Subject:  More about Sir Richard Doll and the ACSH (Dalen).
Date:     Thu, 08 Mar 2001 050713 -0600
From:     Roy Beavers 
To:       guru 
--------------------------------------------------

........From EMF-L.......

Things get curiouser and curiouser.....!!!  I believe this is a very
worthwhile discussion......  Doll has more of a record than we knew:
"He has systematically defended the interests of industry and the 
State."  [From _The Politics of Cancer Revisited_ by Epstein].....
....guru.....

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: More about Sir Richard Doll and the ACSH
Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2001 11:36:11 +0100
From: Per Dalen 
To: Roy Beavers 

Thank you Stewart Fist for an interesting post. Your detailed knowledge of 
the intricacies in this field is impressive. However, I don't think I was 
really stating a case against Sir Richard Doll, but just showing him up as 
a particularly valued ACSH advisor, in fact the only European member of the 
Board as far as I can see (a more direct link to the list is
 
). 

His presence on this board may 
be put down to gullibility, of course, but I am afraid there is more to it. 
Samuel S. Epstein's book "The politics of cancer revisited" (1998) has a 
lot to say about the onetime radical Doll's change of stance beginning some 
20 years ago. A very critical article by Martin Walker is reprinted by 
Epstein (Doll and Peto: The "lifestyle" theorists. The Ecologist, 
March/April 1998). A quote:

"It is easy to demonstrate that in every field in which Doll has been 
involved he has systematically defended the interests of industry and the 
State, even when these are in total conflict with those of people in 
general, and are irreconcilable with all the established knowledge on the 
subject."

Doll has been all in favour of water fluoridation, for instance, even 
suggesting that it was unethical not to add fluoride to drinking water. 
Even his stated positions on asbestos and lead in petrol have been patently 
in favour of industry interests. Walker summarizes a Daily Mail article 
(June 3, 1992) in which Doll is said to have asked the readers:

"not without a dash of desperation, to trust industry and industrialists, 
science and scientists. These, he said are the people with the key to the 
future. He ended the article with a warning that we must stop 
environmentalists whom he describes as the 'anti-science Mafia', from 
'hijacking' the Rio summit." [quote from Walker's article]

Doll may indeed be ultra-cautious, but then selectively so.

Some of the ACSH advisors probably know quite well what they are up to, and 
have agendas similar to that of the ACSH itself. I am sure this applies to 
the four people I mentioned (Baratz, Barrett, Dodes, Sampson) who are 
devoted to "quack-busting" and who habitually defend the massive use of 
mercury in dentistry. I should think Michael B. Shermer, editor of the 
Skeptic Magazine belongs to the same category.

Another advisor, Ian C. Munro of Cantox was actually mentioned on Stewart's 
homepage a few months ago
(. His Cantox has 
branches in Canada and the U.S. and is engaged in several important 
projects involving risk assessment. Munro is for instance chairman of the 
Upper Limits Subcommittee of the Food and Nutrition Board (of the Institute 
of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences). This is a key role in one of 
the biggest strategic industry plans in the health area during the last 
decades. The pharmaceutical giants are trying to gain control of the 
booming vitamin and food supplement market on a global basis. This cannot 
be done without fixing restrictive upper intake limits for at least some 
natural and more or less atoxic substances like vitamin C in order to get 
the whole area under tighter official control. Many billions of dollars are 
at stake here, and the process is moving slowly forward. One of the signs 
that something is going on is the increase in media coverage of negative 
reports on vitamins and supplements, and medicinal herbs like St. John's 
Wort. See  for details. Below are some links to Munro 
and Cantox stuff.











Per

Per Dalen 


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Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com