The corporate criminal's new modus operandi:
First you contaminate the natural environment with toxic chemical waste
-- then you contaminate the intellectual environment with toxic information.
Of course, they've been doing this in other ways for decades, but this
strikes me as unusually brazen. They must be getting desperate.
Craig Gingold
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DECEMBER 23, 2005
12:31 PM
CONTACT: Environmental Working Group
(202) 667-6982
Chrome-Plated Fraud: How PG&E'S Scientists-for-Hire
Reversed Findings of a Cancer Study
WASHINGTON - December 23 ? A consulting firm hired by Pacific Gas
& Electric Co. (PG&E) to fight the "Erin Brockovich" lawsuit distorted
data
from a Chinese study to plant an article in a scientific journal
reversing the
study's original conclusion that linked an industrial chemical to
cancer,
according to documents obtained by Environmental Working Group (EWG).
The Wall Street Journal reported today that the San Francisco-based
consultants, ChemRisk, "conceived, drafted, edited and submitted to
medical journals" a "clarification" of the Chinese study, according to
documents filed in another chromium lawsuit against PG&E. They did so
despite a letter of objection from the Chinese scientist who led the
original
study, calling their reversal of his findings an "inappropriate
inference."
Through the state Public Records Act, EWG has obtained many of the
documents cited by the Journal. They are available at
http://www.ewg.org
In the Brockovich case, residents of Hinkley, Calif., sued PG&E for
dumping
chromium-6 in their drinking water. In 1997, PG&E paid $333 million to
settle the case, but another lawsuit against the company over chromium
pollution is set for trial next month.
The fraudulent article has influenced chromium regulations by state
and federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency.
ChemRisk, perpetrator of the deception, continues to work for corporate
and government clients including the Department of Energy and the
Centers for Disease Control.
The article was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Occupational
and
Environmental Medicine. EWG has written the journal's editors urging
them
to set the record straight and bar the scientists who were involved
from its
pages.
"The scientific community must be notified that a paper circulating in
the
published literature is fraudulent, the paper must be retracted, and
those
responsible for the incident must be appropriately disciplined," EWG
Senior
Vice President Richard Wiles wrote to the journal.
EWG has also written the Centers for Disease Control, which recently
renewed ChemRisk's multi-million dollar contract for a key project at
the
Los Alamos National Laboratory, urging the agency to take prompt action
against the company.
"ChemRisk's current contract must be cancelled and the firm barred from
seeking future contracts from the CDC or other government agencies,"
wrote Wiles.
The documents obtained by EWG show that ChemRisk employees ? with
the knowledge of PG&E's attorneys ? hired one of the original study's
authors as a "consultant," and conducted a new analysis of his data that
deliberately ignored evidence of an association between stomach cancer
and chromium-6 in drinking water. They then wrote and submitted the
article for publication without disclosing that they worked for
ChemRisk or
that PG&E had paid for the new "study." Nowhere in the published article
are the names of the ChemRisk employees who worked on it, or any
indication that it was part of PG&E's legal defense strategy.
The founder and president of ChemRisk is Dennis Paustenbach, who has
made a career of consulting for big polluters including PG&E, ExxonMobil
and Dow Chemical. In 2002, his appointment to a federal committee on the
health effects of chemicals was blasted by independent scientists as
part
of a Bush Administration pattern of packing environmental panels with
industry-friendly experts.
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