State Scientists Say Pollution Risk Studies Thwarted

The main Wilson administration agency responsible for investigating pollution-related public health questions repeatedly has watered down and delayed issuing scientists’ findings, researchers who have left the agency and others charge.

Additionally, some state scientists say managers in the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment appear to be trying to muzzle them.

In a case in Lompoc, for example, a physician who was part of a team investigating residents’ complaints about the ill effects of pesticides was told to stop pursuing one aspect dealing with respiratory ailments such as asthma, the physician said.

And, in a policy rescinded last fall after an environmental group sued, the agency’s management proposed destroying internal documents that did not jibe with the agency’s final reports.

“There’s an overall pattern here: politicizing the science, slowing down the process and starving good people out,” said Stanton Glantz, a medical school professor at UC San Francisco and a member of an outside panel of scientists that oversees the hazard assessment office.

Some scientists in the agency fear that their ability to fully investigate and objectively analyze public health risks is in jeopardy. It’s clear, some scientists say, that the agency’s stature as national leader already has suffered.

“California was always the laboratory and the leader of the nation and world when it came to environmental health,” said Dr. Richard J. Jackson. “The right to know really bloomed in ways that were remarkable in California. It is certainly no longer a leader.”

Jackson is a former California state scientist who left in 1994 to become director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

Questions surrounding the agency will be the focus of a legislative oversight hearing today chaired by state Sen. Byron Sher (D-Stanford).

“The one commandment is that risk assessment [of pollution-related dangers] should be based on good science,” Sher said in an interview. “Once you know the risk, then you decide how you ought to manage it. Those functions ought to be kept separate. The question is, are they?”

Richard Becker, the head of the agency, insisted that no reports have been watered down or delayed for political reasons. He said in an interview last week that he is committed to improving morale among scientists and producing solid risk assessments based on “sound science, done in a timely fashion.”

“We are demanding more of our scientists,” said Becker, himself a toxicologist. “We are demanding greater openness, greater objectivity, and a look at all possible mechanisms and modes of actions of particular chemicals, and this is a change. . . . Change is difficult, so it does create some tension.”

Most scientists in the agency decline to talk publicly. One who quit because of perceived political pressure refused to be identified, for fear that colleagues still in the agency might suffer.

“It is not a normal working environment,” said Kristen Haynie, consultant to the scientists’ union, the California Assn. of Professional Scientists. “By their nature, scientists are taught to question. But it has been made clear that they’re to do what they’re told.”

Becker, a focus of much of the scientists’ displeasure, is scheduled to be among the witnesses today. He was the agency’s deputy director in charge of research until September, when Gov. Pete Wilson promoted him to director.

The governor moved the office’s previous director, James Stratton, to the post of state health officer, state government’s top physician.

“We have confidence in [the agency],” said Sean Walsh, Wilson’s press secretary. “Richard Becker is a scientist’s scientist who is working diligently to keep his department up to date with the latest scientific data and develop an esprit de corps.”

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The charges come as the Wilson administration continues its efforts to overhaul laws passed in the 1970s and 1980s aimed at protecting the public from the ills of pollution. The governor argues that a better balance is needed between environmental regulations and the needs of business and industry.

Major lobbying groups such as agriculture and the oil industry have pushed for many of the changes. While most critics stop short of attributing pressure on the state’s public health scientists to lobbying by such industries, the health hazard assessment office is a crucial link in the regulatory process.

“If you can tie up [the agency] in knots, you effectively tie up the regulatory process,” said Al Meyerhoff of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that has led the attack on the office.

The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment is the central state agency responsible for assessing dangers posed to public health from chemicals ranging from the widely used pesticide methyl bromide to industrial emissions such as lead.

Once scientists investigate the dangers posed by toxins in the air, soil, water, food and consumer products, they forward their findings to regulatory agencies such as the state Air Resources Board. The regulators, in turn, use the findings as the basis for imposing rules restricting chemicals and pollutants.

In several instances, reports that outside experts say should have taken 18 months or two years to produce are taking five years or more. A report assessing the health risks of diesel exhaust has been in the works for more than four years. A report issued last week on secondhand tobacco smoke was six years in the making.

Another report that took years to produce dealt with lead, a heavy metal long known to cause brain damage, particularly in children.

As scientists in the agency worked on the lead report, Becker said he met with lead industry lobbyists “two or three times,” but added that he spent most of his time dealing with lead industry scientists.

“We have an open-door policy,” Becker said. “If they call and want to come in and speak to us about scientific technical issues, that’s what we’re there for. We’re there to gather scientific and technical information, irrespective of the source.”

The California Air Resources Board requested the lead report in 1991. In 1993, the first draft was issued. As is policy, the lead report was given to an oversight panel of scientists primarily drawn from the University of California for review. The review panel generally was happy with the document, but asked for changes.

“I could have done that in five minutes and so could have [the agency],” said Dr. John Froines, a professor at the UCLA school of public health and a member of the panel.

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Froines expected to have the report back the following month. However, the final draft was not released until last October, three years later.

“There had been no scientific changes,” Froines said of the report. “What you had was a rewriting of the document to meet management’s requirements, and what they’d done was water down the document.”

In an often testy hearing, Glantz, Froines and other members of the review panel met in a daylong session in October to sharpen the report’s language, then sent it to the state Air Resources Board. Becker defended the document, saying it incorporated the latest science.

“Under my watch, we have a good track record at producing information,” said Becker. “I intend to keep up with our aggressive schedule. The lead document languished and came out under my watch.”

Scientists say the office’s struggles are especially disturbing given California’s long-held reputation as a leader in scientific research.

“I have heard frustration from colleagues in California; it’s almost exhaustion,” said Jackson, who spent 15 years as a California state scientist before joining the Centers for Disease Control.

While Jackson left for another job, others have simply quit.

“There is a great deal of unhappiness in the department,” said Dr. Robert Holtzer. “A number of people have mentioned if they could find another job, they would.”

Holtzer, 63, retired last year, in part out of frustration over being told in 1995 to drop an aspect of an investigation into complaints from people in Lompoc, who believed that agricultural pesticides were causing increased cancer, birth defects and asthma.

Holtzer had gathered preliminary data from a Lompoc hospital reflecting higher than expected numbers of people with respiratory complaints. Although the information was “crude,” he said it raised enough questions that he wanted to analyze more records.

It was the only time in his 30 years as a public health specialist that he had ever been told to halt such an investigation.

“I frankly don’t understand the decision to stop the work,” he said.

Becker personally co-wrote the agency’s Lompoc birth defect and cancer study last year, finding nothing conclusive. Skeptical Lompoc activists protested the decision to drop the respiratory aspect of the study. Becker said he is considering reopening the respiratory illness investigation.

Agency scientists are also frustrated by a management decision last April that they criticize as the equivalent of asking for permission slips.

Scientists, most of whom are physicians or have doctorates in fields such as toxicology or epidemiology, now must fill out forms requesting permission to speak at universities or symposiums to which they are invited.

The forms must be filled out four weeks before the speaking engagement, and ask whether scientists’ remarks are “potentially controversial,” and whether whether reporters will be in attendance. Some scientists have been refused permission to speak.

“We developed an external communications calendar, so we know who’s talking on what subject to whom,” Becker said, characterizing it as a way of ensuring that scientists’ work is coordinated. “In terms of areas of controversy, we would like that flagged.”

In April, the agency’s management adopted a policy called the Records Retention Policy. Notwithstanding the name, the point of the new policy was to destroy records. The policy stated that scientists were to throw away documents that failed to coincide with the agency’s final recommendations.

“Only those pre-decisional and deliberative communications which are reflected or embodied in the final decision or final document shall be kept on file,” the policy stated.

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Staff scientists quickly dubbed it the “Records Destruction Policy.”

In June, perceiving that the agency’s scientists were not responding quickly enough to the policy, Becker sent a sharply worded memo to section chiefs chiding them for failing to give him a plan for implementing the policy.

One section chief responded by estimating that the section had no fewer than 1.8 million pages of documents to cull. Another scientist replied he would need “40 hours and a blowtorch.” In all, the section chiefs figured they needed 7,880 hours--that’s three years, nine months--to go through their documents and purge records.

To implement the policy, the agency devised forms called Records Retention File Reviews and sent them to some of the scientists. One question on the forms asks the estimated amount of time needed to review the files, and offers the following guide: “Assume a range of about one hour” to go through “six inches if files are very heterogeneous,” or a half-hour to an hour “if files are generally homogeneous.”

Last October, the Natural Resources Defense Council sued to block the policy. Becker responded by insisting the policy had been mischaracterized. In letters and public statements, Becker said he was rescinding the policy, and claimed that no documents had been destroyed.

As it turned out, documents had been destroyed.

One scientist told her boss on Oct. 9 that she had tossed two full file boxes related to the BKK Landfill in West Covina--”everything that differed from the final documents that had been released to the public,” she wrote. The dump has stirred protests for more than a decade because of emissions of vinyl chloride gas.

A month after the scientist told her bosses that she had destroyed documents, Becker issued a statement acknowledging that some records had been destroyed, but that “absolutely no scientific data has been discarded,” and that “in practical terms, it has had no significant impact.”