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Investor Environmental Health Network Peddles Inaccurate Science
Trevor Butterworth, February 20, 2007
Warns – with no apparent scientific expertise – about risks of chemicals.

The devolution of genuine scientific analysis and debate gathers speed with the publication of a report by the Investor Environmental Health Network (IEHN), which as the press release on Yahoo News notes, “represents 20 investment organizations with $22 billion in assets under management.” The release continues,

“Entitled ‘Beneath the Skin: Hidden Liabilities, Market Risk and Drivers of Change in the Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Industry,’ the new IEHN report describes a ticking time bomb scenario of a largely self-policed industry in which regulatory action by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) typically is triggered only by reporting from the companies themselves. ‘The result is a system that permits significant consumer exposure to occur before sufficiently rigorous safety testing is conducted -- ultimately, a game of roulette which places consumers, manufacturers and investors at risk,’ said Sanford Lewis, an attorney specializing in corporate accountability and one of the report's authors.”

Unfortunately, the press release (the full report is not yet online) badly misrepresents the scientific evidence on risk, particularly when it comes to phthalates, which it describes as “having been linked to malformed or underdeveloped reproductive organs in males.”

There is no study showing that male human children had or have malformed reproductive systems due to phthalate exposure.

The most that has been suggested by one study published by Shanna Swan in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives is that some – not all – phthalates were correlated with a shorter anogenital index (AGI) in male infants (the AGI is a biomarker denoting the distance from the anus to the base of the penis, divided by the weight at the time of measurement).

But because no-one in the scientific or medical community has established what constitutes a normal range for AGI is in baby boys, it is misleading to claim that this finding translates into “underdeveloped reproductive organs.” Shorter in the EHP study was still within the normal range.

And merely describing a chemical as a known carcinogen, as IEHN does, is meaningless in terms of actual risk, which has to be judged on how much of the chemical we are exposed to and the nature of its toxicity. Otherwise, to be consistent, the IEHN should be advising investors to pull out of any company involved in growing or marketing tomatoes (the caffeic acid that naturally occurs in tomatoes is carcinogenic to rodents at very high levels).

If this is the level of research that went into “Beneath the Skin,” it is tempting to say that investors are getting useless information; but they’re not: the IEHN and its work reflects the growing power of environmental activism in the marketplace, and the truth that information doesn’t need to be true to be powerful.