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LA Times Uncovers Conflict of Interest in Federal Safety Review
Trevor Butterworth, March 14, 2007
Was a federal risk assessment compromised by a conflict of interest involving the chemical industry, or was the paper spun by a vested interest?

Ongoing fears about the risk from exposure to a common chemical in plastics – bisphenol-A – should have been addressed by a recent draft report by the National Toxicology Program’s Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR), and the public discussion of the report’s findings last week. As it turned out, there was just too much to discuss, and the panel will have to meet again in the coming months.

But now the media is reporting that the work of the panel may be tainted by its use of a contractor – Sciences International – to do the background research that the scientists on the panel can’t actually do themselves. The Environmental Working Group, which has pressed for tougher regulation on chemicals such as bisphenol-A, has now charged that because Sciences International conducts reviews for the chemical industry as well as the government, the integrity of the report is suspect.

And this is evident in the fact that the draft report omits studies, which the group finds compelling in the case for tighter regulation.

Is there a conspiracy here – or is the environmental group staging an attack to undermine the credibility of the panel because the weight of scientific evidence is not going their way?

This would be a fascinating story for the media to investigate, but as that would involve trying to reach some conclusion about the science being conducted, unfortunately, it’s not the one papers like the Los Angeles Times have chosen to report.

Instead, the Times’ Marla Cone noted that “some scientists” say the draft report has a “pro-industry bias.” But the only scientist named in the story is Frederick vom Saal of the University of Missouri:

"It's a combination of inaccurate information and blatant bias as it exists in its draft form," vom Saal said. "They specifically ignore fatal flaws in industry-sponsored publications." He said the 300-page report misrepresented government-funded studies that found effects by inaccurately portraying their findings, and failed to note industry funding of some studies cited.”

But as STATS has noted (here and here), vom Saal, who has campaigned for tighter regulation of bisphenol–A on the basis that it causes problems even at very low doses – has not exactly been scrupulous or analytically rigorous in his literature reviews.

However, because vom Saal has regularly charged that the risk assessments carried out on bisphenol-A by the likes of Harvard’s Center for Risk Analysis are industry funded, they lack credibility, he has found common cause with environmentalists, and is possibly one of the most widely-quoted scientists in the media.

Most astonishing of all, vom Saal then criticizes the scientists on the panel: "none of them have expertise with this chemical,” he tells the Times.

This extraordinary slur should have been a red flag to the paper’s reporter. The CEHRH panels are composed of some of the top scientists in the nation, and to say that they don’t really understand the research on bisphenol-A is tantamount to saying that they don’t understand chemistry, epidemiology, toxicology or biostatistics.

More subtly, it amounts to saying that if the panel reject my arguments, it's because the 14 members just don't understand the science on bisphenol-A as well as I do.

This charge should have been addressed by the Times.

Moreover, the underlying issues could have been clarified if the paper had taken some of the studies which vom Saal and the Environmental Working Group believe ought to be in the draft review and given them to “independent” toxicologists to see if there were compelling reasons why they should have been considered or left out. That would have added substance to the charge that there was evidence of bias.

Instead, the Times gave far too much play, through its sourcing and reporting, to innuendo. It allowed vom Saal to accuse the panel of inexpertise, and charge that some of the studies in the report were fatally flawed, without any real attempt to provide background, insight or balance on the substance of the matter, namely, the science.

While the integrity of the protocols for accumulating research for the NTP panels to evaluate is vitally important, the public review period also allows critics a chance to respond to omissions in the data, which vom Saal did with his critique of the report to the panel, which is available on the CEHRH website. So it’s not as if the CEHRH panel on bisphenol-A is flying blind, or unaware of a body of missing data, or vom Saal's objections.

A conflict of interest is a grave threat to the credibility of any enterprise; in this case, the accusers have a vested interest in the outcome (the hope that there will be tighter regulation of bisphenol-A) just as much as the accused (preserving the integrity of the research and regulatory oversight). It is difficult to read the Times article as being anything other than favorable to the former.