The DQA was passed in 2000 as an obscure 32 word section in a
712 page appropriations act. Congress directed the Office of Management and
Budget (OMB) to prepare guidelines to "provide policy and procedural guidance to
Federal agencies for ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility,
and integrity of information (including statistical information) disseminated by
Federal agencies." Here's a short overview of the OMB guidelines: "The
Data Quality Act: A revoluation in the role of science in policy making or a can
of worms?".
Weiss describes the origins
of the DQA, and explains how it has been used - with a special case study of the
regulation of the herbicide artazine. The general theme is that the DQA was
introduced as a tool for use by business interests to hobble health, safety, and
environmental regulation. No one can be against the use of better science, so a
requirement for better science has considerable rhetorical power. But since
scientific results always have an element of uncertainty, if you set the science
standards high enough you can create grounds for delaying or derailing
science-based regulation.
There is a certain amount of credible evidence
that small amounts of atrazine can disrupt "hormones in wildlife - in some cases
turning frogs into bizarre creatures bearing both male and female sex organs."
Weiss describes how industry lobbyist Jim Tozzi (the author of the DQA itself)
challenged EPA science on atrazine:
"...That petition, filed by Tozzi, made a two-pronged
attack on the effort to regulate atrazine more stringently. The first was to
claim that the evidence for atrazine's gender-bending effects in frogs was not
fully reproduced by other Syngenta-funded EcoRisk [Syngenta makes
artazine, EcoRisk was a consulting firm hired by Syngenta to test it for
potential problems - Ben] scientists...
Tozzi
said reliance on irreproducible results would violate the Data Quality Act
because information that is not reproducible is "not accurate, reliable or
useful."
As evidence of irreproducibility, he pointed to the dozen or
so studies sponsored by Syngenta in addition to Hayes's study [Tyrone
Hayes, a professor at UC Berkeley, who had done considerable work on atrazine,
both for EcoRisk and independently. His experiments had indicated that small
amounts of atrazine could have considerable impact on frogs -
Ben]. An independent panel of experts convened by the
EPA had already expressed exasperation over the conflicting results and
mistakes they found in the design and implementation of those
studies.
In at least two of the studies the "control" frogs that were
supposed to be atrazine-free were later found to have been in water
contaminated with atrazine, an error the scientists said was unintentional.
Another set of Syngenta studies was found to be unreliable because 80 to 90
percent of the animals died, apparently as a result of inadequate
care.
Essentially what Syngenta-funded scientists did "was produce a
number of studies that were purposefully flawed and misleading, and that
changed the weight of the evidence," Hayes said.
While the EPA review
also found some flaws in Hayes's studies, his conclusions have been echoed by
at least four other independent research teams in three
countries.
"What a coincidence that everybody can find an effect of
atrazine on gonads," Hayes said, "except [those] funded by
Syngenta."
David Michaels, a professor of occupational and
environmental health at George Washington University School of Public Health
and Health Services, said even a good study will appear "not reproducible" if
enough bad studies are thrown into the mix.
"I call this 'manufacturing
uncertainty,' and there is a whole industry to do this," said Michaels, who
was the Energy Department's assistant secretary for environment, safety and
health under Clinton. "They reanalyze the data to make [previously firm]
conclusions disappear -- poof. Then they say one study says yes and the other
says no, so we're nowhere."
Pastoor of Syngenta said there was no
conspiracy to create conflicting data..."
Minor
title change, 8-16-04. posted by
Ben Muse at 9:56
PMComments