omega-3 fatty acids appear to have an anti-aging effect on cells.

(NaturalNews)
Thursday, January 28, 2010 by: S. L. Baker, features writer


As NaturalNews has previously reported, omega-3s, the fatty acids found primarily in cold water fish like salmon, have a host of health benefits, including alleviating depression (http://www.naturalnews.com/027285_o...), preventing age-related blindness (http://www.naturalnews.com/026856_o...) and protecting against prostate cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/026752_c...). And now there's evidence omega-3s may have a profound anti-aging effect, too.

Telomeres, structures at the end of chromosomes that are involved in the stability and replication of chromosomes, are markers of biological aging. Genetic factors, exposure to certain chemicals and environmental stressors shorten the length of telomeres and are believed to contribute to the aging process. New research just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) shows that omega-3s slow down the shortening of telomeres -- this means omega-3 fatty acids may protect against aging on a cellular level.

Previous studies have shown that people with established cardiovascular disease who have a high dietary intake of marine omega-3 fatty acids live longer than others with the same health problems who do not have adequate omega-3s in their diet. However, the exact way omega-3s exert this protective effect is not well understood, according to background information in the JAMA study.

So Ramin Farzaneh-Far, M.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues decided to investigate whether omega-3 fatty acid blood levels were linked to changes in leukocyte (a type of blood cell) telomere length in a study of 608 people who had stable coronary artery disease. The scientists studied the patients for about five years, measuring leukocyte telomere length at the beginning of the study and at the end of 5 years of follow-up. Their goal? To see if there was any association between baseline levels of two types of omega-3 fatty acids -- docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) -- in the patients' bodies and any subsequent change in telomere length. There was.

The scientists found that the research subjects with the least amount of DHA and EPA experienced the most rapid rate of telomere shortening. However, those with the highest levels of the omega-3 fatty experienced the slowest rate of telomere shortening.

"Levels of DHA+EPA were associated with less telomere shortening before and after sequential adjustment for established risk factors and potential confounders. Each 1-standard deviation increase in DHA+EPA levels was associated with a 32 percent reduction in the odds of telomere shortening," the authors wrote in their study. "These findings raise the possibility that omega-3 fatty acids may protect against cellular aging in patients with coronary heart disease."

This also raises the very real possibility that an abundance of omega-3s in the diet could offer protection from cellular aging for all people -- whether they have heart disease or not.

Try this really great Omega 3

For more information:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/conten...
http://www.naturalnews.com/omega-3.html

Calcium and vitamin D supplements reduce the risk of bone fractures in everyone, young and old

NaturalNews)
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 by: S. L. Baker, features writer

In recent years, Big Pharma has produced a variety of widely hyped bisphosphonate drugs including alendronate (Fosamax), ibandronate (Boniva), risedronate (Actonel) and zoledronic acid (Reclast) that are aimed at preserving bone mass and reducing the risk of fractures. Unfortunately, as NaturalNews has reported, the more these medications are pushed on patients, the more serious side effects are being reported, from dangerous heart arrhythmias (http://www.naturalnews.com/026027_d...) to dental problems, esophageal ulcers, abdominal pain and severe damage to the jaw bone. But a new study involving almost 70,000 people from throughout the U.S. and Europe shows that nutrients -- calcium and vitamin D taken together -- offer a natural, side effect-free way to prevent fractures.

Because broken bones are a major cause of disability and loss of independence for elders, these findings are of particular interest to older people. In fact, according to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), fall-related injuries are the leading cause of accidental death among Americans age 65 and older. However, fractures can be serious at any age, causing pain, sometimes necessitating surgery and almost always restricting activities.

Good news: the researchers found it isn't only the aged whose bones benefit from taking calcium and vitamin D. Remarkably, they found the supplements reduced fractures in everyone -- the young and old, women and men, and even people who had already sustained fractured bones in the past.

The study, published in the January issue of the British Medical Journal, involved an international team of scientists headed by researchers from Copenhagen University in Denmark. They assessed the results of seven large clinical trials from around the world to document whether vitamin D alone or with calcium was effective in reducing fractures.

One of the most important trials included in the new investigation was a long term study conducted at the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) in Sacramento as part of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI). This 15 year long national program was designed to study the effect of calcium and vitamin D supplements in preventing hip, spine and other types of fractures.

"What is important about this very large study is that it goes a long way toward resolving conflicting evidence about the role of vitamin D, either alone or in combination with calcium, in reducing fractures," John Robbins, professor of internal medicine at UC Davis and a co-author of the journal article, said in a statement to the media. "Our WHI research in Sacramento included more than 1,000 healthy, postmenopausal women and concluded that taking calcium and vitamin D together helped them preserve bone health and prevent fractures. This latest analysis, because it incorporates so many more people, really confirms our earlier conclusions."

Bottom line: the researchers concluded that it is the combination of calcium and vitamin D, rather than vitamin D alone, that is most effective in reducing a variety of fractures. "Interestingly, this combination of supplements benefits both women and men of all ages, which is not something we fully expected to find," Dr. Robbins stated. "We now need to investigate the best dosage, duration and optimal way for people to take it."

Monsanto Hid PCB Pollution for Decades

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46648-2001Dec31.html
Monsanto Hid Decades Of Pollution
PCBs Drenched Ala. Town, But No One Was Ever Told

By Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 1, 2002; Page A01

The Model City
The Company Committee
The Reluctant Regulators
The Dredged-Up Past


ANNISTON, Ala. -- On the west side of Anniston, the poor side of Anniston,
the people ate dirt. They called it "Alabama clay" and cooked it for extra
flavor. They also grew berries in their gardens, raised hogs in their back
yards, caught bass in the murky streams where their children swam and
played and were baptized. They didn't know their dirt and yards and bass
and kids -- along with the acrid air they breathed -- were all contaminated
with chemicals. They didn't know they lived in one of the most polluted patches
of America.

Now they know. They also know that for nearly 40 years, while producing the
now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto
Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped
millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of
pages of Monsanto documents -- many emblazoned with warnings such as
"CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy" -- show that for decades, the corporate
giant concealed what it did and what it knew.

In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek
turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if
dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in
another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided "there is
little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges." In
1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered
its conclusion changed from "slightly tumorigenic" to "does not appear to
be carcinogenic."

Monsanto enjoyed a lucrative four-decade monopoly on PCB production in the
United States, and battled to protect that monopoly long after PCBs were
confirmed as a global pollutant. "We can't afford to lose one dollar of
business," one internal memo concluded.

Lastmonth, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered General Electric Co.
to spend $460 million to dredge PCBs it had dumped into the Hudson River in
the past, perhaps the Bush administration's boldest environmental action to
date. The decision was bitterly opposed by the company, but hailed by
national conservation groups and many prominent and prosperous residents of
the picturesque Hudson River Valley.

In Anniston, far from the national spotlight, the sins of the past are being
addressed in a very different way. Here, Monsanto and its corporate
successors have avoided a regulatory crackdown, spending just $40 million
on cleanup efforts so far. But they have spent $80 million more on legal
settlements, and another lawsuit by 3,600 plaintiffs -- one of every nine
city residents -- is scheduled for trial next Monday. David Carpenter, an
environmental health professor at the State University of New York at
Albany, has been a leading advocate of the EPA's plan to dredge the Hudson,
but he says the PCB problems in Anniston are much worse.

"I'm looking out my window at the Hudson right now, but the reality is that
the people who live around the Monsanto plant have higher PCB levels than
any residential population I've ever seen," said Carpenter, an expert
witness for the plaintiffs in Anniston. "They're 10 times higher than the
people around the Hudson."

The Anniston lawsuits have uncovered a voluminous paper trail, revealing an
unusually detailed story of secret corporate machinations in the era before
strict environmental regulations and right-to-know laws. The documents --
obtained by The Washington Post from plaintiffs' attorneys and the
Environmental Working Group, a chemical industry watchdog -- date as far
back as the 1930s, but they expose actions with consequences that are still
unfolding today.

Officials at Solutia Inc., the name given to Monsanto's chemical operations
after they were spun off into a separate company in 1997, acknowledge that
Monsanto made mistakes. But they also said that for years, PCBs were hailed
for preventing fires and explosions in electrical equipment. Monsanto did
stop making PCBs in 1977, two years before a nationwide ban took effect.
And the current scientific consensus that PCBs are harmful, especially to the
environment, masks serious disputes over just how harmful they are to
people.

Today, the old plant off Monsanto Road here makes a chemical used in
Tylenol. It has not reported a toxic release in four years. Robert Kaley,
the environmental affairs director for Solutia who also serves as the PCB
expert for the American Chemistry Council, said it is unfair to judge the
company's behavior from the 1930s through 1970s by modern standards.

"Did we do some things we wouldn't do today? Of course. But that's a little
piece of a big story," he said. "If you put it all in context, I think
we've got nothing to be ashamed of."

But Monsanto's uncertain legacy is as embedded in west Anniston's psyche as
it is in the town's dirt. The EPA and the World Health Organization classify
PCBs as "probable carcinogens," and while no one has determined whether the
people in Anniston are sicker than average, Solutia has opposed proposals
for comprehensive health studies as unnecessary. And it has not apologized
for any of its contamination or deception.

In the absence of data, local residents seem to believe the worst. The
stories linger: The cancer cluster up the hill. The guy who burned the
soles off his boots while walking on Monsanto's landfill. The dog that died after
a sip from Snow Creek, the long-abused drainage ditch that runs from the
Monsanto plant through the heart of west Anniston's cinder-block cottages
and shotgun houses. Sylvester Harris, 63, an undertaker who lived across
the street from the plant, said he always thought he was burying too many
young children.

"I knew something was wrong around here," he said.

Opal Scruggs, 65, has spent her entire life in west Anniston, the last few
decades in a cottage in back of a Waffle House behind the plant. But in
recent years, Monsanto has bought and demolished about 100 PCB-tainted
homes and mom-and-pop businesses nearby, turning her neighborhood into a
virtual ghost town. Now she has elevated PCB levels in her blood -- along with
Harris and many of their neighbors -- and she believes she's a "walking
time bomb."

"Monsanto did a job on this city," she said. "They thought we were stupid
and illiterate people, so nobody would notice what happens to us."

The Model City

Anniston was born at the height of the Industrial Revolution as a
mineral-rich company town controlled by the Woodstock Iron Works,
off-limits to all but company employees. It was named in 1879 for the foundry
owner's wife -- Annie's Town -- but it was nicknamed "The Model City of
the South" because it was supposed to be a kind of industrial utopia, a centrally
planned rebuke to the North's slums after the Civil War. The company would
provide the workers' cottages, the general store, the church, the schools.
It would take care of the community.

Anniston retains its Model City slogan to this day, but its paternalistic
social experiment was quickly abandoned. It soon developed into a
heavy-industry boomtown, dominated by foundries and factories with 24-hour
smokestacks. In 1929, one of those factories began manufacturing
polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

Now that PCBs are considered "probable" human carcinogens by the EPA
and the World Health Organization, it is easy to forget that they were once
known as miracle chemicals. They are unusually nonflammable, and conduct
heat without conducting electricity. Many safety codes once mandated the use
of PCBs as insulation in transformers and other electrical equipment. They also
were used in paints, newsprint, carbon paper, deep-fat fryers, adhesives, even
bread wrappers. The American public had no idea of the downside of PCBs
until the late 1960s.

Monsanto did. Shortly after buying the 70-acre plant at the foot of
Coldwater Mountain in 1935, the company learned that PCBs, in the
doublenegative of one company memo, "cannot be considered non-toxic." A
1937 Harvard study was the first to find that prolonged exposure could cause
liver damage and a rash called chloracne. Monsanto then hired the scientist
who led the study as a consultant, and company memos began acknowledging
the "systemic toxic effects" of Aroclors, the brand name for PCBs. Monsanto
also began warning its industrial customers to protect their workers from
Aroclors by requiring showers after every shift, providing them with clean
work clothes every day and keeping fumes away from factory floors.

One Aroclor manual reveals that "in the early days of development," workers
at the Anniston plant had developed chloracne and liver problems. In
February 1950, when workers fell ill at a customer's Indiana factory,
Monsanto's medical director, Emmett Kelly, immediately "suspected the
possibility that the Aroclor fumes may have caused liver damage."

Two years later, Monsanto signed an agreement with the U.S. Public Health
Service to label Aroclors: "Avoid repeated contact with the skin and
inhalation of the fumes and dusts." The company also warned its industrial
customers about ecological risks: "If the material is discharged in large
concentrations it will adversely affect . . . aquatic life in the stream."
But it did not warn its neighbors. "It is our desire to comply with the
necessary regulations, but to comply with the minimum," an official wrote.

In 1998, a former Anniston plant manager, William Papageorge, was asked in
a deposition whether Monsanto officials ever shared their data about PCB
hazards with the community.

"Why would they?" he replied.

In the fall of 1966, Monsanto hired a Mississippi State University biologist
named Denzel Ferguson to conduct some studies around its Anniston plant.
Ferguson, who died in 1998, arrived with tanks full of bluegill fish, which
he caged in cloth containers and submerged at various points along nearby
creeks. This is what he reported to Monsanto about the results in Snow
Creek: "All 25 fish lost equilibrium and turned on their sides in 10
seconds and all were dead in 3 1/2 minutes."

"It was like dunking the fish in battery acid," recalled George Murphy, who
was one of Ferguson's graduate students at the time and is now chairman of
Middle Tennessee State University's biology department.

"I've never seen anything like it in my life," said Mack Finley, another
former Ferguson grad student, now an aquatic biologist at Austin Peay State
University. "Their skin would literally slough off, like a blood blister on
the bottom of your foot."

The problem, Ferguson concluded, was the "extremely toxic" wastewater
flowing directly from the Monsanto plant into Snow Creek, and then into the
larger Choccolocco Creek, where he noted similar "die-offs." The outflow,
he calculated, "would probably kill fish when diluted 1,000 times or so." He
warned Monsanto: "Since this is a surface stream that passes through
residential areas, it may represent a potential source of danger to children."
He urged Monsanto to clean up Snow Creek, and to stop dumping
untreated waste there.

Monsanto did not do that -- even though the warnings continued.

In early 1967, a group of Swedish scientists demonstrated publicly that
PCBs were a threat to the global environment. The Swedes identified traces
of PCBs throughout the food chain: in fish, birds, pine needles, even their
children's hair. They proved that PCBs are persistent -- which, as one
lawyer drawled in court last spring, "is nothing but a fancy word for
action preparatory to actual cleanup."

"We should begin to protect ourselves," it said.

The Company Committee

In September 1969, Monsanto appointed an Aroclors Ad Hoc Committee to
address the controversies swirling around its PCB monopoly, which was worth
$22 million a year in sales. According to minutes of the first meeting, the
committee had only two formal objectives: "Permit continued sales and
profits" and "Protect image of . . . the Corporation."

But the members agreed that the situation looked bleak. PCBs had been found
across the nation in fish, oysters and even bald eagles. They had been
identified in milk in Georgia and Maryland. They were implicated in a major
shrimp kill in Florida. Their status as a serious pollutant, the committee
concluded, was "certain."

"Subject is snowballing," one member jotted in his notes. "Where do we go
from here?"

One option, as a member put it, was to "sell the hell out of them as long
as we can." Another option was to stop making them immediately. But the
committee instead recommended "The Responsible Approach" -- phasing out its
PCB products, but only once it could develop alternatives.The idea was to
maintain "one of Monsanto's most profitable franchises" as long as possible
while taking care to "reduce our exposure in terms of liability." The
committee even drew up graphs charting profits vs. liability over time, and
urged more studies to poke holes in the government's case against PCBs.

But the company's own tests on rats, chickens and even dogs proved
discouraging. "The PCBs are exhibiting a greater degree of toxicity than we
had anticipated," reported the committee chairman. Fish tests were worse:
"Doses which were believed to be OK produced 100% kill." The chairman
pressured the company's consultants for more Monsanto-friendly results, but
they replied: "We are very sorry that we can't paint a brighter picture at
the present time."

The picture was not bright in Anniston, either. Company studies were
finding "ominous" concentrations of PCBs in streams and sediments. In
Choccolocco Creek, Monsanto had discovered deformed and lethargic
fish with off-the-charts PCB levels, including a blacktail shiner with 37,800
parts per million. The legal maximum was only 5 parts per million. "It is
apparent to us that there is a cause-and-effect relationship," the consultants
wrote.

At first, the committee members proposed reducing PCB releases to an
"absolute minimum." But then they removed the word "absolute." They saw no
benefit in a unilateral crackdown on Monsanto's PCBs when Monsanto's
customers were still dumping, too: "It was agreed that until the problems
of gross environmental contamination by our customers have been alleviated,
there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges."

And before Monsanto even began to phase out its best-selling PCBs, its top
customer intervened: General Electric, according to a memo by Papageorge,
insisted that it needed to keep buying PCBs to prevent power outages and
that the environmental threat was still "questionable." Monsanto agreed to
slow down its plan, and kept making PCBs until 1977, although only for
closely monitored industrial uses.

And what, Kaley asks, is wrong with that? Corporations, after all, have
obligations to their shareholders, and the federal law banning the
manufacture of PCBs did not take effect until 1979. Monsanto's critics,
Kaley says, do not understand capitalism.

"Look, this was a good product," Kaley said. "Did we try to save it as long
as we could? Absolutely. Was the writing on the wall when we stopped
producing it? Sure. But we did stop."

The Reluctant Regulators

By May 1970, PCBs were a hot topic in the national media. Members of
Congress were calling for hearings. It seemed like only a matter of time
before regulators would notice the river of PCBs spewing out of the
Anniston plant. "This would shut us down depending on what plants or
animals they choose to find harmed," the committee had warned.

So Monsanto decided to inform the Alabama Water Improvement Commission
(AWIC) on its own that PCBs were entering Snow Creek. And AWIC helped the
company keep its toxic secrets.

According to a company memo, AWIC's technical director, Joe Crockett, had
been "totally unaware of published information concerning Aroclors." The
Monsanto executives assured him that everything was under control, and
Crockett, who is now deceased, said he appreciated their forthright
approach. "Give no statements or publications which would bring the
situation to the public's attention," he told them, according to the memo.

"In summary . . . the full cooperation of the AWIC on a confidential basis
can be anticipated," the memo concluded.

That summer, Crockett again came to Monsanto's rescue after the federal
Food and Drug Administration found PCB-tainted fish in Choccolocco Creek.
(There were no fish -- or any other aquatic life -- in Snow Creek.) Monsanto's
managers told him not to worry, saying they hoped to reduce PCB emissions
to 0.1 pounds per day by September.

"Crockett will try to handle the problem quietly without release of the
information to the public at this time," announced a memo marked
CONFIDENTIAL: F.Y.I. AND DESTROY. Crockett explained that if word leaked
out, the state would be forced to ban fishing in Choccolocco Creek and a
popular lake downstream to ensure public safety.

Instead, the public kept fishing. But Monsanto's daily PCB losses, after
dipping from a high of 250 pounds to a low of 16 pounds, ballooned to 88
pounds -- 880 times its goal.

"There is extreme reluctance to report even relatively low emission figures
because the information could be subpoenaed and used against us in legal
actions," wrote an executive at Monsanto headquarters in St. Louis.
"Obviously, having to report these gross losses multiplies, enormously, our
problems because the figures would appear to indicate lack of control. . .
.
Is there anything more that can be done to get the losses down?"

There was. The problem had festered for 36 years, but the Anniston managers
finally began to act that fall, installing a sump, a carbon bed and a new
limestone pit to trap PCBs. And in 1971, facing as much as $1 billion in
additional pollution control costs in Anniston, Monsanto shifted all PCB
production to its plant in Illinois.

Before the year was over, Crockett helped out once more. The Justice
Department was considering a lawsuit against Monsanto over PCBs, and the
EPA wanted it to dredge Snow Creek. So Crockett set up a meeting between
Monsanto and an EPA regulator and helped argue the company's case. The
company's problems disappeared. One executive noted with relief in a memo
that a federal prosecutor had tried but failed to obtain Monsanto's
customer list: "I shudder to think how easily it would have been for someone . . .
to start spilling the beans as to whom we have been selling PCB products."

Monsanto's luck with regulators held in 1983, when the federal Soil
Conservation Service found PCBs in Choccolocco Creek, but took no action.
In 1985, state authorities found PCB-tainted soils around Snow Creek, but a
dispute over cleanup details lingered until a new attorney general named
Donald Siegelman took office in 1988. In a letter that April, Monsanto's
Anniston superintendent thanked Siegelman -- who is now the state's
Democratic governor -- for addressing the Alabama Chemical Association, and
meeting Monsanto's lobbyists for dinner. Then he got to the point: Monsanto
wanted to go forward with its own cleanup plan, dredging just a few hundred
yards of Snow Creek and its tributaries.

The company soon received approval to do just that.

A spokesman for Gov. Siegelman noted that in April 2000, he wrote to
President Bill Clinton about Anniston's PCBs, pointing out "the severity of
the situation" and requesting federal funding. But several state officials
acknowledged that a dozen years earlier, Alabama should have tested a much
larger area for PCBs before approving Monsanto's limited plan.

"It's hard to know how that one slipped through the cracks," said Stephen
Cobb, the state's hazardous waste chief. "For some reason, no one
investigated the larger PCB problem."

The larger problem finally burst into public view in 1993, after a local
angler caught deformed largemouth bass in Choccolocco Creek. After studies
again detected PCBs, Alabama issued the first advisories against eating
fish from the area -- 27 years after Monsanto learned about those bluegills
sliding out of their skins.

By 1996, state officials and plaintiffs' attorneys were finding astronomical
PCB levels in the area: as high as 940 times the federal level of concern
in yard soils, 200 times that level in dust inside people's homes, 2,000 times
that level in Monsanto's drainage ditches. The PCB levels in the air were
also too high. And in blood tests, nearly one-third of the residents of the
working-class Sweet Valley and Cobbtown neighborhoods near the plant were
found to have elevated PCB levels. The communities were declared public
health hazards. Near Snow Creek, the state warned, "the increased risk of
cancer is estimated to be high."

That's when Monsanto launched a program to buy and raze contaminated
properties, offering early sign-up bonuses and moving expenses as
incentives. "Monsanto intends to be a good neighbor -- to those who wish to
leave, and to those who wish to stay," its brochures explained.

Sally Franklin, a 64-year-old retired mechanic with a girlish voice, decided
to stay; she couldn't afford to buy a new home with the money Monsanto was
offering. One spring afternoon, she looked down from her PCB-contaminated
home overlooking what used to be Sweet Valley, now just an overgrown field
around an incongruous stop sign. So much for good neighbors, she grumbled.

"They must not think we know a black cow can give white milk," she said.


The Dredged-Up Past

Anniston is not much of a model city anymore. The EPA officials who set up
an Anniston satellite office to deal with the PCB problem are now alarmed
about widespread lead poisoning as well. The Army is building an
incinerator here to burn 2,000 tons of deadly sarin and mustard gas. And
the Anniston Star has been questioning Monsanto's past mercury releases.

Duane Higgins runs the Chamber of Commerce here in Calhoun County --
motto: "Near Atlanta . . . Near Birmingham . . . Near Perfect" -- and like
many civic leaders here, he's sick of headlines about pollution. "I'm tired of
paying for the sins of our fathers and grandfathers," he said. "I don't see
the point of dredging this stuff up."

He meant that literally, too. Local activists want Monsanto to dredge all
its PCBs out of Anniston's creeks and move all its buried PCBs to
hazardous-waste landfills. That could cost billions of dollars. But state
and EPA officials do not agree that such drastic measures are necessary.
They have no evidence that PCBs have escaped from the dumps since Monsanto
was required to cap them after a spill in 1996; they believe most of
Anniston's PCBs spread from the creeks during floods. And dredging projects
such as the one approved for the Hudson River remain scientifically as well
as politically controversial.

"There's a very pervasive problem in Anniston, but so far we haven't seen a
need for those kinds of dramatic actions," said Wesley Hardegree, an EPA
corrective action specialist.

Part of the problem is that despite all the publicity, much remains unknown
about PCBs. Various animal studies have linked them to various cancers.
Other studies suggest possible ties to low IQs, birth defects, thyroid
problems, immune problems, diabetes. A federal research summary titled "Do
PCBs Affect Human Health?" concluded: "No smoking gun . . . but plenty of
bullets on the floor."

But no one has found a link between PCBs and any cancer as definitive as
the link between, say, cigarettes and lung cancer. A recent GE-funded study --
conducted by the same toxicologist who originally discovered that PCBs
cause cancer in rats -- found no link to cancer in humans. And some
independent scientists remain skeptical of any serious health effects from
real-world PCB exposure.

Today, Solutia is negotiating a final Anniston cleanup plan; EPA officials
say the company has been aggressive in pressing for lower standards but
generally cooperative. It employs 85 workers in Anniston, and donates
computers and science labs to area schools. Its brochures pledge to "insure
environmental safety and health for the community" and to hide nothing from
Anniston residents: "You have a right to know, and we have a responsibility
to keep you, our valued neighbor, informed."

"We don't have horns coming out of our head," said David Cain, the current
manager of the Solutia plant in Anniston. "We're not evil people."

Still, the company's credibility problems linger in Anniston. A recent
company e-mail revealed that even the gifts of computers and labs were part
of a new damage-control strategy, along with donations to Siegelman's
inaugural fund: "The strategy calls for significantly increasing . . .
community outreach, contributions and political involvement while
aggressively seeking . . . to contain media issues regionally." The
company's critics say little has changed. And they warn that Monsanto,
which no longer produces chemicals, is now promising the world that its
genetically engineered crops are safe for human consumption.

"For years, these guys said PCBs were safe, too," said Mike Casey of the
Environmental Working Group, which has been compiling chemical industry
documents on the Web. "But there's obviously a corporate culture of
deceiving the public."

On Jan. 7, the two sides will have their day in court. Kaley said his
company has nothing to hide.

"I'm really pretty proud of what we did," Kaley said. "Was it perfect? No.
Could we be second-guessed? Sure. But I think we mostly did what any
company would do, even today."

Taxpayers Forced to Fund Monsanto's Poisoning of Third World

Monsanto has also been implicated in the indiscriminate sale and use of RoundUp Ultra in the anti-drug fumigation efforts of Plan Colombia. Of the some $1.3 billion of taxpayers' money earmarked for Plan Colombia, Monsanto has received upwards of $25 million for providing RoundUp Ultra.

RoundUp Ultra is a highly concentrated version of Monsanto's glyphosate herbicide, with additional surfactants to increases its lethality. Local communities and human rights organizations charge that Ultra is destroying food crops, water sources and protected areas in the Andes, primarily Colombia.

Paradoxically, the use of RoundUp Ultra has actually increased coca cultivation in the Andes. As local farming communities are increasingly impacted by RoundUp Ultra fumigations, many turn to the drug trade as a means of economic survival. Regional NGOs have estimated that almost 200,000 hectares have been fumigated with Ultra under Plan Colombia.

Monsanto's Agent Orange: The Persistent Ghost from the Vietnam War

Meryl Nass, MD

The Issue That Wont Go Away
What Did We Know About Dioxin, and When Did We Know It?
What Did It Take to Forget What We Knew?
Agent Orange: 2002
Recommended Reading


The Issue That Wont Go Away

"TCDD (dioxin) has been shown to be extremely toxic to a number of
animal species. Mortality does not occur immediately.it appears that
the animals' environment suddenly becomes toxic to them."

Casarett and Doull's Toxicology, 1996

From 1962 to 1970, the US military sprayed 72 million liters of
herbicides, mostly Agent Orange, in Vietnam. Over one million
Vietnamese were exposed to the spraying, as well as over 100,000
Americans and allied troops. Dr. James Clary, a scientist at the
Chemical Weapons Branch, Eglin Air Force Base, who designed the
herbicide spray tank and wrote a 1979 report on Operation Ranch Hand
(the name of the spraying program), told Senator Daschle in 1988,

"When we (military scientists) initiated the herbicide program in the
1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin
contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the 'military'
formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the 'civilian'
version due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture. However,
because the material was to be used on the 'enemy,' none of us were
overly concerned. We never considered a scenario in which our own
personnel would become contaminated with the herbicide."

quoted by Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, 1990

What Did We Know About Dioxin, and When Did We Know It?

The first reported industrial dioxin poisoning occurred in Nitro, West
Virginia in 1949. The exposed workers complained of rash, nausea,
headaches, muscle aches, fatigue and emotional instability. A 1953
accident elsewhere resulted in peripheral neuropathies.

A 1969 report commissioned by the USDA found Agent Orange showed a
"significant potential to increase birth defects." The same year, the
NIH confirmed that it caused malformations and stillbirths in mice. In
1970, the US Surgeon General warned it might be hazardous to "our
health." The same day, the Secretaries of the Departments of
Agriculture, the Interior, and HEW jointly announced the suspension of
its use around lakes, recreation areas, homes and crops intended for
human consumption. DOD simultaneously announced its suspension of all
uses of Agent Orange.

When dioxin contaminated material spread on a Missouri farm in 1971,
hundreds of birds, 11 cats, 4 dogs and 43 horses died.

In 1978 the EPA suspended spraying Agent Orange in national forests,
due to increases in miscarriages in women living near forests that had
been sprayed.

A 1979 study published in the JAMA by Bogen et al looked at 78 Vietnam
veterans who reported Agent Orange exposures. Eighty percent reported
extreme fatigue. Over 60% had peripheral neuropathies, 73% had
depression, and 8% had attempted suicide. Forty-five per cent reported
violent rages. Sudden lapses of memory were seen in 21%.

A 1981 study by Pazderova et al. found one half of 80 exposed workers
had metabolic disturbances, 23% peripheral neuropathies, and the
majority, psychiatric changes, primarily depression and fatigue.

In 1979, 47 railroad workers were exposed to PCBs including dioxin in
Missouri when cleaning up a spillage from a damaged tank car that had
been filled with these chemicals. All were followed medically for six
years. Their initial complaints included fatigue and muscle aches. Two
committed suicide. Careful evaluations at Rush-Presbyterian Hospital,
in Chicago, confirmed peripheral neuropathies (in 96%), depression
(69%), tremors (78%), abnormal fatigue (91%), and muscle aches or
cramp (51%). Half had cognitive problems, including problems with
attention and concentration (50%) and slowed reaction times.

These studies are all consistent with each other, and describe a very
significant, multi-system illness affecting all parts of the nervous
system, and causing fatigue and muscle aches. Some of the studies
documented additional organ dysfunction. This syndrome could be very
disabling.

What Did It Take to Forget What We Knew?

By 1983, 9170 veterans had filed claims for disabilities that they
said were caused by Agent Orange. The VA denied compensation to 7709,
saying that a facial rash was the only disease associated with
exposure.

Congress passed the Veterans' Dioxin and Radiation Exposure
Compensation Standards Act of 1984 in response. It required the VA to
appoint a 'Veterans' Advisory Committee on Environmental Hazards' to
review the literature on dioxin and submit recommendations to the head
of the VA.

According to Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, "The VA.directly contradicted its
own established practice, promulgating instead the more stringent
requirement that compensation depends on establishing a cause and
effect relationship," improperly denying the bulk of the claims.

Four groups of impartial scientists were asked by Zumwalt to review
the Advisory Committee transcripts. Their comments are telling, and
include the following:

"The work of the Advisory Committee.has little or no scientific
merit."

".an inadequate process is being used to evaluate scientific
publications for use in public policy."

".less than objective."

Unfortunately, the flawed scientific reviews didn't end with the VA
committee. The CDC was brought in to add weight to the bogus analysis
of dioxin's effects. After 4 years and $63 million in federal funds,
CDC concluded that an Agent Orange study could not be done based on
military records, and furthermore concluded, without data, that
veterans were never exposed to harmful doses of Agent Orange!

When the CDC's protocols were examined, however, it was found that
three changes had been made to its study in 1985, in an apparent
attempt to dilute any negative effect that might be found. Congress
learned in 1986 that administration officials, not scientists, had
forestalled CDC research on the effects of dioxin.

In 1990, Senator Daschle disclosed additional political interference
in the Air Force's Ranch Hand study of Agent Orange effects. A 1984
draft report's conclusion was substantially altered, and the study was
described as "reassuring."

The Ranch Hand study is still ongoing, despite new allegations of
fraudulent methodologies coming to light every few years. It will cost
taxpayers over $100 million.

Monsanto, a manufacturer of Agent Orange, was happy to duplicate the
methods of federally funded studies. By omitting five deaths in the
exposed group and putting four exposed workers in the control group,
they were able to hide a 65% higher death rate in the workers exposed
at the Nitro plant. Another study of workers exposed in 1953 at a BASF
plant was also shown to be falsified, as all the data had been
supplied by the BASF company.

Thanks to the efforts of Admiral Zumwalt, who as the commanding Navy
Admiral in Vietnam was responsible for some of the spraying, and whose
son died from lymphoma, probably as a result of dioxin exposure, many
more illnesses were finally linked to Agent Orange, and have been made
service-connectable over the past decade.

But Zumwalt did not succeed at clearing the air regarding dioxin's
actual toxicity, nor did he stop further scientific shenanigans
carried out by government and industry to hide the toxic effects of
other products, especially those to which our servicemen and women are
exposed.

In April 2000, the National Institute for Environmental Health
Sciences tried to release a report listing dioxin as a carcinogen, but
it was blocked by a lawsuit filed by an industry group. NIEHS had
tried to list dioxin as a carcinogen in 1991, but was not allowed to
do so then. John Bucher, deputy director of the NIEHS, says, "Dioxin
tends to increase the likelihood of all types of cancers" while
industry representatives continue to claim there is insufficient
evidence to link dioxin to health problems.

Ellen Silbergeld, a University of Maryland toxicologist, responded, "I
think the public should be mad as hell about the [dioxin review]
process and the way it's been abused."

Agent Orange: 2002

US and Vietnamese government scientists and international experts met
last week in Hanoi to discuss the effects of the "last significant
ghost" of the Vietnam War: Agent Orange.

Vietnam wants US help performing research and obtaining compensation.
It blames Agent Orange for tens of thousands of birth defects. The US
and Vietnam did sign an agreement during the meeting to carry out
joint research studies. But US ambassador Raymond Burghardt noted that
developing research studies "that are definitive and address the
underlying causes of disease in Vietnam" will be a "difficult task."

Reporting on the conference, Reuters pointed out, "Observers say
conclusive research could have far-reaching and expensive consequences
in terms of compensation claims for the US and Agent Orange makers,
Dow Chemical and Monsanto."

However, the US seems to think it has an ace in the hole. The US
embassy made clear, at the time of the conference, that "US-Vietnam
relations were normalized in 1995 after Vietnam dropped claims of war
reparations/compensation. At the time of normalization, neither
compensation nor reparations were granted or contemplated for the
future."

And, anyway, the US government has a fallback position. "Washington
argues there is no hard evidence showing the defoliant caused specific
illness," Reuters reported last week. And US government scientists
chimed in that any linkages to birth defects "would take many more
years to prove."

The well-documented story of dioxin and scientific perfidy provide a
guidepost for how to assess government-sponsored research, advisory
committees, and regulatory decisions that impact on the health effects
of toxic exposures, especially when the government may be liable for
damages.

"Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It"

--George Santayana

Recommended Reading

Zumwalt ER. Report to the Secretary of the Department of Veterans'
Affairs on the association between adverse health effects and exposure
to Agent Orange. DVA Report, 1990.

Echobichon DJ. Toxic Effects of Pesticides, in Casarett and Doull's
Toxicology. Klaassen CD ed, McGraw-Hill, NY. 1996.

Klawans HL et al. Neurologic problems following exposure to TCDD,
dioxin. In Neurotoxins and their pharmacological implications, ed.
Jenner P, 1987. Raven Press, NY.

Welch, Craig. Dioxin debate growing hotter. Seattle Times May 29, 2000

Agent Orange help needed now, Vietnam Red Cross says. Reuters, March
5, 2002.

Brunnstrom, David. Hanoi meeting probes "last ghost" of Vietnam War.
Reuters, March 3, 2002.