EPA Takes UCSD Scientist Off Smoking Panel : Environment: Tobacco industry and Virginia congressman pushed for removal of strong anti-smoking advocate from the committee studying effects of second-hand smoke.

At the urging of the Tobacco Institute and a Virginia congressman, a nationally acclaimed scientist from UC San Diego has been removed from an Environmental Protection Agency panel formed to review the effects of second-hand cigarette smoke.

“I’ve never seen anything like this” in 12 years, said Steven Bayard, manager of the EPA project to assess passive smoking’s health risks.

“I’m disturbed about this,” he told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I think it was lousy. I think it shows undue pressure, personally, from the tobacco companies and the Congress.”

The scientist is Dr. David M. Burns, an associate clinical professor of medicine and pulmonary specialist at UC San Diego Medical Center, whose fervent anti-smoking views have made him an enemy of the tobacco industry.

In an interview with The Times, he called his removal “an extraordinarily poor public policy decision (on the part of EPA) to respond to pressure from the tobacco industry in this way.”

He said the tobacco industry is frightened about the quality of the two scientific reports on second-hand smoke the panel was asked to review.

The EPA reports, which analyze the effects of passive cigarette smoke on adults, children and people in the workplace, are scientifically “solid,” Burns said.

His removal from the advisory panel convened to review the scientific accuracy of the reports “doesn’t compromise the documents in any way,” he said.

Since the late 1970s, Burns, 43, has served as a senior editor and reviewer of the surgeon general’s smoking reports. Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop presented Burns with the prestigious Surgeon General’s Medallion. He also was editor of the 1986 report on passive smoking.

Dr. Donald Barnes, head of EPA’s Scientific Advisory Board, told both Burns and The Times on Thursday that, technically, Burns has not been removed from the panel, because the group doesn’t officially exist yet.

But Burns said he was asked by the EPA to serve on the panel in July, a fact confirmed in an Aug. 10 letter from the agency asking him to analyze the reports. Burns, in fact, made a preliminary review in preparation for the panel’s September meeting, which was postponed and rescheduled for December.

The EPA’s Bayard said Burns’ comments “were by far the best comments that I received.”

Barnes said Thursday that he was unaware that Burns had been working on the reports. He said Burns had been highly recommended by the EPA staff and by Dr. Robert Flaak, also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board, to be a “core” member of the panel.

On Aug. 10, the same day Burns received his letter from the EPA, the Tobacco Institute, an industry lobbying group, wrote to EPA administrator William Reilly protesting Burns’ selection, according to the Associated Press.

“Frankly, we are mystified how an individual with Dr. Burns’ long and intense involvement with the anti-smoking movement can be expected to contribute to a reasonable, objective examination” of the EPA reports, the letter said.

Brennan Dawson, a Tobacco Institute spokeswoman, told the wire service, “We want a fair panel that will look at it objectively. Our concern is that Mr. Burns is unable to do that.”

On Sept. 18, Rep. Thomas J. Bliley (R-Va.) wrote the EPA without mentioning Burns by name but urging that the panel “consist of qualified individuals who have not already prejudged this issue in any manner.”

Bliley is a strong tobacco industry ally. Philip Morris is the largest private employer in his congressional district.

Barnes said Thursday that the tobacco industry representatives came to see him two or three times to object to Burns.

Barnes said that, although Burns was highly competent, there were two or three other scientists who had also worked on surgeon general reports who were equally qualified but hadn’t taken strong public positions against smoking.

What the EPA was looking for, Barnes said, were people who not only would be fair but who would also be perceived as being fair.

Barnes, himself a former EPA staff scientist, maintained that there was not any undue pressure to remove Burns, who was praised Thursday by EPA staffers and others.

“I don’t know of anyone else you could point to that would have the degree of expertise he would possess on smoking in general and the whole issue of passive smoking in particular,” Donald Shopland, coordinator of the National Cancer Institute’s smoking control program and a long-time Burns colleague, told the Associated Press.

Dr. Thomas Novotny of the U.S. Office on Smoking and Health said, “Dr. Burns is a very well respected researcher in the field of tobacco and health. . . . I’d say he’d be a very good choice for the panel.”

The tobacco industry’s lobbying campaign, said Shopland, “is a typical tobacco industry ploy that tries to interfere with legitimate scientific work. If you look at the last 40 years, they have a history of always doing this.”

“This is an industry that continues to maintain that active cigarette smoking doesn’t cause disease,” Burns said. “ . . . The tobacco industry has continually maintained that this is an open scientific question. And that the only objective scientists are the ones who believe that it’s an open question as to whether cigarettes cause any disease whatsoever.”

The Associated Press and Times staff writer Rudy Abramson in Washington contributed to this report.