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Potential Conflict of Interest at NIEHS
By Trevor | March 7, 2007
The National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) is under fire. Effect Measure, a blog written anonymously by public health experts and practitioners, has written a critical review of David Schwartz’s two year term as director of the NIEHS:
Schwartz, like other Bush appointees, has a penchant for outsourcing public functions to private concerns, and under his boss, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, even the peer review function was put out for bids. Schwartz has been dismantling the flagship environmental health scientific journal, Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP), moving to outsource it, gut its news and comment sections and eliminate the foreign language editions. EHP is an open access journal, but if it is outsourced it may not remain that way. The biggest losers are the many scientists in the developing world, whose environmental problems dwarf those in the developed world. Schwartz had given his word that EHP would not be privatized, an assurance forced on him by congressional pressure. But one of the most disheartening aspects of his reign is that his word cannot be relied upon. Link
The comments from Effect Measure were primed by an article in the LA Times indicating that Sciences International, a private consulting firm, is being questioned by Congress regarding its role as an advisor to the NIEHS and potential conflicts of interest. The potential conflict of interest in question is that in 2006, Sciences International had clients that were among the largest names in the chemical industry, which produces compounds that have been shown to be damaging to reproductive health.
“The most significant project at our firm is the management of the National Toxicology Program’s Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction,” the Sciences International website says. It says half its clients are from the private sector, but its health studies are independent and it “is proud of its reputation for objective science.”
Its current website contains no list of industry clients. But a 2006 version names BASF and Dow Chemical — which manufacture the plastics compound BPA — as well as DuPont, Chevron, ExxonMobil, 3-M, Union Carbide, the National Assn. of Manufacturers, and 45 other manufacturing companies and industry groups.
In 1999, Sciences International represented R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in fighting an Environmental Protection Agency proposal to regulate a pesticide used on tobacco crops. In 2004, its vice president, Dr. Anthony Scialli, who is identified as the federal center’s “principal investigator,” co-wrote a study with a Dow Chemical Co. researcher on how to extrapolate data from animal tests to humans.
In addition, another Sciences International employee who works at the federal agency, Gloria Jahnke, has collaborated nine times on chemicals research with another company that gets funding from the plastics industry, according to a Times review of medical publications. Link
Director David Schwartz has written letters in the past indicating his support of epigenetics research, and his 5-year plan for the agency highlighted epigenetics as an important avenue of investigation.
Update: Additional information on Sciences International and the debate on “privatizing science” is available at The Pump Handle, a relatively new blog on public health. The article is written by Dr. David Michaels, who heads the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP) and is Professor and Associate Chairman in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. Link
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