Occupational and environmental health studies with industry funding are more than four times as likely to report negative results, an analysis of hundreds of scientific papers has found.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health also identified a ‘dose-response’ effect, meaning the greater the industry backing the greater the likelihood the study would find nothing to worry about.

Lee Friedman and David Friedman analysed 373 original research articles published in 2012 in 17 peer-reviewed occupational and environmental health journals. They found “a clear relationship between negative results in studies evaluating adverse health outcomes in humans and financial COI [conflicts of interest] arising from relationships with organisations involved in the processing, use, or disposal of industrial and commercial products.”

These studies were 4.31 times as likely to report negative results. Where the backing came from the military, negative results were more than nine times as common. The authors found occupational and environmental health research funded by public agencies didn’t have a bias towards positive results.

The paper, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, notes: “A publication bias can be caused by multiple factors, including inappropriate study design, biased interpretation or presentation of results, legal obstruction preventing an author from publishing results, and failure to report findings that are found to be damaging to the interests of the funding organisation.

“The findings presented in this analysis show a clear association between financial COI and reported findings, and the direction, magnitude, and observed ‘dose-response’ effect of the relationship is consistent with the vast majority of similar studies in other scientific fields (eg. pharmacology, biomedicine, and so on), which demonstrates the need for further research in the field of environmental and occupational health to determine whether this observed association is a product of an underlying publication bias, in particular the omission of studies showing ‘positive’ findings within the public forum.”

• Lee Friedman and Michael Friedman. Financial Conflicts of Interest and Study Results in Environmental and Occupational Health Research, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, volume 58, issue 3, pages 238–247, March 2016 [abstract].

UK-based scientists are playing a prominent role in promoting the continued use of asbestos around the world, according to a new investigative report.

Friendly fibre? notes that while Britain has the highest death rates from asbestos cancers in the world, it is also home to some of the industry’s more turned-to experts. It alleges these have shown a ‘remarkable willingness’ to defend chrysotile, the most common and last remaining form of asbestos in commercial use.

The report, published in the latest edition of Hazards magazine, presents evidence of UK-based scientists authoring scientific papers claiming chrysotile is safe or playing down the risks without declaring their links to the asbestos industry.

Named in the report are Fred Pooley, an emeritus professor at the University of Cardiff, Allen Gibbs, an NHS pathologist from the University of Wales College of Medicine, Ken Donaldson, a particle toxicologist with a long association with the Institute of Occupational Medicine and Royal Society of Chemistry fellow John Hoskins.

Hoskins’ recent activities have also included presentations at International Chrysotile Association (ICA) promotional seminars in India and Vietnam (pictured in a related TV interview, below). Hoskins and Gibbs were also among the authors of ‘Chrysotile revisited’, an ICA-funded defence of chrysotile.

This was used by the industry in its successful campaign to block tighter global rules on chrysotile exports and to defeat planned national bans, including an officially proposed prohibition in Pakistan.

The Hazards report notes: “Supporting those selling chrysotile asbestos in the developing world isn’t a crime. Neither is producing industry-sponsored research to order. Nor is authoring papers that defy the ‘overwhelming’ scientific opinion on a carcinogen like chrysotile. But neglecting to mention those industry affiliations is a big deal. So is producing science that omits inconvenient evidence and that crosses over from plain scientific fact into clear product defence.”

It concludes: “Maybe, just maybe, in the face of what is already the largest industry-created health catastrophe in history, there’s a reason to wonder if this combination of commissions and omissions really does cross the line.”

• Friendly fibre? How the asbestos industry turns to British scientists, Hazards, number 133, March 2016.

Unions are warning that occupational cancer kills 100,000 people every year in the European Union (EU) and are calling for an end to this preventable waste of life.
Europe-wide union federation ETUC says occupational cancer is the most common work-related cause of death, with between 8 and 16 per cent of all cancers in Europe the result of exposures at work.
Criticising the EU’s do-nothing workplace health and safety strategy, Esther Lynch, confederal secretary of the ETUC, said: “Occupational cancer is the ignored epidemic. Workers are dying, literally in the thousands every year, and for 12 long years the EU has done nothing about it. These deaths are the result of preventable workplace exposures.”
She added: “Trade unionists demand binding workplace exposure limits now for these predictable causes of cancer. The Commission needs to stop stalling, delaying until 2020 is irresponsible and unacceptable. The EU should aim for zero workplace cancer. Workers who have been exposed to cancer-causing substances or processes should get regular health checks during and after their employment.”
The ETUC’s list of 50 targeted causes of occupational cancer includes diesel engine exhaust, leather dust, formaldehyde, refractory ceramic fibres, respiratory crystalline silica, cadmium and cadmium compounds, benzo(a)pyrene, chromium VI compounds, ethylene oxide and trichloroethylene.
A new report from ETUC’s research wing, ETUI, identifies more than 70 carcinogenic substances for which it says binding limit values for exposure of workers at the workplace should be set at the EU level.

• Carcinogens that should be subject to binding limits on workers’ exposure, ETUI report no.136, March 2016. Stop cancer at work infographic.

Twenty workers at the Faslane nuclear submarine base in Scotland were exposed to radiation in breach of safety rules, according to an investigation by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

A series of radiation blunders on Trident submarines docked at the Clyde naval port has been revealed in heavily redacted MoD documents obtained by the Nuclear Information Service, a campaign group opposed to nuclear weapons.

Safety procedures were flouted by MoD and contractor Babcock at the Scottish site, the documents show. Breaches included a failure to give visitors radiation badges, a contaminated sponge being taken from a submarine, and another worker being irradiated.

The revelations, which MoD took two years to release, have prompted concern from experts and politicians, who are demanding a major overhaul of safety at Faslane. Prospect, the trade union representing Faslane engineers, promised to support workers worried about radiation poisoning.

The union’s negotiations officer, Richard Hardy, said: “Any incident which involves exposure to radiation is of concern and we will work with Babcock as the employer of our members to ensure that any lessons learned are taken forward as a matter of urgency and also to ensure that staffing and knowledge levels within this critical facility are maintained at the appropriate level.”

Faslane is regulated by an internal MoD watchdog, the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator. It is not licensed by the government’s Office for Nuclear Regulation, which oversees civil nuclear sites. The MoD said safety at the base was paramount and none of the events described in the reports caused harm to the health of any member of staff or to any member of the public.

The UK Health and Safety Executive’s developing approach to occupational hygiene – the measurement of exposures to chemicals, dust and other exposures at work – has come in for scathing criticism.

Hans Kromhout, based at Utrecht University’s Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, said he was ‘amazed’ to hear an HSE presentation on ‘hygiene without numbers’. Writing in the Annals of Occupational Hygiene, he indicated the approach fell in line with the UK government’s attack on ‘red tape.’ He added: “The old mantras of ‘measurements are expensive’, ‘measurements delay control measures’, ‘with statistics you can prove anything’, and of course ‘if you provide enough guidance on best practices everything will be well-controlled’ made up the gist of the message.”

Kromhout noted: “Such numberless interventions may be appealing to policymakers, who face the hefty task of creating meaningful and economically feasible guidelines for workplace health. However, treating workers’ exposure to chemical, biological, or physical agents as a static entity that can be satisfactory controlled by guidance sheets is factually wrong and ignores the intrinsic variability of occupational exposure.”

His paper concludes: “Preventing occupational hygiene to follow the path of demise like its sister discipline occupational medicine in the UK should be our first priority. Cutting red tape – resulting in fewer carefully inspected and controlled European workplaces – may ‘solve’ the issue of the burden of collecting numbers in the short term, but this is likely to produce thousands of preventable cases of occupational disease and untimely disability. ‘Hygiene Without Numbers’ comes with a price and we all know who will have to pick up the bill.”

Kären Clayton, director of HSE’s long latency health risks division, has made a number of recent conference presentations referring to the ‘hygiene without numbers’ theme.

• Hans Kromhout. Commentary: Hygiene without numbers, Annals of Occupational Hygiene, published online ahead of print, 2016. doi:10.1093/annhyg/mev096

Chemical safety rules are not a burden on businesses, but deliver a substantial net benefit, a new report has concluded.

The bigger picture, published by the chemical safety think tank ChemSec, concludes chemical regulation creates opportunities for many progressive companies. It uses case studies to show these companies are not only opting for safer chemicals, but are finding the alternatives are frequently better too. ChemSec said the Europe-wide REACH chemical safety framework “offers an opportunity for Europe’s economy to keep evolving; the question is in which direction.”

Anne-Sofie Andersson, the director of ChemSec, commented: “Do we really want to accommodate laggard companies that aim to keep using hazardous chemicals, which in turn will work against the purpose of circular economy, or do we want to look to the future and stimulate innovative businesses creating safe products fit for a new economy?”

The report notes that using hazardous chemicals is itself a costly option. Frida Hök, ChemSec’s policy advisor, said: “We urge policy makers to include several aspects in their assessments whether to regulate a chemical or not, similar to the way progressive companies do when they assess the benefits of substitution.”

She added: “They do not just consider chemical prices in a straightforward per kilo comparison, rather they look at the bigger picture and include more parameters, like costs of waste handling, worker safety, consumer satisfaction, to name a few. Combining all these factors makes it clear that substitution can give a competitive advantage on the market, making it economically beneficial.”

The report features the case of US firm Lumber Liquidators, whose share price plummeted when it was found their products contained high levels of carcinogenic formaldehyde, leading to the resignation of the company CEO in May 2015. Further revelations this week about formaldehyde emissions from Lumber Liquidators products saw the share price sink still further.

• The bigger picture: Assessing economic aspects of chemicals substitution, ChemSec, February 2016.

Ford Motor Company spent $40 million on scientific studies designed to cast doubt on the link between asbestos brake linings and cancers including mesothelioma, an investigation has found.

The probe by the Washington DC-based Center for Public Integrity found the firm, stung by asbestos disease lawsuits involving mechanics, first retained toxicologist Dennis Paustenbach, then vice-president at the consulting firm Exponent, in 2001.

“Thus began a relationship that, according to recent depositions, has enriched Exponent by $18.2 million and brought another $21 million to Cardno ChemRisk, a similar firm Paustenbach founded in 1985, left and restarted in 2003,” CPI claims. “All told, testimony shows, Ford has spent nearly $40 million funding journal articles and expert testimony concluding there is no evidence brake mechanics are at increased risk of developing mesothelioma.”

This finding, recounted countless times in courtrooms and law offices over the past 15 years, is an attempt at scientific misdirection aimed at extricating Ford from lawsuits, critics say.

John Dement, a professor in Duke University’s Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, said: “Fifteen years ago, I thought the issue of asbestos risk assessment was pretty much defined. All they’ve accomplished is to try to generate doubt where, really, little doubt existed.”

David Egilman, a clinical professor of family medicine at Brown University and editor of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, argues that the papers are deceptive by design. “They can throw a lot of things at the wall and hope something sticks with the jury,” he said. “It forces people like me or other scientists to try to clean up each thing that was thrown at the wall, one at a time. And by the end of the day, that could be confusing to a jury or judge.”

The chemical industry responded to unexpectedly high numbers of brain tumours at a US plant by launching a flawed study to obscure the extent of the problem, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) has found.

The CPI investigation, the latest in its Science for sale series, examined a cancer cluster affected workers at the sprawling Union Carbide plant south of Houston, Texas. More than 7,500 people had worked at the plant, now owned by Dow, since it opened in 1941. It took three years, but by the late 1970s scientists at the federal safety regulator OSHA and its research arm NIOSH, discovered 23 brain tumour deaths there – double the normal rate. It was the largest cluster of work-related brain tumours ever reported, and in 1979 became national news.

The leading suspect was vinyl chloride, a chemical used to make polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic. Industry studies already had found higher-than-expected rates of brain cancer at vinyl chloride plants, and in 1979, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) took the unequivocal position that vinyl chloride caused brain tumours.

“Yet today, a generation later, the scientific literature largely exonerates vinyl chloride,” notes CPI. A 2000 industry review of brain cancer deaths at vinyl chloride plants found that the chemical’s link to brain cancer “remains unclear.” Citing that study and others, IARC in 2008 reversed its position.

However a CPI review of thousands of once-confidential documents showed that “the industry study cited by IARC was flawed, if not rigged.” Although that study was supposed to tally all brain cancer deaths of workers exposed to vinyl chloride, Union Carbide counted only one of the 23 brain tumour deaths in Texas City.

The Center’s investigation found that because of the way industry officials designed the study, it left out workers known to have been exposed to vinyl chloride, including some who had died of brain tumours. Excluding even a few deaths caused by a rare disease can dramatically change the results of a study, flipping a positive association on its head.

CPI warned that the decline in public funding for studies meant the “dominance of industry-funded research for specific chemicals has become more common.”

‘Rented white coats’ – scientists in the pay of vested interests – are defending toxic chemicals with horrific consequences for the workers these substances make ill.

A ‘Science for sale’ investigation by the Washington DC based Center for Public Integrity (CPI) found industry-backed research has exploded “as government-funded science dwindles. Its effects are felt not only in courtrooms but also in regulatory agencies that issue rules to try to prevent disease.”

CPI found substances like asbestos, arsenic and lead, whose deadly properties seem incontrovertible, have become subjects of ceaseless debate. It discovered corporations intent on obscuring damning evidence are steering millions of dollars to scientific consulting firms including Gradient, Chemrisk and Environ, group often employing scientists with links to prestigious institutions like Harvard.

It concludes this ‘tainted science’ is “used to fend off, or lessen the sting of, lawsuits filed on behalf of sick people.” It also stalls regulatory processes “and made it harder for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect workers. It creates doubt where little or none existed.”

The CPI investigation cautions that science on everything from air pollution, to asbestos risks to toxic chemicals like BPA, styrene and n-propyl bromide has been influenced by often ‘ridiculous’ industry-financed studies. But in casting doubt over the impartial science, people dying of related diseases are denied compensation and efforts to better control chemicals at work and in the wider environment are stalled or blocked entirely.

Asbestos financed scientists cited non-existent evidence to support claims made in a paper that downplayed the risks posed by chrysotile (white) asbestos, the only form of asbestos currently in commercial use.

Stefania Boccia and Carlo La Vecchia, the editors-in-chief of the journal Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Public Health (EBPH), published an erratum in their current issue regarding the false information in a 2015 paper, ‘Critical reappraisal of Balangero chrysotile and mesothelioma risk’. Two of the four authors of this paper – Fred Pooley and John Hoskins – are UK-based scientists, while a third, Edward Ilgren, is listed as formerly of the faculty of biological sciences at Oxford University.

Their paper claims that cases of mesothelioma contracted by workers and nearby residents of the Balangero chrysotile asbestos mine in northern Italy were not caused by chrysotile asbestos and that the workers and residents must have been exposed to other forms of asbestos, adding there was “good evidence” this caused the harm. The article states that “Crocidolite and amosite (asbestos) were also transferred to Balangero in jute bags.” But the source cited in the paper to support this claim provides no such evidence, with the erratum admitting it was an “erroneous claim”.

This is the second erratum the article has attracted. An earlier correction came because of undisclosed conflicts of interest, and required Ilgren, Pooley and Hoskins  to disclose their previously unacknowledged ties to the asbestos lobby.

Human rights campaigner Kathleen Ruff, who exposed the errors and undeclared ties, noted: “Asbestos interests spend tens of millions of dollars for scientists to write articles that deny harm caused by chrysotile asbestos and claim that ‘anything but chrysotile (ABC)’ has caused harm. Workers and populations who are exposed to harm from chrysotile asbestos do not have tens of millions of dollars to spend to defend their right to health. Instead, they depend on scientists and scientific organisations to show integrity and uphold scientific and ethical standards.”

She said that the EBPH editors had been reluctant to publish either erratum.

EBPH joint editor Carlo La Vecchia had earlier been forced to publish an erratum to a May 2012 article he co-authored with Paulo Boffetta in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention, admitting their undeclared links to the asbestos industry.  Almost three years after publishing the original paper, both admitted they had acted for asbestos defendants in criminal trials in Italy.

• Edward B Ilgren, Frederick D Pooley, Yumi M Kumiya, John A Hoskins, Critical reappraisal of Balangero chrysotile and mesothelioma risk, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Public Health, volume 12, number 1, 2015. Erratum.