scientific integrity
cmonforton | July 26, 2017My favorite way to capture students’ attention about lead poisoning is to tell them about Dr. Herbert Needleman and his use of children’s baby teeth. In the late 1960's, Needleman recruited school teachers in Chelsea and Somerville, MA to collect their young students’ deciduous teeth when they fell out. It was a non-invasive way----no needlesticks, no bone biopsies---to get data on lead burden in children.
Needleman’s team analyzed the teeth for lead which helped them establish a population distribution of tooth lead levels. (It did not exist up to that time.) In 1972, he published the…
lborkowski | July 24, 2017Members of the public health community are aware of many of the ways the Trump administration and the 115th Congress are hindering and reversing evidence-based actions for public health – from an executive order requiring agencies to scrap two regulations each time they create a new one to advancing legislation that would make it harder for EPA to obtain and use the most up-to-date science in its work. With so many threats to public health arising each month, it can be hard to catch all of them, though. The Union of Concerned Scientists has performed a tremendous service by producing the…
pgleick | May 4, 2017The ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency, the selection of his cabinet and senior advisers, and the actions of the GOP-dominated legislative branch have all raised new serious questions and concerns about the role of science, research, and analysis in national law and policy. These concerns have been worsened by elements of the new administration’s proposed budget that severely cut or eliminate core federal science efforts, Congressional hearings and actions that have been perceived to promote ideological viewpoints over scientific findings, presidential executive orders that attempt…
lborkowski | April 11, 2017The House of Representatives has passed two bills that, if they clear the Senate and are signed by President Trump, will make it much harder for EPA to do the important work of analyzing, warning about, and regulating health threats in the environment. The HONEST Act, introduced by House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Chair Lamar Alexander (R-Texas), would severely limit the research findings EPA could use in creating a wide range of communications, standards, and regulations. The EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act, introduced by Representative Frank Lucas (R-Oklahoma), would…
lborkowski | February 27, 2017Government scientists play essential roles in our country's top public health achievements. From food-safety improvements to tobacco cessation, we rely on them to warn us of health risks, identify solutions, and create standards that promote public health. The Trump administration puts our health at risk when it instructs science-based agencies to halt communications; requires political-appointee review of EPA science; gives attention to people who make dangerous and uniformed statements about vaccines; and selects an EPA administrator who ignores decades of evidence on climate change.…
egrossman | November 19, 2014Often unwatched by all but policy-wonks yet key to determining policies put forth by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), are the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Boards. These boards consult with the EPA on the science that influences regulations, particularly on individual chemicals – science that’s used to protect the public from chemical hazards. On Tuesday the House passed a bill, the EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act of 2013 or H.R. 1422, that would change how the EPA selects Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) members. The White House, in a statement from the Office of Management and…
cmonforton | November 12, 2013My jaw continues to drop when I think about the scathing reports this month from the Center for Public Integrity about the law firm Jackson Kelly and their scheming with clients to screw coal miners out of black lung benefits. In “Coal industry's go-to law firm withheld evidence of black lung, at expense of sick miners,” Chris Hamby explains the deceitful and devious manner in which Jackson Kelly attorneys intentionally withheld medical reports that validate diagnoses of serious respiratory disease in coal miners.
The irony---the disgusting irony---is how coal operators insist that their…
cmonforton | October 30, 2013A marriage of public health science and civil rights is one way to describe the lifework of John Froines, PhD, professor emeritus at UCLA School of Public Health. After a 50-year career in academia and public service, and the untolled contributions from it, Froines was recognized this week by the internationally renowned Collegium Ramazzini.
The nomination letter submitted to the Collegium by his colleagues captures many highlights of Froines’ impact over several decades, such as:
His high-profile role in the 1960’s anti-war and civil rights movements
His position with the Vermont State…
cmonforton | October 28, 2013Earlier this month I wrote about the merits of policies that require conflict of interest disclosures. Last week, two items also about conflicts of interest landed in my in-box. They were just too juicy to not take a bite, and write about here.
First came a commentary from the October 2013 issue of the Annals of Occupational Hygiene written by the journal’s chief editor Noah Seixas, PhD, MS. The lead paragraph reads:
"On 6 June 2013, a court in New York handed down a decision that calls into question the validity of research that was sponsored by Georgia-Pacific [GP] and published in eight…
egrossman | October 23, 2013On October 17, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced that it has classified air pollution as a human carcinogen. Although the composition of air pollution and exposure levels vary widely from place to place, IARC says its assessment is applicable worldwide and notes that exposures in rapidly industrializing countries with large populations have increased significantly in recent years. According to the IARC review of the latest scientific studies, exposure to air pollution increases the risk for lung cancer and for bladder cancer. IARC…
cmonforton | October 9, 2013Who paid for the study? That's an important piece of information to have when considering a study's methods and reported findings. Financial ties are the most obvious conflicts of interest, but others include pre-publication review and other requirements imposed by a study’s sponsors.
Scientists publishing papers in the leading biomedical journals have, for at least ten years, been providing readers with disclosures of real or potential conflicts. The editors of more than 1,300 medical journals require authors to comply with specific disclosure policies. Researchers from other disciplines…
lborkowski | September 4, 2013A regular contributor to The Pump Handle, Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA, and his co-editor Phyllis Freeman wrote the following editorial which is available at the Journal of Public Health Policy.
In early July 2013, James R. Clapper, Jr, United States Director of National Intelligence apologized to the Chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for ‘clearly erroneous’ statements made during public testimony before the committee in March.1 In his testimony, he denied that the National Security Agency collected private data on millions of American citizens. In a television interview,…
cmonforton | November 2, 2012I was eight years old on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. "Give a hoot, don't pollute!" was the slogan for us kids. When we'd see a newscast with factory stacks spewing thick gray smoke we'd say "yuck." We'd hold our noses when tailpipes of junker cars belched exhaust. In our minds, air pollution was a bad thing because of what we could see and smell. We sure didn't think about it as something that was cutting short people's lives.
One of the first prospective U.S. studies to demonstrate an association between air pollutants and premature mortality was published in the New England…
lborkowski | August 17, 2012by Kim Krisberg
For years, Peter Rosenfeld was looking for an effective way to treat what doctors had diagnosed as severe and intractable migraines. He'd heard of medical marijuana, but thought it was a joke — that it was just a way for people to justify their marijuana use.
Then in 2000, the New Jersey resident enrolled in a California program studying the effects of medical marijuana. It was a blind study, so Rosenfeld didn't know whether he was one of the participants being given marijuana or not. It turns out he was. And it worked.
"Marijuana was the first effective treatment that I had…
lborkowski | April 9, 2012In the New York Times last week, Gardiner Harris reported on tensions between FDA and the White House over FDA decisions that White House officials fear will be politically problematic for President Obama. Harris reminds readers that "The Bush administration repeatedly stopped the agency from issuing rules to prevent contamination of eggs, produce and other foods ... Much of the agency's staff assumed that the Obama administration would restore the agency's independence."
This assumption of the Obama administration restoring agency independence wasn't unfounded -- less than two months after…
lborkowski | January 9, 2012By Susan Wood, cross-posted from RH Reality Check
On Friday, January 6th, 2012, several public health experts addressed the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on the issue of Plan B One-Step® and the Obama administration's refusal to let the Food and Drug Administration lift the age restriction from over-the-counter deliver of emergency contraception. Dr. Susan Wood gave the following testimony:
Good afternoon Dr. Holdren and members of the Council. I would like discuss the recent misuse of science and data as part of the decision by the Secretary of HHS to overrule…
lborkowski | December 12, 2011My colleague Susan F. Wood had an excellent op-ed in the Washington Post over the weekend about the Obama administration's overruling of the scientifically grounded FDA decision to approve emergency contraceptive Plan B for over-the-counter sale without age restrictions. She begins by going back in time to a much more promising moment: President Obama's signing of a Presidential Memorandum on scientific integrity:
It was a proud moment, in the East Room of the White House, on a beautiful spring day in March 2009. In the room were leading scientists, Nobel laureates, the president's science…
lborkowski | December 7, 2011During the George W. Bush Administration, one of the prime examples of politics trumping science was the FDA's refusal to approve the emergency contraceptive Plan B (levonorgestrel) for over-the-counter sale without age restrictions. Now, during the Barack Obama Administration, history seems to be repeating itself.
Emergency contraceptives like Plan B can dramatically reduce the risk of an unintended pregnancy if taken within 72 hours after unprotected intercourse, but their efficacy wanes the longer a woman has to wait to take the drug. If a woman has to wait to see a doctor to get a…
cmonforton | September 6, 2011Last Friday when the White House told Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson to drop her plans to revise the national ambient standard for ozone, it seemed like just another example of President Obama caving to business interests. Others were quick to remind me though that bowing to business is not the half of it: the White House order is illegal. As University of Texas law professor Tom McGarity explains,
"Under the Clean Air Act, EPA is required to establish ambient air quality standards at a level that protects human health with an adequate margin of safety. It's…
lborkowski | December 17, 2010Less than two months after taking office, President Obama issued a memorandum on scientific integrity, which stated:
The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and…