Scranton also accuses us of the sins of misrepresentation and omission. He says that we omit the fact that Dr. John Creech did not believe that vinyl chloride caused AOL (p. 25). But our point was that Drs. McCormick and Wilson, the principal authors of the first draft of the article that was ultimately published by Goodrich, were convinced that vinyl chloride was the cause of AOL. But, significantly, when the revised article was published it omitted this idea that directly linked vinyl to AOL. Whatever Dr. Creech believed, he was the plant physician, and not the researchers with the primary responsibility for writing the article.
Scranton spends almost a page and a half (Scranton, pp. 25-27) criticizing our interpretation of V.K. Rowe’s letter of May 12, 1959. He specifically chides us for claiming “that Rowe expected ‘appreciable injury’ to full-time workers, given the current 500 ppm TLV.” He says, “This was an error, for the source did not mention workers, their exposures, or their likelihood of injury.” Although Rowe was conducting research on animals, it is clear that the context of the letter was that “the Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists has for some time been recommending a maximum average of 500 ppm.” Threshold Level Values were established for workers, not animals. Further, Rowe goes on to say that this number “Can not be relied upon to [sic] strongly when considering chronic exposures.” Again, it is clear he is talking about workers. Rowe concludes the paragraph by saying that he is confident that “500 ppm is going to produce rather appreciable injury when inhaled 7 hours a day, five days a week for an extended period.” We conclude that Rowe is talking about workers working in a plant 35 hours a week, not rats in cages. The very next sentence is that “this opinion is not ready for dissemination yet.” Thus he is not talking about data for animals, but his opinion is focused, as might be expected, on what is harmful to workers. This is further confirmed by the fact that when Rowe does publish his data two years later he and the other authors recommended a TLV of 50 ppm – one-tenth the TLV and again clearly tied to worker safety. It is Scranton, not us, who misuses and misrepresents the evidence.
Scranton also argues that we misrepresent the minutes of the MCA’s Ad Hoc Planning Group of December 14, 1971 where they describe the “concerns that should guide any decisions made on research protocols….” He writes that we misrepresent the document by using in our quotation the term “reassure the public” rather than the full term “reassure the public that polyvinyl chloride entails no risk for the user.” He argues that the MCA was trying “to avoid confusion between vinyl chloride (hazardous) and polyvinyl chloride (not hazardous).” While this sounds perfectly innocent and again reflects Scranton’s effort to depict industry actions in their best, most benign, light, his presentation of the material is misleading. In the early 1970s the industry did not know that polyvinyl chloride was “not hazardous.” In fact, around this time, because it was discovered that vinyl chloride monomer was leaching out of polyvinyl chloride plastic liquor bottles, the FDA imposed a temporary ban on the use of polyvinyl chloride in liquor bottles. In fact, there is still a healthy debate over whether or not polyvinyl chloride in clear plastic food wrappings, when heated as in microwave ovens, leaches the monomer. Thus, the industry, by designing research to “reassure the public” about the safety of consumer products rather than to pursue the question with an open mind, was planning a research protocol that was at best self-serving. Similarly, the claim by industry that the motive for their concern for workers’ health rings false when we consider that the industry refused to present to the workforce the results of the European research and did not even refer to its own research honestly. We did omit the fourth “element” about “their need to establish the program under conditions that would provide industry with the means to guarantee the objectivity of the program and the validity of the experimental conditions.” If the goal of the research was to “reassure the public” a “guarantee” of objectivity is at best self-serving.
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