Saturday December 14th, another night settles on the Town of Kirkby, and the Toxic Sonae Factory is taking advantage of the cover of night to pollute the residents with all manner of nasty chemicals. As I write this, the odour from the Factory is extremely strong, but this is becoming a more common occurrence of a night and the early hours of the morning. The smell is generally that of chipboard, the smell of chipboard has a smell of its own, and this is due to a variety of chemicals which are used to bond the wood dust and chips together to form the finished product. Other odour's, more chemical like are also smelt by residents living a couple of miles from the Toxic Sonae Factory. Sonae's chipboard, plywood and similar board materials are manufactured with adhesives that release formaldehyde even after they are sold off as furniture and household fittings. Formaldehyde is colourless but has a pungent chemical smell, and if we can smell chipboard constantly, you can bet your life that formaldehyde will also be there, constantly. New research is showing that formaldehyde may be more dangerous than thought. As far back as 1980, the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT) released a study showing that rats which inhaled formaldehyde got cancer, but the Chemical Industries, which Sonae is part of, played down the results. Some would say they covered up the real dangers.

The Article below is reproduced and is a damning article which relates to the actual issue of formaldehyde pollution. It seems the figures we use to measure pollution and ill health are not impartial scientific facts after all, you can decide for yourself by reading the piece below. If Sonae and others are using figures which are themselves questionable, then we could well be facing a nightmare future in which Kirkby is an even bigger cancer hotspot than it is now.

How the Wood Product Manufacturers Cover Up Bad News

Formaldehyde is common glue in wood products such as plywood and particle board. Kip Howlett, then director of safety and environmental affairs for Georgia-Pacific (a giant wood products manufacturer) laid out a strategy for countering the bad news:

** Claim that rats aren't the right animal to study because they breathe through their noses, never through their mouths;

** Claim that the exposure levels were unrealistically high (even if they were scientifically too low);

** Pay for new studies that will produce different results;

** Hire academic researchers to give "independent" testimonials to the safety of formaldehyde and to put a positive spin on any studies that shows cancer in rats;

** Attack any scientist who says formaldehyde is dangerous;

** Move aggressively to fund universities and other research institutions to steer research in directions that play down formaldehyde's dangers.

A Typical Corporate Stategy

This is a fairly typical corporate strategy for using "science" to achieve corporate goals. Together, these tactics are often called "sound science" by corporate polluters and anything else is often called "junk science." Georgia-Pacific needed to counter the bad news about formaldehyde and Kip Howlett laid out a game plan that would be followed by all formaldehyde manufacturers for years to come. It worked. Howlett then graduated to a much more important position: he now heads the Chlorine Chemistry Council where he oversees teams who manipulate science for the purpose of keeping numerous dangerous chlorine compounds on the market.

Acceptable Formaldehyde exposure limits are manipulated

The keystone of the formaldehyde strategy was to get new data that cast doubt on the CIIT study. Once there is doubt, the regulatory process slows to a crawl or stops entirely. And scientific doubt is relatively easy to create. In this case, the Formaldehyde Institute hired a small laboratory to conduct a new rat inhalation study. They limited the concentration of formaldehyde to 3 parts per million (ppm) whereas the CIIT study had used 15 ppm. EPA scientists said they believed even 15 ppm was too low, but the Formaldehyde Institute used 3 ppm and got what it wanted. In 1980, long before the 3 ppm study was completed, the Institute issued a press release saying, "A new study indicates there should be no chronic health effect from exposure to the level of formaldehyde normally encountered in the home." When the study was published three years later, it showed that, even at 3 ppm, rats suffered from "severe sinus problems" and had early signs of cancer in their cells. Furthermore, they had decreased body and liver weights -- sure signs of ill effects. The Formaldehyde Institute did not issue a press release about these unwanted findings.

30% Increase in Cancer with workers exposed to formaldehyde.

The Formaldehyde Institute then entered into a contract with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to conduct a joint study of 26,000 workers exposed to formaldehyde. The study eventually showed a 30% increase in lung cancer deaths among workers exposed to formaldehyde, but the Institute put its own "spin" on the results and got the NCI to go along: the excess cancers may have been caused by something besides formaldehyde, the NCI concluded. (The study design made it impossible to rule out other causes.) Formaldehyde was thus seemingly exonerated.

What was never revealed (until TOXIC DECEPTION told the story) was that the contract between the Formaldehyde Institute and NCI contained the following clauses:

** The Formaldehyde Institute, not NCI, would select which workers that would be studied;

** NCI researchers were denied access to the raw data: job histories, death certificates, information about plants, processes or exposures -- in sum, the basic data needed to conduct and evaluate such a study.

Thus NCI had no way to judge the accuracy or the reliability of the data being handed them by the Institute, and no way to check what assumptions and judgments had been made in gathering the data.

Despite this, NCI helped the Institute explain away the 30% cancer increase that the study revealed. It was a clear demonstration of the raw power of the corporation over a federal agency's science.

The above article was taken from the internet and a great deal of is credited to a book called 'Toxic Deception' which is the result of a three-year investigation into the USA federal government's regulation of toxic chemicals.Toxic Deception shows how the industry uses campaign contributions, junkets, job offers, 'scorched-earth' courtroom strategies, misleading advertising and multimillion-dollar public relations campaigns to keep their products on the market no matter how great the potential dangers.

By Dan Fagin, Marianne Lavelle and the Center for Public Integrity (Common Courage Press, 1999)

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