Subject: (Brodeur) NY Times Betrayal of Silent Spring? (fwd)
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 033845 -0600 (CST)
From: "Roy L. Beavers" <rbeavers@llion.org>
To: emfguru <rbeavers@llion.org>
--------------------------------------------------
......The following needs no introduction..... We need Paul back,
reporting on the EMF/EMR saga.....
Roy Beavers (EMFguru)
rbeavers@llion.org................
...It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness...
.................PEOPLE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PROFITS...............
.......DO YOU KNOW OF OTHERS WHO SHOULD BE ON THIS LIST?????..........
Subject: NY Times: Betrayal of Silent Spring?
Note: In the early 1960s Rachel Carson announced to her editor William
Shawn, that she would no longer be contributing to the New Yorker due
to her failing health from cancer. Shawn then asked Brodeur to cover
the environment (at that time he was writing the Talk of the Town
column.) He accepted Shawn's offer and continued writing about the
environment for almost 40 years with pioneering articles and books.
***********************************************************************
March 1, 1999
Whatever Happened to "The New Yorker" that
Published Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring?"
by
Paul Brodeur
The January 11, 1999 issue of THE NEW YORKER contains
a Comment piece (the magazine's equivalent of an editorial) in which a
staff writer named Malcolm Gladwell delivers some opinions about the
carcinogenicity of trichlorethylene (TCE), the chemical that a jury, in
1986, found W. R. Grace & Company responsible for dumping into open
ground and contaminating drinking water supplies in Woburn,
Massachusetts. W. R. Grace subsequently settled the case by paying
eight million dollars to the families of eight leukemia victims (most
of them children), who had lived in the neighborhood where the dumping
had occurred, and had allegedly drunk water from TCE-contaminated
wells.
In his NEW YORKER Comment piece, Gladwell uses the
movie "A Civil Action,"--an account of the Woburn tragedy based upon
Jonathan Harr's book of the same title, and starring John Travolta--as
the starting point for the following statement regarding the
carcinogenicity of TCE:
"It is taken as a given that the chemical allegedly dumped,
trichlorethylene (TCE), is a human carcinogen--even though, in point of
fact, TCE is only a probable human carcinogen: tests have been made on
animals, BUT NO HUMAN-BASED DATA HAVE TIED IT TO CANCER.
On January 15th, after checking with officials of the National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' National Toxicology Program, I
wrote to David Remnick, editor of THE NEW YORKER, THE MAIL, section of the
magazine that publishes letters from readers to the editor. In my letter
to tHE MAIL, I pointed out that several studies published in the
peer-reviewed medical literature had tied TCE to the development of cancer
in humans, and cited by volume, number, and page one that had appeared, in
1998, in the highly respected JOURNAL OF CANCER RESEARCH AND CLINICAL
ONCOLOGY. I went on to point out that more than half a dozen studies
published in the peer-reviewed medical literature show that TCE causes
liver tumors in mice and kidney tumors in rats. The fact that TCE is a
carcinogen in multiple species, Iexplained, is why the International Agency
for Research on Cancer (IARC) has listed it as a probable (more likely than
not) cancer-producing agent in humans. I ended the letter by saying that
TCE was widely used in the electronic industry as a solvent for cleaning
circuit boards.
On January 22nd, an associate editor at "The New Yorker",
to whom Remnick had referred my letter, wrote to inform me
that the magazine's fact checker had done some further research, and
that "The study you cite was the only one we could find that turned up
link between TCE and cancer." The associate editor then cited a
1991 study that had been conducted by researchers from the National
Cancer Institute, and had appeared in the prestigious BRITISH HOURNAL OF
MEDICINE which showed that "'Detailed analysis of
the 6,929 employees [of an aircraft maintenance facility]
occupationally exposed to trichlorethylene... did not show any
significant or persuasive association' between TCE and cancer of any
type." She went on to inform me that "Given that there is the one
study showing a link, what Gladwell wrote may seem like a semantic
wriggle, but I really think that it isn't, and that there isn't enough
data to show a 'tie.'" She told me that as a result the magazine would
not be able to run my letter.
During the next ten days, I was travelling. Before leaving home,
However, I asked a medical-scientist friend to download MEDLINE and
provide me with copies of any studies that had been published in the
peer-reviewed medical and scientific literature regarding the capacity
of TCE to produce cancer or other disease in humans. When I returned,
a thick envelope awaited me. It contained copies or abstracts of 42
studies--ten of which suggested that TCE was carcinogenic in humans.
One of the studies was entitled "An Analysis of Contaminated Well Water
and Health Effects in Woburn, Massachusetts." It had been published in
September, 1986, in Volume 81, No. 395 of the JOURNAL OF THE
AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION and it had been conducted by
researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and Boston's
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who had found that drinking water from
the very same TCE-contaminated wells described in "A Civil Action" was
at least partly responsible for elevated incidence rates of childhood
leukemia in Woburn.
Among the other studies downloaded from MEDLINE was a copy of the 1991
investigation cited by THE NEW YORKER associate editor
as having shown no persuasive association between TCE and cancer of any
type, as well as a copy of a follow-up study of the same workers that
had been conducted by researchers for the National Cancer Institute
(NCI), and published in "Occupational and Environmental
Medicine". Many of the results were quite interesting. For example, the
1991 study found almost twice as many deaths as expected from cancer of the
biliary passages and the liver among white male workers exposed to TCE,
who had died after 1980. In the follow-up study, non- significant excesses
for non-Hodgkins lymphoma and for cancers of the oesophagus, colon,
primary liver, breast, cervix, kidney, and bone were found workers exposed
to TCE. In the conclusion section of the follow-up study, the NCI
researchers stated that their findings did not "strongly support a causal
link with trichlorethylene because the associations were not significant,
not clearly dose related, and inconsistent between men and women."
However, they went on to declare that "Because findings from
experimental investigations and other epidemiological studies on
solvents other than trichlorethylene provide some biological
plausibility, the suggested links between these chemicals and
non-Hodgkins lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and breast cancer found here
deserve further attention."
Meanwhile, the issue of THE NEW YORKER dated February
8 had come out with an article entitled "The Cancer-Cluster Myth" by
Atul Gawande, a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health,
who declared in a parenthetical statement on page 36 that a sevenfold
increase in the occurrence of a cancer is "a rate of increase not
considered particularly high by epidemiologists."
On February 8, I wrote a second letter to David Remnick in which I
enclosed the abstracts or copies of five studies showing a link between
exposure to trichlorethylene and the development of cancer in humans.
I drew his attention to the fact that one of these studies dealt with
the wells in Woburn that W. R. Grace had been found responsible for
contaminating with TCE. I pointed out that since TCE and similar
halogenated hydrocarbons are widely used as pesticides, solvents,
cleaning agents, degreasing agents, cutting fluids, propellants, and
refrigerants, millions of Americans are being exposed to them on a
daily basis.
In my letter of February 8, I went on to tell Remnick that Gawande's
assertion in "The Cancer-Cluster Myth" that a sevenfold increase in the
occurrence of a cancer is "a rate of increase not considered particularly
high by epidemiologists" was absurd on the face of it. In this regard, I
drew his attention to a second letter to THE MAIL that I was enclosing.
The final paragraph of my letter to Remnick read as follows:
"Finally, let me say that I trust my pointing out errors of fact in two
recent issues of THE NEWYORKER will be taken by you in the spirit in which
it has been given. I have high regard for the magazine on whose staff I
served for thirty-eight years, and I wish you great success in your
stewardship of it."
In my accompanying letter to THE MAIL, I once again
pointed out that Gladwell was in error when he claimed that no
human-based data have tied trichlorethylene to cancer, and cited five
medical or scientific journals in which such data had been published in
recent years. As for Gawande's dismissal of the importance of a
sevenfold increase in the occurrence of a cancer, I pointed out that
"Non-smoking workers exposed to asbestos--one of the most deadly
industrial carcinogens ever discovered--suffer a fivefold increase in
lung cancer," and that "one-pack-a-day smokers of cigarettes--far and
away the most deadly carcinogen ever discovered--suffer a tenfold
increased incidence of lung cancer." After reminding the reader that
occupational exposure to asbestos has killed at least half a million
workers in America in recent years, and that cigarettes have and will
continue to kill millions upon millions of people in the general
population, I pointed out that "Obviously...a sevenfold increase in the
occurrence of a cancer caused by a single carcinogen has to be
considered dangerously high, particularly if significant numbers of
people are exposed to that carcinogen."
My letter to THE MAILconcluded as follows:
"Not to consider it [a sevenfold increase] as such would be a way of
overlooking the fact that one in every three American men and one out
of every four American women is today developing cancer in his or her
lifetime. There's a word for that kind of incidence--no matter what
the disease. The word is epidemic."
On February 10, David Remnick wrote me a letter of reply that read
as follows:
"Thank you for your letters and the attached excerpts and information.
It seems to me what we have here is not a matter of right and wrong and
fact versus, well, something else, but rather a legitimate debate in
which you disagree with both Gladwell and Gawande. You ask if I mind
your sending them: Of course, I don't. But I also trust you know I
am sincere when I say that we went to great lengths to ensure the
accuracy, as best it can be established, of both pieces. The
traditions at The New Yorker have not changed where
that is concerned."
Alas, Mr. Remnick, they have. Slowly but surely, ever since Tina
Brown took over the magazine in the autumn of 1992.
Under the 35-year editorship of William Shawn, from 1952 to 1987,and
under the five-year editorship of Robert Gottlieb, from 1987 to 1992,
errors of such magnitude as I have pointed out to you would have been
highly unlikely. But, had they occurred, for the editor of THE NEW YORKER
not to have acknowledged them--either in a Department of Amplification or a
statement of correction issued to avoid the appearance of downgrading a
major potential public health hazard--would have been unthinkable.
The magazine that published Rachel Carson's seminal "Silent Spring"
has lost its way. It is not too late, however, for you to bring it
back.
**************************************************************
Ed note:
Paul Brodeur was a staff writer at THE NEW YORKER for almost forrty years.
In 1968, he alerted the nation to the massive public health hazard posed by
asbestos, and has written four books on that subject, including "Expendable
Americans" and "Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial."
The articles in THE NEW YORKER upon which those books were based won a
National Magazine Award, a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, and the Silver
Gavel Award of the American Bar Association.
Brodeur's pioneering articles on the destruction of the ozone
layer by man-made chemicals won the Journalism Award of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. As a result of these
articles, he was named to the United Nations Environment Program's
Global 500 Roll of Honour for outstanding environmental achievements.
His articles on the health hazards associated with exposure to
microwave radiation were published as a book entitled "The Zapping of
America," which was listed in the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW as one of the
notable books of 1977. His three-part series of articles on the cancer
hazard associated with exposure to the electromagnetic fields given off by
power lines won a public service award from the American Society of
Professional Journalists. These articles were published as a book
entitled "Currents of Death." Subsequent articles on the power-line
hazard that appeared in THE NEW YORKER were published as a book entitled
"The Great Power-Line Cover-Up."
Brodeur's memoir, "Secrets: A Writer in the Cold War," was
published in 1997. It recounts his experiences as a counter-intelligence
agent in Post-War Germany and as a longtime staff writer at THE NEW
YORKER, and it was listed in the http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.feb.se/EMF-L/EMF-L.html