This is upsetting:
For nearly 50 years, a statistical omission tantamount to data falsification sat undiscovered in a critical study at the heart of regulating one of the most controversial and widely used pesticides in America.
Chlorpyrifos, an insecticide created in the late 1960s by the Dow Chemical Co., has been linked to serious health problems, especially in children. It has been the subject of many lawsuits and banned in Europe and California. The EPA itself nearly banned the chemical, but in 2017 the Trump administration backtracked and rejected EPA’s own recommendation to take chlorpyrifos off the market. The EPA plans to reconsider the chemical’s use by 2022. [University of Washington]
What happened?
Lianne Sheppard, a professor of biostatistics and environmental health in the UW School of Public Health and the study’s lead author, explained that the 1972 “Coulston study” established erroneously how much of the chemical a human could be exposed to before adverse effects showed up in a body’s chemistry.
When Sheppard re-ran the study data using the same longhand statistical analysis as the original, she discovered that key data used in two other level-of-exposure tests in the same study had been left out of the central exposure question — inexplicably. Consequently, the safe exposure limit, called the “no observed adverse effect level,” that the EPA used was wrong.
But – inexplicably – no why. Worse yet:
Why the 1972 Coulston study was not thoroughly examined even as the maturing EPA began reviewing these kinds of studies more rigorously through its inaugural 2006 Human Studies Review Board is a mystery, said co-author Richard Fenske, emeritus professor in the UW School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences.
But when the EPA formally set out to review human-subject studies like the Coulston study, the maker of chlorpyrifos (Dow) specifically removed the study from that process, said Fenske, who was a member of that initial review board.
Which appears to be appalling, at least to me. While the initial error can be understood as a blunder – even if it’s inexplicable – the second incident appears to be a deliberate attempt to shield profits from damage by scientific scrutiny. This is – or should be – considered a severe ethical lapse.
If in fact the removal from the human-subject review process was deliberately to shield those profits, someone should end up in the pokey.
