Much of the arsenic would have to be removed by the mining companies and
others that create the problem. It is very dangerous in small amounts.
Again, the WSJ article makes it seem like an airtight case.
Here is the article plus a more recent one
April 19, 2001
Major Business News
EPA's Reversal on Arsenic Standards
Shows Disagreement Among Experts
All Agree Chemical Kills, but Question
Is Just How Much It Takes to Do So
By PETER WALDMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
After declaring that arsenic in drinking water causes cancer, it
took the Environmental Protection Agency 17 years, and six
intense weeks at the tail end of the Clinton administration, to
order sharp reductions of the naturally occurring carcinogen in
America's water supply.
It took the Bush administration 58 days to shelve the new rule.
"At the very last minute, my predecessor made a decision" to
lower arsenic standards, said President George W. Bush last
month. "We pulled back his decision, so that we can make a
decision based upon sound science."
In fact, few government decisions could have been more
thoroughly researched, over so many years, than the EPA's
move to slash the allowable content of arsenic in U.S. drinking
water by 80%. The beefed-up standard, to 10 parts per billion
from 50 ppb, was first proposed by the U.S. Public Health
Service back in 1962. Over the next three decades, regulators
weighed dozens of studies on the issue, including six reports by
the prestigious National Research Council, as they struggled to
balance the health risks of arsenic with the huge costs of
extracting the metal from drinking water.
'The Science Is Unequivocal'
"We know arsenic is carcinogenic in people -- not just
laboratory animals -- at exposure levels that aren't much higher
than the current U.S. standard," says Richard Wilson, a
Harvard University physics professor and former department
chair who studies health risks. "The science is unequivocal."
Not to everyone. Since 1990, consultants working for
corporations that could face billions of dollars in cleanup costs
under a lower arsenic standard have cast doubts on the
science. For ammunition, they funded studies, then shelved
results they didn't like. In one case, a water-industry
consultant
put a prominent Taiwanese epidemiologist's name atop a
scientific paper that the scientist says he never approved for
publication. In another, a big energy company offered money
to a Chilean researcher to produce helpful data. Offended, the
researcher declined.
"In earlier years, when tobacco companies needed science to
support their claims, they had to hire their own researchers,"
says Jay Gourley of the Public Education Center, a Washington
foundation that studies scientific issues. "Now, there's a
thriving
industry of consultants who will do it for you."
Acrimony also infected the EPA. Researchers inside and
outside government saw an apparent conflict of interest in
senior EPA scientists co-authoring papers with industry
consultants and helping organize a biannual conference on
arsenic partly funded by industry.
"I never saw a contaminant that caused so much friction within
the agency," says James Elder, who ran EPA's drinking-water
program in the early 1990s.
'Fair and Fully Justified'
Wednesday, EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman
signaled the administration will lower the arsenic standard
within nine months, but probably not as low as the Clinton
administration's 10 ppb. She asked the National Academy of
Sciences to perform yet another arsenic study, this time on
levels of 3 to 20 ppb. She also asked a separate panel of
experts to review the economic impact of lowering the arsenic
standard, to ensure the "costs are fair and fully justified."
The administration's stance on arsenic
has become a lightning rod for
environmental groups who claim it
typifies President Bush's preference for
pleasing industry at the environment's expense. This week,
after several high-profile reversals of Clinton-administration
moves to enhance environmental protection, President Bush let
stand stronger regulations for wetlands and lead emissions.
That arsenic is harmful to human health was never in dispute.
Rather, the main issue -- and the debate reopened by the Bush
administration -- concerns dosage: How much arsenic in water
does it take to give people cancer?
In places where arsenic has been proved to cause cancer,
including Taiwan and Chile, residents were exposed to much
higher levels of the metal in their water than are generally
found
in the U.S. Moreover, because arsenic hasn't proved
particularly toxic in laboratory animals, toxicologists are at a
loss to explain its ill effects on humans. Industry consultants
cite both these facts in arguing that arsenic may not be harmful
at all at the low exposure levels prevalent in the U.S.
"Given the huge uncertainty, we really ought to be careful
before we go spend all this money" cleaning up arsenic, says
mining-industry consultant Barbara Beck of Gradient Corp.,
Cambridge, Mass.
Better safe than sorry, say epidemiologists and public-health
experts. The EPA's usual practice with known carcinogens
such as arsenic, when the effects of low-dose exposure are
unclear, is to assume the health risks are proportional from high
dose to low. In practice, that has meant establishing wide
margins of public safety by setting allowable limits for
chemicals in drinking water that are several orders of magnitude
smaller than the minimal dose found to harm people or
laboratory animals.
A Razor-Thin Gap
For example, when the industrial solvent 1,1,2-trichloroethane
was found to cause blood and liver damage in mice at a dose of
200,000 ppb, the EPA set its drinking-water standard for the
chemical at five ppb. Arsenic, in contrast, has been found to
cause several types of cancer in humans at doses as low as 200
ppb in drinking water, or just four times the current EPA
standard -- a razor-thin gap, scientifically speaking. Three
peer-reviewed papers published in academic journals in the past
18 months found cancerous effects below 100 ppb.
"The margin of safety for arsenic is lower than virtually any
other substance EPA regulates," says Michael Kosnett, a
University of Colorado professor who served on the National
Research Council subcommittee in 1999 that recommended
tightening the standard. "We're talking about people's drinking
water; why make an exception for arsenic?"
Money, for one thing. The American Water Works
Association, a trade group, estimates the national cost of
meeting a 10 ppb arsenic standard at $4.5 billion for special
treatment facilities, plus $500 million or so a year in increased
extraction costs. That burden would fall mainly on ratepayers in
small communities in the Southwest and parts of the upper
Midwest and New England, where arsenic leaches naturally
from rocks into water supplies. Roughly 15% of New
Hampshire's drinking water exceeds 10 ppb of arsenic, for
example, as do 3,300 water systems in Michigan and 25% of
New Mexico's water districts, including Albuquerque's. In all,
about 15 million Americans drink affected water.
"The cost of complying with this new standard could well put
small rural systems out of business," complained Sen. Pete
Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, in a recent speech.
"There is no proof it will increase health benefits."
Industry's Interest
The ramifications extend far beyond water producers. Arsenic,
which was once used widely in pesticides and is a common
byproduct of mining and electric-power generation, is among
the most prevalent pollutants at toxic-waste sites across the
country. The threat of being held to a much tighter cleanup
standard has compelled an array of industry groups, from the
International Lead Zinc Research Organization to the Electric
Power Research Institute, to join the fray.
In 1990, for example, Harvard's Dr. Wilson was hired with
some outside consultants by Atlantic Richfield Co., which then
owned the massive Anaconda mining complex in Montana, to
demonstrate that arsenic wasn't carcinogenic to humans at low
levels. At the time, he says, he was convinced that the available
evidence pointed to an exposure threshold below which arsenic
appeared to be relatively safe. But Dr. Wilson quickly changed
his mind, he says, after visiting epidemiologist Chien-Jen Chen
in Taiwan, whose studies in the 1980s were the first to link
arsenic to lung, bladder and kidney cancers.
"The Taiwanese data on internal cancers was so shocking and
out of kilter with everything else the EPA was doing," says Dr.
Wilson, that the professor called for an immediate "emergency"
arsenic standard of 20 ppb, pending further research. That's
not what his sponsors at ARCO apparently had in mind. The
company canceled the research project and prevented the
group from publishing their results for several years, Dr. Wilson
says.
A former ARCO scientist says the company killed the project
not because it feared the results, but because the group's report
was badly prepared. ARCO blocked publication of the work,
this scientist says, because the research belonged to ARCO,
which BP Amoco PLC acquired last year.
Meanwhile, epidemiologist Allan Smith and several colleagues
at the University of California at Berkeley published their own
explosive findings in 1992: For people who drink water
contaminated with the U.S. limit of 50 ppb of arsenic, they
found, the estimated lifetime risk of dying from bladder,
kidney, lung or liver cancer was 1% greater than normal --
more than 100 times the EPA's own guideline for excess
carcinogenic risk in drinking water. The finding meant that, to
be consistent, regulators would probably have to slash the
arsenic standard to five ppb or less, at a huge cost to industry.
In scientific journals and conferences, the Smith results were
assailed by industry consultants, who argued the need for more
research. The Smith group erred, the consultants charged, by
basing their risk assessments on direct extrapolations from the
Taiwanese data. This so-called linear risk model didn't account
for dietary and genetic differences between Americans and
Taiwanese, they argued, and excluded the possibility that, at
the lower exposure levels found in the U.S., people might be
able to detoxify arsenic through normal metabolism.
(More-recent evidence from researchers at the EPA and
institutions such as the University of Arizona suggests that
metabolized arsenic may be even more toxic to people, not
less.)
With a court-ordered deadline for revising the arsenic standard
looming in 1995, industry kicked into high gear. Corporate
interests helped fund the arsenic task force within the Society
of Environmental Geochemistry and Health, a professional
group that launched a biannual international conference on
arsenic in 1993.
The task force included several industry consultants. At first,
toxicologist Paul Mushak, then a University of North Carolina
medical professor and now a consultant, also joined the task
force, which was co-sponsored by the EPA. But Dr. Mushak
quickly resigned, he says, when he decided the panel's main
aim was to thwart tighter EPA regulations in deference to the
task force's corporate backers. In particular, Mr. Mushak says,
he found the role of some EPA scientists on the panel
"astounding."
"This was not a case of EPA people exercising rights as
scientists," Dr. Mushak says, "but of participating on a task
force whose tasks included disrupting the legitimate regulatory
process."
Jeanette Wiltse, a senior official at the EPA who helped craft
the arsenic standard, denies the agency was ever unduly
influenced by industry in the debate over arsenic. She notes
that industry sponsorship of scientific conferences and research
happens all the time, and that, "we at the EPA have plenty of
ability to know when we're talking science or some
stakeholder's wishes."
In 1995, the industry side appeared to score a coup when a
scientific paper was published, ostensibly co-written by Dr.
Chen, casting doubt on the early Taiwanese data that had
underlay most cancer-risk assessments on arsenic. The paper's
primary author was consultant Kenneth Brown of Chapel Hill,
N.C., an arsenic task-force member hired by the American
Water Works Association to review Dr. Chen's data on internal
cancers. Dr. Brown concluded that exposure levels in the
Taiwanese villages studied were too unreliable for extrapolating
cancer risks. The paper, which came out just as the EPA was
gearing up to develop a new arsenic standard, appeared to
contradict Dr. Chen's own pioneering work in the 1980s.
Naming Names
But Dr. Chen says he pointed out to Dr. Brown many major
problems in an early draft of the paper that were never
adequately corrected before publication. The Taiwanese
epidemiologist says he didn't realize Dr. Brown was working
for the water industry on the report, or that arsenic research
had grown so politicized. He was shocked, he says, to learn
that his data had been improperly manipulated in a paper under
his own name, but he refrained from taking his objections
public.
"I always thought this was an academic, scientific discussion,"
says Dr. Chen. When he later met Dr. Brown at scientific
conferences, he chose not to confront Dr. Brown. "We just
said 'Hi' and didn't talk in depth."
Dr. Brown acknowledges he didn't include all of Dr. Chen's
changes in the final paper, but he stands by his criticisms of
the
Taiwanese data. He says he sent Dr. Chen a final version for
his approval, but, after not hearing back from Taiwan for more
than four weeks, signed off with the publisher on Dr. Chen's
behalf.
"Maybe I should have called him," Dr. Brown says.
Racing to Analyze Data
In the mid-1990s, industry scrutiny shifted focus to a new
front: Chile. Studies by local and U.S. researchers on the
copper-mining areas of northern Chile were beginning to
corroborate, and sometimes exceed, the Smith group's earlier
cancer-risk estimates out of Taiwan. A race broke out as
scientists at ARCO headquarters in Los Angeles scrambled to
analyze the raw Chilean data to counter any more bad news
from epidemiologists at Berkeley or the EPA, says Howard
Greene, the former ARCO scientist who led the company's
arsenic research.
In October 1996, Dr. Greene took Dr. Brown to an arsenic
conference in Chile's capital, Santiago, where they asked
scientist Ana Maria Sancha to share her university group's
unprocessed data. She declined, insisting the Chileans wanted
to publish the results themselves before releasing the numbers,
Dr. Greene says. On the second night of the conference, Drs.
Greene and Brown invited Guillermo Marshall, a statistician
working with Dr. Sancha, to dinner at the tony Santiago Hyatt.
"They were very nice," remembers Dr. Marshall, a professor of
mathematics and public health at the Catholic University of
Chile, interviewed by telephone in Santiago. "They showed a
lot of interest in my work. ... Then, in the middle of dinner,
they offered me money to do research for them. They said
they had a lot of money and could create a center here to do
research to show the EPA that the impact of arsenic is not as
high as was claimed. They were clearly saying they'd pay me
for results that helped them."
At first, Dr. Marshall was offended by the offer, he recalls, but
now he laughs whenever he describes the dinner to his
students. "I teach the kids you must look for the truth," he
says, "not for the people who will pay you."
Dr. Greene doesn't remember offering to fund a research
center in Chile, but he does recall trying to work out what he
calls a "win-win" partnership with Dr. Marshall. "I could have
helped him with money to complete his analysis," Dr. Greene
says, "and we could have gained access to data we really
wanted."
Last year, Dr. Marshall's group published their results in the
scientific journal Epidemiology. The findings showed some of
the highest cancer risks ever associated with arsenic.
"At the level of 50 parts per billion," says Dr. Marshall,
referring to the EPA standard now restored by President Bush,
"arsenic is killing a lot of people in Chile."
April 20, 2001
Arsenic Issue May End up Poisoning
Bush's 'Compassionate Conservatism'
By JEANNE CUMMINGS and JOHN HARWOOD
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- President Bush never intended his
trademark "compassionate conservatism" to be defined by the
level of arsenic he allows in drinking water. But it may well
come to that.
The Bush administration's decision last month to delay
implementation of tougher standards on arsenic has helped
precipitate the first real public-relations stumble of his
administration -- one the new president's team has been
scrambling to repair ever since. The arsenic decision was one
of a string of early moves by Mr. Bush that stunned
environmental activists and convinced them -- and many
ordinary citizens, as well -- that the president was putting the
interests of his business backers ahead of environmental
concerns.
This Sunday, Earth Day, environmental groups plan to
highlight that point by decrying Bush decisions to reject an
international agreement on global warming, abandon a pledge
to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, soften new efficiency
standards for air conditioners and delay the arsenic rules.
"Before there was any outreach, before there was any
dialogue, the environment appears to have been targeted for
hostile action," says Fred Krupp, executive director of
Environmental Defense, a New York environmental group.
Mr. Krupp's view is all the more striking because he was an
important participant in the elder President Bush's effort to
win landmark clean-air legislation, and he traveled to Austin,
Texas, to discuss environmental issues with candidate Bush
during the 2000 campaign.
Mr. Bush has spent the past week frantically trying to repair
his environmental image in advance of Earth Day. He
announced he would adopt the Clinton administration's
last-minute rules establishing new reporting requirements on
lead emissions, and he agreed to a Clinton plan to set aside
thousands of acres of wetlands for preservation. Wednesday,
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine
Todd Whitman signaled the administration would tighten the
arsenic rules, though not for nine months and probably not by
as much as President Clinton wanted. Thursday, the President
brought Ms. Whitman and his secretary of state, Colin Powell,
out on the White House lawn to announce plans to sign a
relatively minor treaty; it bans world-wide use of a group of
highly toxic chemicals that already are banned in many
developed nations.
Activists remain unimpressed, but they aren't the White
House's target audience. "There's nothing that we can do that
will please them long term," grumbles a senior administration
official. "We're going to look green enough for the ordinary
person."
Perhaps. But even in this week of orchestrated
pro-environment news conferences, word leaked out that the
president would proceed with plans to allow oil exploration in
the Gulf of Mexico, despite the opposition of Florida Gov. Jeb
Bush.
In part, the surprise over Mr. Bush's environmental decisions
reflects broader lack of recognition over the new president's
conservative bent. Anyone who closely examined his record
as governor of Texas or his campaign statements shouldn't
have been amazed -- he is more conservative than his father,
for instance, on a number of issues. But his campaign
messages of racial inclusion and education reform led many to
expect a more moderate presidency. As for environmental
issues in particular, they didn't get much airing during the
campaign and have never been among Mr. Bush's top
priorities.
By undermining his moderate image, the fracas over the
environment could diminish Mr. Bush's appeal with so-called
swing voters -- the same voters who will be pivotal in next
year's House and Senate midterm elections. In a CBS News
poll released this month, 61% of the respondents said
protecting the environment was more important than
producing energy, while only 29% picked energy over the
environment. When asked which issue they believed Mr.
Bush thought was more important, 65% said the president
would elevate energy over the environment, compared with
9% who thought the reverse. As Bush nears the 100-day mark
of his presidency, Democrats point hopefully to signs that Mr.
Bush's support among younger women is eroding.
Probably no issue has caused more political damage to the
president than arsenic. President Bush's decision to delay the
standard was a boon to the mining industry, a main
contributor to arsenic in ground water. The industry donated
nearly $1.7 million directly to federal candidates and
committees, of which 82% went to Republicans. Mr. Bush
received $115,521 from mining-industry officials, and two
mining executives contributed $100,000 each to the
Bush-Cheney inaugural. Meanwhile, environmental groups
donated $1.4 million to federal candidates, of which 92%
went to Democrats.
Debate over the safe levels of arsenic in drinking water has
been raging in the scientific community and within the
Environmental Protection Agency for decades. In January
2000, then-EPA Administrator Carol Browner proposed a
reduction to five parts per billion from 50 parts per billion.
Three days before leaving office, the Clinton administration
made a partial bow to opponents of the lower standard,
announcing a reduction to 10 parts per billion.
Even before Mr. Clinton proposed the rule, opponents were
mobilizing to kill the new standards. The National Mining
Association contacted Republican New Mexico Sen. Pete
Domenici, whose home state is grappling with particularly high
levels of ground-water arsenic, and sought his aid in helping to
block implementation of the new rules. The Western
Governors Association, dominated by conservative
Republicans, began shipping briefs detailing the economic
impact of the new rules to the Bush transition team.
During inaugural weekend, Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt lobbied
Ms. Whitman at a chance meeting at one reception to plead
for help. She vowed to examine the issue.
Mr. Bush had barely finished his oath of office when the
Browner regulations were put on hold by incoming Chief of
Staff Andrew Card, who issued an order delaying
implementation of all last-minute Clinton rules so the new
team had time to review them. After Mr. Card's
announcement, the American Wood Preservers Institute,
whose members use arsenic in their production process, sent
Mr. Card a letter warning of the Clinton rule's "devastating
impact upon many small businesses in our industry." On Feb.
12, Mr. Domenici wrote Ms. Whitman about the "excruciating
financial burden" the rule would place on New Mexico water
users, adding a hand-written post-script: "No benefits, huge
costs."
Ms. Whitman announced her plan to delay the arsenic rules
for further study on March 21. Almost instantly, it became a
staple of the late night comedians. Aides have been working
since, to cast Mr. Bush's environmental views in a softer light,
embracing some Clinton proposals and easing others.
Wednesday, Ms. Whitman announced that the new
administration will make its final recommendations on
tightening allowable arsenic levels in February -- just as the
midterm election campaigns are getting under way.
John Henry wrote:
> At 05:31 PM 4/20/2001 -0700, you wrote:
> >John, the Wall Street Journal article made the case that it is one of the
> >most studied issues in history. It also is dangerous in VERY small
> >amounts. Of course, more affluent people can drink bottled water, so the
> >benefits from cleaning up might not be much.
>
> OK, I thought I had agreed with you on the benefit of zero arsenic.
>
> The question I asked was how dangerous in small amounts vs how dangerous
> the effects of diverting resources to remove it? Not just to the rich but
> to the poor as well.
>
> Where is the cost-benefit analysis?
>
> I note you avoid addressing that.
>
> >It reminds me of the web site with the abortion doctors. If it had the
> >home addresses of Supreme Court justices ....
>
> HUH? Where did that come from?
>
> Best,
>
> John R Henry CPP
>
> Visit the Quick Changeover website at http://www.changeover.com
>
> Subscribe to the Quick Changeover Newsletter at
> http://www.changeover.com/newsletter.htm
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
