Warning: This is your brain on toxins | Opinion | The Seattle Times

Warning: This is your brain on toxins | Opinion | The Seattle Times:

“Lead helps to guard your health.”

That was the marketing line that the former National Lead Co. used decades ago to sell lead-based household paints. Yet we now know that lead was poisoning millions of children and permanently damaging their brains. Tens of thousands of children died, and countless millions were left mentally impaired.

One boy, Sam, born in Milwaukee in 1990, “thrived as a baby,” according to his medical record. But then, as a toddler, he began to chew on lead paint or suck on fingers with lead dust, and his blood showed soaring lead levels.

Sam’s family moved homes, but it was no use. At age 3, he was hospitalized for five days because of lead poisoning, and in kindergarten his teachers noticed that he had speech problems. He struggled through school, and doctors concluded that he had “permanent and irreversible” deficiencies in brain function.

Sam’s story appears in “Lead Wars,” a book by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner published this year that chronicles the monstrous irresponsibility of companies in the lead industry over the course of the 20th century. Eventually, over industry protests, came regulation and the removal of lead from gasoline. As a result, lead levels of U.S. children have declined 90 percent in the past few decades, and scholars have estimated that, as a result, children’s IQs on average have risen at least two points and perhaps more than four.

So what are the lessons from the human catastrophe of lead poisoning over so many decades? 

Alarm about endocrine disruptors once was a fringe scientific concern, but increasingly has moved mainstream. There is still uncertainty and debate about the risk posed by individual chemicals, but there is growing concern about the risk of endocrine disruptors in general — particularly to fetuses and children. There is less concern about adults.

These are the kinds of threats that we in journalism are not very good at covering. We did a wretched job covering risks from lead and tobacco in the early years; instead of watchdogs, we were lap dogs.

Andrea C. Gore, the editor of Endocrinology, published an editorial asserting that corporate interests are abusing science today with endocrine disruptors the way they once did with lead: for the “production of uncertainty.”

She added that the evidence is “undeniable: that endocrine-disrupting chemicals pose a threat to human health.”

When scientists feud, it’s hard for the rest of us to know what to do. But I’m struck that many experts in endocrinology, toxicology or pediatrics aren’t waiting for regulatory changes. They don’t heat food in plastic containers, they reduce their use of plastic water bottles, and they try to give their kids organic food to reduce exposure to pesticides.

So a question for big chemical companies: Are you really going to follow the model of tobacco and lead and fight regulation every step of the way, once more risking our children’s futures?

The Perils of Ignoring History: Big Tobacco Played Dirty and Millions Died. How Similar Is Big Food?

The Perils of Ignoring History: Big Tobacco Played Dirty and Millions Died. How Similar Is Big Food?

KELLY D. BROWNELL and KENNETH E. WARNER
Yale University; University of Michigan (2009)

Context:In 1954 the tobacco industry paid to publish the “Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” in hundreds of U.S. newspapers. It stated that the public’s health was the industry’s concern above all others and promised a variety of good-faith changes. What followed were decades of deceit and actions that cost
millions of lives. In the hope that the food history will be written differently, this article both highlights important lessons that can be learned from the tobacco experience and recommends actions for the food industry.

Methods:A review and analysis of empirical and historical evidence pertaining to tobacco and food industry practices, messages, and strategies to influence public opinion, legislation and regulation, litigation, and the conduct of science.

Findings: The tobacco industry had a playbook, a script, that emphasized personal responsibility, paying scientists who delivered research that instilled doubt, criticizing the “junk” science that found harms associated with smoking, making self-regulatory pledges, lobbying with massive resources to stifle government action, introducing “safer” products, and simultaneously manipulating and denying both the addictive nature of their products and their marketing to children. The script of the food industry is both similar to and different from
the tobacco industry script.

Conclusions: Food is obviously different from tobacco, and the food industry differs from tobacco companies in important ways, but there also are significant similarities in the actions that these industries have taken in response to concern that their products cause harm. Because obesity is now a major global problem, the world cannot afford a repeat of the tobacco history, in which industry talks about the moral high ground but does not occupy it.

...the industry is organized and politically powerful. It
consists of massive agribusiness companies like Cargill, Archer Daniels
Midland, Bunge, and Monsanto; food sellers as large as Kraft (so big
as to own Nabisco) and Pepsi-Co (owner of Frito Lay); and restaurant
companies as large as McDonald’s and Yum! Brands (owner of Pizza
Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, and more). These are represented by lobbyists,
lawyers, and trade organizations that in turn represent a type of food (e.g.,
Snack Food Association, American Beverage Association), a segment of
the industry (e.g., National Restaurant Association), a constituent of
food (e.g., Sugar Association, Corn Refiners Association), or the entire
industry (e.g., Grocery Manufacturers of America).
Common to all these players is an arresting logic: to successfully
address the obesity epidemic, the nation must consume fewer calories,
which means eating less food...A shrinking market for all those
calories would mean less money—a lot less.



Address correspondence to: Kelly D. Brownell, Rudd Center for Food Policy and
Obesity, Yale University, 309 Edwards St., Box 208369, New Haven, CT
06520-8369 (email: kelly.brownell@yale.edu).
The Milbank Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 1, 2009 (pp. 259–294)
c 2009 Milbank Memorial Fund. Published by Wiley Periodicals Inc.
259

Poisoned For Profit: philip morris white coat project

Book: Poisoned For Profit: How Toxins Are Making Our Children Chronically Ill, based on more than five years of investigative research and reporting, reveals the cumulative scientific evidence connecting the massive increase in environmental poisons to the epidemic of disability, disease, and dysfunction among our nation´s children.

Poisoned For Profit Page 164:

"Studies produced by the scientists-for-hire were praised as "sound science," while opposing research was denigrated as "junk science," terms created purposely for the tobacco industry.

This strategy of doubt and other ploys used in the tobacco wars served as fully staged dress rehearsals for"...BioTech and BigAg.

Watch Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hefTk8m4tMI

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Doctors, American Medical Association hawked cigarettes as healthy for consumers

Doctors, American Medical Association hawked cigarettes as healthy for consumers

Both the AMA and individual doctors sided with big tobacco for decades after the deleterious effects of smoking were proven. Medical historians have tracked this relationship in great detail, examining internal documents from tobacco companies and their legal counsel and public relations advisers. The overarching theme of big tobacco's efforts was to keep alive the appearance of a "debate" or "controversy" of the health effects of cigarette smoking.

The first research to make a statistical correlation between cancer and smoking was published in 1930 in Cologne, Germany. In 1938, Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University reported that smokers do not live as long as non-smokers. The tobacco industry dismissed these early findings as anecdotal -- but at the same time recruited doctors to endorse cigarettes.

JAMA kicks off two decades of cigarette advertising

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published its first cigarette advertisement in 1933, stating that it had done so only "after careful consideration of the extent to which cigarettes were used by physicians in practice." These advertisements continued for 20 years. The same year, Chesterfield began running ads in the New York State Journal of Medicine, with the claim that its cigarettes were "Just as pure as the water you drink... and practically untouched by human hands."

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/021949_Big_Tobacco_the_AMA.html#ixzz2JrMfazJK

GMO Tobacco Produces Antibodies To Treat Rabies

GMO Tobacco Produces Antibodies To Treat Rabies

Here is a conundrum in the culture wars; genetically modified tobacco has been shown to have numerous beneficial effects and now another one has been added.

The treatment for rabies (painful shots, thankfully not all in the stomach in 2013) is not as bad as the disease (death) but it is hardly civilized, so here is hoping the anti-science crowd does not claim genetically modified tobacco will create giant rats with SuperRabies.  Rabies deaths are not a big issue in the USA, 10 a year or so, and therefore it may be safe to do fundraising campaigns about Frankentobacco here, but for developing nations a better solution would save a lot of lives.

In a new report, scientists produced a monoclonal antibody in transgenic tobacco plants that was shown to neutralize the rabies virus. This new antibody works by preventing the virus from attaching to nerve endings around the bite site and keeps the virus from traveling to the brain.

Big Food Hires Big Tobacco Shills to Fight GMO Labeling

Big Food Hires Big Tobacco Shills to Fight GMO Labeling

Creating Front Groups for the Dirty Work
Another tactic honed by Big Tobacco is to form a front group, which appears to be made up of small businesses and others designed to give the impression of a grassroots campaign, but in reality is funded by large corporations. This tactic, known as an astroturfing, is alive and well with “No on 37,” which describes itself as, “A broad coalition of family farmers, scientists, doctors, taxpayers, small businesses, labor, food companies, biotechnology companies and grocers.

Small farmers and small businesses? I don’t see any listed on the “Who We Are” page. I do see many not-so-small trade groups representing numerous not-so-small corporations, some of them from outside California, including CropLife America, which is a trade group for the biotech and pesticide industry.

Also, the “No on 37” campaign is represented by the law firm, Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, which has a sordid history of stealth tactics such as astroturfing. And no wonder, with former Phillip Morris outside council Tom Hiltachk as the campaign’s treasurer. (His firm’s address is listed on the webpage for where to send donations.)
Hiltachk had this disingenuous quote about the GMO labeling initiative back in February: “Farmers and food producers strongly oppose this costly, ill-conceived labeling proposition.” There are those invisible farmers again.

Right to Know Blog: DDT, Agent Orange, Tobacco, GMOs and YOU

Right to Know Blog

Why do we need to label genetically engineered foods? As Mark Bittman wrote in today's New York Times, because we have a right to know and to decide for ourselves what's in the food we're eating and feeding our families. Who could be against this core American value? That one's easy: the companies that are genetically engineering our food system without our knowledge or consent -- which happen to be the same companies that told us DDT and Agent Orange were safe. With a little help from their tobacco friends.

This is the important story behind Proposition 37's first television ad: The Same Companies that Told Us DDT and Agent Orange were Safe.  The 30-second ad presents the history of notoriously inaccurate health claims by the very same corporations that are funding the No on 37 campaign and opposing our right to know what's in our food.

Read on for the facts about who is behind the No on 37 campaign...

Tobacco industry operatives are key players in the No on 37 Campaign No on 37 consultants MB Public Affairs worked for Altria (formerly Phillip Morris Companies, Inc.). Donations to No on 37 go to the law firm of Bell, McAndrews and Hiltachk. Charles Bell and Thomas Hiltachk were higher ups in the tobacco industry’s misinformation campaign in the 1980s and 1990s. Hiltachk is the treasurer of the No on Prop 37 campaign, was the architect of efforts to dismantle California’s global warming law, and is author of the union-busting Prop 32 on the November ballot which LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik described as the “fraud to end all frauds”

Also see: Meet the Scientific Experts who Claim that GMOs are Safe.

Consider the Source: No on 37 is a Campaign of Lies

Deadly Persuasion - The Advertising of Tobacco

Bestselling author and influential advertising expert Jean Kilbourne examines the ever-evolving marketing and sales strategies of the alcohol and tobacco industries. Kilbourne takes a close look at how both industries have re-tooled their strategies in the face of rising public health concerns, showing how ad executives continue to mobilize a highly sophisticated understanding of gendered identity -- and the psychology of addiction -- to override rational resistance to what they're selling. With its close analysis of a wide sampling of cigarette and alcohol ads, Deadly Persuasion is as much a case study in media literacy as it is a public health tool.

Nesheed proposes bill requiring GMO labeling

Nesheed proposes bill requiring GMO labeling

Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-District 5, has proposed SB 155, which would require labeling on all genetically modified meat and fish (GMOs).

SB 155 amends Chapter 196 of the Missouri Revised Statues. The bill was introduced earlier this month.
Nasheed said she hopes the bill will increase awareness about GMOs.

“Right now, approximately 75 percent of the food in the supermarket is genetically modified,” she said. “People don’t know about it because there are no requirements for labeling.”

Nasheed said she proposed the bill because she believes people have a right to know about the food they are consuming.

Increased hardiness and improved animal health are both potential benefits of genetically modifying meat or fish, according to the National Institutes of Health. However, possible health impacts include allergens and transfer of antibiotic resistors.

“I truly believe that GMOs are here to stay,” Nasheed said. “If genetically modified products are going to be on the shelf, then the people should have a right to know.”

Nasheed compared the labeling requirement to the warnings on cigarettes.

Nasheed said she isn’t arguing that GMOs can cause cancer or allergens. She said she thinks if GMOs were labeled, then consumers may be more aware of what they are consuming.

“If they know that the products they buy contain GMOs, people will become more conscious of what these genetically modified foods entail and how it changes the natural condition of the meat,” she said