3 replies to this topic

[pistol_pete]

"It is abundantly clear that CDC's contractor, ChemRisk, does not have the necessary scientific or ethical integrity to engender public trust," EWG's Wiles wrote to CDC Director Julie Gerberding in March. "It is also clear that ChemRisk founder and president Dennis Paustenbach has been directly involved in the firm's unethical behavior."


Big business and Gvt trump science

Link,

http://ewg.org/repor...ase20060602.php

[calmcookie]

Hi Pete, It's unfortunate that this sort of thing is happening more and more. Money CAN buy almost anything ... including a specific research outcome in a prestigious medical journal. While published results are often legitimate .... I always ask myself "WHO has written this article?, WHERE are they from?, What bias interests might they have? What's the money angle? And oddly enough ... is there a related advertisement for a commercial product closeby in the same journal? (you'd think they'd avoid this obviously blatant conflict of interest ... but it's so common as to be laughable). As trader, Alexander Elder, once said "if you want to hide contraband ... just put it right under the nose of customs officials." The only defense we have as consumers is to use our own common sense, think through all the issues and never trust anyone else to insist what is or is not good for OUR one and only body. Not an easy task for most lay people. Best to you, C.C.

Edited by calmcookie, 04 June 2006 - 01:36 AM.

[TTHQ Staff]

Watch all of the available sources...Seems that Big-Money Lobbyists trump science, too.

EWG executive director Kenneth Cook has told numerous media outlets — including The New York Times (February 24, 2002) — that he started the Environmental Working Group in 1993. However, published grant records from over a dozen big-money foundations show that EWG was raking in the big bucks as early as 1989. At that time, Cook was vice president of an environmental publishing house called the Center for Resource Economics/Island Press (CRE/IP).

Island Press was originally founded in 1979 by Mellon banking heiress Catherine Conover; it was reorganized in 1984 as the Center for Resource Economics/Island Press, and placed under the leadership of Tides Foundation director Charles Savitt. Drummond Pike, who started the Tides Foundation in 1976, has also been on EWG’s board since the beginning, and is a long time director of CRE/IP as well (he’s currently its treasurer).

Until 1993, Cook and EWG engaged in the questionable (but apparently legal) practice of using CRE/IP’s existing tax exemption as a cover to receive foundation money. In this way, EWG collected over $5 million before 1993, the year Cook claims the organization was founded. In 1993 Cook left CRE/IP and moved EWG under the protective umbrella of the Tides Foundation, an organization that specializes in lending its tax-exempt status to leftist startups that might not satisfy the Internal Revenue Service’s criteria on their own. When the Tides Foundation spun off the “Tides Center” in 1996, EWG was among a few hundred activist groups that were quietly shifted to the new entity. Catherine Conover, while still on CRE/IP’s board, is also among the biggest individual donors to the Tides Foundation/Center complex.

The Environmental Working Group emerged from under the Tides umbrella in 1999 and incorporated in Washington, DC.

EWG’s game plan is simple. It releases “scientific” analyses designed to make the public (especially parents) worry tremendously about tiny amounts of pesticide exposure from fruits and vegetables. Throwing around phrases like “cancer risk” and “nervous system toxicity” attracts press coverage and lends EWG the veneer of scientific respectability. The “Environmental Worrying Group,” as some commentators have dubbed the organization, then goes on to recommend that Americans “buy as much organic food as possible” in order to avoid the supposed health risks associated with these pesky chemicals.

What they’re not telling us, of course, is that most of the pesticides we find on fresh produce are completely natural, and manufactured by plants themselves. In a 1995 interview with Vegetarian Times magazine, the award-winning Berkeley biologist Bruce Ames insisted that “99.99% of the pesticides we eat are naturally present in plants to ward off insects and other predators… Reducing our exposure to the 0.01% of ingested pesticides that are synthetic is not likely to reduce cancer rates.”

And even that small portion of agricultural pesticides that are synthetic have resulted in tremendous gains for humanity, despite the general public anxiety that EWG regularly offers up to the TV ratings gods. Man-made agricultural chemicals have been in use for over 50 years in the United States, and they are among the most rigorously tested and heavily regulated products in our economy. They have undeniably made fresh fruits and vegetables cheaper and more readily available for Americans, especially for the economically disadvantaged. The U.S. Public Health Service says that “such nutritional advances are largely responsible” for much of the 30 years of increased life expectancy that we’ve all gained in the last 100 years.

The Environmental Working Group represents a political movement in the U.S. that wants to dump the world’s finest farming system in favor of organic agriculture, a backward scheme that threatens to build a bridge back to the 19th century. And if the organic food movement succeeds, it will undoubtedly be at great financial cost to U.S. consumers. Those in the organic marketing biz seem to think the more expensive food is, the better off the world is. As Theresa Marquez, marketing director for Organic Valley, has said: “The question is not, why is organic food so expensive. The question is, why are the foods we are eating now so cheap?”

EWG’s scientific reign of error and needless hyperbole includes a wealth of misinformation and seemingly intentional deceit -- all of it calculated to tarnish the public image of agricultural pesticides and promote organic foods as “the solution”.

http://www.activistcash.com

[calmcookie]

Yes ... I agree with admin. To me, it's the difference between being awake to human nature and human motivation or simply thinking that the world works as it "should." What a joke that is. Off to catch a train, C.C.