EPA announces oil dispersant toxicity data

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released Wednesday the first dataset of peer-reviewed study results from the agency’s own toxicity testing of oil-dispersing chemicals.

All eight dispersants studied were found to be “slight toxic to practically non-toxic.”

Officials did not say why the agency hadn’t studied the toxicity of oil spill dispersants years ago, prior to approving their marketing and use.

The agency has yet to have its scientists study oil dispersants’ effects on the release of cancer-causing chemicals like benzene from the crude oil, however — a potentially crucial factor in the eventual recovery of the Gulf’s seafood industry. And an official seemed to duck the question when a reporter asked if dispersants were settling on the Gulf floor rather than truly ‘disappearing’ from the Gulf, as the official had suggested.

The EPA had previously relied on BP’s own assessments of dispersant toxicity.

All eight dispersants studied by the EPA were found to be “slightly toxic to practically non-toxic,” and much less toxic than crude oil, which contains carcinogens like benzene, EPA research and development director Paul Anastas told reporters Wednesday afternoon.

Sticking to a script that closely followed a written press release, Anastas told reporters the chemicals all exhibited roughly the same impact on fish, mice and shrimp.

The next step in EPA assessments of the toxicity of the BP oil spill will be to study the toxicity of the crude oil alone and in combination with each of the eight dispersants. Only after those analyses are completed will EPA decide whether or not to order BP to change dispersants it is using.

Anastas did not indicate how long that testing would require.

The EPA’s approval of dispersant use by BP was “difficult,” Anastas said, but necessary to break up oil slicks before they reached fragile wetlands along the Gulf coast. BP has reduced its use of dispersants by 70 percent since use peaked several weeks ago, Anastas said.

More than 1.5 million gallons of the dispersants have been dumped into the Gulf during the BP oil spill response effort.

Anastas said the dispersants biodegrade and disappear from ocean water within “weeks to months,” rather than the years of persistence exhibited by crude oil.

However, he based that conclusion on measurements of surface and subsurface sea water, and seemed to duck a reporter’s question about whether or not dispersants are simply settling on the Gulf floor.

Dispersants are generally less toxic than oil and can prevent some oil from impacting sensitive areas along the Gulf Coast, Anastas emphasized.



Deadly bias: drug company money muddied the waters on Rosiglitazone’s risks

Eleven years after the anti-diabetes drug rosiglitazone hit the market, a pair of studies published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) report it dramatically increases the risk of heart attack compared to other anti-diabetes drugs.

One of the studies included clinical trial data from the drug’s manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline. A court order required GSK to disclose that data.

But what makes the new reports even more tragic, is a study published three months ago in the British Medical Journal, showing that academic researchers paid by the drug’s manufacturer may have muddied the waters and delayed recognition of rosiglitazone’s risks.

The Archives of Internal Medicine paper is a meta-analysis, pooling data from published studies and  drug company data that might never have seen the light of day were it not for a 2004 court settlement in New York required GlaxoSmithKline to disclose their clinical trial results. Cleveland Clinic Foundation researchers pooled those with numbers from published studies in a meta-analysis of data from 56 clinical trials.

The conflict of interest study, conducted by researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., showed a “clear and strong link”  between papers emphasizing the drug’s risks or safety, and whether or not the authors had been paid by the drug’s manufacturer.

Worse, payments from industry were not disclosed in industry-backed researchers’ scientific papers.

“Disclosure rates for financial conflicts of interest were unexpectedly low,” the Mayo team reported.

The team modestly concluded their findings “underscore the need for further changes in disclosure procedures in order for the scientific record to be trusted.”

In stark contrast to researchers who hid their industry ties, Steven Nissen, the author of the Cleveland Clinic meta-analysis, disclosed fees from numerous pharmaceutical companies — all of which was given directly to charity.

No tungsten or exotic alloys in Army’s newest ‘green’ ammo

The U.S. Army’s new “green ammo” has no exotic alloys or toxic/carcinogenic tungsten, Picatinny Arsenal spokeswoman Audra Calloway e-mailed Monday.

“The M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round is made with a copper jacket, copper slug (versus lead) and a hardened steel penetrator,” she wrote in a nearly immediate, same-day e-mail response to my inquiry.

That’s a new and genuinely safer, if expensive, approach to reducing lead pollution in the soil and water at U.S. military reservations than past attempts at developing “green” ammunition.

The Army’s 2005 attempt to develop an environmentally-friendly alternative to lead and depleted uranium centered around exotic tungsten alloys. But tungsten alloy bullet fragments turned out to be aggressively carcinogenic in lab rats and the tungsten was more water soluble than the Army had assumed.

This time around, they’re going with much safer metals, environmentally speaking: copper and steel.

They’re likely to cost much more to produce than lead bullets, of course.

My quick search of federal contracts databases identified $36 million paid to Alliant Techsystems for green ammo development in 2009 alone. It’s not clear from those records how many bullets were actually produced.

I’ve asked for per-bullet production costs, just out of curiosity.

‘Also asked whether there are plans to scale up the new bullets to replace controversial depleted uranium rounds as well as lead rifle bullets.

Obama administration cracking down on whistleblowers

My recent experiences with the intimidation of EPA and Army medicine experts appear to be part of a larger trend, if the New York Times is to be believed.

While the level of secrecy is not yet as bad as what I encountered during the Bush years, Obama’s open government pledges are beginning to ring a little hollow.

US Army fails to disclose what is in new ‘green ammo’

The U.S. Army has begun shipping new “green,” lead-free M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round ammunition, but has yet to disclose what’s in those bullets.

That’s a curious omission, given the troubled history of the Army’s effort to replace lead and depleted uranium munitions. Earlier efforts yielded aggressively carcinogenic metal alloys and complaints that the rounds don’t work well in the battlefield.

Gulf university ecologists shut out of BP oil spill research

I’ve been finding that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — on paper, the lead agency for assessing human health risks from oil spills — has ceded to BP the measurement of carcinogenic and toxic chemicals from water contaminated by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The EPA is also ignoring the movement of carcinogens into the Gulf food chain.

Academic experts on Gulf ecology appear to have been sidelined from the response effort as well, The Scientist reported yesterday:

“A chorus is developing here,” said William Hawkins, director of the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Research Laboratory (GCRL), of the growing frustration among Gulf State academics who feel that they should be involved more rapidly and intimately in the cleanup and assessment efforts. “It goes without saying that we have knowledge of the environments that are adjacent to us as do colleagues in the other states,” he told The Scientist.

EPA rises the FOIA bar for BP oil spill records

The EPA appears not to be taking to heart President Obama’s executive order on compliance with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and a strong ‘presumption of disclosure’ in agencies’ responses to FOIA requests.

EPA headquarters is now reviewing and ‘clearing’ FOIA requests related to the BP oil spill, an EPA FOIA officer has told me.

BP not complying with EPA directive to curb dispersants in Gulf

Richard Denison at EDF posted a very interesting analysis of BP’s subsurface dispersants use in the Gulf.

EPA briefly approved BP’s use of dispersants when it appeared the spill was much, much smaller than it really was. Published, peer-reviewed studies show that dispersants increase the rate of release to seawater of benzene and other carcinogens and mutagens from crude oil, and increase levels of those chemicals in the food chain.

Where is the EPA’s only research ship? Nowhere near the oil spill.

EPA scientists are hitching rides on NOAA and BP ships as they can, because their own agency’s research vessel is nowhere near the BP oil spill.

My requests this week to EPA press folk for information about EPA research vessel deployments (or lack of deployments) to the Gulf of Mexico have gone unanswered.  Maybe that’s because the EPA’s only research ship, the Ocean Survey Vessel Bold, is currently sitting off the New England coast.

EPA — the official lead agency in assessing oil spill health effects — is ‘not involved’

According to the National Response and National Contingency plans, the EPA is supposed to be the lead government agency for public health responses to oil spills.

But two months into the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, that’s simply not happening, agency sources tell me. Instead, some complained, the agency has essentially ceded that responsibility to BP.

“Today, EPA’s just not involved,” one source said earlier this week. “It’s mind-boggling. We’re the EPA. We should be telling states and regions what to do, not sitting on our asses.”