science

October 20, 2022

Secret “Paraquat Papers” reveal corporate tactics to protect weed killer linked to Parkinson’s disease

By Carey Gillam and Aliya Uteuova

For more than 50 years, Swiss chemical giant Syngenta has manufactured and marketed a widely used weed killing chemical called paraquat, and for much of that time the company has been dealing with external concerns that long-term exposure to the chemical may cause the dreaded, incurable brain ailment known as Parkinson’s disease.

Syngenta has repeatedly told customers and regulators that scientific research does not prove a connection between its weed killer and the disease, insisting that the chemical does not readily cross the blood-brain barrier, and does not affect brain cells in ways that cause Parkinson’s.

But a cache of internal corporate documents dating back to the 1950s obtained by The New Lede in a reporting collaboration with the Guardian suggests that the public narrative put forward by Syngenta and the corporate entities that preceded it has at times contradicted the company’s own research and knowledge.

And though the documents reviewed do not show that Syngenta’s scientists and executives accepted and believed that paraquat can cause Parkinson’s, they do show a corporate focus on strategies to protect product sales, refute external scientific research and influence regulators.

In one defensive tactic, the documents lay out how the company worked behind the scenes to try to keep a highly regarded scientist from sitting on an advisory panel for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency is the chief US regulator for paraquat and other pesticides. Company officials wanted to make sure the efforts could not be traced back to Syngenta, the documents show.

And the documents show that insiders feared they could face legal liability for long-term, chronic effects of paraquat as long ago as 1975. One company scientist called the situation “a quite terrible problem,” for which “some plan could be made….”

October 12, 2022

New study says more than 57,400 US sites have PFAS contamination

Scientists have identified more than 57,400 sites in the United States that can be presumed to be contaminated with toxins linked to cancer and other health problems, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The sites identified by the analysis include 49,145 industrial facilities, 4,255 wastewater treatment plants, 3,493 military sites, and 519 airports. A map of the sites is publicly available on a PFAS Project Lab website.

PFAS, an acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of thousands of chemicals commonly used to make such things as food packaging, cookware, fabrics, paints, and fire-fighting foams. Exposures to some types of PFAS have been linked to a range of adverse human health issues, including certain types of cancer, birth defects, and reproductive issues.

October 3, 2022

Postcard from California: State falling short on promise of clean water

By Bill Walker
In 2012, California became the first US state to establish a legal right to clean water.

The law declares that “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.”

The law is less a mandate than an ideal: It requires state agencies to consider the right to water in all decisions, but explicitly says it does not obligate the state to provide or pay for safe water.

Now, ten years since the law’s enactment, a state oversight agency’s investigation shows how far short of its aspiration California has fallen.

In July, a report from the California State Auditor found that nearly 1 million Californians lack access to safe drinking water.

September 30, 2022

New study sees link between pesticide and arthritis

By Grace van Deelen

Exposure to a commonly used pesticide could put people at higher risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis, according to a new study.

The findings, published last week in the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research, looked at potential links between the disease and a class of chemicals known as pyrethroids, which are found in many commercial products used to control insects, including household bug killers, pet sprays and shampoos.

Using data collected as part of a long-term study of US residents called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the research team said they looked at levels of pyrethroids found in urine samples of the more than 4,000 study participants and analyzed how the exposure correlated with incidences of the disease.

The research team, which was led by scientists from Anhui Medical University in Hefei, China, concluded that levels of pyrethroid indicators in the urine of those who had self-reported a rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis were “significantly higher” than those who had not reported the diagnosis.

September 26, 2022

High levels of toxic PFAS found in pesticides used in farming

By Shannon Kelleher

Widely used pesticides contain concerning levels of toxic “forever chemicals” called PFAS, adding to concerns about the human health risks posed by pesticides that are used in growing food, according to a study published last week.

The study found a type of PFAS called PFOS at levels hundreds of thousands of times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers safe in 6 out of 10 insecticides tested, including malathion, one of the most commonly applied insecticides in the world.

PFOS was found at levels ranging from 3,920,000 to 19,200,000 parts-per-trillion (ppt), far higher than the EPA’s health advisory for PFOS in drinking water, which is set at 0.02 ppt. PFOS is no longer manufactured in the US and has been linked to cancer, as well as problems with the liver, thyroid, and immune system.

PFAS chemicals, including PFOS, were also found in soil samples, corn kernels, string beans, and peanuts that had been sprayed with pesticides at a government research laboratory in Lubbock, Texas, where the study was conducted.

“The level of PFAS absorption by plants detected in this study suggests that this exposure pathway poses a major threat to the safety of our food supply,” Tim Whitehouse, executive director of the government watchdog group PEER, wrote in a Sept. 26 letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan.

“For this reason, it is quite possible that PFAS in our food is a bigger PFAS exposure pathway than water. This threat is not merely to the safety of U.S. agriculture but of the world’s food supply, as these pesticides are widely applied in other countries,” Whitehouse wrote in the letter.

September 15, 2022

Pesticides plague Californians of color, new study shows

by Shannon Kelleher

Carmen Obeso was pulling weeds at a strawberry field in Ventura County, California when she smelled something strange. Not far from where she stood, she spotted a machine spraying pesticides. With watering eyes and a sickened stomach, Obeso, a Latina farmworker, reported the incident to her crew leader. After insisting on treatment, she was permitted to visit an on-site health care clinic, where she says a doctor reassured her that she had not been exposed to anything harmful.

Obeso was interviewed by the county agricultural commissioner that same day and was asked if she felt droplets on her skin. She said she had not, since she could not feel the pesticide spray through her long sleeves, hat and face covering. Obeso says that because she said this, her case was never escalated further, and the company expected her back at work the following Monday.

But Obeso didn’t feel better by the next week, nor in the weeks that followed. Her eyes kept watering and began to feel grainy. She knew something was wrong, but the on-site physician still insisted she was fine. Finally, Obeso went to see a different doctor, who confirmed that her eyes had been damaged.

September 8, 2022

Postcard from California: Can new laws slow the “plastics pandemic?”

In July, a 130-foot vessel called the Kwai docked in Sausalito carrying a sickening cargo: 96 tons of plastic garbage and other trash recovered from the Pacific Ocean during a 45-day voyage from Honolulu.

Before arriving in California, the Kwai had sailed through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an area more than twice the size of Texas that has been described as a “cloudy soup” of plastic debris and other trash accumulating in a vortex of swirling ocean currents.

The voyage was a project of the nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute in partnership with the government of the Marshall Islands, which like other island nations is acutely threatened by rising sea levels from the melting of polar ice caps and icebergs. Since 2009, the institute’s Pacific expeditions have recovered nearly 700,000 pounds of trash; 340,000 pounds were collected in 2020 alone.

Each year, approximately 460 million metric tons of these plastics become plastic waste, and more than 90 percent does not get recycled.

September 2, 2022

Roundup litigation at turning point as Bayer rejects “global resolution plan”

By Carey Gillam

Fresh off a fifth-in-a-row trial victory, Monsanto owner Bayer AG is rejecting a proposed “global resolution plan” put forward by plaintiffs’ lawyers as a last chance to try to settle tens of thousands of pending Roundup cancer claims before a wave of new trials get underway, newly filed court documents show.

The company stance comes at a pivotal point in the ongoing nationwide litigation involving plaintiffs who allege they developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) from exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weed killers, such as Roundup.

The group of law firms leading the cases in what is called “multidistrict litigation (MDL)” is asking US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria to approve a plan that would set a 60-day window in which both sides would try to forge a final global settlement that would cover the claims of roughly 30,000 plaintiffs.

If no settlement can be reached, the plaintiffs’ firms want the judge to start the process of dissolving the MDL and clearing waves of cases to go to trial in the states where they originated.

The plaintiffs’ law firms say the current court-approved settlement process, which has been ongoing for two years, is too slow and ties plaintiffs into a mediation process that provides only low-ball settlement offers to plaintiffs while delaying trials.

“The offers made within the settlement program appear to be woefully inadequate. Thus, a substantial number of MDL cases remain unresolved by the settlement program, and it is highly unlikely that these cases will be settled absent global resolution or an imminent trial setting,” the plaintiffs’ firms said in a Sept. 1 court filing.

In opposing the proposal, Monsanto lawyers said the current MDL structure should be maintained and the mediation process kept in place. The company lawyers argued that disbanding the MDL and sending “thousands of current and future cases to district courts throughout this country” would “bring chaos to bear.”

September 1, 2022

Jury finds for Monsanto in St. Louis Roundup cancer case

By Carey Gillam

After brief deliberations, a St. Louis jury on Thursday sided with Monsanto in the latest Roundup cancer trial. The win puts Monsanto and its German owner Bayer AG at five trials won versus three won by plaintiffs. The jury took only a few hours to reach the defense verdict.

The decision in favor of the company came after a lawyer for three cancer patients failed to convince jurors that his clients’ exposure to Monsanto herbicides caused their illnesses, as a lawyer for the company insisted that scientific evidence proves the products are safe.

The five-week trial closed as it began – with starkly different presentations about decades of scientific studies about glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup weed killer and other herbicides, and with evidence about Monsanto efforts to thwart concerns that its products might cause cancer.

The case is part of the sprawling nationwide litigation that began in 2015 after the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. More than 100,000 people in the US have brought claims alleging they developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) after long-term use of Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides, including Roundup.

Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, has settled the majority of the cases, but this was the eighth to go to trial. Many more are scheduled over the next several months and into next year.

August 31, 2022

NOAA is damaging marine life by bottom trawling Gulf of Mexico

By Shannon Kelleher

A U.S. government agency that is supposed to protect ocean resources is instead endangering coral reefs, fish, and other marine life as it collects data from the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental watchdog group alleged this week.

In an Aug. 29 letter, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) called on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to stop scraping the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico with heavy nets for fishery studies. PEER is a Washington, DC-based group that works to expose improper government actions related to the environment.

Peer said it received concerning information from a NOAA scientist about the practice, and a review of NOAA’s own data demonstrates that the “bottom trawling” may inflict irreparable damage on sea floor habitats that can last for years.

“Ironically, NOAA’s own marine protection policies are designed to minimize the very type of damage these research trawls cause,” PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse said in a press release. “We believe that that the damage caused outweighs the marginal research value of these trawls.”

PEER said the trawls involve dragging heavy nets, large metal doors, and chains over the sea floor to catch fish, similar to industrial fishing. The trawls sometimes result in nets abandoned in the ocean, where they can entangle sea turtles and other marine animals, PEER said.