Score another point
for corporate power over protection of the public
U.S. Rep Lamar Smith,
chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space,
& Technology, slated a full committee hearing for
Feb. 6 with an agenda aimed squarely at attacking some of the world's top
cancer scientists.
It's worth noting that
the plan to put the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) on the
hot seat was put into motion roughly three years ago when Monsanto predicted
the international cancer scientists would find its weed killer to have
carcinogenic potential.
The documents also show
that it was February 2015, a month before the IARC classification, when
Monsanto executives laid out a strategic plan to
discredit the cancer scientists. The plan was designed to "orchestrate
outcry with IARC decision."
The efforts to manipulate public perception about IARC ramped up last summer when Monsanto allies spoon-fed a false narrative to a Reuters reporter who produced a news story that shot around the globe and has been a key talking point for the chemical industry attack against IARC.
The story relied on the
deposition of an IARC scientist named Aaron Blair and reported that Blair
withheld critical information that would have altered the IARC glyphosate
classification. Reuters never provided a link to the deposition, which at that
point was not filed in any court and was not publicly available.
Chairman Smith ran with
the story, stating that Blair "admitted to knowing that this research
could have prevented" the classification of glyphosate as a probable
carcinogen.
Anyone taking time to
actually read the deposition, which is
now public, would see that Blair never said any such thing, and in fact
protested multiple times that the data in question was not fully analyzed and
not published and thus was not suitable to be considered by IARC.
A similar false narrative
pushed by the chemical industry and repeated by Smith accused IARC of deleting
assessments finding no connection between glyphosate and cancer from its final
report. Smith and team either don't know or don't care that IARC's deletions
were of Monsanto assertions that the cancer scientists said could
not be substantiated.
IARC officials have detailed the
falsehoods perpetuated against them by the chemical industry but the defense
has fallen on deaf ears.
Monsanto needs to
discredit the international cancer scientists because it was the IARC finding
that triggered waves of lawsuits against
Monsanto, and prompted moves to ban the chemical in some European countries.
But while Monsanto and
other chemical industry interests are concerned about the billions of dollars
in revenues they rake in annually from glyphosate-based products, the attack on
this independent science group should have all of us concerned.
Approximately 39 percent
of men and women living in the United States are expected to be diagnosed with
cancer during their lifetimes, according to the National Cancer Institute.
For this year alone, the
American Cancer Society has estimated there will be more than 1.68 million people
newly diagnosed with cancer and more than 600,000 deaths from cancer.
Worldwide, there are more that 14 million cases of cancer occurring each year,
and that number is expected to hit nearly 22 million by 2030.
Cancer "affects
almost everyone's life, either directly or indirectly," and beyond the
toll on life and health it costs the United States more than $200 billion in
medical costs and lost productivity, according to the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS).
In order to reduce
deaths from cancer we have to put more emphasis on preventing it in the first
place, and a big part of that "primary prevention" according to a
2016 report by the HHS National Toxicology Program (NTP) "is to identify
the carcinogens."
Clearly, the companies
that sell chemicals linked to cancer prefer to see IARC defunded and
dismantled. They've said as much through the disingenuously namedCouncil for Accuracy in Public
Health Research (CAPHR), a nonprofit established by the
American Chemistry Council a year ago with the specific goal of promoting the "reform"
of IARC.
But to see our lawmakers
so eagerly promoting corporate interests when such dire public safety interests
are at stake marks perhaps a new low in American politics. These are literally
life and death matters.
Our public servants must
be held to account, to support the scientists who work to identify carcinogens,
and push back against the corporate interests who want to discredit the science
that threatens its profits.
Scientific integrity
should mean exactly that.
Carey Gillam is a former
Reuters journalist and author of Whitewash - The Story of a Weed
Killer, Cancer and the Corruption of Science. She directs
research into the agrochemical industry for the consumer advocacy group U.S.
Right to Know. Gillam was one of seven invited experts to testify at the
European Parliament in October 2017 regarding glyphosate concerns.