment concludes the greatest risk is due to particles less than 2.5 microns in width, and that PM2.5 is associated with a range of cardiovascular and respiratory effects.

For the first time, the EPA concluded that the evidence was strong enough to show a "likely" causal relationship between long-term PM2.5 exposure and cancer, as well as nervous system effects. The EPA concluded, as it has in the past, that there is evidence of health risks even at extremely low levels of PM exposure.

Now, in a harshly worded draft review, the Trump administration's science advisors are blasting those findings as based on "unverifiable opinions" and lacking in scientific support.

The advisers are members of a seven-member panel called the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee. Although it is clear the members are not unified in their critique—individual members attached separate letters—the document calls for "substantial revisions" to EPA's assessment of PM, including giving more weight to what it called the "discordant" evidence among the 2,800 published studies cited in the EPA's 1,900-page science assessment.

"Substantial discordant and conflicting evidence remains ignored or unresolved," the Trump administration-appointed CASAC wrote, "leading to repeated assertions that the literature shows consistent and coherent positive associations when in fact it shows a mixture of positive and negative results."

When asked for comment on the critique, a spokesperson for the EPA said by email: "We appreciate the work of the CASAC and we will review the report."

Who Are New Committee Members Listening To?

The CASAC, now chaired by Louis Anthony "Tony" Cox, Jr., a Denver-based consultant, offers a few examples of the studies it wants to see the EPA give more weight to. Among them are studies that are authored, in fact, by Cox himself—whose clients have included theAmerican Petroleum Institute, the tobacco industry and the chemical industry.

Other studies mentioned by the CASAC are by S. Stanley Young, a former pharmaceutical industry statistician based in Raleigh, N.C., who is an adviser to the HeartlandInstitute, a conservative think tank that has led a years-long campaign to discredit climate science. Young is now also an EPA science adviser.

The CASAC also pointed to the work of James Enstrom, a Los Angeles epidemiologist who for years has questioned the health risks of particulate matter. A former tobacco industry researcher, Enstrom was a plaintiff in a 2016 lawsuit brought by the fossil fuel industry-funded Energy and Environment Legal Institute that challenged the makeup of the previous CASAC.

Many of the environmental scientists who were appointed to EPA's advisory panels had received funding from EPA at some point in their careers, which the Enstrom suit said was a conflict of interest. In 2017, Trump's first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, made the same argument when he replaced scientific experts from the existing science advisory boards with new appointees—including a number of industry allies and consultants, like Cox and Young.

'CASAC Itself Lacks Necessary Expertise'

One scientist who was among those removed from the CASAC last year, H. Christopher Frey, an environmental engineer at the University of North Carolina, said the harsh science critique from the Trump administration-appointed committee comes amid "numerous major changes to the [air quality standards] review process that collectively undermine its quality, integrity and credibility."

"Most astonishing is the arrogant and insulting tone of this letter toward EPA scientific staff," Frey, a former chairman of the CASAC, said in an email to InsideClimate News. Frey dismissed as "patently absurd" the document's assertion that the EPA's approach on particulate matter was unscientific. "The statement is ironic given that the CASAC itself lacks necessary expertise," he said.

In fact, the CASAC recommended that it be given access to additional technical expertise in order to complete its review of EPA science on particulate matter. Two members of the CASAC called for the EPA to reconstitute a 20-member special review panel on particulate matter that EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler disbanded in October, just prior to the start of the peer review. That panel included experts in the science of particulate matter and health effects—expertise that is now missing on the CASAC. Although much of the science on the health risks of particulate matter is from large human studies, there are no epidemiologists on the current CASAC.

In one striking passage of its draft peer review, the CASAC said it is unable to reach consensus on the link between particulate matter and mortality—the "causality determination of mortality from PM2.5 exposure." Some members "are of the opinion that, although uncertainties remain, the evidence supporting the causal relationship between PM2.5 exposure and mortality is robust, diverse, and convincing," the document said. But other committee members think EPA should provide a better justification for its determination that there is a causal relationship between PM exposure and premature death.

Daniel Greenbaum, president of the Boston-based Health Effects Institute (HEI), a research institute that has conducted major studies on air pollution, said that he was surprised at that passage.

"Given that there is more than a decade worth of work now looking at the epidemiology, the toxicology, and a number of other things to see whether or not PM can contribute to mortality, there's pretty robust literature that says that," said Greenbaum. HEI has offered its own critiques of some aspects of EPA's assessment—for example, it does not agree with EPA's conclusion on nervous system effects. But HEI does not dispute EPA's fundamental conclusion on mortality risk. "By most standards, people would say that the evidence has strengthened over the last 20 years," Greenbaum said.

But Greenbaum noted that the committee's review document is only a draft. The CASAC has set a conference call for March 28 to discuss the document and the next steps before submitting its final recommendations to Wheeler.

off bs SPA SAB!

University of California, Los Angeles Dr. James E. Enstrom is a retiredResearch Professor/Researcher from the School of Public Health and Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is President of the Scientific Integrity Institute in Los Angeles. He received a BS in physics from Harvey Mudd College, a PhD in elementary particle physics from Stanford University, and a MPH and postdoctoral certificate in epidemiology from UCLA.

Dr. Enstrom has authored, primarily as first or sole author, about 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on physics, epidemiology, and List of Candidates with Biosketches for 2017 SAB Annual Membership 18 scientific integrity. He has received research funding from many sources, including NIH, ACS, UC, foundations, industry sources, and personal donations. He has received no funding in recent years, but has still conducted important research by using innovative and cost-effective methods. He has taught graduate classes on environmental health science. He has given numerous lectures on epidemiology and ethics.

He has published important articles relating good health practices to reduced mortality and most recently has shown that fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is not related to total mortality in the ACS CPS I and CPS II cohorts. He is the only independent scientist to obtain and analyze original ACS CPS cohort data.

His research shows that the EPA PM2.5 NAAQS must undergo complete and objective reassessment. His Scientific Integrity Institute website contains thousands of documents relevant to air pollution epidemiology, lifestyle epidemiology, statistics, and scientific integrity. He understands air pollution health research from the perspectives of both physics and epidemiology and maintains the highest level of integrity. He is a Life Member of the American Physical Society, a Founding Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology, and a current member of the ACE Ethics Committee. In 2015 he received the Heroes of Conscience Award from the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles.

http://www.:{sourcewatch.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:org/index.php/James_E._Enstrom

https://www.desmogblog.com/no-apology-is-owed-dr-s-fred-singer-and-none-will-be-forthcoming

On Sunday, June 18, the DeSmogBlog received an email from Dr. S. Fred Singer, in which he says, “Yr (sic) June 16 blog contains the false statement that I sold my services to tobacco lobbyists.”

Dr. Singer goes on to “demand a full retraction and apologyfrom the blog,” and he asks that we publish the following statement: “Dr. Singer and SEPP (Science & Environmental Policy Project) have no connection whatsoever with the tobacco industry, now or in the past. As a matter of policy, SEPP does not solicit funds or other kinds of support from any industry or from government, but relies on tax-deductible donations from foundations and individuals in many countries. Further, Dr. Singer serves on the Advisory Board of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), an organization that has a strong anti-smoking position.”

We have no comment on the ACSH, but Dr. Singer’s main point – that he has “no connection whatsoever with the tobacco industry, now or in the past” – strains credulity.

For example, here is the link to a memo in which an official from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution solicits $20,000 from the Tobacco Institute for the preparation of a “research” paper challenging the health effects of second-hand smoke, and suggesting that Dr. Singer be retained to write the report. Here is the link to a letter thanking the Tobacco Institute for $20,000 intended “to support our research and education projects.” Here is a research paper, just as described in the earlier memo, with Dr. Singer’s name as the author. And here is another Tobacco Institute memo, reporting on Dr. Singer’s appearance with two Congressional Representatives releasing the paper to the media.

More to the point, for a blog about the dubious public relations tactics being used to skew the climate change debate, is Dr. Singer’s previous statements about his involvement with the oil industry.

For example, on Feb. 21, 2001, Dr. Singer wrote to the Washington Post, saying: “As for full disclosure: My résumé clearly states that I consulted for several oil companies on the subject of oil pricing, some 20 years ago, after publishing a monograph on the subject. “My connection to oil during the past decade is as a Wesson Fellow at the Hoover Institution; the Wesson money derives from salad oil.” At the time that Dr. Singer wrote this letter,ExxonMobilwas listing him on their website as a recipient of US $10,000 in direct funding and as a participant in an event to which ExMo contributed $65,000. Our colleague Ross Gelbspan reported all this in The Nation in an article that can be found here.

This is a stark illustration of what we are up against in the climate change “debate.” On one hand you have the world's most accomplished and reputable scientists - more than 2,000 of whom have submitted research to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - carefully weighing every pronouncement for accuracy and subjecting all of their research to peer-review before announcing it publicly. These people agree, unreservedly, that climate change is happening and is caused by human activity.

On the other hand, you have a huge and expensive public relations campaign denying that scientific consensus. This campaign is largely financed with money from energy companies like ExxonMobil, which is then lightly laundered through “think tanks” like the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution or the Competitive Enterprise Institute or through industry front groups like Dr. Singer's own Science & Environmental Policy Project. The money is then passed along to “experts” like Dr. Singer, who seems happy enough to be paid for his services, even if he is reticent to admit it after the fact.

There should be no doubt in this conversation where the weight of credibility lies.

hoggan desmog 2006?

https://www.thecollegefix.com/ucla-whistleblower-encourages-students-fight-truth-odds/

2/16

no lnx

"The truth will set you free’

LOS ANGELES — A retired UCLA researcher fired for exposing bad science and unethical conduct by California regulators who eventually won a legal battle against the school recently spoke to a group of UCLA students, encouraging them to pursue and fight for truth no matter the hurdles they face.

Facing the room full of about 45 students, James Enstrom said he was never sure he would get support during his battle to expose climate pollution data fraud and then for his academic freedom rights against UCLA — yet it came.

He went on to quote two Bible verses. The first, John 8:32: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.” Enstrom said it inspires him because the truth “is what real scientists pursue.”

“They pursue the truth whether it is politically correct or incorrect,” he said. “That is how science advances. Any imitation or phony sciences is a destruction of real science.”

His second Bible reference was that of the shepherd boy David defeating the giant Goliath with a sling.

“By knowing exactly where to aim the stone, you can do powerful things even though the odds against you are very high,” Enstrom said.

Between 2005 and 2010, Enstrom worked to expose the faulty science behind onerous diesel regulations in California. The battle Enstrom underwent to not only expose that shoddy data – but also the worthless credentials of the study’s lead author – led him to be fired from UCLA in 2011 after 34 years there.

Last year, he won a lengthy legal battle against the public university, which was forced to pay Enstrom $140,000, reinstate his title as “retired researcher,” and restore his access to campus resources, “effectively” rescinding his termination there.

RELATED — VINDICATED: Researcher punished for exposing climate fraud beats UCLA

(His story is told in a news report by Reason he viewed with students prior to his speech … )

In his recent talk at UCLA, Enstrom criticized the environmental regulation complex, saying it has encouraged bad science and academic suppression.

He went on to state that although official reports list the ratio of liberals to conservatives at UCLA at around 5 to 1, the situation is much worse. When he looked at donations data, there is evidence that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is “closer to 20 to 1.”

Looking back on his career, Enstrom said “I spent most of my career in the closet, but then I was dealing with honest liberals.” Today, administrators are more willing to suppress research that debunks climate change than ever before.

He said liberals have mounted a successful effort to “takeover … science.” And more threats remain.

For example, the current frontrunner in the election for the National Academy of the Sciences top leader, Marcia McNutt, is a repeat offender when it comes to suppression of academic dissent. Yet McNutt is expected to be elected unopposed. Her accession has been marked as a historic moment because she would be the first woman to lead the academy.

Enstrom has a different take. McNutt, he claims, rejected a paper he and his colleagues submitted to Science without even reading the evidence. The reason: his paper disagreed with a seminal article published in Science 60 years ago that claimed the effects of pollution increase linearly with the amount of pollution people are exposed to, which laid the ground work for the reasoning behind current emissions regulations.

Because the academy influences grant decisions, this type of suppression is “very concerning,” he said.

Enstrom is not alone.

National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood pointed out of her record: “Dr. McNutt has in her career found herself faced more than once with the challenge of what to do when an entrenched orthodoxy meets a substantial scientific challenge. The challenge in each case could itself prove to be mistaken, but it met what most scientists would concede to be the threshold criteria to deserve a serious hearing. Yet in each case Dr. McNutt chose to reinforce the orthodoxy by shutting the door on the challenge.”

At the end of his talk, Enstrom encouraged students, especially science majors, to keep their eyes open for infringement of academic freedom. He also said students should email Susan Wessler, a professor at UC Riverside who is in charge of administrating the election of the new president of the National Academy of the Sciences, to voice their concern over McNutt’s nomination.

“She is not a professor here,” he told the UCLA students, “so she cannot do anything against you.”

Enstrom’s talk was sponsored by Bruin Republicans at UCLA.

RELATED: UNC philosophy professor warns: ‘Progressive privilege’ abounds in academia

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INTO THE WEEDS

Here’s what “association” means in this context.

This was a very large epidemiological study that looked at data on more than 500,000 Americans enrolled by the American Cancer Society in 1982 and followed for death through 1989.

Pope combined each subject’s lifestyle data with their estimated PM2.5 exposure level based on their address in 1982.

He then did a statistical analysis to estimate the contribution of PM2.5 to their deaths through 1989.

Popecompared that data, which included the subjects’ lifestyles, ages, address and deaths, to exposure levels of PM2.5 and created a statistical analysis of whether PM2.5 may have played a role in their deaths.

The role PM2.5 may have played is labeled as the “relative risk” in this and other studies.

In that seminal Pope study, the relative risk was found to be 1.07, meaning for every 10-unit increase in PM2.5 exposure, you have a 7 percent greater risk of dying early.

STUDY QUESTIONED

The 1995 American Cancer Society study by C. Arden Pope created a huge outcry at the time with many scientists questioning its conclusions.

That didn’t stop the Environmental Protection Agency from creating a national ambient air quality standard for PM2.5 in 1997, based primarily on Pope’s work.

The annual standard back then was set at 15 micrograms per cubic meter. The current annual standard is 12 micrograms per cubic meter.

The San Joaquin Valley has yet to meet the 1997 standard and has virtually no hope of hitting the new standard by the 2025 deadline, by the way.

Between then and now, a number of studies have come out showing no association between PM2.5 and premature deaths.

These other studies are not based on the “gold standard” American Cancer Society data, however.

And they are routinely discounted by the EPA and the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, when the latest scientific information is evaluated for proposed new regulations.

BLACK SHEEP

The latest study, published in the journal Dose-Response last month byJames Enstrom, did use the American Cancer Society data.

For anyone who’s followed air pollution science for any length of time, the name “Enstrom” will likely elicit a response.

Enstrom has been arguing the merits of Pope’s and other researchers’ PM2.5 findings for the better part of 15 years.

It was Enstrom who discovered a CARB researcher who helped propagate those truck rules I mentioned earlier had lied about his Ph.D. credentials and CARB staffers knew about the deception.

It wasn’t long after that when UCLA attempted to fire Enstrom from his longtime research position with the Environmental Health Sciences Department.

In a termination letter, he was informed “your research is not aligned with the academic mission of the Department.”

Enstrom sued.

As part of the 2012 settlement, UCLA rescinded Enstrom’s termination, paid him $140,000 and allowed him access to school resources, which he still has.

What I’ve learned over the years of covering Enstrom and this topic is that while Enstrom’s views may be unpopular, no one has been able to throw shade on his actual work.

I find that telling.

In his latest paper, Enstrom uses the American Cancer Society human data — which he won’t say how he obtained (which is bound to be a big deal, see sidebox at right) — to recreate Pope’s 1995 study.

He shows that you can get a relative risk similar to Pope’s or you can get no relative risk.

It all depends on which PM2.5 exposure data you use and the best available PM2.5 data yields no relative risk.

Of particular interest, Enstrom found when he separated the Ohio Valley area from the rest of the country, there’s no significant effect in either area no matter which PM2.5 data he used.

That kind of sensitivity brings the whole idea of PM2.5 as a killer into question.

SILENCE ISN’T AN ANSWER

Since Enstrom’s paper directly calls out Pope and his findings, I called him up.

Pope would only say that he knows Enstrom to be a very bright scientist, that he takes the questions in Enstrom’s paper seriously and would be reading it closely and writing up a response.

“Hey, this is what science is about,” he said. “We need people to be skeptical and pick apart our work. It forces us to be more rigorous.”

That’s a refreshing attitude and one I hope is catching.

...

top 2 commesnt: 1st 2 anyway:

Scientist Apr 16, 2017 10:38pm

A study of 2.1 million (non-immigrant) Canadians found that death rates increased by 10% for every 10 ug/m3 increase in PM2.5 pollution (and a 15% increase in deaths from heart disease). A study of 1.06 million New Zealanders found a 7% increase in mortality per 10 ug/m3 increase in PM10 pollution (wood smoke is the dominant source of PM10 pollution in New Zealand). A study of 1.25 million adults in in Rome found a 4% increase in all deaths and 6% increase in cardiovascular deaths. Rather than a "deafening silence", studies involving over 4 million people have found similar results. Several newer studies use improved estimates of PM2.5 exposure, by supplement measurements at the nearest air pollution monitor with satellite data.

Scientists are also investigating the most harmful sources of pollution. In three Canadian cities, heart attacks increased with increasing PM2.5 pollution and that winter wood smoke pollution was worse than other forms of PM2.5 pollution. On the 33% of days with the highest proportion of pollution from woodsmoke, a 10 ug/m3 increase in PM2.5 pollution resulted in 34% more heart attacks, compared to 16% more heart attacks if a lower proportion of the pollution came from wood smoke, and only 8% more heart attacks for on the 33% of days with the lowest proportion of pollution from woodsmoke.

A study of PM2.5 across 4 US cities concluded that “among the primary PM2.5 sources assessed, biomass burning PM2.5 was most strongly associated with respiratory health”. An analysis of deaths and hospital admissions for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in two polluted cities in Chile concluded: “there is greater risk when people are exposed to air polluted with wood smoke”. For 119 U.S. urban communities: “Ambient levels of elemental carbon (EC) and organic carbon matter (OCM), which are generated primarily from vehicle emissions, diesel, and wood burning, were associated with the largest risks of emergency hospitalization across the major chemical constituents of PM2.5.”

Adding to the evidence is that fact that Launceston, Tasmania, achieved significant health benefits when a large proportion of residents switched from wood stoves to non-polluting heating. Wintertime deaths in winter from respiratory disease fell by 28% and cardiovascular disease by 20%.

There can be little doubt that clean air means better health, and that the savings will be many times greater than the cost of cleaning up the air.

Ellen Apr 16, 2017 7:39pm

Many studies over a period of decades have consistently shown that PM2.5 raises the risk of serious illness and premature deaths. Pope, et al has certainly not been the only one. It is only part of a large and growing body of evidence that fine particulate pollution sickens and kills people prematurely.

Enstrom worked for tobacco companies, helping them deny the evidence that cigarette smoke is harmful. Over a decade ago he published a deeply flawed, tobacco industry-funded study that purported to show that secondhand smoke wasn't harmful. In 2006, a US Federal Judge explicitly cited his secondhand smoke study as an example of how tobacco companies engaged in criminal racketeering and fraud to hide the dangers of tobacco smoke.

Enstrom has no scientific credibility outside of a minority of science deniers, conspiracy theorists, tobacco salesman and polluters. It is alarming for anyone to try to claim that the large, consistent body of evidence demonstrating that PM2.5 is harmful has been somehow debunked based on any claims from Enstrom.

oreskes hit:

http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Fred%20Singer%20emails%20re%20Merchants%20of%20Doubt.pdf

enstrom: complain to UC and harvard, both oreskes and glantz; o got all info for smears on you hacks from tobacco library[he's in there too?] cf tilting at tobacco and Combatting lysenko pseudoscience" get salary from sacbee db; 2 others phd's unnamed; hennessey smart and principled prez; singer notes she got cal pay while promoting bk

stanford alum = blog?

https://alumni-gsb.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=43514

enstrom hit on oreskes cites:

Tilting at Tobacco

He learned the art of raising hell at Stanford. Now, Stanton Slantz is gleefully storming the gates of one of the nation's most powerful industries.

Saul Bromberger/Sandra Hoover

By Mark Robinson

The jury filed into Courtroom No. 2 in the Duval County Courthouse last August 9 and calmly tossed a live grenade at the tobacco industry. The six Jacksonville, Fla., jurors ordered the nation's third-largest cigarette maker, Brown & Williamson, to pay $750,000 to a lung cancer victim and his wife. For the first time, a living ex-smoker had convinced a jury that a tobacco company should be held liable for selling a product it secretly knew caused disease. The door was suddenly wide open for Joe Smoker to sue the smile off Joe Camel's face.

On the other side of the continent, medical professor Stanton Glantz was sitting in his tiny 11th-floor office on the UC-San Francisco campus. It was a quiet day, good for watching the fog glide through the Golden Gate, ideal for plowing through the foot-high stack of unanswered mail piled on one corner of his desk. The phone interrupted him. It was a reporter calling to get his reaction to the landmark verdict in Florida.

"I was stunned, sure," says Glantz, PhD '73, a hint of pride creeping into his gravelly Midwestern voice. But even though the devoted anti-tobacco crusader had helped set the stage for the verdict, he doesn't remember pumping his fist in the air or allowing himself a satisfied grin. He just uttered the obligatory quotes, said goodbye to the reporter--he doesn't even recall who it was--and went back to work. "It was strange," he says. "It was almost routine."

Routine, indeed. For the man who's been called the Ralph Nader of the anti-tobacco movement, these are the best of times. Consider the news of the last few months alone: The Clinton Administration has imposed unprecedented new regulations on the industry, 15 states are now suing cigarette makers seeking money for smokers' medical bills, and ailing ex-smokers are lining up for a litigation lynching. The tobacco issue even found its way into the early stages of the presidential race, tripping up GOP nominee Bob Dole.

And where there's smoke, there's Glantz. For nearly two decades, the intense, combative researcher has assaulted the $45 billion industry using the preferred weapon of a savvy academic: intellectual bombs thrown from the ivory tower. He's a restless scholar who is the author or co-author of eight books and 96 scholarly articles and a source for journalists from People to 60 Minutes . His in-your-face tactics helped change the terms of the tobacco debate by recasting smoking as a social and political issue, not just a medical problem.

Glantz has done as much as anyone to put smoking on the public agenda. His landmark work on the dangers of secondhand smoke launched smoking bans in public places from restaurants to airplanes.Dubbed a "pain in the butt," he was one of Newsweek's 100 newsmakers of 1995. In a recent book, Smokescreen , New York Times tobacco writer Philip Hilts calls him one of the Seven Samurai of the anti-tobacco movement. Glantz showed up on anABC News special in July to analyze the industry's political clout and called tobacco executives "cockroaches." His office phone rarely stops ringing. Last summer, he went all the way to Australia for vacation just to get away from the hubbub.

"He has moved the marble for tobacco control," says John Seffrin, CEO of the American Cancer Society. "You can argue it would have happened eventually, but when you talk about a thousand deaths a day caused by tobacco, time is of the essence."

***

Proud of his iconoclasm and fabled abrasiveness, Glantz, 50, cultivates a certain eccentricity. The stocky, rumpled academic likes to wear a T-shirt that says, "Here Comes Trouble." He lives modestly in San Francisco's Sunset district and drives a '69 Dodge Dart, the only new car he's ever bought. He still turns up in the trademark orange vest his mother knitted for him. ("Although people now expect it, so I don't wear it as much.") And he takes almost as much pride in offending his friends--the California branch of the American Cancer Society, the California Medical Association--as his avowed enemies in the tobacco industry.

Is he a loose cannon? "Yeah," he says, taking a sip of warm tea as Mozart burbles on his office radio. "I like it that way."

Not surprisingly, the blunt professor has made his share of enemies. He is, of course, a favorite bobo doll for tobacco companies. They love to punch him; he loves to come bouncing back up. "He's apparently addicted to puff pieces, because there's been one in about every publication you can find," says Tom Lauria, a spokesman for the Tobacco Institute. He says Glantz's research has no validity because the professor has it out for the tobacco companies.

Thomas DiLorenzo, a conservative professor of economics at Loyola College in Baltimore, has slammed Glantz and others for taking government money for anti-tobacco research. "I'm a nonsmoker. I agree 100 percent that cigarettes are unhealthy," DiLorenzo says. "I just think it's illegal and unethical to use taxpayer money to organize a lobbying effort to prohibit cigarettes."

Glantz counters that his government-funded research is designed to improve public health--and that often means criticizing tobacco companies and the politicians they support.

"He just calmly tries to tell the documented truth," says Martin Perl, a Stanford physicist, Nobel laureate and Glantz fan. "He's not a zealot."

***

For those who knew Stan Glantz as a Stanford graduate student in the early 1970s, his career as a rabble-rousing academic makes perfect sense. By the time he finished his PhD in applied mechanics in 1973, the 27-year-old had learned how to stand in the hurricane of public debate that often follows politically charged social research.

Like many engineering and science students in 1971, Glantz worried about Pentagon-sponsored research on campus. "We had the anti-war radicals on the one hand saying that the faculty was out murdering babies in Vietnam," he recalls. "And, on the other hand, we had the faculty saying this is all basic research with no connection to anything, and the Defense Department just gives us all this money because of our incredible good looks and they love science because we won World War II for them."

Glantz led a group of students in an investigation of the two perceptions of Pentagon funding. Their project was sponsored by the newly formed Stanford Workshops on Political and Social Issues (SWOPSI), a series of free-form courses created by young faculty and graduate students.

The student investigators followed a simple plan. They compared the faculty's explanations of its Pentagon-sponsored research with official Defense Department rationales for funding the work. The inconsistencies suggested that the professors were more deeply involved in direct military research than many knew. "We just laid them side by side and said, 'Draw your own conclusions,' " Glantz recalls. "The faculty went completely berserk. The radicals went berserk, too, because we weren't saying that the faculty was all killing babies in Vietnam, it's more complicated than that."

Glantz reveled in the ruckus he'd created. "He struck me as an amazingly strong, unflappable character," says Norm Albers, who as a graduate student in physics became Glantz's partner in the project. "The way he could stand in the flak and argue in the face of people's anger--it was something that was hard for me to learn."

The report's disclosures made it onto the front page of the Washington Post. Pentagon officials loved the report because it showed their university-backed research had some military merit. Back at Stanford, the debate helped push the University toward limiting defense contracts.

"Most faculty researchers were genuinely surprised," about the disclosures, says Philip Zimbardo, then one of the young faculty heavily involved in anti-war protests. "You can either say we were naive or narrowly focused." Zimbardo, now a full professor of psychology at Stanford, decided not to renew his grant from the Office of Naval Research because of the report.

For Albers, as for Glantz, the SWOPSI course was a turning point. Albers remembers being called into the office of his Physics Department adviser, whose own work had come under scrutiny in the report. "He said, 'Albers, if I can get you thrown in jail, I will.' " Albers recalls. The professor didn't manage to bring charges against the young physicist, but Albers was shaken. "I realized at that moment that we were playing with the big boys, and this is how the big boys played: hardball." The experience helped convince Albers to quit physics. He moved to southern Oregon and started a new career as a piano builder and tuner.

For Glantz, on the other hand, this was just practice for taking on the really big boys.

"That SWOPSI course was one of the most valuable things I did at Stanford in terms of learning how to do research on complicated, highly charged issues," Glantz says. The course also gave him a litmus test for future research: Will it make a difference in society? "If I can't answer that in a reasonable way, then I don't do it."

***

In 1976, three years after getting his PhD, Glantz found himself plugging away a bit too quietly as one of the few non-M.D. medical research fellows at UCSF. He worked at figuring out the complicated biomechanics of the human heart--but wanted something that would speed up his own pulse. He decided to apply for a year's fellowship in Washington, D.C. The program, sponsored by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, brought scientists to work on congressional staffs and committees.

Glantz made the final cut. Now he had to choose a topic and bang out a briefing paper in 24 hours. There was only one health-related subject on the list: a proposal by Sen. Ted Kennedy to tax cigarettes based on their nicotine content.

Donning his orange vest, Glantz flew to Washington with his briefing paper and passionately argued that the senator had a dumb idea. What you should really do, Glantz said, is attack the social acceptability of smoking, undermine the subtle web of support for smokers.

He didn't get the fellowship. "I was just crushed because, like a lot of people who go to Stanford and are overachievers, this was the first time I'd ever really tried for something and not made it." But Glantz had accomplished more than he realized: His briefing paper, expanded and refined over the next few years, became a blueprint for the modern anti-tobacco movement. This new paradigm saw smoking not as a medical problem but as a social scourge and fountain of political corruption. Tobacco companies weren't normal businesses, they were duplicitous peddlers of death. Secondhand smoke wasn't just smelly and annoying, it was an environmental toxin that killed more than 50,000 people a year.

Losing out on that Washington year was probably for the best, Glantz says now. "Being a highly opinionated, loud-mouthed person is not the psychological profile of the successful career staffer."

But those same qualities may have helped him attract his wife. The couple, who now have two children, met in the '70s at a conference. Marsha noticed Glantz because he was yelling at somebody for bad-mouthing Ralph Nader. She joined the argument--on Glantz's side.

***

By 1981, Glantz had become an expert on the effects of smoking on the unsuccessful California initiative campaigns aimed at limiting smoking in public. He'd helped found Californians for Nonsmokers' Rights, which a few years later became Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights.

And he was getting good at pitching the tobacco story to a media that had yet to see its significance. "There were many years that Stan was frustrated because he had very good material and he couldn't get anybody's attention," says Douglas Foster, the former editor of Mother Jones who headed Stanford's news service from 1994 until last September. "In the early '80s, this was not considered a story. Tobacco was a legal product, just part of the landscape. In a case like that, it takes somebody who is a big pain in the ass. That was Stan."

Glantz knocked on Foster's door with a story in 1982. Californians for Nonsmokers' Rights had received a plain brown envelope with no return address. Inside was a pirated videotape of "Death in the West," a 1976 British documentary that juxtaposed images of the Marlboro man with stories of real cowboys with lung cancer. The film, aired only once in England, had been effectively banned after legal pressure from Philip Morris, Marlboro's manufacturer.

Foster, then a staffer at the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, helped Glantz get the documentary aired on KRON, the NBC affiliate in San Francisco. Eventually it received worldwide exposure. It also spawned a smoking-prevention program aimed at kids. Since 1983, more than 750,000 children have completed the "Death in the West" curriculum.

In some ways, Glantz began operating like an investigative reporter himself: He looked for dramatic story lines, gathered documents obsessively and followed the money. In recent research, that m.o. led him to track the tobacco companies' political contributions and the connection between the number of smokers and the amount of money spent on cigarette advertising.

Given his emerging profile, it wasn't all that unusual that, on the morning of May 12, 1994, another mysterious package loaded with explosive tobacco material arrived at Glantz's office. The return address on the big FedEx box said simply, "Mr. Butts," an apparent reference to the Doonesbury comic-strip character who pushes cigarettes on kids. Glantz was on his way out the door to teach a biostatistics class, but his curiosity got the better of him, and he decided to have a look inside.

What he found was a treasure trove of sensitive documents from Brown & Williamson. There were memos showing that the maker of Kool, Pall Mall and Lucky Strike knew about the cancer-causing and addictive properties of cigarettes as far back as the early 1960s. There was evidence of a sophisticated disinformation campaign sponsored by the industry. There was even a 1983 letter from Sylvester Stallone in which the actor agreed to use B&W products in five action movies--in exchange for $500,000.

"It was stuff that everybody always sort of expected," Glantz says. "But to actually see it was just mind-boggling." Even to his jaded eyes, the documents still had the power to make blood boil. "It's like thinking your wife is messing around and then knowing your wife is messing around--but then coming home and catching her messing around."

Glantz went to class and then returned to his office with a couple of students to photocopy the whole 4,000 pages. He took one set home to index at the dining room table, put one set "in a safe place"--he still won't say where--and sent another off to Hilts, the Times reporter, who used them as the basis for a three-part series in June 1994.

Back in Glantz's office, the original papers were cluttering up the place; visitors were using the box as a footrest. He decided to place them in the newly formed tobacco archive at UCSF's library. Before long, dozens of journalists, plaintiffs' attorneys, government officials and researchers were signing up at the special collections desk to have a look at the rare papers.

Brown & Williamson, meanwhile, went on the offensive. The company sent a letter demanding return of its "stolen property" and insisting that public access to the documents be cut off immediately. Then the company's private investigators started hanging out in the library, taking note of anybody who used the collection. "They had leather jackets and cell phones and cameras," says Karen Butter, deputy director of the campus library. "They were kind of obvious."

When Brown & Williamson filed suit to force the return of the documents in February 1995, the stage was set for a First Amendment fight. Suddenly, the very freedom of a researcher and a university to disseminate information was on the line. "Basically, they were trying to keep books out of the library, and universities are here to spread information, not suppress it," Glantz says. He was summoned to a meeting at the university counsel's office, across Parnassus Avenue, which runs through the UCSF campus. "I was riding the elevator down and I was thinking, 'Time to walk the plank. They're going to toss me overboard.' "

It was a reasonable concern. This was just six months before ABC would make a humiliating on-air apology to settle a $10 million suit filed by Philip Morris over a Day One story claiming that the company spiked its cigarettes with extra nicotine. Three months after that, producers at 60 Minutes , fearing a lawsuit by Brown & Williamson, held off on airing a controversial interview with Jeffrey Wigand, the turncoat tobacco executive.

But saying they'd rather fight than quit, the UC administrators backed Glantz. The university lawyers argued that the documents were a legitimate subject of study and that they were already public records because they had been written about so extensively in the New York Times and elsewhere. In June 1995, the California Supreme Court ruled in the university's favor. To spare strain on the library, the university published them on the Internet and sold copies on CD-ROM.

In Jacksonville, Fla., the lawyers for Grady Carter, a 44-year smoker who was suing B&W, knew what to do with such hot stuff. They introduced some of the most compelling documents as evidence, arguing that the papers proved the company knew its cigarettes were addictive and deadly years before the surgeon general warned the public in 1964. Carter won his case, clearing the way for an avalanche of similar lawsuits. "It wasn't until we got Stan Glantz's book and his CD-ROM that we were able to put together the evidence we needed," says Greg Maxwell, one of Carter's attorneys.

Meanwhile, Glantz and four colleagues were themselves poring over the documents. They cross-matched them with other records subpoenaed by various congressional committees and put the whole lot in the context of a 30-year effort by cigarette makers to stay ahead of regulators, health advocates and anti-tobacco groups. The resulting book, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop wrote in a foreword, "is a vital weapon in the battle against tobacco. I don't think that anyone who reads it can remain passive in the struggle."

After shopping the manuscript to 30 litigation-wary commercial publishers, the authors finally found a home with the University of California Press. The Cigarette Papers came out last May.

Glantz wasn't surprised that publishers shied away from the manuscript. But his literary agent, Jane Dystel, "was completely shocked at how badly it went," Glantz says. "I thought she would have a hard time. But the level of cowardice out there was just truly amazing."

***

Glantz's work has made waves in political as well as legal circles. In July 1995, he and his colleagues scored an unprecedented triumph when their analysis of the Brown & Williamson papers filled almost an entire edition of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association . After President Clinton read the issue, he decided to push new restrictions on teen smoking. ("It's hard to argue with this," he told senior aides.)

The research presented in the jumbo JAMA issue, which was partially funded by a $600,000 National Cancer Institute grant, also caught the eye of Rep. John Porter (R-Ill.), a tobacco industry defender. At his behest, Glantz's NCI funding became the first National Institutes of Health grant ever targeted for cutoff by a congressional committee. Most of the funding was restored after vociferous lobbying by the American Cancer Society.

Closer to home, Glantz made an antagonist of Willie Brown, the former all-powerful speaker of the California Assembly and now mayor of San Francisco. In a May 1995 study of the political influence of tobacco money, Glantz and a colleague showed that since 1980, Brown had received in excess of $659,000--more than any other single legislator in the nation.

But even before that, Brown (who has since become a born-again tobacco foe) was no fan of the professor. In the fall of 1993, Brown was meeting with three UC administrators to discuss state funding for the system. The assembly speaker took the opportunity to pitilessly dress down the administrators on the subject of Glantz's research on the tobacco industry. "You're going to have trouble with me on every single appropriation!" Brown thundered, according to an account that appeared in the February 1994 issue of the Atlantic . "If that guy gets one more cent of state money, you'll have trouble with me."

Glantz is prone to such scrapes. "The people who pay attention to the facts about tobacco end up being partisan--because the facts are so clearly one-sided," Hilts says. "That's a difficult position for a professional like him to get into, to be constantly attacked by the tobacco companies. He's one of the few who has a hide thick enough that he can handle it."

***

Glantz has few illusions about the future of the tobacco wars he is helping lead. No single blow--lawsuit, regulation or embarrassing disclosure--can knock the cigarette makers out. It is a war of attrition, and Glantz, safely ensconced in his tenured professorship, isn't going anywhere. "They know they're losing," he says, leaning back in his office chair until his feet dangle. For Glantz, their defeat can't come soon enough.

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also cites himself"

https://www.science.gov/topicpages/c/combating+lysenko+pseudoscience.html

Defending legitimate epidemiologic research: combating Lysenko pseudoscience

PubMed Central

Enstrom, James E

2007-01-01

This analysis presents a detailed defense of my epidemiologic research in the May 17, 2003 British Medical Journal that found no significant relationship between environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and tobacco-related mortality. In order to defend the honesty and scientific integrity of my research, I have identified and addressed in a detailed manner several unethical and erroneous attacks on this research. Specifically, I have demonstrated that this research is not "fatally flawed," that I have not made "inappropriate use" of the underlying database, and that my findings agree with other United States results on this relationship. My research suggests, contrary to popular claims, that there is not a causal relationship between ETS and mortality in the U.S. responsible for 50,000 excess annual deaths, but rather there is a weak and inconsistent relationship. The popular claims tend to damage the credibility of epidemiology.

In addition, I address the omission of my research from the 2006 Surgeon General's Report on Involuntary Smoking and the inclusion of it in a massive U.S. Department of Justice racketeering lawsuit. I refute erroneous statements made by powerful U.S. epidemiologists and activists about me and my research and I defend the funding used to conduct this research. Finally, I compare many aspect of ETS epidemiology in the U.S. with pseudoscience in the Soviet Union during the period of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Overall, this paper is intended to defend legitimate research against illegitimate criticism by those who have attempted to suppress and discredit it because it does not support their ideological and political agendas. Hopefully, this defense will help other scientists defend their legitimate research and combat "Lysenko pseudoscience." PMID:17927827

main Kabat, ETS

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2164936/?tool=pmcentrez

...

The instantaneous attack on our paper appears to have been a coordinated effort, primarily organized by the ACS and Glantz. Glantz is a well-known anti-smoking activist who has worked closely with the ACS for many years [10]. As part of this coordinated effort, Glantz organized a May 15, 2003 Miami, Florida press conference involving a panel of "international experts" in order to "debunk" our "Marry a Smoker, Get Less Cancer" study before the press embargo ended [11]. At the time of the ACS press release and the Miami press conference, neither the ACS, Glantz, or the other Miami "experts" had access to the full ten-page version of our paper, let alone time to read it and carefully analyze it. The full version of our paper was not posted on the BMJ website until the press embargo lifted at 7:01 PM EDT on May 15, 2003 [1]. The only version available when the embargoed BMJ press release was issued on May 13, 2003 was the abridged five-page paper that appears in the print version of the BMJ [12]. Obviously, these critics chose to hastily write a press release and hold a press conference based on limited information. They did not have the integrity or objectivity to read our full ten-page paper or to contact the authors before beginning their attack, which included erroneous claims about the paper's content and quality.

The ACS press release was authored by Michael J. Thun, M.D., ACS Vice President, Epidemiology and Surveillance Research, and Harmon J. Eyre, M.D., ACS Chief Medical Officer. This press release makes several entirely false statements about the study, such as:...

Continuing Glantz Campaign to Discredit Enstrom

Beginning with his activities at the time of the publication of our BMJ paper, Glantz has continually attacked me and my research, in spite of the fact that we are both established, long-term faculty members in the University of California system. Glantz is well-known as a long-time anti-smoking activist [10,56], whose ultimate goal is achieving a society free of smokers [57]. However, as a UC faculty member, he is supposed to adhere to the UCSF Campus Code of Conduct [58] and the UC Standards of Ethical Conduct [59]. For instance, the Code of Conduct states "Misconduct or Misconduct in Science means fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted within the scientific community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research." The UC Standards of Ethical Conductstates "Members of the University community are expected to conduct themselves ethically, honestly, and with integrity in all dealings."

However, based on his clearly documented written and verbal attack on me, he has not adhered to these codes. Indeed, I have spent the past four years responding to his false and misleading statements and defending my honesty and scientific integrity. The full details of his campaign are too extensive to present here, but the selected examples below demonstrate the tactics that he used against me and the epidemiologic research that I have been conducting at UCLA.

On July 25, 2003 Neal L. Benowitz, MD, UCSF Professor of Medicine, and Glantz co-wrote an eight-page letter to the UC Vice Provost for Research Lawrence Coleman which attempts to make the case that acceptance of tobacco industry funding for research violates current Regents and University policy and should be ended [60]. On pages 3 and 4 of this letter they claim: "The most recent example of how the tobacco industry uses funding of university research as part of its for propaganda campaign is a May 17, 2003 study from UCLA on the health effects of secondhand smoke published in the British Medical Journal. . . . There is little possibility that it will be taken seriously in scientific circles. . . . this paper would go down as one bit of poor research done at a university with a reputation for high quality scholarship that slipped into a good journal because of the foibles of the peer review process."

On March 8, 2005 Glantz participated with other UC faculty members in a San Francisco based KQED radio program entitled "Funders and Academic Research: Forum assesses the controversy surrounding the relationship between funders and academic research," which can be listened to on the Internet and audio files [61]. During this program Glantz attempted to discredit well qualified scientists and their peer-reviewed research publications by inappropriately linking them to the tobacco industry. The "scandal" about me and my BMJ study was discussed during minutes 17–19 of this 52 minute program, when Glantz made several clearly false and inflammatory statements. First, Glantz claimed that the BMJ study "was not funded by the American Cancer Society," but was "done with Philip Morris' money." Actually, the study was funded by ACS from 1959 to 1990, by the UC Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program from 1991 to 1997, and by the Center for Indoor Air Research (CIAR) from 1998 to 2003. Philip Morris provided no direct funding for this study and had no role in its conduct. Then, Glantz stated that I was "a damn fool" who was told by ACS that I "made inappropriate use of the data", an unsubstantiated claim made only after Glantz and ACS learned of my results. Then, Glantz implied that I was "advocating a pro-tobacco position" when I have never done so. Finally, Glantz claimed "the science that the UCLA study did was crap", whereas it clearly conformed to the standards of epidemiologic research. These statements indicate the unprofessional approach used by Glantz to attack scientific findings with which he disagrees and to advocate positions that are not supported by the facts.

Glantz's arguments for banning tobacco industry funding of research at UC have been rejected in favor of academic freedom. The UC administration has expressed its strong support for academic freedom and UC Vice Provost for Research Coleman has stated "Academic freedom must be absolute or no one has it" [62]. On May 11, 2005 the UC Academic Senate adopted a strong Academic Senate Resolution on Research Funding Sources which clearly supports the right of individual UC faculty members to accept research support from any source, including the tobacco industry, as long as this funding adheres to University policy [63]. In spite of this strong faculty resolution, in September 2006 Glantz brought the issue of a ban on tobacco industry funding to the UC Regents, the governing body of the University [64]. Glantz cited my BMJ study as one rationale for such a ban in written documents [65] and in a January 18, 2007 presentation before the UC Regents [66]. The UC Regents requested advice on this issue from the UC Academic Senate, which spent several months carefully evaluating the matter [67]. My perspective, including a defense of my research, my funding, and my scientific integrity, was presented to the UC Academic Senate in April 2007 [68]. In May 2007 representatives of the UC Academic Senate voted almost unanimously (15 to 1 by the Academic Council and 44 to 5 by the Academic Assembly) in favor in academic freedom and against a proposed ban on tobacco industry funding advocated by Glantz [69-71].

One final example of Glantz's unprofessional treatment of my research is contained in his May 24, 2005 Circulation report, where he attempts to make the case that passive smoking has nearly the same impact as active smoking on cardiovascular effects [72]. In his meta-analysis of the relation between ETS and CHD, he found "The pooled relative risk computed with a random-effects model (computed with Stata Version 7) was 1.31 (95% CI, 1.21 to 1.41), similar to the estimates of earlier meta-analyses." To achieve this result, he omitted the two largest studies, which represent a major portion of the available evidence. My BMJ study, which began in 1960 [1], was omitted based on his unsubstantiated claim that it had "serious misclassification bias" and the 1995 study by LeVois and Layard, which also began in 1960 [40], was omitted without comment and was not even cited. However, Glantz included the other cohort studies which began in the 1960s and 1970s without any comment about their misclassification bias. Kabat and I fully addressed all these studies and the issue of misclassification bias in our 2006 meta-analysis [39]. Glantz's biased analysis regarding the relation between ETS and CHD is evident when his 2-page 2005 meta-analysis [72] is compared with our 12-page 2006 meta-analysis [39].

...

To illustrate the existing bias in the release of ACS results, it is quite informative to note the response by Thun to the September 26, 1994 letter that he received from Glantz [140], regarding the CPS II analyses that LeVois and Layard conducted in 1994 and published in 1995 [40]. Thun sent Glantz a detailed November 4, 1994 letter which included preliminary CPS II analyses and criticisms and described plans to do further CPS II analyses [141]. Responses to Thun's CPS II analyses and criticisms were then made by LeVois [142] and Layard [143]. All of this correspondence and commentary reinforces the continuing need for a full and objective analysis of the CPS I and CPS II data possessed by ACS.

Go to:

Conclusion

It is very disturbing that a major health organization like the ACS has made false and misleading statements about me and my May 17, 2003 BMJ paper for over four years. It is further disturbing that prominent individuals like Thun, Samet, and Glantz have continued to attack the findings in the BMJ paper, even though I have presented extensive evidence that supports the validity of these findings. In addition, it is reprehensible that the BMJ paper was inserted in the USDOJ RICO lawsuit and omitted from the 2006 Surgeon General's Report. These actions must be kept in mind when evaluating the honesty, integrity, and objectivity of those responsible.

These criticisms may sound personally defensive, and indeed when one is so personally attacked, some personal defense is necessary. But this is also a defense against epidemiology becoming "Lysenko pseudoscience," where the validity of methods and studies is based merely on those results that are preferred by influential advocates and researchers and contrary results are discredited using the tactics of Lysenko. Epidemiologic science is not inherently pseudoscience, of course, but the process that has led to many current claims about ETS is.

Hopefully, epidemiology can continue as a field in which all legitimate research findings can be published and objectively evaluated, including those findings considered to be controversial. However, this will happen only if advocacy organizations like the ACS and activists like Glantz refrain from unethically smearing honest scientists and putting out false and misleading statements. In addition, epidemiologists like Thun must honestly analyze all the epidemiologic evidence that they possess and fully report their results, and epidemiologists like Samet must not omit important and accurate research findings from a major document such as the Surgeon General's Report. Such omissions and actions have seriously distorted the evidence on the health effects of ETS exposure, particularly within the US.

Hopefully, this entire episode will help prevent similar episodes in the future. Furthermore, this episode will be particularly valuable if it eventually leads to a full and objective analysis of the important epidemiologic evidence that the ACS possesses on both active and passive smoking. In the meantime, epidemiologists and others interested in a full assessment of the available epidemiologic evidence on the health effects of ETS should carefully read and study this document and all the references and tables that are included in it.

Go to:

Competing interests

Funding of this paper is the same as that of reference 39. The content of this paper is based on the knowledge I have acquired during my entire epidemiologic career, during which I have had many funding sources. My competing interests are fully discussed in the text of this paper and in reference 1 and are known worldwide thanks largely to the efforts of Glantz, Thun, and Samet. My personal stake in the matters discussed here should be self-evident. In order to address concerns about my competing interests, this paper is entirely transparent and its contents can be verified with the references cited.

Go to:

Acknowledgements

My epidemiologic research and this analysis have been made possible because of the 36 years of continuous and unlimited academic freedom that I have had at the University of California, the greatest system of higher education in the entire world. I am particularly indebted to the specific individuals who have granted me this academic freedom and who have unfailingly supported me. In addition, I would like to thank Joseph Turner of the American Literary Historical Society and Harold Callahan of the San Francisco Police Departmentfor their valuable assistance.

...

2017 pm 2.5

mofo's used enstrom:

2 stanford grad students?

5. Discussion

There is considerable literature in support of the current paradigm that air quality is associated with acute mortality. See, for example, the review paper by Atkinson et al. (2014). Here we make the case that there is literature support for our findings of no association, and we offer some explanation for claims made in the current literature.

In this paper we analyze daily death data for the eight most populous air basins in California for associations with air quality. We found no associations using regression-based time series analysis. Extensive sensitivity analyses found air quality variables do not add to the predictive ability of the models examined. Even when the predictive ability is improved, the improvement is negligible relative to a model that only uses time of year. The form of the air quality variable that comes into models is inconsistent across basin/year combinations. In short, we were unable to find a consistent and meaningful relationship between air quality and acute death in any of the eight California air basins considered.

This result appears to contradict results from the well-known NMMAPS study that studied ozone and PM10, and subsequent studies involving PM2.5, e.g. HEI reports, Samet et al. (2000a, 2000b), Health Effects Institute (2003), Bell et al. (2004), Dominici et al. (2007), Zanobetti and Schwartz (2009), Smith et al. (2009). However, all of these were national studies. The present study is restricted to California, because we have been unable so far to compile a full-US dataset for post-2001. The ozone results that we have derived are consistent with those of the NMMAPS dataset when restricted to California, as shown in the S04. Note that in the context of ozone, Bell and Dominici (2008) and Smith et al. (2009) both drew attention to geographical heterogeneity in the pollution-mortality relationship; the present results show that this is an issue in post-2001 data as well. In addition, we find no effect for PM2.5 for California.

The question of chronic air quality mortality effects are addressed by Enstrom (2005) who found no chronic effects in California. His summary for all cause deaths for California is given in Table 7. The average risk ratio was 0.9979, with a standard error of 0.0126.

Table 7

References	Years	Risk Ratio	Confidence Limits
McDonnell et al. (2000)	1976–1992	1.03_	0.95_–1.12_
Krewski (2000)	1982–1989	0.872	0.805–0.944
Enstrom (2005)	1973–1982	1.039	1.010–1.069
Enstrom (2005)	1983–2002	0.997	0.978–1.016
Enstrom (2006)	1973–1982	1.061	1.017–1.106
Enstrom (2006)	1983–2002	0.995	0.968–1.024
Zeger et al. (2008)	2000–2005	0.989	0.970–1.008
Jerrett (2010)	1982–2000	0.994	0.965–1.025
Krewski (2010)	1982–2000	0.960	0.920–1.002
Krewski (2010)	1982–2000	0.968	0.916–1.022
:{Jerrett:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: (2011)	1982–2000	0.994	0.965–1.024
Jerrett (2011)	1982–2000	1.002	0.992–1.012
Lipsett et al. (2011)	2000–2005	1.01_	0.95_–1.09_
Ostro et al. (2010)	2002–2007	1.06_	0.96_–1.16_

The standard method for showing cause and effect is through an experiment.

...

The question of interactions of air quality with geography deserves deeper consideration. Both Greven and Chay state there is no local or covariate adjusted effect of air quality on mortality. Milojevic et al. (2014) studied heart attacks and stroke in a very large UK data set. They determined the time of the event down to the hour. They studied six air components: CO, NO2, O3, PM10, PM2.5, and SO2. They examined possible lag effects and they found no lag effects. They also essentially found no association of air quality, in particular ozone and PM2.5, with heart attacks or stroke. There were ten necropsies (among the 60 deaths) with the air pollution disaster in 1930 in the Meuse Valley reported on by Nemery et al. (2001). They report no effect on heart. They go on to state, “However, carbon particles should have been innocuous, unless they had adsorbed irritant acids. … After a process of successive elimination, the commission concluded ‘that the sulphur produced by coal burning had a deleterious effect, either as sulphurous anhydride of acid, or as sulphuric acid, the production of which was made possible by unusual weather conditions.’” Together these papers effectively remove heart attacks and stroke as a possible etiology for acute air quality deaths. Given the known poor reliability, Ravakhah (2006), of death certificate cause of death, analysis of all cause deaths make sense as the primary endpoint of analysis.

The EPA states that “An extensive body of scientific evidence indicates that breathing in PM2.5 over the course of hours to days (short-term exposure) and months to years (long-term exposure) can cause serious public health effects that include premature death and adverse cardiovascular effects.” See www3.epa.gov/pm/2012/decfshealth.pdf. The EPA goes on to say, “Most of the economic benefits (about 85 percent) are attributable to reductions in premature mortality associated with reductions in ambient particulate matter.” These and similar quotes from EPA seem to imply that causal associations are assumed. The present study calls into question whether those associations are genuine at all in the state of California. Given that California is the most populous state of the Union, the national benefits of recent tightening of the ozone and PM2.5 standards may have to be re-assessed. We provide our analysis code, data set and sensitivity analysis results so that others can do their own evaluation.

As a note, the current standards (a) for PM2.5 – daily limit of 35 μg/m3, annual mean 12 μg/m3 averaged over three years and (b) Ozone: daily max 8-h average less than 70 ppb; based on the three-year average of fourth highest value per year. Past justifications for these standards rely heavily on positive associations for ozone or PM2.5 with acute mortality, which do not accord with our results in California.

In summary, our empirical evidence, supported by literature and logic, is that current levels of air quality, ozone and PM2.5, are not associated with or causally related to acute deaths for California. Our results, well summarized in Figs. 4 and 5, show no effect of ozone or PM2.5 at 12 μg/m3 or across all doses examined. There is no indication of any effect at low doses, for example. These results should be taken into account in any future revisions of the NAAQS for PM2.5 and O3.

Acknowledgements

Funding from National Black Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273230017301538

Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology

Volume 88, August 2017, Pages 173-184

Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology

http://www.sciencedirect.com.oca.ucsc.edu/science/article/pii/S0273230017301538

Air quality and acute deaths in California, 2000–2012

. Author links open the author workspace.S. StanleyYounga. Numbers and letters correspond to the affiliation list. Click to expose these in author workspaceOpens the author workspaceOpens the author workspace. Author links open the author workspace.Richard L.Smithb. Numbers and letters correspond to the affiliation list. Click to expose these in author workspaceOpens the author workspace. Author links open the author workspace.Keneth K.Lopianoc. Numbers and letters correspond to the affiliation list. Click to expose these in author workspaceOpens the author workspace

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yrtph.2017.06.003Get rights and content

Highlights

•

California air quality and daily deaths are analyzed, 2000–2012.

•

An extensive sensitivity analysis is done; 78,624 models are computed.

•

No association of acute deaths with levels of PM2.5 or ozone is found.

•

The data set and analysis code are made publicly available.

•

With no association, causation is called into question for California.

Abstract

Many studies have shown an association between air quality and acute deaths, and such associations are widely interpreted as causal. Several factors call causation and even association into question, for example multiple testing and multiple modeling, publication bias and confirmation bias. Many published studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce because of lack of access to confidential data sources. Here we make publically available a dataset containing daily air quality levels, PM2.5 and ozone, daily temperature levels, minimum and maximum and daily maximum relative humidity levels for the eight most populous California air basins, thirteen years, >2M deaths, over 37,000 exposure days. The data are analyzed using standard time series analysis, and a sensitivity analysis is computed varying model parameters, locations and years. Our analysis finds little evidence for association between air quality and acute deaths. These results are consistent with those for the widely cited NMMAPS dataset when the latter are restricted to California. The daily death variability was mostly explained by time of year or weather variables; Neither PM2.5 nor ozone added appreciably to the prediction of daily deaths. These results call into question the widespread belief that association between air quality and acute deaths is causal/near-universal.

http://**junkscience.com**/:{2017:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:/01/ucalifornia-profs-warned-not-to-use-school-resources-for-personal-attacks-on-president-trump/#more-91079

Wanna-be political activists masquerading as professors should not be using their taxpayer-funded day jobs as a perch from which to spout their politics.

[big pix of angela davis in fro]

The letter is below.

For more on liberal political activism at the University of California, read the April 2, 2012 report from the National Association of Scholars, “:{NAS Report :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:“A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California.”

###

January 25, 2017

Professor Eric L. Russell

UC Davis French

https://frenchanditalian.ucdavis.edu/people/profile/96

erussell@ucdavis.edu

Professor Dennis J. Silverman

UC Irvine Physics and Astronomy

http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/

dennis.silverman@uci.edu

Dear Professors Russell and Silverman,

UC professors must not misuse UC resources for political attacks on President Donald J. Trump and his advisors. UC must adhere to underlying state law and must not engage in activities that might violate its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. You can make your political attacks using your own personal resources. Please read the four articles below and realize that you are being watched by those of us who want UC to adhere to its original mission and to not engage in political activism.

Thank you very much for your consideration of my request.

Sincerely yours,

James E. Enstrom, Ph.D.,M.P.H.

UCLA and Scientific Integrity Institute

jenstrom@ucla.edu

January 23, 2017 California Political Review “UC Davis Professors STEAL From Students/Taxpayers”

http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/uc-davis-professors-steal-from-studentstaxpayers/

January 16, 2017 UCI Energy Observer “Trump Advisor Will Happer is Not a Climate Scientist”

http://sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/2017/01/16/trump-advisor-will-happer-is-not-a-climate-scientist/

January 18, 2017 UCI Energy Observer “Update on the Climate Science Denier’s Praise of Increasing CO2”

http://sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/2017/01/18/update-on-the-climate-science-deniers-praise-of-increasing-co2/

January 18, 2017 UCI Energy Observer “Trump’s Cabinet: Make America Dumber, Sicker, Smoggier, and Thirstier Again”

http://sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/2017/01/18/trumps-cabinet-make-america-dumber-sicker-smoggier-and-thirstier-again/

Tobacco Gun for Hire James Enstrom, Willie Soon and the Climate Deniers Attack on Merchants of Doubt

By Kevin Grandia • Friday, March 13, 2015 - 13:31

This article was co-written by Dan Zegart, author of Civil Warriors, the legal siege on the tobacco industry.

A leaked email chain reported earlier this week on DeSmog shines a harsh light on the behind-the-scenes coordination between well-known climate deniers and fossil fuel funded spindoctors.

But it turns out that there is much more to this story than just climate change, and we find ourselves once again reaching back into the rich history of scientists paid by tobacco companies to conduct research bringing into question the links between cigarette smoke and cancer.

The October 2014 email discussion, led by infamous climate denier Fred Singer, asks whether it would make sense to file a lawsuit to try and stop the release of the new feature length documentary, Merchants of Doubt– a film tracing the tactics used by Big Tobacco to spread misinformation and how those same tactics are now being used by those attacking climate change science and the 97% consensus.

As an expert-for-hire who has taken money from both Big Tobacco and fossil fuel companies over the span of his career, S. FredSinger is a major focal point in Merchants of Doubt.

But where the really interesting story lies, is in two of the recipients of the Singer email who share an uncannily similar history.

One recipient is Willie Soon, a name familiar to loyal DeSmog readers who have no doubt seen stories on the Willie Soon Harvard-Smithsonian scandal over the past few weeks. Dr. Soon, has been making headlines for his funding from utility (coal) and oil companies, in exchange for publishing peer reviewed scientific papers that question the role of carbon dioxide pollution in warming the planet.

Another recipient on the Singer email chain, James Enstrom, advised Singer to launch grievances with Stanford, Harvard and University of California against Naomi Oreskes and StantonGlantz— an intimidating 'attack the messenger' tactic we'll revisit in a moment.

Enstrom is a former University of California Los Angeles epidemiologist who has been makingheadlines as of late after UCLA settled a wrongful termination suit that Enstrom had filed. Some right-wing blogs have portrayed Enstrom as a hero for winning the suit last month, in which he claims he was let go by UCLA in an attempt to “purge an academic dissenter.”

At the crux of the suitwas Enstrom's research concluding that there is no causal link between diesel soot and deaths in California — a conclusion that runs contrary to the California Air Resources Board's claim that new fuel standards on diesel emissions in that State will save close to 10,000 lives over the next 14 years and save billions in health care costs.

Enstrom says it was his contrarian view that resulted in UCLA not renewing his contract.

In the recently exposed Singer emails, Enstrom suggests that instead of suing those behind the Merchants of Doubt film, that Singer instead go on the attack and lodge complaints to Harvard and Stanford against Dr. Naomi Oreskes, the professor whose book with Erik Conway of the same name serves as a foundation for the film.

Enstrom writes:

Enstrom elaborates on how this attack could unfold:

Apparently the academic freedoms Enstrom appears to hold so dear in his wrongful dismissal suit, do not extend past himself.

But it is not the UCLA lawsuit, or Enstrom's name alongside Soon's on the Singer email string, where the similarities lie between Enstrom and Soon.

It is instead the willingness of both men to take large sums of money from industry-related interests and then to produce science that suits those interests' needs.

While Soon was recently exposed for taking money from fossil fuel interests and failing to disclose it to Congress or science journals, while Enstrom has been taking large sums of money from tobacco companies over the years and often not disclosing it.

For almost thirty years, :{Enstrom's:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}::{ research into smoking and health:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: was funded by the cigarette makers.

In fact, Enstrom did so much work for Big Tobacco that when the United States Department of Justice summed up i:{ts civil RICO case against the cigarette makers:(style="letter-spacing:0.03em"):}: [PDF] at the end of a months-long trial in a lengthy legal filing, Enstrom got his own chapter — one of just three scientists singled out by DOJ out of many dozens of tobacco-funded researchers for having been vital to the industry's efforts to sow confusion about the health effects of smoking.

U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler apparently agreed on Enstrom's role, singling out his work for extensive treatment in a scathing 1652-page final opinion in 2006 [PDF] in which she ruled that the tobacco companies were indeed a “racketeer influenced and corrupt organization” under the RICO law, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court.

In a section entitled “Defendants and Their Paid Consultants Controlled ETS Research Findings,” Kessler zeroed in on a 2003 study published in the British Medical Journal by Enstrom and co-author Geoffrey Kabat claiming that links between secondhand smoke, or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and lung cancer or coronary heart disease “may be considerably weaker than generally believed.”

The study was “funded and managed” by the Center for Indoor Air Research, a scientific front group set up to cast doubt on the link between ETS and disease, to the tune of $525,000 in 1998, after Enstrom did a “pre-cursor” study for $150,000 in 1997 — a year in which he was already being paid by another tobacco front called the Council for Tobacco Research.

Kessler wrote that Enstrom chose to examine data that was the least likely to show an association between ETS and disease, despite being “repeatedly warned” by the American Cancer Society that using the data,

“in the manner he was using it would lead to unreliable results. Enstrom used only a small subset of the overall data, and, more importantly, the data corresponded to participants who enrolled in 1959, a time when exposure to tobacco smoke was common.”

:{Kessler noted that the Center for Indoor Air Research funded two types of research proposals. One set were pre-screened by the CIAR's Scientific Advisory Board, made up of scientists from outside the industry.

But Enstrom's study was funded as an “Applied Project.” Applied Projects by-passed the SAB and were chosen directly by the CIAR's Board of Directors, made up of in-house tobacco scientists, executives and a high-ranking industry lawyer.}:

In fact, legal considerations — and lawyers — were at the very heart of the decision-making process at CIAR.

Wrote Don Hoel, an attorney with Shook Hardy and Bacon (SHB), which represented tobacco company Philip Morris (PM):

“Within that organization [CIAR], SHB represents the interests of PM in evaluating research proposals and in determining which existing projects should be continued.”

Enstrom's contracts specified that among the “deliverables” his research was expected to produce was publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

With the source of his funding kept confidential, Enstrom became a high profile authority in articles in the mainstream press which cited him as an independent scientist who was convinced that the evidence linking ETS to disease was weak.

Back to present day.

While as far as we know Soon has no ties to big tobacco, nor has he done any work that brings into question the links between cancer and tobacco smoke, the similarities in the stories of Soon and Enstrom, and the trajectories of their careers, are uncanny.

Two scientists found to have been paid large sums of money by companies that benefit from their conclusions.

For Enstrom, his research bringing into question the links between tobacco smoke and cancer, with his Big Tobacco sponsors hoping the effect will be to slow proposed regulations limiting exposure to tobacco smoke in public places.

For Soon, his research downplaying the role fossil fuels play in climate change, with his Big Oil and Coal sponsors hoping the effect will be to slow down government regulations that would curtail carbon emissions from dirty fossil fuels.

Some might say this has all the makings of a grand conspiracy theory. But when something is documented this well and the links are made based on solid evidence there is very little theory left to prove.

And while this story is about two of the main characters, there is a larger question about where the corporations fit in.

In the case of the tobacco companies, that question has already been answered in the form of a massive class action lawsuit by 50 US State Attorneys General that was settled for a whopping $206 billion.

In the case of the fossil fuel companies paying the likes of Soon to deliver science that suits their needs, that story has yet to reach its final chapter.

Apologies dear reader, this is a long post. It’s worth reading, though, we promise!

With few exceptions (like this weak WSJ column), the folks defending Exxon from RICO accusations focus their attention on the free speech argument and avoid the tobacco comparison. But now one of their own, Dr. James Enstrom, has provided a painfully clear connection between the beleaguered industries.

The Daily Callercarries the news that the Energy & Environment Legal Institute’s (EELI) latest attempt to waste its (probably coal) funders' money is a lawsuit against the EPA, claiming an independent review panel for air quality regulations isn’t actually independent. Their reason is that members of the panel have received funding from the EPA for past studies.

Obviously, that’s ridiculous, since public and private funding are vastly different in terms of conflict of interest.

So what does a real conflict of interest look like? For a prime example, look no further than the plaintiffs EELI is representing: The Western States Trucking Association (WSTA) and Dr. James Enstrom.

Now, the WSTA has a legitimate stake here, as the regulation in question deals with particulate matter emissions from trucks, so the organization's members would face a cost to upgrade their trucks to meet stricter EPA standards. Fine.

But who is Dr. James Enstrom? Oh, he's just your run of the mill epidemiologist who took funding from tobacco giant Philip Morris and produced a study in 2003 downplaying the connection between second-hand smoke and cancer. Enstrom was such a pivotal player in the pro-smoking propaganda that when the Department of Justice wrapped up its successful RICO case against the tobacco industry, it dedicated an entire chapter to Enstrom—one of just three researchers to receive such a distinction. (H/T DeSmog)

A search of his name in the Tobacco Industry Documents database returns over 500,000 results. An LA Times article notes that Enstrom became “Exhibit A” in the fight between the tobacco industry and anti-smoking activists, a prime example of how the tobacco industry funded friendly studies for PR and lobbying purposes.

Since then, Dr. Enstrom has turned his attention to other epidemiology questions, namely the dangers from particulate matter. And who funded his work? None other than an electric utility group, which used his study to argue against stricter PM standards that would force utilities to reduce the pollution from coal plants.

So even as the fossil fuel industry fights off RICO accusations and denies the tobacco parallels, its surrogate EELI is fighting to give “Exhibit A” from the tobacco corruption case a chance to use his industry-funded science to shape the EPA’s regulations.

Though connecting the dots between tobacco corruption and fossil fuels looks like a colossal own-goal, maybe EELI isn’t as foolish as this makes them seem. After all, if the fossil fuel industry needs to defend itself from a RICO suit like the tobacco industry did, surely EELI will offer their services?

And odds are slim they’d do it pro bono…

refed

Tobacco funding of research reviewed

March 28,:{ 2007:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:|

Richard C. Paddock | Times Staff Writer

The society had earlier rejected his plan, noting that there had been no follow-up since 1972 to learn whether subjects had remained married or changed their smoking habits.

"I told him repeatedly that the results would not be meaningful," said Michael Thun, the American Cancer Society's chief epidemiologist.

Without informing the society, Enstrom asked Philip Morris for funding. In a letter to the company -- cited in court documents -- he wrote:

"A substantial research commitment on your part is necessary in order for me to effectively compete against the large mountain of epidemiologic data and opinions that already exist regarding the health effects of ETS [environmental tobacco smoke] and active smoking."

Enstrom says the letter was part of the normal grant process and his words were "taken out of context" by the court.

For Immediate Release:

May17, 2016

Contact:

Craig Richardson

Richardson@eelegal.org

703-981-5553

E&E Legal Sues EPA for Stacking ‘Independent’ Science Panel with EPA Grant Recipients;

Watchdog Groups Asks Court to Dissolve EPA Panel

Washington, DC – Last Friday, The Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for illegal formation of a key science advisory committee. The committee at issue is the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee Particulate Matter Review Panel for 2015-2018 (CASAC PM Panel). E E Legal filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of its members who include the Western States Trucking Association andDr. James Enstrom, a Research Fellow and epidemiologist retired from the University of California, Los Angeles.

“The EPA has stacked the panel, which is required by law to be independent and unbiased, with researchers who have received over $190 million in discretionary grants from the EPA,” said Steve Milloy, an attorney and Senior Fellow with E&E Legal. “This clearly violates the law and makes a mockery of the notion of ‘independent’ scientific review,” Milloy added.

“We are asking the court to prevent the EPA from convening the panel until the panel can be formed in a balanced manner in compliance with applicable laws,” said Dr. David Schnare, E&E Legal’s General Counsel and a 33-year veteran of the EPA.

The EPA’s regulation of ambient airborne fine particulate matter, soot or dust in outdoor air also called “PM_2.5” (pronounced Pee-Em-Two-Point-Five”), has been scientifically controversial since the EPA began the process of regulating it in the early 1990s. The EPA claims that any inhalation of PM_2.5 can cause death within hours and that PM_2.5 in outdoor air kills hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. Not only has the EPA hidden from public scrutiny for over 20 years key scientific data that its PM_2.5 regulation relies on, but also the agency stacks the legally required CASAC panel with EPA-paid researchers.

EPA’s claims about the lethality of PM_2.5 have been a primary basis for the agency’s justification of its air quality standards for particulate matter and ozone, as well as regulations key to the Obama administration’s so-called “war on coal”, including the: Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, Mercury Air Transport Standard and Clean Power Plan. State implementation of EPA’s PM_2.5 standards is also quite costly as evidenced by E & E Legal member Western States Trucking Association, whose own members are forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars retrofitting truck engines to comply with California state PM_2.5 emissions requirements as mandated by the EPA.

“Not only does the EPA pay researchers to produce controversial research that advances its PM_2.5 regulatory agenda, but the agency pays the very same researchers to review their own controversial work,” explained Milloy. “Of the 26 members the EPA selected to be on the CASAC PM Panel, 24 of them have been paid or are currently being paid by the EPA a total sum in excess of $190 million,” Milloyobserved. “The EPA’s supposedly ‘independent’ review process is entirely rigged to advance EPA’s agenda,” Milloy added.

“Both the Clean Air Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act require that the CASAC PM Panel be independent and unbiased,” Schnare said. “We are asking the court to determine that an EPA advisory panel that operates on a consensus basis but that is 90 percent comprised of highly-paid EPA cronies does not meet the requirements of the law,” Schnare added.

“The EPA process for commissioning and evaluating PM_2.5 research has been so rigged and so biased for so long that many scientists don’t even try to get nominated for CASAC panels any more,” Milloy said. “They’ve simply given up. A case study of this is E & E Legal member and PM_2.5 researcher Jim Enstrom who, in questioning EPA’s PM_2.5 ~science, has lost professional opportunities because of the extreme biases of the EPA, CASAC and current and former CASAC panel members,” Milloy said. “CASAC is a cabal, not an independent committee,” he added.

“As the EPA is at the very beginning a new round of review of PM_2.5 regulation, as required by the Clean Air Act, our lawsuit is intended to make sure that process is conducted in an independent and unbiased manner as required by the law and expected by the public and Congress,” Schnare concluded.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) is a 501(c)(3) organization engaged in strategic litigation, policy research, and public education on important energy and environmental issues. Primarily through its petition litigation and transparency practice areas, E&E Legal seeks to correct onerous federal and state policies that hinder the economy, increase the cost of energy, eliminate jobs, and do little or nothing to improve the environment.

http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/03/13/tobacco-gun-hire-james-enstrom-willie-soon-climate-change

2015

This article was co-written by Dan Zegart, author of Civil Warriors, the legal siege on the tobacco industry.

A leaked email chain reported earlier this week on DeSmog shines a harsh light on the behind-the-scenes coordination between well-known climate deniers and fossil fuel funded spindoctors.

As an expert-for-hire who has taken money from both Big Tobacco and fossil fuel companies over the span of his career, S. FredSinger is a major focal point in Merchants of Doubt.

But where the really interesting story lies, is in two of the recipients of the Singer email who share an uncannily similar history.

Another recipient on the Singer email chain, James Enstrom, advised Singer to launch grievances with Stanford, Harvard and University of California against Naomi Oreskes and Stanton Glantz — an intimidating 'attack the messenger' tactic we'll revisit in a moment.

Enstrom says it was his contrarian view that resulted in UCLA not renewing his contract.

Enstrom writes:

Enstrom elaborates on how this attack could unfold:

Apparently the academic freedoms Enstrom appears to hold so dear in his wrongful dismissal suit, do not extend past himself.

But it is not the UCLA lawsuit, or Enstrom's name alongside Soon's on the Singer email string, where the similarities lie between Enstrom and Soon.

It is instead the willingness of both men to take large sums of money from industry-related interests and then to produce science that suits those interests' needs.

For almost thirty years, Enstrom's research into smoking and health was funded by the cigarette makers.

“in the manner he was using it would lead to unreliable results. Enstrom used only a small subset of the overall data, and, more importantly, the data corresponded to participants who enrolled in 1959, a time when exposure to tobacco smoke was common.”

In fact, legal considerations — and lawyers — were at the very heart of the decision-making process at CIAR.

Wrote Don Hoel, an attorney withShook Hardy and Bacon (SHB), which represented tobacco company Philip Morris (PM):

“Within that organization [CIAR], SHB represents the interests of PM in evaluating research proposals and in determining which existing projects should be continued.”

Enstrom's contracts specified that among the “deliverables” his research was expected to produce was publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Back to present day.

Two scientists found to have been paid large sums of money by companies that benefit from their conclusions.

And while this story is about two of the main characters, there is a larger question about where the corporations fit in.

In the case of the fossil fuel companies paying the likes of Soon to deliver science that suits their needs, that story has yet to reach its final chapter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Indoor_Air_Research

The Center for Indoor Air Research (often abbreviated CIAR) was a non-profit organization established by three American tobacco companies--Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and Lorillard—in Linthicum, Maryland, in 1988. The organization funded research on indoor air pollution, some of which pertained to passive smoking and some of which did not. It also funded research pertaining to causes of lung cancer other than passive smoking, such as diet. The organization disbanded in 1998 as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.

History

The CIAR was founded in March 1988 by Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and Lorillard.^[1] It was based in Linthicum, Maryland.^[3] The Swedish tobacco company Svenska Tobaks joined the organization in 1994.^[4] Soon after it was founded, it became the largest non-governmental source of funding for research on indoor air pollution.^[5] In 1998, a master settlement, known as the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, was reached between American tobacco companies and a number of American state attorneys general. This agreement required the tobacco industry to disband the CIAR, as well as the Council for Tobacco Research.^[1][6] According to Alisa Tong and Stanton Glantz, the CIAR has "been essentially reconstituted as the Philip Morris External Research Program."^[7]

Stated mission

The original stated mission of the CIAR was to conduct "high-quality, objective research" pertaining to indoor air, including the health effects of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS).^[8] A confidential memo from 1988 described the CIAR as part of a plan to "carry out work on ETS to keep the controversy alive."^[9] In 1992, the reference to passive smoking was removed from the organization's mission statement.^[4] This was, in turn, followed by a decrease in the amount of research funded by the CIAR that pertained to the health effects of passive smoking.^[4]

Structure

The CIAR awarded both "peer-reviewed" projects after review by their Science Advisory Board, as well as "special-reviewed" projects awarded after review by tobacco company executives.^[8][10]:276 The aim of the CIAR's peer-reviewed projects was mainly to divert attention from ETS as an indoor air pollutant, whereas special-reviewed projects were more likely to produce evidence that the tobacco industry could later use to argue against anti-smoking legislation.^[11]

Funding of scientific research

From 1989 to 1999, the CIAR funded at least 244 published studies.^[1] According to a 2001 paper in the American Journal of Public Health, the CIAR "acted as a buffer between the tobacco industry and scientists," because many scientists, although unwilling to accept funds directly from the tobacco industry, were willing to accept funds from the CIAR.^[1] The majority of peer-reviewed studies funded by the CIAR were unrelated to ETS, and served instead to divert attention from its health effects and focus attention on other indoor air toxins instead.^[12]

In 1992, the CIAR awarded $72,760 to Antonio H. Miguel, Jari Cardoso, and Aquino Neto to study indoor air quality in offices and restaurants in the Brazilian cities ofSao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.^[13] The CIAR also awarded Miguel additional funding in 1998 for another indoor air quality study, this time measuring air quality inSantiago, Chile, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. This study was based on the hypothesis that particles transported indoors from outdoor air, rather than ETS, were responsible for a significant proportion of indoor aerosol concentrations.^[13] The CIAR also funded research by Arthur Penn, of New York University, into the effects of exposure to tobacco smoke in chickens from 1990 to 1994.^[7] After some of his studies found that this exposure caused increased plaque buildup in the chickens' arteries, the CIAR refused to fund any more of his work.^[14][15] Another study funded by the CIAR was authored by Johns Hopkins researcher Genevieve Matanoski in 1995, and claimed that some cases of lung cancer previously attributed to passive smoking might actually be caused by other factors, such as diet.^[2] Another was the "16 cities study", authored by Roger Jenkins and published in 1996, examining levels of second-hand smoke measured by subjects in sixteen different cities at work and at home.^[16] The study concluded that homes were a greater source of exposure to second-hand smoke than workplaces, which led the tobacco industry to use its conclusions to argue that workplace smoking restrictions were unnecessary.^[17] This study has been criticized for suffering from "serious biases" that led to low values of exposure being reported.^[17]

Epidemiologic studies

In 1995, the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology published two studies funded by the CIAR examining the association between ETS and heart disease. Both studies concluded that ETS exposure from spouses did not increase the risk of heart disease, and that previous conclusions to the contrary were due to publication bias.^[7] Both of these studies have been criticized for suffering from exposure misclassification, because both studies failed to distinguish between current and former smokers.^[7] In 2003, a study funded by the center was published in the BMJ. Authored by James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat, the study found little association between secondhand smoke and coronary heart disease or lung cancer.^[18] This study has been criticized for failing to distinguish between those who were exposed to second-hand smoke and those who were not, because, according to the American Cancer Society, the study's participants were enrolled in 1959, "when exposure to secondhand smoke was so pervasive that virtually everyone was exposed to ETS, whether or not they were married to a smoker."^[9]

References

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Categories:

Has she finally gone too far?...Maybe this is the right time for legal action. What say you?”

The cry for help got an immediate response. Monckton offered to help draft a legal complaint against Oreskes.

James Enstrom, an epidemiologist who dismisses the public health dangers of air pollution, advised Singer he had “a very strong case” for complaining to Oreskes’s employers.

“I suggest you attack Oreskes by filing short grievances with Harvard and Stanford,” Enstrom wrote.

“Good thought,” Singer said.

Climate change: why the Guardian is putting threat to Earth front and centre

By 6 March, Singer had moved on to challenging Kenner directly, raising the prospect of legal action. In a letter, he claimed he was called “a liar for hire” in the documentary.

The phrase does not appear in the film, Kenner said. However, it does appear in media coverage of the film.

“I have some experience with libel suits,” Singer writes in the letter. “I would prefer to avoid having to go to court; but if we do, we are confident that we will prevail.”

He goes on to criticise Kenner for basing his film on the Oreskes book, saying: “It is rather too bad that you got mixed up with Naomi Oreskes. She claims to be a historian of science; unfortunately, she has only demonstrated that she’s a great polemicist with a rather well-defined bias.”

On 9 March, Enstrom also wrote to Kenner, echoing Singer’s claims. “I am concerned that your film makes statements about Dr Singer that could be considered defamatory,” he wrote. “Because your film is based on the book ‘Merchants of Doubt’ by Naomi Oreskes, PhD, you need to know about her contentious and controversial background.”

Enstrom called on Kenner to arrange a debate between Oreskes and Willie Soon, the Harvard-Smithsonian researcher exposed for taking industry funding, when his film is screened in Boston later this month.

Singer did not respond to requests for comment.

interesting to use Enstrom to debunk myth of brave dissenting scientist being punished (vs Hayes, you're own your own]

wow how went from linus pauling and wheat germ vit E to dark side? got prop 99 $ at first, but then went to tobacco industry

http://www.scientificintegrityinstitute.org/Pauling1975.pdf foto

2005 brit study , 2010 fired from ucla

The Enstrom and Kabat secondhand smoke study was initially funded by a grant from the Tobacco Related Disease Research Program, an organization that manages funds generated by the Proposition 99 California state cigarette tax. After the program’s scientific, peer-review panel, denied continued funding for the project, Enstrom sought out financial support from other sources. In 1997, he submitted an application for,6 and ultimately received, $210,000 from Philip Morris and the Council on Tobacco Research (CTR)7,8,9, a front group created in 1954 by the tobacco companies to fund research on smoking and health.10 It became well known over the years for sponsoring flimsy scientific research that promoted tobacco industry positions.

THE AUTHORS

“For the past three years, I have done consulting and research on passive smoking for Jeffery L. Furr ofWomble Carlyleon behalf of RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris.”

-- Dr. James Enstrom to the Center of Indoor Air Research11

Summary Biography BS

December 21, 2013

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-enstrom/10/530/59

In 1965 Dr. Enstrom graduated co-valedictorian of his class at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA, where he obtained a B.S. in physics. In 1970 Dr. Enstrom obtained his Ph.D. in elementary particle physics at Stanford University from Nobel Laureate Melvin Schwartz. During 1971-1973 he worked as a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in research group of Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez. He then came to the UCLA School of Public Health as a postdoctoral fellow in cancer epidemiology and received an M.P.H. and postdoctoral certificate in 1976 from renown public health epidemiologist Dr. Lester Breslow.

He then joined the UCLA School of Public Health faculty as a Research Professor / Researcher and he held that position for 36 years until June 2012. He currently retains a similar affiliation with UCLA, although he is now drawing retirement. He has been a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology since 1981, he has been listed in Who’s Who in America since 1990, and he has been President of the Scientific Integrity Institute since 2005.

During his long career, he has explored many important epidemiological issues, particularly focusing on California. A major theme of his research has been identifying lifestyle factors which reduce mortality from cancer and heart disease and increase longevity. An example is his long-term study of religiously active California Mormons. Their healthy lifestyle, which includes avoidance of tobacco and alcohol and emphasis on education and marriage, results in an increase in longevity of about 10 years.

He has also examined the influence of environmental factors on mortality. In December 2005 he published a major paper on fine particulate matter and mortality in California. Since then he has conclusively documented that fine particulate matter does not cause premature death in California

(http://www.scientificintegrityinstitute.org/ASAS092812.pdf) . Since August 1, 2013 he has been assisting the US House Science Committee with its subpoena of the secret science data that EPA has used to improperly justify its fine particulate and ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) and related regulations in California and the United States.

He has an ongoing Federal lawsuit against UCLA in order to resolve the issues associated with his academic freedom and his faculty position at UCLA (http://thefire.org/article/15587.html).

Contact: jenstrom@ucla.edu

By Will Creeley March 26, 2013

After 35 years of employment, and many years of disagreement over research on air pollution and its implications for environmental regulations, Dr. James E. Enstrom, assisted by the American Center for Law and Justice,filed a federal lawsuit against various University of California and UCLA administrators in June 2012. Enstrom’s complaintalleged that UCLA had refused to reappoint him after he engaged in successful whistleblowingagainst a member of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences.

Last week, a federal district court issued an encouraging ruling in Enstrom’s case. On March 18, United States District Judge Jesus G. Bernal signed an order denying some defendants’ motions to dismiss Enstrom’s First Amendment retaliation claims. [looks like all nearly all, dismissed, just the bookkeeping stuff left?] 14 days to refile? result?

Specifically, Judge Bernal’s ruling denies motions to dismiss Enstrom’s First Amendment claims against former Vice Chancellor for Academic Personnel Thomas Rice and Vice Chancellor for Academic Personnel Carole Goldberg. The ruling further grants Enstrom leave to amend his complaint’s First Amendment claims against UC President Mark Yudof, UCLA Chancellor Gene D. Block, Dean of the UCLA School of Public Health Linda Rosenstock, and UCLA administrator Barbara Housel. (Department Chair Richard Jackson and former School of Public Health Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Hilary Godwin did not challenge Enstrom’s complaint, at least on the grounds that others did, which was that Enstrom had supposedly failed to plead specific facts to support his claims.) To sum this up, some of Enstrom’s First Amendment claims are going forward, and none of them are permanently off the table.

Judge Bernal also found that Enstrom may have a due process right to an accounting of how UCLA spent the research and grant funds he brought into the university. Accordingly, the judge denied the motions by Jackson, Godwin, and Housel to dismiss Enstrom’s due process claim and granted him leave to amend his complaint with respect to this claim against other defendants.

In other words, Enstrom’s case will proceed, having cleared an important early hurdle. As former FIRE President and current ACLJ senior counsel David French observed, this is an important step toward vindicating Enstrom’s rights.

Torch readers will be familiar with Enstrom’s case, which we’ve been covering since 2010, when Enstrom came to FIRE for help. FIRE wrote UCLA Chancellor Gene D. Block on August 26, 2010, pointing out that it is unconstitutional to refuse to rehire a faculty member because of his protected expression. FIRE also assisted Enstrom with internal grievances at UCLA and ultimately helped him win two additional years at UCLA.

Here’s the full story of Enstrom’s ordeal, as explained in the press release we issued after Enstrom filed suit last year:

Enstrom has worked at UCLA as a researcher and professor since 1976, being rehired consistently each year until his ordeal began. Beginning in 2004, he worked in UCLA’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences (EHS). Over the years, he and a few of his colleagues have sometimes disagreed strongly about research on environmental health issues—for example, on the extent of the threat to public health posed by certain air pollutants, a topic of Enstrom’s research which has been the subject of intense debate in California because of its implications for state environmental regulations.

Enstrom also was a successful whistleblower whose activism led tofellow EHS faculty member John Froines being replaced on a panel for the California Air Resources Board (CARB).Several members of the panel, including Froines, had been serving beyond the three-year legal limit on their terms of office, and Enstrom’s whistleblowing provided part of the grounds for a June 2009 lawsuit on the issue. Enstrom also blew the whistle on afake Ph.D. degree claimed by a CARB researcher.

UCLA’s retaliation against Enstrom first became apparent in December 2009, when Enstrom discovered that UCLA had cut off his salary fund and charged his salary against his research funds without his knowledge. In February 2010, Environmental Health Sciences Chair Richard J. Jackson told Enstrom that UCLA was laying him off. Enstrom fought back and kept his job.

After UCLA’s first attempt failed, Enstrom learned of further retaliation in June 2010 when the EHS faculty (including Froines) voted not to rehire him because his "research is not aligned with the academic mission of the Department." UCLA also invoked vague and previously unmentioned "minimum requirements," even though his research output was similar to or greater than that of other professors in his department. Enstrom learned he was going to be "indefinitely laid off" effective June 30, 2010.

Enstrom has demonstrated that his research on environmental health is fully aligned with EHS’ research mission of furthering "extremely interdisciplinary" research "at the interface between human health and the environment."

And here’s a video produced by ReasonTV last year focusing on Enstrom’s case: trucking, CARB 9 min "Green Regulation Machine" 2k premature deaths, enstron says zero; he says largest study (76K?)

2006 study hien tran phd stats from __thornhill not___UCD, but actually from cf mary D nichols CARB chair ucla

froines 26 yrs ucla (implies fired in retaliation for "whistleblow"

whitney 15K muffler truck work 5k the wheels

phelen uci health effects lab job loss hurts public health

34 yrs at ucla? kissel

Rapid responses for Enstrom and Kabat, 326 (7398) 1057-0

Jump to full article: British Medical Journal, 2003-05-16

Intro:- It is true that the Center for Indoor Air Research (CIAR) is an agency receiving money primarily from US tobacco companies but this rather understates its role. As Barnes and Bero [2] have shown, in a detailed analysis of industry documents, CIAR funded two types of research, peer-reviewed and "special-reviewed", with the latter awarded directly by tobacco industry executives. Barnes and Bero showed that special-reviewed projects were more likely than peer-reviewed projects to support the tobacco industry position and be used by the industry to argue against smoking bans in public places. We should be told which category this research fell into.In the light of experience in another case involving CIAR funded research, the editor may wish to require full documentary disclosure of the process involved.[3]

Dr Kabat may also wish to clarify some other matters. He states that he never received tobacco industry funding until last year, when he received support from a law firm that has several tobacco companies as clients.

First, given what is known of the central role played in the tobacco industry’s campaign by certain lawyers, we should be told which firm this is and, specifically, whether it is one that has been linked to the industry campaign and if so, what role it played in it.

There is a major flaw in the study and the Editors may wish to consider a public retraction.This study assumes that there is a considerable difference in the exposure to ETS of never smokers' spouse compared to ever smoker's spouse. This is obviously not true.

Most never smoker's spouses would have been exposed to considerable ETS before the late 1990s, when the general exposure to ETS in California started reducing. . .

There is no doubt that however flawed this study, unless it is retracted by the BMJ, tobacco industry will use it extensively to promote their vigorous opposition to anti-smoking legislation in general, and anti-ETS laws in specific. Of course they have an urgent need to replace their loss of customer base of about 10,000 to 20,000 per day with new recruits of young smokers.

I have long been concerned that all passive smoking studies actually underestimate true risks for the following reasons:1. Few non-smokers are not frequently exposed to tobacco smoke in their daily activities. I live in a non-smoking house, travel on non- smoking trains, and work in non-smoking buildings. Yet I am exposed to tobacco smoke perhaps 15-20 minutes of each day, for instance when waiting for trains to arrive, entering and leaving my workplace, walking near smokers in towns and when going shopping. It may be impossible to find true negative control subjects for passive smoking studies.
Medical focussed research only tells part of the story. Commercial links with research inevitably have influence, and that includes tobacco and pharmaceutical companies. However, society gets the research projects that these companies are funding, not necessarily the ones that are really needed. . . Some of the most important issues around second-hand smoke have nothing to do with medical health. Stinging eyes, tobacco ash, unpleasant stale smells, dirty hair and clothing are examples of things that smokefree people don't like, or want. Second-hand smoke imposes itself on people without discrimination, removing from non-smokers their choice of access to clean air in many public places. The majority non-smoking population wants smokefree public places. What's the problem?
I was genuinely shocked to see this splashed across the front page of this week's BMJ, tabloid-style. An industry-sponsored, methodologically flawed study with inconclusive results but with major potential public health implications especially once the lay press get hold of it. 'Passive smoking may not kill': how much would the tobacco industry pay for such a soundbite in a major peer-reviewed medical journal? Since when did I pay my subscription so that you could do their dirty work for them?...

see kabat (gmu) stats ENTINE

sr epidem

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Department of Epidemiology and Population Health

1300 Morris Park Avenue

Bronx, NY 10461

E-mail: geoffrey.kabat@einstein.yu.edu

[Now in its second century, Yeshiva University is the oldest and most comprehensive educational institution under Jewish auspices in America. It is an independent university that ranks among the nation's leading academic research institutions and, reflecting the time-honored tradition of Torah Umadda, provides the highest quality Jewish and secular education of any Jewish university in the world. Since its inception the University has been dedicated to melding the ancient traditions of Jewish law and life with the heritage of Western civilization, and each year we celebrate as future leaders make YU their home.]

Montefiore to takeover Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx

A deal is in the works to transfer day-to-day operations and financial management of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Morris Park from Yeshiva University to healthcare giant Montefiore.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx/montefiore-talks-takeover-einstein-college-article-1.1809100#ixzz37llpQTl4

My interests include a range of environmental and lifestyle exposures that may play a role in the development of various cancers, either as risk factors or protective factors. Major focuses include the following: 1) the roles of tobacco and alcohol in cancers of different sites; this includes the earliest studies of use of mentholated cigarettes in relation to risk of cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract and early studies of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke; 2) the roles of diet and specific nutrients in relation to the risk of various cancers, including glycemic index/glycemic load and intake of iron and heme iron, antioxidants, and B-vitamins; 3) risk factors for lung cancer in people who have never smoked; 4) exposure to endogenous hormones (including estrogens and insulin), hormone therapy, and metabolic factors; and 5) the role of obesity, anthropometric factors (including body mass index, waist circumference, and height), and physical activity in relation to the risk of different cancers.

Book

The media constantly bombard us with news of health hazards lurking in our everyday lives. But many of these alleged hazards turn out to have been greatly overblown. Starting from the premise that health scares must be understood as "social facts," in HYPING HEALTH RISKS, I explore a variety of factors contributing to the inflating of miniscule risks and emphasize the importance of focusing on exposures and behaviors that have a palpable effect on health.

HYPING HEALTH RISKS: ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS IN DAILY LIFE AND THE SCIENCE OF EPIDEMIOLOGY, Columbia University Press, 2008.

For more information go to: www.hypinghealthrisks.com

Summary

For thirty years I have been involved in primary research on the causes of cancer and have published extensively on a wide range of environmental and lifestyle exposures thought to contribute to the risk of specific cancers. Knowledge derived from epidemiology holds tremendous potential for reducing the toll of cancer and other chronic diseases.

At the same time, there is considerable confusion about what factors actually have an important impact on health. Too often, hypothetical risks become the focus of attention in the media and regulatory agencies and get blown out of proportion, causing needless anxiety and distracting people from well-established and important factors that they can actually do something to modify.

We are faced with enormous societal issues regarding health, health care costs, energy, and the environment. But, all too often, certain aspects of these issues get focused on, and other crucial aspects get ignored. Examples of high-profile issues that are highly contested and on which the relevant information can be skewed are: the future of nuclear power (following the Fukushima incident in Japan), hydraulic fracturing to exploit natural gas deposits, and the health effects of extremely low-level exposures to chemicals such as bisphenol-A (BPA), phthalates, and various pesticides.

In a recent book and articles, I have attempted to demonstrate how crucial it is to put aside political ideology and to critically assess all of the relevant scientific evidence to arrive at a dispassionate assessment of what is firmly known on a specific topic and what uncertainties remain. Such assessment is essential to the process of formulating sound policy and putting specific issues in perspective.

I address current issues of health risks and risk perception in my regular Forbes column:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffreykabat/

Experience

Albert Einstein College of MedicineSenior Epidemiologist

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

July 2006 – Present (8 years 1 month)Bronx, NY

Stony Brook UniversityAssociate Professor

Stony Brook University

November 1996 – January 2001 (4 years 3 months)Stony Brook, New York

Albert Einstein College of MedicineAssociate Professor

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

October 1992 – October 1996 (4 years 1 month)Bronx, NY

Senior Epidemiologist

American Health Foundation

June 1982 – October 1992 (10 years 5 months)New York City

Languages

French

Full professional proficiency

Russian

Professional working proficiency

Japanese

Limited working proficiency

Skills & Endorsements

Top Skills

17Epidemiology

13Cancer

9Literature Reviews

9Health Research

6Books

6International Health

5Cancer Research

5Community Health

4Medical Research

4Medical Writing

Geoffrey also knows about...

4Research

4Preventive Medicine

3Environmental Health

3Public Health

3Evidence-based Medicine

3Pharmacoepidemiology

2Biostatistics

2Statistics

2Research Design

2Reproductive Health

1SAS

1Infectious Diseases

1Global Health

1Oncology

1Molecular Biology

See 22+

Publications

Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology(Link)

Columbia University Press

June 2008

The media constantly bombard us with news of health hazards lurking in our everyday lives, but many of these hazards turn out to have been greatly overblown. According to author and epidemiologist Geoffrey C. Kabat, this hyping of low-level environmental hazards leads to needless anxiety and confusion on the part of the public concerning which exposures have important effects on health and which...more

Start worrrying -- details to follow(Link)

Columbia University Press blog

January 2011

Hyping health risks in Brazil(Link)

Columbia University Press blog

May 2010

Defending the achievements, if not the style, of the anti-smoking movement.(Link)

In: R. Veras (ed.) Myths and Misconceptions about Environmental Tobacco Smoke: Dissenting Views. Rio de Janeiro: UnATI, 2010, pp. 29-35.

2010

Misdiagnosing cell threat(Link)

The Daily

June 2011

scientific publications (130)(Link)

Behind the World Health Organization's Pronouncement on Cell Phones(Link)

Forbes

August 23, 2011

Does coffee drinking really protect against devastating diseases?(Link)

Forbes

December 6, 2011

Why UCLA's firing of a lone dissenting voice should worry us(Link)

National Association of Scholars

December 5, 2011

The Bad News about the Good News about Chocolate(Link)

Forbes

April 1, 2012

How Activism Distorts the Assessment of Health Risks(Link)

Forbes

November 20, 2012

Natural does not mean safe(Link)

Slate

November 26, 2012

How Useful Is Body Mass Index In Predicting Long-Term Health?(Link)

Forbes

January 6, 2013

Making Room for the Unseen in Tackling Complex Problems(Link)

Forbes

January 17, 2013

What Caused A Billion Dollar Federal Study Of Child Health To Implode?(Link)

Forbes

February 4, 2013

After 40 Years Of Research, What Do We Know About Preventing Breast Cancer?(Link)

Forbes

February 24, 2013

Do Cell Phones Cause Brain Cancer? The Diehards Cling Desperately To Opinion(Link)

Forbes

March 5, 2013

Finer Grained Data Transform Our Understanding of the Holocaust(Link)

Forbes

March 13, 2013

Do Cell Phones Cause Brain Cancer? The Conspiracy Theorists Say Yes(Link)

Forbes

March 10, 2013

To Combat some Big Diseases We Should Focus on the Basics(Link)

Forbes

March 27, 2013

Should the FCC Re-examine Cell Phone Radiation?(Link)

Forbes

April 4, 2013

Modish, anti-scientific thinking will not advance breast cancer prevention(Link)

Forbes

April 23, 2013

Can Setting a Deadline Put an End to Breast Cancer?(Link)

Forbes

April 29, 2013

New Research Holds Promise for the Most Deadly Form of Cancer(Link)

Forbes

May 2, 2013

Why Do Some People Live to 100 Years?(Link)

Forbes

May 29, 2013

HPV Vaccination in India: An Historic Opportunity...and A Daunting Challenge(Link)

Forbes

June 28, 2013

Why LabelingObesity As a Disease is a Big Mistake(Link)

Forbes

July 9, 2013

Why Labeling Obesity As a Disease is a Big Mistake, part 2(Link)

Forbes

July 15, 2013

How Abysmal Scientific Research Is Used To Scare America's Parents(Link)

Forbes

August 20, 2013

Yet Another Large Study Discredits the Link Between Cell Phones and Brain Cancer(Link)

Forbes

September 4, 2013

What is Really at Stake in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Supoena of EPA Data(Link)

Forbes

September 23, 2013

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Bans Dietary Supplements from Its Pharmacy(Link)

Forbes

October 18, 2013

Over-Reaching California EPA Regulators Promoted A False Breast Cancer Link(Link)

Forbes

October 25, 2013

Maintaining A Healthy Body Weight Is Key To A Healthy Body(Link)

Forbes

November 19, 2013

Does Peanut Consumption Lead to Decreased Mortality?(Link)

Forbes

November 24, 2013

Six Solid Ways to Reduce Your Cancer Risk -- and That of Your Children(Link)

Forbes

December 6, 2013

The Passive Smoking Issue Is A Rorschach Test For The Ability To Think Scientifically(Link)

Forbes

December 21, 2013

Is the Obesity Epidemic Reversible, or Does Obesity Represent a New Stage of Human Evolution?(Link)

Forbes

January 6, 2014

Weight Gain Starting in Adolescence is Linked to Greater Mortality Later in Life(Link)

Forbes

January 17, 2014

There Is An Urgent Need To Address The "Terrible Situation Of Chronic Disease In Developing Countries"(Link)

Forbes

February 2, 2014

Sochi and Syria: How Can We Watch The Olympics Knowing What is Going on a Few Hundred Miles Away in Syria?(Link)

Forbes

February 19, 2014

How Credible Is CDC's 43 Percent Decline In Obesity In Young Children?(Link)

Forbes

February 27, 2014

The Disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370 Represents An Affront To Our Most Basic Assumptions About Reality(Link)

Forbes

March 16, 2014

A New Report Documents How Smoking and its Consequences Are Increasingly Confined to the Poor -- A Trend Which Was Pointed Out Forty Years Ago!(Link)

Forbes

March 30, 2014

We Worry About Trace Amounts Of BPA While Playing Russian Roulette With Dietary Supplements

http://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffreykabat/2014/04/11/we-worry-about-trace-amounts-of-bpa-while-playing-russian-roulette-with-dietary-supplements/

April 11, 2014

Top Scientists Call For Reform Of "Unsustainable" Biomedical Research Enterprise(Link)

Forbes

May 5, 2014

Should Mammography Be Abolished?(Link)

Forbes

May 24, 2014

Much Coventional Wisdom about the Causes of the Obesity Epidemic May be Wrong(Link)

Forbes

June 2, 2014

We Are Nowhere Near Understanding the Causes of Obesity and How to Prevent it(Link)

Forbes

June 9, 2014

Do We Really Have to Worry about Shower Curtains Causing Weight Gain?(Link)

Forbes

June 18, 2014

The New York Times Revisits The "Debate" Over Electromagnetic Fields, Reviving Baseless Fears, While Ignoring What Has Been Learned(Link)

Forbes

July 8, 2014

Education

Columbia University School of Public Health

M.S., Epidemiology

1982 – 1984

Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures/Comparative Literature

1971 – 1976

Leningrad State University

Russian literature - dissertation research

1971 – 1972

Stanford University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Slavic Languages and Literatures/Comparative Literature

1967 – 1968

Haverford College

B.S., Classics, French

1963 – 1967

forbes opinion

OPINION 7/22/2013 @ 8:00AM 5,465 views

The Real Motivation Behind Park And Beach Smoking Bans

Campaigns to restrict smoking in public places first emerged in the 1970s and have continued to expand apace over the past 3 decades. Over this time period there has been a dramatic change in the landscape – many states and municipalities now have statutes prohibiting smoking in public buildings, bars and restaurants, schools, hospitals, and other venues.

These laws and statutes were largely justified by reference to the 1993 EPA report that classified secondhand tobacco smoke as a Class A (human) carcinogen. Although that report stuck many scientists as putting activism above a careful reading of the evidence, there is no question that it achieved the intended aim of providing an official sanction – a founding text — for statutes protecting nonsmokers from the allegedly lethal effects of breathing other people’s tobacco smoke.....

http://www.scientificintegrityinstitute.org/documents.html

huffpo replies:

http://archive.tobacco.org/resources/dcouments/030520enstromyears.html

And this from Proctor's book: "Federal Judge Kessler in her 2006 ruling in USA v. Philip Morris commented on the flawed nature of Enstrom's work, much of which was 'litigation oriented'; the court also noted that the cigarette makers had gone so far as to organize a scientific collaborator for the man- Geoffrey C. Kabat, a long-standing Wynder sidekick- who went on to coauthor further denialist papers with Enstrom...Enstrom continues even today to defend his work against the medical mainstream, aided by a total of at least $1.4 million in research support from the tobacco racketeers along with an undisclosed sum from years of private consulting for their co-conspiring legal arms."

In other words, in the federal racketeering case brought against American tobacco companies, the judge specifically mentioned Enstrom's work as evidence of Big Tobacco's attempts to corrupt science and undermine science in the minds of the general public. The tobacco companies were found guilty of said racketeering charges. The Supreme Court let this decision stand in 2010.

04:56 PM on 06/16/2012

From Robert Proctor's new book, Golden Holocaust: "Enstrom was attractive to the industry as a classic 'we need more research' skeptic. From the 1970s into the 2000s he published a steady stream of articles challenging the significance of tobacco to health. The documents reveal a certain combative streak and sense of an uphill fight, as in 1997, when Enstrom requested $150,000 from Philp Morris's director of scientific affairs to explore the health effects of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), insisting that a 'substantial research commitment' was required 'to effectively compete against the large mountain of epidemiologic data and opinions that already exist regarding the health effects of ETS and active smoking."

Enstrom is a mercenary scientist for Big Tobacco. "An honest scientist"? I don't think so, Mr. Kissel.

BS?

09:41 AM on 06/15/2012

Dr. James E. Enstrom’s peer-reviewed research challenged California’s status quo by contending that exposure to fine particulate matter, like diesel particles, does not kill. The majority of his colleagues believe the particles cause lung cancer and death, a popular belief that Enstrom said ignores evidence to the contrary.

Enstrom charged in 2008 that his colleagues exaggerated the adverse effects of particulate matter in order to justifyexpensive diesel fuel regulationsto the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Enstrom testified in the same year to the state Senate that the lead contributor to the CARB report, Hien T. Tran, paid $1,000 for his Ph.D. from a fake university, and members of a CARB panel had exceeded their mandated three-year term limits by decades.

Shortly after Enstrom revealed the misconduct, UCLA began sending him notices of termination and has refused to compensate him for more than a year’s worth of work.

“The facts of this case are astounding,” said senior counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice. “UCLA terminated a professor after 35 years of service simply because he exposed the truth about an activist scientific agenda that was not only based in fraud, but violated California law.”

Tran was eventually suspended for 60 days, and one professor who had served on the CARB panel for 26 consecutive years was removed and later put back on the panel. John Froines, who has publicly supported diesel fuel regulations, was on a committee that voted to dismiss Enstrom.

Dissidentair pollution researcher sues university over firing

16 Jun 2012 | 11:21 BST | Posted by Ivan Semeniuk | Category: Health and medicine, Policy

James Enstrom

Posted on behalf of Zoë Corbyn.

A controversial epidemiologist who lost his job is suing the University of California, Los Angeles claiming the decision is an attempt to “purge an academic dissenter” from its ranks after his work questioned the link between diesel particulates and deaths in Californians.

James Enstrom, a non-tenured researcher in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, is due to finish work this month after over 35 years and a lengthy grievance procedure in which he challenged the university’s 2010 decision not to renew his appointment.

On 13 June he filed a lawsuit against the university and its administrators claiming it was retaliation for his criticism of UCLA air pollution research and his whistle-blowing activities.

Enstrom – who is seeking his job back and financial damages – is represented by lawyers from the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative Christan organization which amongst other things has fought to protect the free speech rights of pro-life demonstrators.

Enstrom’s research has provoked fierce criticism in the past. A 2003 study, which received tobacco industry funding, played down the dangers of second-hand smoke. Questions were raised about whether the article, published in the British Medical Journal, involved scientific misconduct because it relied on purportedly faulty smoke-exposure data, though no formal inquiry or investigation was launched.

Passive-smoking study faces review

Nature 446, 242 (15 March 2007) | doi:10.1038/446242a; Published online 14 March 2007

Rex Dalton

Top of page

Abstract

Did the tobacco industry skew results of survey?

But it was his work which found no relationship between diesel particulates and mortality of Californians, including a 2005 study published in journal Inhalation Toxicology, which the lawsuit really claims is the wellspring of his termination.

He became an “aggressive and lone critic at UCLA of air pollution research” and spoke out against “draconian” air quality regulations, which put him at odds with several senior faculty members and created embarrassing publicity for UCLA, claims the lawsuit. He also exposed wrongdoing on state air pollution boards which led to the removal of several members, it adds.

The ultimate result was a retaliatory campaigning against him that caused “permanent damage” to his reputation and “effectively ended” his career, it says. “Defendants discriminated against Dr. Enstrom based on his ideological and political affiliations and sought to purge an academic dissenter from their ranks,” it adds.

The university said in a statement that it planned to “vigorously contest” the lawsuit in court and Enstrom had been given a “full and fair” grievance hearing consistent with procedures for non-tenured academics.

“UCLA zealously protects the intellectual independence of members of our academic community and has long maintained that Enstrom’s political and scientific views and outside activities were not considered during his reappointment process,” the statement says.

The lawsuit claims UCLA violated Enstrom’s rights with regard to free speech and due process.

Enstrom’s lawyers said he was unavailable for comment.

Partly for this reason, other investigations have also found little effect of second-hand smoke on lung cancer or heart disease. But when the results of different studies are lumped together - a technique called meta-analysis - passive smokers tend to show a 20-30% increased risk of suffering these diseases.

Data revisited

To cloud the issue further, the original data - from an American Cancer Society study that was set up in 1959 - were used in previous studies led by the tobacco industry. The current study also received industry money.

404: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/64583

logue threatens hearing in protest letter

Second-hand Smoke Study Sparks Controversy

By Mike Wendling

July 7, 2008

Subscribe to Mike Wendling's posts

London (CNSNews.com) - A study about to be published in this week's British Medical Journal indicates that second-hand smoke doesn't increase the risk of heart disease or lung cancer, but the publication and the study's authors have come under attack by anti-smoking groups.

Two American researchers analyzed data from an American Cancer Society survey that followed more than 118,000 Californians from 1960 until 1998.

James E. Enstrom, of the University of California at Los Angeles and Geoffrey C. Kabat of the State University of New York at Stony Brook concluded that "the results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke (second-hand smoke) and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect."

"The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed," the researchers wrote.

The study was roundly condemned by anti-smoking groups including the American Cancer Society and even by the British Medical Journal's parent organization, the British Medical Association. They said the researchers received money from the tobacco industry, a statement that was confirmed by the journal Friday.

The American Cancer Society (ACS) pointed out what it called several flaws in the research. The researchers based their study on a small subset of the original data, the ACS said, and because of the greater prevalence of smokers in the 60s and 70s, "virtually everyone was exposed to environmental tobacco smoke."

Smoking opponents also pointed out in the original study, although the health of the subjects were monitored until 1998, no information on smoking habits was collected after 1972.

"We are appalled that the tobacco industry has succeeded in giving visibility to a study with so many problems," Michael J. Thun, ACS national vice president of epidemiology and surveillance research, said in a statement.

"The American Cancer Society welcomes thoughtful, independent peer review of our data. But this study is neither reliable nor independent," Thun said.

Other studies have indicated that inhaling second-hand smoke on a regular basis increases the risk of heart disease by about 30 percent. But as the researchers pointed out in their BMJ article, exposure to second-hand smoke is difficult to measure and such studies necessarily rely on self-reported data that may or may not be accurate.

Figures are skewed, researchers said, by former smokers who are wrongly classified.

"The relation between tobacco-related diseases and environmental tobacco smoke may be influenced by misclassification of some smokers as never smokers," the researchers wrote.

However, several British groups agreed with the ACS assessment of the study. The British Medical Association said that 1,000 people die every year in the U.K. as a result of passive smoking.

"There is overwhelming evidence, built up over decades, that passive smoking causes lung cancer and heart disease, as well as triggering asthma attacks," said Vivienne Nathanson, BMA's head of science and ethics. "In children, passive smoking increases the risk of pneumonia, bronchitis, and reduces lung growth, as well as both causing and worsening asthma."

A spokesman for Action on Smoking and Health said: "We are utterly surprised as to why the BMJ has published this. It's nothing but a lobbying tool."

"This is just one study," the spokesman said. "It will do nothing to change the massive body of evidence that has built up over the years."

The journal stood by its decision to publish research but editors turned down interview requests Friday. A spokeswoman said decisions on publication were made only after "careful consideration and peer review."

The study, which was available online and will be published in the BMJ on Saturday, was partially funded by money from the tobacco industry, the spokeswoman said, but could not provide further details.

Groups campaigning against further tobacco regulations in Britain welcomed the research. Smokers' lobby group FOREST said the "jury is still out" on the effects of second-hand smoke.

"This is typical of the anti-smoking lobby's bullying tactics," said FOREST director Simon Clark. "They attack not just the authors but the messenger ... the BMJ is one of the most respected journals in the world."

Attacks on the study in the U.K. have been led by proponents of a total ban on smoking in public places like pubs, clubs and restaurants, a position that Clark said was undermined by the study.

"People who want to ban smoking in public places use passive smoking as their number one argument," he said. "That's why this study is so significant."

Whistleblowing Scientist Who Challenged Environmental Regulation Sues UCLA

June 14, 2012

LOS ANGELES, June 14, 2012—After 35 years at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. James E. Enstrom is suing UCLA to keep his job. Following many years of disagreement over research on air pollution and its implications for environmental regulations, UCLA finally refused to reappoint Enstrom after he engaged in successful whistleblowing against a member of the department. When UCLA told Enstrom he was being let go because his research failed to accord with the department's "mission," Enstrom turned to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

"FIRE has been helping Dr. Enstrom to keep his job for two years now, but enough is enough," said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. "While a lawsuit should never have been necessary, we're grateful that the American Center for Law and Justice and former FIRE President David French have filed suit on Dr. Enstrom's behalf, and we hope that justice will finally be served."

Enstrom has worked at UCLA as a researcher and professor since 1976, being rehired consistently each year until his ordeal began. Beginning in 2004, he worked in UCLA's Department of Environmental Health Sciences (EHS). Over the years, he and a few of his colleagues have sometimes disagreed strongly about research on environmental health issues—for example, on the extent of the threat to public health posed by certain air pollutants, a topic of Enstrom's research which has been the subject of intense debate in California because of its implications for state environmental regulations.

Enstrom also was a successful whistleblower whose activism led to fellow EHS faculty member John Froines being replaced on a panel for the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Several members of the panel, including Froines, had been serving beyond the three-year legal limit on their terms of office, and Enstrom's whistleblowing provided part of the grounds for a June 2009 lawsuit on the issue. Enstrom also blew the whistle on a fake Ph.D. degree claimed by a CARB researcher.

UCLA's retaliation against Enstrom first became apparent in December 2009, when Enstrom discovered that UCLA had cut off his salary fund and charged his salary against his research funds without his knowledge. In February 2010, Environmental Health Sciences Chair Richard J. Jackson told Enstrom that UCLA was laying him off. Enstrom fought back and kept his job.

After UCLA's first attempt failed, Enstrom learned of further retaliation in June 2010 when the EHS faculty (including Froines) voted not to rehire him because his "research is not aligned with the academic mission of the Department." UCLA also invoked vague and previously unmentioned "minimum requirements," even though his research output was similar to or greater than that of other professors in his department. Enstrom learned he was going to be "indefinitely laid off" effective June 30, 2010.

Enstrom has demonstrated that his research on environmental health is fully aligned with EHS' research mission of furthering "extremely interdisciplinary" research "at the interface between human health and the environment."

Enstrom came to FIRE for help. FIRE wrote UCLA Chancellor Gene D. Block on August 26, 2010, pointing out that it is unconstitutional to refuse to rehire a faculty member because of his protected expression. FIRE assisted Enstrom with internal grievances at UCLA and ultimately helped him win two additional years at UCLA. Reason.tv also produced a video about the case.

Enstrom's situation has received national attention as well as statements of concern from state legislators. The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) also took up Enstrom's case and is representing Enstrom in a lawsuit filed late yesterday in Los Angeles federal court against UCLA officials and the University of California Regents. Enstrom is seeking a declaration that UCLA violated Enstrom's free speech and due process rights, as well as an injunction requiring UCLA to rehire him.

"Because of Enstrom's research and his whistleblowing against prominent advocates of environmental regulation in California, UCLA seemingly has decided to silence him any way it can," said FIRE Vice President of Programs Adam Kissel. "If there is anywhere we need honest scientists who aren't on a mission to exclude whistleblowers and skeptics, it is the American university."

FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals from across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of individual rights, due process, freedom of expression, academic freedom, and rights of conscience at our nation's colleges and universities. FIRE's efforts to preserve liberty on campuses across America are described at thefire.org.

CONTACT:

Adam Kissel, Vice President of Programs, FIRE: 215-717-3473; adam@thefire.org

Gene D. Block, Chancellor, University of California, Los Angeles: 310-825-2151; chancellor@ucla.edu

ref above

http://www.thefire.org/did-someone-lie-to-ucla-chancellor-gene-block/

Did Someone Lie to UCLA Chancellor Gene Block?

October 1, 2010

by Adam Kissel

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Chancellor Gene D. Block has responded to FIRE's August 26, 2010, letter in the matter of Associate Resident Professor James Enstrom. All signs are that UCLA retaliated against Dr. Enstrom's activism and research in the area of environmental health. Our letter explained that the faculty members in his department voted against his reappointment on nebulous grounds--that his research on environmental health "is not aligned with the academic mission of the Department, and that [his] research output and other contributions do not meet the [Environmental Health Sciences] department minimums." According to Enstrom, however, no minimum requirements had ever been communicated to him, and any reasonable person could infer that his research on environmental health—for example, on the extent of the threat to public health posed by certain air pollutants—has everything to do with the work of an environmental health sciences department.

The circumstances of Enstrom's non-reappointment are suspicious for additional reasons. One of the faculty members in Enstrom's department had lost his position on the Scientific Review Panel (SRP) on Toxic Air Contaminants for the California Air Resources Board (CARB) due to Enstrom's activism. Enstrom had demonstrated that several SRP members had never been properly reappointed following the applicable rules. According to a lawsuit filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation in June 2009, the SRP members had been serving beyond the three-year legal limit on their terms of office without being properly re-nominated. Many of them subsequently were replaced.

Furthermore, over the years, Enstrom and a few of his colleagues in the School of Public Health have sometimes disagreed strongly about research on environmental health issues, such as the actual danger of diesel emissions. Enstrom's peer-reviewed research is one of the things at the center of the debate in California over regulation of diesel emissions—we're not talking about a petty department squabble.

In addition, while some faculty members in Environmental Health Sciences might not have had strong personal or political reasons for voting against Enstrom, it seems that the faculty members were never given a chance to properly assess Enstrom's reappointment dossier. Soon, I plan to publish documents here on The Torch relating to Enstrom's non-reappointment grievance that show the various ways that the faculty apparently were prevented from having access to Enstrom's full dossier, but that is a topic for another post.

Here, I am examining the strange claim in Chancellor Block's letter that "Dr. Enstrom is not a professor at UCLA, and is not a member of our faculty." According to Enstrom, he has continuously held a non-tenured faculty position in the School of Public Health since 1976. Take a look at these documents:

An e-mail from UCLA Dean Linda Rosenstock to "Assoc Resident Professor" James E. Enstrom on April 1, 2004. In the e-mail, Rosenstock calls Enstrom "a faculty member in good standing" and refers to his appointment as a "faculty appointment." I think it's safe to presume that "Assoc Resident Professor" means "Associate Resident Professor."

The 1998-99 UCLA directory listing which identifies Enstrom as "Assoc Res Prof."

The 2002-03 University of California directory listing which identifies Enstrom as "Assoc Res Prof."

The 2005 and 2006 faculty/staff directories in Enstrom's department, where he is listed as a "Researcher" in the Faculty section. (Specific titles are not given.)

The 2010 UCLA directory listing which identifies Enstrom as "Assoc Res Prof."

The July 1, 2010, electronic directory listing which identifies Enstrom as "Assoc Res Prof."

When I worked for the University of Chicago Directory, you bet we verified the exact status of every single member of every department, year after year, with the relevant departments. UCLA has a lot of explaining to do, because these documents make it look like Chancellor Block's letter is based on a flat-out lie. Who has fed Chancellor Block the apparently false information about Enstrom's status? Or is all of this just a huge misunderstanding?

http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/action/search/basic?fd=0&q=enstrom&Submit=Submit+Query

http://no-smoke.org/document.php?id=333

Responding to the Enstrom and Kabat Study on Secondhand Smoke

PDF Format

November 2004

The tobacco industry has a long history of trying to cast doubt on the science of secondhand smoke. In its latest attempt, the industry has funded a new study, published in theBritish Medical Journal. The study, written by researchers funded by the tobacco industry, misrepresented data from the American Cancer Society (ACS), and used flawed methodology to come to the inaccurate conclusion that secondhand smoke does not cause an increased risk for lung cancer and heart disease. Don’t be fooled by Big Tobacco. Secondhand smoke kills.

“The study is fundamentally flawed.”

–British Medical Association1

The British Medical Journal published a study in its May 2003 issue entitled, “Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-1998,” which was authored by Dr. James E. Enstrom and Dr. Geoffrey C. Kabat. The study claimed that no causal relationship was found between secondhand smoke and tobacco-related mortality, after analyzing data from 35,351 adults over a period of thirty-eight years. As one might expect, the study generated an enormous amount of media attention. Speculation abounded that the unanimous conclusion of public health officials and medical practitioners, that secondhand smoke is hazardous to health, had been premature. Big Tobacco and its allies hailed the study as proof that the adverse health effects of secondhand smoke are greatly exaggerated. Under closer scrutiny, the inevitable was found to be true: the Enstrom and Kabat secondhand smoke study was largely funded by tobacco industry dollars, conducted by industry allies, and riddled with methodological errors.

Although the Enstrom and Kabat secondhand smoke study has now largely been discredited, the tobacco industry and its allies attempt to use the study to cast doubt upon the science of secondhand smoke.This document provides some basic information regarding the study, its funding, and its authors, and should help to counter any attempts to use the study to undermine the established body of research confirming the health hazards of secondhand smoke.

THE STUDY

“The editors believe that this opinion piece is full of speculative assumptions of doubtful scientific value. We could not judge the merits of your criticisms because your own data and methods were so inadequately described. I should add that your article contains pejorative comments that should have no place in responsible scientific discourse.”

—Letter from the Journal of the American Medical Association to James E. Enstrom2

The data and design of the Enstrom and Kabat secondhand smoke study has been widely criticized. Even the British Medical Association, the publisher of the journal that printed the study, described the research as being “fundamentally flawed.”3 The misuse of data and flawed methodology are two very significant faults in the study.

Enstrom and Kabat did not gather original data for their study. Instead, it drew on data from the ACS’s Cancer Prevention Study (CPS-I), and used only a small subset (approximately 10%) of the total CPS-I data. Researchers at ACS repeatedly warned Enstrom that the data from CPS-I could not be used to determine the health effects of secondhand smoke, and they spoke out against the study upon its release, stating that their data had been misused.4

The study used cohort methodology to look at the rate of mortality from heart disease and lung cancer in nonsmokers who were married to smokers, covering a time period from 1959 to 1998. A severe error in the study was the failure to establish a control group of nonsmokers who were unexposed to secondhand smoke. Other critical methodological flaws include not measuring for secondhand smoke exposure from any source other than the spouse, including workplace (where smoking was extremely prevalent at the time); not taking into account either spouse’s smoking status after 1972, though the study continued for 26 more years; and classifying the nonsmoking spouse as still exposed to secondhand smoke in that 26 year period, during which time the “smoking spouse” could have quit smoking or died, not to mention that they could have divorced or separated.

THE FUNDING

“A substantial research commitment on your part is necessary in order for me to effectively compete against the large mountain of epidemiologic data and opinions that already exist regarding the health effects of ETS and active smoking.”

-- Dr. James E. Enstrom to Philip Morris Research Center5

THE AUTHORS

“For the past three years, I have done consulting and research on passive smoking for Jeffery L. Furr of Womble Carlyle on behalf of RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris.”

-- Dr. James Enstrom to the Center of Indoor Air Research11

Dr. James E. Enstrom: Enstrom has played down the support that he has received from the tobacco industry, but his involvement with the industry can be traced back for many years. As early as 1975, Enstrom solicited the CTR for $50,000 to “assess the possible role which other factors besides smoking play in the etiology of cancer.”12The Competing Interests section of the Enstrom and Kabat secondhand smoke study states: “In recent years [Enstrom] has received funds originating from the tobacco industry for his tobacco related epidemiological research because it has been impossible for his to obtain equivalent funds from other sources.”13 Although the CTR, the Tobacco Institute, and Center for Indoor Air Research (CIAR) are all now defunct, Enstrom continued to contract with Philip Morris.14,15

Dr. Geoffrey Kabat: Kabat’s connections with the tobacco industry over the years have been well documented. A search of internal industry documents finds Kabat’s name listed as an industry resource more than 7,000 times, showing his involvement with, among others, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, American Tobacco Company, and CIAR.16

CONCLUSION

Enstrom and Kabat’s substantial methodological flaws, combined with the tobacco industry’s funding of the study, and other studies supported by the tobacco industry, can help you to inoculate others against this misinformation. Over one hundred independently funded, peer-reviewed studies show that secondhand smoke exposure causes serious disease and death in nonsmokers. Don’t let this one study undermine the body of solid science that confirms the hazardous health effects of secondhand smoke exposure. For more information on Enstrom and Kabat or other studies that challenge the credible science of secondhand smoke, please contact us at (510) 841-3032 or at anr@no-smoke.org.

REFERENCES

[n.a.], “BMA response to BMJ paper ‘effect of passive smoking on health’,” British Medical Association, May 16, 2003.

Rennie, D. “[Letter from JAMA to James E. Enstrom re: published study.],” Philip Morris, August 23, 1996, Bates No. 2073788479. Accessed on November 17, 2004. Download at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/kiv85c00.

[n.a.], “BMA response to BMJ paper ‘effect of passive smoking on health’,” British Medical Association, May 16, 2003.

[n.a.], “American Cancer Society Condemns Tobacco Industry Study for Inaccurate Use of Data,” American Cancer Society, May 15, 2003.

Enstrom, J., “Proposed Research on the Relationship of Low Levels of Active Smoking to Mortality,” Philip Morris, January 15, 1997, Bates No. 2075873003. Accessed on November 17, 2004. Download at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/dfk37d00.

Ibid., 1997.

Carchman, RA., “Principal Investigator @ D James E. Enstrom, PhD, MPH, Grant Title @D ‘Relationship of Low Levels of Active Smoking to Mortality’,” Philip Morris, January 30, 1998, Bates No. 2063654067. Accessed on November 17, 2004. Download at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/hyf67e00.

CTR, “CHECK TRANSMITTAL FORM GRANT NUMBER: 3333AR2,” Council for Tobacco Research, February 11, 1998, Bates No. 40001768. Accessed on November 14, 2004. Download at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/dlx89c00.

CTR, “CHECK TRANSMITTAL FORM GRANT NUMBER:333AR2,” Council for Tobacco Research, July 11, 1997, Bates No. 40001771. Accessed on November 17, 2004. Download at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/ilx89c00.

Glantz, SA.; Slade, J.; Bero, L.; Hanauer, P.; Barnes, D., The Cigarette Papers (University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London) 1996.

Enstrom, J., “Proposed Research on Passive Smoking,” Brown and Williamson, July 15, 1996, Bates No. 566944402. Accessed on November 17, 2004. Download athttp://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/tww91d00.

Enstrom, J. “[Letter re: funding for tobacco study within Mormon community.],” Council for Tobacco Research, June 3, 1975, Bates No. 50207891-7892. Accessed on November 17, 2004. Download at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/ldi79c00.

Enstrom, J.; Kabat, G. “Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-1998,” British Medical Journal, Volume 326, May 17, 2003.

[n.a.], “WSA / INBIFO Project Milestone Status Report 000519 – 000615,” Philip Morris, June 22, 2000, Bates No. 2505591306/1310. Accessed on November 17, 2004. Download at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/mqb19c00.

Nelson, BL, “[Letter re: speaking opportunity.],” Philip Morris, May 18, 2000, Bates No. 2073736520. Accessed on November 17, 2004. Download athttp://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/vrx85c00.

[n.a.], “[Search in American Legacy Tobacco Documents Library re: Kabat.],” http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu, November 17, 2004.

Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights

enstrom 2

More Weight for 'Discordant' Claims?

Who Are New Committee Members Listening To?

'CASAC Itself Lacks Necessary Expertise'

INTO THE WEEDS

STUDY QUESTIONED

BLACK SHEEP

SILENCE ISN’T AN ANSWER

5. Discussion

Acknowledgements

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Tobacco Gun for Hire James Enstrom, Willie Soon and the Climate Deniers Attack on Merchants of Doubt

Tobacco funding of research reviewed

History

Stated mission

Structure

Funding of scientific research

Epidemiologic studies

References

Rapid responses for Enstrom and Kabat, 326 (7398) 1057-0