Outsourcing health reviews to industry-financed consultants.
Minneapolis Star Tribune , Staff
Published March 11, 2007
You would have to look far and wide for a clearer example of putting a fox in charge of the henhouse than the relationship between a federal public-health agency and Sciences International.
SI is a consulting group, created by chemical companies, that gets about half its work from industry and the other half from a government panel assessing whether human reproduction is threatened by -- you guessed it -- its private clients' products.
Given our past attention to the Bush administration's consistent bending of regulatory practice to suit industry interests, we'll note right at the outset that the SI outrage may well be the work of Bill Clinton's crew. At the least, SI has played some consulting role in the Center for Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction since 1998, when CERHR was established within the National Institutes for Health.
SI describes its role as merely providing "objective science" to its clients, and officials in various parts of NIH say the company has been given no authority to make policy or set agendas. Congressional inquiries now underway will establish whether SI's role was ever that modest, but a recent episode shows its influence now to be quite sweeping.
A chemical of special concern to CERHR is the plasticizer bisphenol A. It can mimic estrogen and has been shown to afflict lab animals with a variety of reproductive harms, as well as prostate cancer. Because bisphenol A is used so widely -- it's an ingredient of polycarbonate water bottles, baby bottles, food-can linings, dental sealants and so on -- pretty much all Americans are carrying traces of it in their bodies.
But are these levels dangerous? A dozen or so industry-sponsored studies say no; scores of government or university studies say otherwise. When scientists involved in the independent research learned that SI's analysis would side with industry, they raised a ruckus.
This got the attention of the Environmental Working Group and the Los Angeles Times, whose reviews of government documents found that SI has played a key role not only in advising government panels but selecting their members, setting their agendas and writing their official reports.
It also found that SI had helped R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. resist federal regulation of a pesticide used by its growers -- and that its president, in recruiting Reynolds as a client, boasted that SI's government contracts gave it "a unique credibility to negotiate with regulators on behalf of our private sector clients."
Those clients have included Dow Chemical and BASF, which make bisphenol A, as well as DuPont, Chevron, ExxonMobil, 3M, Union Carbide, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Council, the American Chemistry Council and 40-some others.
Which, come to think of it, may explain its bargain rate of a mere $1 million a year for CERHR. Besides providing a semblance of public service, in what its website calls SI's "most significant project," SI is reaping all that credibility to sell its private customers.
For us and, we think, for most Americans, "credibility" describes something roughly opposite what SI has been providing its customers, whether public or private. Exactly what the company has done for its taxpaying clients is an interesting question; a timely search for answers is being led by two California Democrats, Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. Henry Waxman.
