Validity of oft-cited' 97 study under attack
Star-Ledger (NJ), Alexander Lane
Published June 2, 2006
A scientific journal has decided to retract an industry-funded 1997 study that downplayed the risks of toxic chromium, which plagues Hudson and Essex counties.
The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine will tell readers that "input to the paper by outside parties was not disclosed," according to an advance copy of the retraction released by an environmental group yesterday.
Those outside parties are widely believed to be industry-paid scientists who helped write the study but left their names off it and their conflict of interest undisclosed.
The revelation comes amid mounting questions about whether New Jersey's
cleanup standards are strong enough to protect the thousands of people who live near chromium sites. State chromium limits are based on the assumption that the chemical does not cause cancer by ingestion, but two recent papers -- and the retraction -- support suspicions that it does.
Eileen Murphy and Alan Stern, chromium experts at the state Department of Environmental Protection, said the department has never relied on the 1997 paper. At least one DEP scientist has disputed that, however.
Questions about the study have been raised for years, including in The
Star-Ledger in 2004 and the Wall Street Journal in December.
"The implication of this case is to make us wonder how much stuff that is published in peer-reviewed journals is in fact corporate-sponsored science, bought and paid for by corporate clients," said Bill Walker, vice president of the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit
organization.
Walker said the federal Environmental Protection Agency cited the study in a 2000 decision allowing a wood preservative containing chromium to stay on the market. He said the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry had also cited it in a fact sheet.
The study's purported authors were two Chinese scientists, Zhang JianDong and Shukun Li. It essentially reversed Zhang's finding 10 years earlier that chromium-tainted water caused stomach cancer and other problems in 155 Chinese villagers.
Critics have long alleged that ChemRisk, a consulting firm that worked for major chromium polluters in New Jersey and California, ghost-wrote the 1997 paper. ChemRisk's founder, Dennis Paustenbach, has acknowledged he helped revise it.
Neither Paustenbach nor Columbia University professor Paul Brandt-Rauf,
editor of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, responded to requests for comment yesterday. Zhang is now deceased.
If chromium is found to cause cancer by ingestion -- as compared to only inhalation -- it would be regulated much more strictly, requiring more costly cleanups. The primary means of ingestion in New Jersey would be children putting objects covered with chromium-tainted dust in their mouths.
New Jersey is home to some 200 known chromium sites, where waste from three long-shut plants in Jersey City and Kearny was used as fill. The state relaxed its chromium cleanup standards dramatically in the past 15 years as the companies responsible for the pollution and their hired scientists argued it did not cause cancer by ingestion.
Other scientists have long questioned that, especially recently.
A paper by California regulators published in April found "oral exposure to this agent appears to pose a carcinogenic risk." A March paper by New York University professor Max Costa found chromium "can likely be considered a human carcinogen by ingestion."
Joe Morris of the Interfaith Community Organization, which represents
churches in Jersey City, said his group would petition Gov. Jon Corzine next week to revisit chromium regulations.
"We knew 15 years ago in Jersey City just from talking to people in our
congregation there was an odd number of stomach cancers," Morris said.
A task force of New Jersey regulators looked in 2004 at whether to regulate chromium more strictly. They decided against it, but acknowledged the ingestion issue was a lingering question.
Two members of the task force dissented. One, chemical engineer Zoe Kelman, criticized the DEP last year for relying on a literature review based partly on the 1997 study.
Kelman's superiors countered that the DEP cited the literature review only "incidentally."
Stern and Murphy of the DEP said they are waiting for a federal study of chromium dangers due out this fall, and may strengthen standards based on that.
In the meantime, any final approvals of chromium cleanup require review by DEP Commissioner Lisa Jackson, according to DEP spokeswoman Elaine Makatura. The only approval issued in the past year was under Jackson's predecessor, Bradley Campbell, Makatura said. It was at Liberty National, a championship golf course under construction at an old industrial site in Jersey City in view of the Statue of Liberty.
