Fred Wilcox - Waiting for an Army to Die

The Missouri incident to which Dr. Westing refers occurred in 1971 at three horse arenas in eastern Missouri that had been sprayed with waste oil containing approximately 328 parts per million dioxin. The oil came from a plant that produced 2,4,5-T for use in Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and later made hexachlorophene. Shortly before the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company, which leased the plant, went out of business, it hired a waste hauler to remove eighteen thousand gallons of contaminated oil. The hauler, who later signed an affidavit declaring he was unaware that the oil contained dioxin, sprayed five thousand gallons of his cargo on the three horse arenas to keep down dust.

According to Thomas Whiteside, of the eighty-five horses exercised in the arenas, fifty-eight horses became ill and forty-three died. [25] The total number of dead horses was approximately sixty-two. At least twenty-six pregnant mares aborted, and foals exposed in utero died at birth or soon after. Six of the foals were born with birth deformities. In addition to the horses, hundreds of rodents, birds, cats, and dogs died, ten people reported rashes, headaches, and diarrhea, and two children were hospitalized, one of them with an inflamed kidney and internal bleeding. Twelve years later the children are still ill and have been warned by doctors that they “face an increased risk of cancer and birth defects.” 6

On October 1982, the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed that significant levels of dioxin have been found in fourteen sites in Missouri, and that eleven more sites in that state may contain dangerous amounts of dioxin. The EPA also said that approximately forty-eight pounds of dioxin contained in the waste oil from Northeastern Pharmaceutical are missing. Investigators have found dioxin in fish caught up to eighty miles downstream from the plant, and dangerous levels of dioxin have been discovered in a residential area where soil removed from the three horse arenas was deposited in 1973.

Most disturbing about the Missouri incident is that the company responsible for disposing of the toxic waste did so without attempting to find out what effect the chemicals might have on the environment, a practice so widespread in the United States that at least one state, New York, has trained an armed task force to prevent the continued dumping of toxic wastes into its landfills, lakes, rivers, and forests. Shortly before the first members of the task force completed their training, dioxin had been discovered in striped bass caught in the Hudson River, and in forty-five fish samples taken from Lake Ontario.

Can the Environmental Protection Agency, inadequately funded and understaffed, really protect the American environment from the deluge of pesticides, herbicides, and other toxic substances that, their manufacturers argue, are necessary if we are to “maintain economic growth and a high standard of living”? There is reason to believe that it cannot. In 1972, with the passage of the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act (FEPCA), Congress provided the EPA with a legal basis by which it could “duly process all new pesticide registration applications and pesticide residue tolerance petitions,” as well as review and, “only if compatible with human and environmental health,” register some of the approximately fifty thousand pesticides previously registered over the past thirty years. Congress set October 1976 as the deadline for the completion of this Herculean task.

Under FEPCA, the EPA was responsible for determining whether pesticides registered would “perform their intended function without unreasonable adverse effects” on human health and the environment.

In addition to more conventional toxicity data, pesticide companies were required under FEPCA to show: 1) animal testing data, indicating whether their products could cause birth defects, tumors, and interference with reproductive capacity or other harmful chronic effects and 2) data on the effects of exposure to fish, mammals and birds. If the administrator of the EPA determines through a risk/benefit analysis of a certain pesticide that it causes “unreasonable adverse effects” he or she may “restrict, suspend, or cancel the use of the pesticide.” 7

Faced with a monumental task and a minimum of human power to accomplish it, the EPA began devising shortcuts for reviewing data, one of which was the organization of products of a similar chemical structure into “batches.” Thus the EPA managed to cut down the number of products it reviewed from the fifty thousand that are actually on the market to the fourteen hundred active ingredients in those products—a practice that failed to consider either the possible consequences of combining these ingredients in one product or the toxic properties of what scientists have called “inert” ingredients. Short of qualified staff that could evaluate complicated data on the effects of a particular substance on laboratory animals, the EPA’s task force resorted to a cursory examination of data that had been submitted to the agency by manufacturers in support of reregistration of their products. Although manufacturers often failed to include any chronic toxicity testing in their “research conclusions,” the EPA staff routinely decided the safety of a product on the basis of the manufacturer’s “research.” This “cooperation” continued in spite of the fact that “in virtually every instance, independent pathologists diagnosed many more cancerous and precancerous tumors in the test animals than did the original manufacturer’s laboratory pathologists.” 8

The story of 2,4-D reregistration by the EPA in April 1976 is typical of the EPA’s casual and cursory approach to the reregistration of pesticides.

On April 8, 1976, EPA mailed reregistration guideline packages to manufacturers of 670 products containing 2,4-D for which more than 45 residue tolerances have been granted on such foods as dairy milk, eggs, poultry, meat, corn, apples, vegetables, and citrus fruits. The guidance packages cited a two-year rat and dog feeding study performed by FDA in 1963 as “sufficient” to satisfy the “chronic” safety testing requirements for reregistration. Yet a summary report on the study in EPA’s files stated that there was “increased tumor formation” in the rats… An independent pathologist, who reviewed the raw data on the study at the request of subcommittee staff, concluded that 2,4-D “is carcinogenic in rats.” 9

Despite its rather slipshod methods of determining whether a particular chemical should be reregistered, the EPA cannot be held responsible for the quality of the data upon which it must base its decisions. Nor can one hold the EPA accountable for the fact that some of the data it has received is not only poor in quality but fraudulent . According to a federal grand jury’s indictments against four former officials of Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories, once considered one of the most important industrial laboratories in America, the company fabricated results of two cancer studies on the herbicide Sencor and the insecticide Nemacur, submitting the results of “tests” to the EPA in support of registration of those products.

The indictment also accuses the officials of “concealing the fact that TCC (trichlorocarbanilide), an antibacterial agent used in deodorant soaps manufactured by Monsanto Corp., caused atrophy in the testes at the lowest dose tested in mice…” 10“They also fabricated results of blood and urine studies which were never performed on Syntex Corp.’s anti-arthritic drug Naprosyn, according to the indictment.” 11Curiously enough, even though the EPA may have based its decision to register a product or products on falsified laboratory data, this is not considered grounds for removing the product from the market. After receiving permission from the EPA, Mobay, a Pittsburgh-based subsidiary of Bayer AG of West Germany, continued selling Sencor and Nemacur. 12