Blog Action Day: The Gospel according to DuPont

[Today is Blog Action Day, where bloggers of all political stripes and subject interest are encouraged to put up a post on an environmental topic. Here is the second of two.]]

The January 2005 good news press release from the DuPont company was not exactly "the gospel truth." No, not exactly. Dupont's good news was about PFOA. A scientific study by the company showed it was perfectly safe. PFOA, or ammonium perfluorooctanoate (also called C8), is used by DuPont to make Teflon, but in reality, PFOA is a DuPont dollar's way of making another dollar. A stop-off point for investment, not a permanent home. Unless you are a DuPont worker. Or you. Or your children. PFOA and its chemical cousins have been found in over 90% of blood samples taken of the general population. Is that bad?

There have been persistent concerns that PFOA was a health risk, and under pressure DuPont performed an epidemiologic study of its workers under the watchful eye of an independent Epidemiologic Review Board. I know several of the board personally. They are good. Very good. So it must have been good news to DuPont workers and shareholders when the company announced to press and the employees:

"To date, no human health effects known to be caused by PFOA," announced the headline on DuPont's news release.

Plant manager Paul Bossert repeated the line in a letter to Washington Works employees. The study results, Bossert said, "Reaffirm what we have said all along: There are no known human health effects associated with exposure to PFOA."

DuPont officials touted the study as having the seal of approval from the company's Epidemiology Review Board, a team of independent experts from various universities, including Johns Hopkins and Yale. (West Virginia Gazette)

This was almost three years ago. What the public and employees had were the company's public statements. What they didn't have were the confidential emails that went back and forth between the company and the independent experts. Now we can see them, a result of a court filing over a pollution lawsuit in New Jersey:

One of the experts, Noah Seixas of the University of Washington, was "a bit shocked" by DuPont's press statements. Another, David Wegman of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, was "quite uncomfortable" with the way the company described the findings.

Four members of the expert team agreed that Bossert's letter to employees "was somewhere between misleading and disingenuous."

"We were unanimous in believing that the results do show a health effect," Wegman wrote in a Feb. 4, 2005, e-mail to other members of DuPont's Epidemiology Review Board, or ERB.

So DuPont's own board of independent scientists believed they were overstating their case when the company claimed C8 was perfectly safe. DuPont developed a convenient case of deafness. When confronted with the email messages, the company's response was: the emails speak for themselves. In other words: Whatever. They are also no longer claiming the review board agreed with their version:

The board members, Turner said, "reviewed and approved the results and conclusions" of the company's studies. DuPont, Turner said, works with the board members "to incorporate their comments into our final conclusions.

"The public statements DuPont has made on PFOA and human health are consistent with our studies, as well as the weight of evidence of other studies reported in peer-reviewed journals," Turner said in an e-mail response to questions last week.

Let's hope they're right because it's pretty hard to put the PFOA genie back in the bottle. The stuff hardly degrades at all in the environment. Where it's coming from isn't at all clear. Possibly non-stick cookware but more likely food packaging or stain resistant fabrics or textiles. We don't know.

Meanwhile DuPont continues to study it in workers. The 2005 announcement dealt with preliminary results on liver function and blood tests. But a previously reported relationship with cholesterol levels was seen. Not to worry, says DuPont's doctor. These cholesterol increases were in workers. In the general public the levels of PFOA are much less. Unless you live in a town polluted by DuPont, that is, where some of the levels exceeded those in DuPont workers. As Dave Wegman, one of the scientists on the board pointed out in an email at the time, an increase in cholesterol level of 10% is most certainly a health effect. And an increase in cholesterol was not limited to the highest exposures.

Here are some more tidbits from the confidential emails, as reported by the West Virginia Gazette (DuPont has a PFOA plant in West Virginia):

"We believe that no party can claim sufficient knowledge that PFOA does or does not pose any risk to health," the board members wrote in a March 2, 2006, e-mail to top DuPont officials. "Thus, we question the basis of DuPont's public expression asserting that PFOA does not pose a risk to health.

"In this circumstance, as we understand it, the burden of proof to establish the safety of PFOA is now placed on DuPont's shoulders," the board members wrote.

A few months later, in July 2006, Seixas warned DuPont scientist Robin Leonard that the actual study text "continues to attempt to avoid or downplay the significant findings.

"I think the level of evidence produced is fairly substantial," Seixas wrote. "Whether or not this is a 'major health effect' I guess is a matter of interpretation."

A year ago DuPont released data from a second phase of their study, this one reporting on worker mortality:

"No increased mortality in workers exposed to PFOA," the release said.

DuPont said the study did find "a slight, but not statistically significant" increase in the rate of kidney cancer mortality.

Sax said in the company's news release, "The Washington Works II study supports a conclusion that there are no human health effects known to be caused by PFOA."

The same day as DuPont's announcement, members of the company's ERB complained that the press statements went too far.

Jonathan Samet, a board member from Johns Hopkins [and former Chair of their Department of Epidemiology], wrote that press release was "troubling" in part because Sax's "statement is overly certain."

Wegman wrote that another board member, Mark Cullen of Yale University, tried to convince DuPont to change its wording before the study was released, but "this was as far as he was able to push them."

Wegman's reaction was resigned. At least the data about the effects are there, however well hidden, he wrote.

"But the release certainly appears written to leave the impression 'don't worry' and I guess we had to expect that."

Yes, I guess we had to expect that. How sad.