The night after Julia Roberts won an Oscar for her fact-based portrayal of environmental activist Erin Brockovich, the chemical industry is set to take another blow on national television Monday evening as PBS airs “Trade Secrets” — an expose of “secrets buried in thousands of confidential documents from America’s chemical companies.” The following researchers and policy analysts are available for interviews:
ADRIENNE ANDERSON
For decades, Anderson has assisted communities poisoned by various chemicals. She teaches environmental ethics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is currently filing a whistler-blower case.
DAVID ROSNER
Coauthor of the forthcoming Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, Rosner has examined tens of thousands of documents on the chemical industry’s knowledge of the toxic effects of vinyl chloride which it tried to hide from the public. He is one of the experts cited on the “Trade Secrets” program.
JOE THORNTON
A biologist at Columbia University and the author of Pandora’s Poison: Chlorine, Health,and a New Environmental Strategy, Thornton said today: “Scientific evidence is mounting that hundreds of long-lived industrial chemicals can have profound effects at low doses and may be impairing the health of the general public. The great tragedy is that this situation is entirely unnecessary, because safer substitutes exist now for virtually all the uses of persistent toxic substances. But the chemical industry has used its extraordinary influence to deny the hazards of its products and to establish a regulatory system that protects the industry more than it does public health and the environment.”
DIANNE DUMANOSKI
Coauthor of Our Stolen Future, Dumanoski said today: “Since the end of World War II, the chemical industry has flooded the earth with trillions of pounds of novel, man-made chemicals. This has been nothing less than a great global experiment, which changed the chemistry of our own bodies. The question about how these contaminants in our bodies affect health has been with us since Rachel Carson first raised it in Silent Spring 40 years ago. Today, this question has taken on new urgency with the discovery that man-made chemicals can sabotage the body’s internal communication system, jeopardizing your children’s ability to learn, to fight off disease and reproduce.”
SHELDON RAMPTON and JOHN STAUBER
Rampton and Stauber edit the quarterly journal PR Watch and are coauthors of the new book Trust Us, We’re Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future. They said today: “For half a century the corporations manufacturing and using toxic chemicals have been waging a massive propaganda campaign of deceptive PR and lobbying to prevent effective regulation of their dangerous products.”
More Information
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020
