Rice and Arsenic
I have reproduced below an article from Scientific American in entirety, because of its Public Health Implication to US (Ceylon, India and China).
Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity
It is happening right under our nose, in Sri-Lanka and our politicians also like to hide the true scientific facts.
Unfortunately it takes years for the clinical effects to manifest.
Farmers are the first to be affected and then later the consumers, (rice included).
This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a
nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington,
D.C.
It is part of a collaboration among the Center for Public
Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting and Michigan Radio.
It
was featured on Reveal, a new program from the Center for
Investigative Reporting and PRX.
MOUNT VERNON, Maine—Living in the lush, wooded countryside with
fresh New England air, Wendy Brennan never imagined her family might
be consuming poison every day. But when she signed up for a research
study offering a free T-shirt and a water-quality test, she was
stunned to discover that her private well contained arsenic.
“My eldest daughter said...‘You’re feeding us rat poison.’
I said, ‘Not really,’ but I guess essentially...that is what
you’re doing. You’re poisoning your kids,” Brennan lamented in
her thick Maine accent. “I felt bad for not knowing it.”
Brennan is not alone. Urine samples collected by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention from volunteers reveal that most
Americans regularly consume small amounts of arsenic.
It’s not just
in water; it’s also in some of the foods we eat and beverages we
drink, such as rice, fruit juice, beer and wine.
Under orders from a Republican-controlled Congress, the
Environmental Protection Agency in 2001 established a new
drinking-water standard to try to limit people’s exposure to
arsenic. But a growing body of research since then has raised
questions about whether the standard is adequate.
The EPA has been prepared to say since 2008, based on its review
of independent science, that arsenic is 17 times more potent as a
carcinogen than the agency now reports. Women are especially
vulnerable. Agency scientists calculated that if 100,000 women
consumed the legal limit of arsenic every day, 730 of them would
eventually get bladder or lung cancer from it.
After years of research and delays, the EPA was on the verge of
making its findings official by 2012. Once the science was complete,
the agency could review the drinking water standard. But an
investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that one
member of Congress effectively blocked the release of the EPA
findings and any new regulations for years.
It is a battle between politics and science. Mining companies and
rice producers, which could be hurt by the EPA’s findings, lobbied
against them. But some of the most aggressive lobbying came from two
pesticide companies that sell a weed killer containing arsenic.
The EPA had reached an agreement with those companies to ban most
uses of their herbicide by the end of last year. But the agreement
was conditioned on the EPA’s completing its scientific review. The
delay by Congress caused the EPA to suspend its ban. The weed killer,
called MSMA, remains on the market.
Turning to a powerful lawmaker for help is one tactic in an
arsenal used by industry to virtually paralyze EPA scientists who
evaluate toxic chemicals. In 2009, President Obama signed an
executive memorandum to try to stop political interference with
science. That same year, the EPA unveiled an ambitious plan to
evaluate far more chemicals each year than had been done in either
the Bush or Clinton administrations.
But in 2012 and 2013, the EPA has managed to complete only six
scientific evaluations of toxic chemicals, creating a backlog of 47
ongoing assessments. It’s a track record no better than past
administrations. The Center found that a key reason for this is the
intervention by a single member of Congress.
The story of arsenic shows how easily industry thwarted the
Obama’s administration’s effort to prevent interference with
science.
A ubiquitous poison
Arsenic is virtually
synonymous with poison. But it’s also everywhere, found naturally
in the Earth’s crust. Even if the toxin were eliminated from
drinking water, people would still consume it in food, a more vexing
problem to address.
Scientists are debating whether there is such a thing as a safe
level of arsenic. New research has raised questions whether even low
levels of arsenic can be harmful, especially to children and fetuses.
The findings of the study Wendy Brennan enrolled in were published
in April. Researchers from Columbia University gave IQ tests to about
270 grade-school children in Maine. They also checked to see if there
was arsenic in their tap water at home. Maine is known as a hot spot
for arsenic in groundwater.
The researchers found that children who drank water with
arsenic—even at levels below the current EPA drinking water
standard—had an average IQ deficit of six points compared to
children who drank water with virtually no arsenic.
The findings are eerily similar to studies of lead, a toxin
considered so dangerous to children that it was removed from paint
and gasoline decades ago. Other studies have linked arsenic to a wide
variety of other ailments, including cancer, heart disease, strokes
and diabetes.
“I jokingly say that arsenic makes lead look like a vitamin,”
said Joseph Graziano, a Columbia professor who headed the Maine
research. “Because the lead effects are limited to just a couple of
organ systems—brain, blood, kidney. The arsenic effects just sweep
across the body and impact everything that’s going on, every organ
system.”
For 15 years, Brennan and her family drank water with arsenic
levels five times greater than the current drinking-water standard.
She has no way of knowing what effect this has had on her two
daughters.
Carrington Brennan, now 14, says it bothers her to think that
drinking water may have affected her intelligence. “It shocked and
scared me, I guess,” she said. “I think it should be prevented in
future cases.”
Chemical reviews lag
It’s the job of the EPA
to protect the public from toxic chemicals. To do that, the agency
must first review the scientific literature to determine which
chemicals are harmful and at what doses. This duty falls on an
obscure program with a drab bureaucratic name, the Integrated Risk
Information System (IRIS).
There are tens of thousands of chemicals on the market and by one
estimate, 700 new chemicals are introduced every year. Yet since
1987, IRIS has completed evaluations on only 557 of them.
The last time IRIS analyzed arsenic was in 1988, just a year
before the Safe Drinking Water Act called for the EPA to set a new
drinking-water standard for the toxin. The EPA missed that deadline,
so in 1996, a Republican-controlled Congress gave the agency five
more years to comply. The EPA turned to the prestigious National
Academy of Sciences for help. Scientists there reviewed the EPA’s
1988 analysis. They said it was badly out of date and underestimated
the risk of arsenic.
After the EPA set a new drinking-water standard in 2001, the IRIS
program moved to update its analysis of arsenic. EPA scientists spent
five years reviewing hundred of studies before sending a draft report
to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget in October
2008.
EPA scientists concluded that arsenic was 17 times more potent as
a carcinogen than the agency currently reports. Put another way, the
risk of someone eventually getting cancer from drinking the legal
limit of arsenic every day is 60 times greater than any other toxin
regulated by drinking-water laws.
The White House at that point had become a nemesis of EPA
scientists, requiring them to clear their science through OMB
starting in 2004. Scientific assessments were often sent to OMB only
to die, seemingly the victim of political influence. A stinging
report by the Government Accountability Office in 2008 said that IRIS
was at serious risk of becoming obsolete, unable to keep up with the
workload or the science. The GAO noted that in 2007 the EPA sent 16
assessments to OMB, where they got held up. That year, the agency
managed to complete only two assessments.
Within five months of Obama taking office, the EPA wrested back
control of the process. The agency also set up an ambitious timetable
to complete toxic-chemical assessments within two years. By that
point, the arsenic assessment had already been in the works for six.
The arsenic draft had to go through an external peer-review before
being considered valid. But IRIS officials were optimistic about
completing it by the end of 2011.
Meanwhile, in an entirely different office within the EPA,
negotiations were under way that would ultimately prevent IRIS from
finishing its work.
Groundwater fears
Veterans Community Park is
one of the busiest parks in Naples, Fla., with softball fields,
basketball and tennis courts and a playground. In early 2004, Collier
County began spraying the herbicide MSMA on the fields to control
weeds. But soon, tests detected high levels of arsenic in the
groundwater.
It wasn’t the first time alarms had sounded about MSMA. Tests at
nine golf courses using the weed killer had detected significant
levels of arsenic in shallow groundwater and ponds, a concern because
90 percent of all drinking water in Florida comes from wells. The EPA
had already banned all pesticides containing inorganic arsenic,
considered to be the most toxic form of the metal. But evidence
showed that the organic arsenic in MSMA converts to inorganic in
soil. EPA scientists feared that MSMA could be contaminating drinking
water.
In 2006, the EPA’s Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic
Substances announced plans to ban all uses of herbicides containing
arsenic and began negotiating with the few companies still selling
them. Within three years, they had reached an agreement. The
pesticide companies would phase out all uses of MSMA, except on
cotton fields, by the end of 2013.
But the agreement included a condition. It required the EPA to
complete a scientific review of arsenic before the ban could take
effect. The pesticide office apparently assumed that the IRIS
assessment, then six years in the making, would be done by then.
In all likelihood, IRIS would have met the deadline. But two
pesticide companies and their lobbyist turned to Congress.
The two companies are Drexel Chemical Co. of Memphis, Tenn., and
Luxembourg-Pamol, whose parent, Luxembourg Industries, is based in
Tel Aviv, Israel. Both are family-owned. Luxembourg-Pamol doesn’t
release sales figures; Drexel Chemical says its sales exceed $100
million a year.
Though anyone can buy MSMA, the label cautions that it should be
sprayed only on cotton fields, sod farms, highway shoulders and golf
courses. The market for MSMA is likely worth several million dollars
for these companies. The EPA estimated in 2006 that about 3 million
pounds of MSMA and another similar compound were sold each year in
the United States. The weed killer retails for about $5 a pound.
The companies joined forces to hire Charlie Grizzle, a lobbyist
who worked as an EPA assistant administrator during the President
George H. W. Bush era. When the EPA released a public draft of its
arsenic assessment in February 2010, the pesticide companies
countered with a unique argument.
Michal Eldan, a vice president at Luxembourg-Pamol, said her
company had the scientific literature scoured and found 300 studies
published since 2007 that the EPA had not included in the draft.
“If the report is not up to date, a risk assessment cannot be
based on that,” Eldan said in an interview. “We mentioned that
because this is the one inarguable detail. You can argue about
toxicity. You can argue about risk assessment. You can’t argue
about 300 publications that are missing from the list of references.”
Grizzle added, “I think it’s safe to say that the missing 300
studies, if you will
In August 2010, 15 Republicans in the House and Senate made that
very argument in a letter to then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson: “We
are informed that there are nearly 300 studies in the scientific
literature on arsenic published since 2007 that were not included in
the agency’s evaluation. We find that troubling and are concerned
that this could allow critics to conclude that the agency is
‘cherry-picking’ data to support its conclusions."
After reading the letter, Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at
Consumers Union who has followed the arsenic review closely, said,
“This is a really dishonest couple of sentences ... That’s
because the [EPA] document was written in early 2008, and the only
reason the public is seeing it [in 2010] is because OMB sat on it.”
“It’s not cherry-picking the data. When the document was
written, those studies hadn’t been published yet,” he said.
Yet the missing publications ultimately became the rationale for
Congress to derail the EPA’s assessment. In July 2011, language
appeared in a House Appropriations Committee report ordering the EPA
to take no action on its arsenic assessment and turn the job over to
the National Academy of Sciences. The report instructed the academy
to include “the 300 studies in the published scientific literature
EPA failed to review for its 2010 draft assessment.”
Committee reports explain how to implement a bill. Government
agencies could ignore them, but they seldom do, for fear of angering
congressional leaders who control funding. Burying language in a
report — as opposed to the bill itself—was the same technique
once used for earmarks. Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for
Common Sense, a nonprofit group that closely monitors the
Appropriations Committee, said rank-and-file members of the House
cannot strike or amend language in a report. In fact, he said, only a
couple of lawmakers in leadership would likely know who put the
language in the report.
Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat on the subcommittee that
oversees EPA funding, said she has no way of knowing who is
responsible for trying to kill the arsenic assessment. “It’s
happening more and more in this Congress that we see less and less of
what goes on behind the scenes, that members aren’t informed until
the last minute,” she said. “So things like this, major policy
changes like this, can happen somewhat in the dark of the night with
very little information to the public.”
So, who did it? All the evidence from the Center’s investigation
pointed to one congressman: Mike Simpson of Idaho.
Simpson was one of the Republicans who signed the letter to the
EPA administrator complaining about the missing 300 studies. He was
the chairman of the subcommittee that controlled funding for the EPA,
where the language first appeared. He was also a member of another
committee where the language surfaced again in a different report. He
even asked the EPA administrator about arsenic at a subcommittee
hearing.
Simpson, who worked as a dentist and state legislator before
entering Congress, is a frequent critic of the EPA. But in the 2012
and 2014 election campaigns, he has been portrayed as too liberal by
Tea Party candidates funded by the right-wing Club for Growth.
In a brief interview outside his Capitol Hill office, Simpson
accepted credit for instructing the EPA to stop work on its arsenic
assessment. “I’m worried about drinking water and small
communities trying to meet standards that they can’t meet,” he
said. “So we want the Academy of Science to look at how they come
up with their science.”
Simpson said he didn’t know that his actions kept a weed killer
containing arsenic on the market. He denied that the pesticide
companies lobbied him for the delay. But lobbyist Grizzle offered a
different account. “I was part of a group that met with the
congressman and his staff a number of years ago on our concerns,”
Grizzle said, adding that there were four or five other lobbyists in
that meeting but he couldn’t remember who they were.
Other organizations that disclosed lobbying the EPA and Congress
on the agency’s arsenic evaluation were the U.S. Rice Federation;
the Mulch and Soil Council; the Association of California Water
Agencies; and the National Mining Association, including the mining
companies Arch Coal and Rio Tinto.
Grizzle began making donations to Simpson’s re-election campaign
in January 2011, a few months before Simpson took action to delay the
arsenic assessment. Since then, Grizzle has given a total of $7,500.
That’s more than he’s given in that time to any other candidate.
Asked if the contributions were made in exchange for the delay,
Grizzle said, “I don’t see a connection. I’ve been a friend and
supporter of Congressman Simpson for a long time.” When Simpson was
asked if he was aware of the donations, he terminated the interview,
saying, “I have no idea. But I’ve got a hearing.”
Industry playbook
The National Academy of
Sciences was created during the Civil War to provide objective advice
from the nation’s most highly regarded scientists. In 1999 and
2001, the academy twice reviewed the EPA’s analysis of arsenic and
concluded it badly underestimated the risk. The EPA’s draft that
has been delayed was built in part off the academy’s critique.
Taking scientific assessments out of the hands of the EPA and
giving them to the academy has become a tactic to delay regulations,
said Charles Fox, a former EPA assistant administrator who oversaw
the development of a new drinking water standard for arsenic. “The
standard playbook that industry uses first begins with questioning
the science, and they can question the science in any one of a number
of different forms,” he said. “There is a scientific advisory
board at EPA. There’s the National Academy of Sciences.”
But endless delays to perfect the science can jeopardize public
health, Fox said. “We always as regulators had to do our best to
make decisions based on the best available science we had at the
time. Science will always improve and you can always revisit that
decision down the road, but fundamentally we have an obligation to
protect public health in the environment, and that decision needs to
be made on the best science that you have today.”
In a letter last October telling buyers that the EPA had lifted
its ban for at least three years, the MSMA manufacturers said in a
joint statement that they “fully expect the NAS review to result in
a less stringent risk value for human exposure to inorganic arsenic.”
If so, the companies said, they are confident the threat of a ban
will be lifted permanently and the EPA may even allow other uses of
MSMA.
The two manufacturers of the herbicide are still trying to
influence the scientific assessment. The National Academy held a
meeting in April 2013 to review the science on arsenic. It invited 14
scientists to give presentations. Two of those scientists are funded
by Drexel and Luxembourg-Pamol, which lobbied Simpson to delay the
EPA.
The academy doesn’t require presenters to disclose their
financial ties; some choose to do so and some don’t. Neither of the
scientists funded by the pesticide companies disclosed their ties at
the meeting.
Dr. Samuel Cohen, a professor at the University of Nebraska
College of Medicine, told the panel that inorganic arsenic doesn't
cause cancer or any other diseases in people below a certain
threshold dose, which he suggests is substantially higher than the
current drinking water standard. Cohen has been funded by the MSMA
manufacturers for more than a decade, according to disclosures in
published articles.
Barbara Beck, who works for Gradient, a scientific consulting firm
often hired by industry, also gave a presentation without disclosing
her ties.
Eldan, with Luxembourg-Pamol, acknowledged that both scientists
are paid by her company. Beck prepared a 32-page report on the EPA’s
arsenic assessment. Eldan said that Beck and Cohen disclose their
ties in published articles in scientific journals. In some cases,
Eldan, a scientist herself, is listed as a co-author.
Cohen said in an email that he disclosed his funding in published
articles that he provided to the academy. Records show that Cohen
sent the academy three articles that listed funding only from the
“Arsenic Science Task Force,” with no further explanation about
the task force.
Beck said, “Although I have done work for the Organic Arsenical
Products Task Force [composed of the two pesticide companies], my
presence and presentation at the April 2013 meeting were funded
wholly by Gradient …. At both meetings, I am solely responsible for
my comments.”
Joseph Graziano, who chairs the National Academy of Sciences panel
on arsenic, said he hadn’t realized that Beck and Cohen were being
funded by the pesticide companies when they spoke at the workshop. “I
was not aware of that,” he said, “and I don’t think the
committee was aware of it.”
Congress rescues the formaldehyde industry
This
is not the first time Congress has pressured the EPA to hand over
science on toxic chemicals to the National Academy. In 2009, Sen.
David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana, held up the nomination of
a top EPA official as leverage to force the agency to have the
academy review the risks of formaldehyde.
The World Health Organization’s International Agency for
Research on Cancer and the National Institute of Health’s National
Toxicology Program both say that formaldehyde can cause cancer. The
EPA was preparing to say the same.
Yet the agency ultimately relented to Vitter’s demand. After
months of review, the academy criticized the IRIS draft on
formaldehyde for being repetitive, poorly organized and failing to
clearly present all the evidence of its findings. The panel
recommended the EPA redo the draft to be more clear and concise.
Recognizing that the EPA was having a problem in completing
assessments, the academy said it wasn’t calling for a delay.
Soon, however, the formaldehyde industry was turning to Congress
to help it delay the assessment. Right next to Simpson’s language
in the committee report about delaying the arsenic assessment was
another set of instructions to the EPA. This time, IRIS was told to
apply the academy’s recommendations on formaldehyde to all ongoing
and future assessments. When asked if he requested the language,
Grizzle acknowledged only that he was one of the lobbyists for the
Formaldehyde Council, an arm of the industry.
The EPA said in a report to Congress it won’t start all its
assessments over from scratch, but it will try to incorporate the
academy’s recommendations. As a result, the 47 pending reviews have
been further delayed.
IRIS Director Vincent Cogliano said the changes will lead to more
rigorous assessments that should have an easier time getting through
peer review. When asked how IRIS responds to political pressure, he
said he had little control over that. “We’re doing our best to
keep our assessments focused on the science,” he said. “What
happens after that is not part of the IRIS process.”
‘It’s not their right’
Eldan said people
shouldn’t be worried about her company’s weed killer. “To be
honest, we believe that this is a good product, that it does not pose
a concern to health and the environment,” she said. Clearing weeds
from the sides of highways can be a safety issue, she said, because
tall plants can block vision. Even on golf courses, there are safety
concerns, she said. “The weeds have a tendency to spread. If you
don’t use herbicides, it’s not only one weed. They can cover the
golf course,” Eldan said. “The players can stumble on them.”
Meanwhile, in Maine, Wendy Brennan worries about all the years her
family was drinking arsenic-tainted water. “I know a lot of people
around the area that have had cancer, and so you always think,
‘Jesus, that's going to be my kids. It’s going to be me or my
husband,’ ” Brennan said.
Her congresswoman, Pingree, also worries about her constituents.
“When you have a toxic chemical in the environment that could be
affecting child development or people who could eventually be
contracting cancer from their exposure to this, we shouldn’t be
delaying,” Pingree said.
She fears that after the National Academy of Sciences completes
its review, the pesticide companies will find another delaying
tactic. “That’s the sad part; there’s nothing to stop Congress
from finding another roadblock to delay,” Pingree said. “Congress
can say, ‘Well, here’s another 200 studies, you better review
them.’ ”
Brennan doesn’t understand why there’s a need to wait. “If
they’ve already got some proof that it’s 17 times more potent,
you’d think they’d want to get the information they had out and
then continue to explore scientifically more,” she said. “We need
to know what’s going on with our drinking water. If somebody wants
to not let us know because they want to keep some pesticides making
money for five more years…it's not their right. It’s not their
body. It’s not their decision.”
Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity
