NRDC releases report recommending science journals protect themselves from misuse
Posted June 1, 2009 in Health and the Environment
Today, I released a new report on the need for scientific journals to enforce strict and effective conflict disclosure policies for authors, peer reviewers, and even journal editors. The report, titled, Effective and Practical Disclosure Policies: NRDC Paper on Workshop to Identify Key Elements of Disclosure Policies for Health Science Journals is available on the NRDC website.
The NRDC report is also featured in my Guest Editorial in today's online release of the June issue of the premiere environmental science journal, Environmental Health Perspectives. In that article I quote Richard Smith, long-time editor of the British Medical Journal lamenting at how the pharmaceutical industry has used science journals to give a "stamp of approval" to industry-funded studies that promote their drug products.
Why is it so important for science journals to require authors to disclose conflicts to their readers? Because effective disclosure policies play an important role in protecting journals from becoming unwitting agents of the type of propaganda, distortion, and corporate marketing, that Richard Smith and other journal editors are concerned about.
When a toxic chemical starts to look like it might be causing harm, maybe to the environment, maybe to our health, the product manufacturer will usually start to circle the wagons defensively, and that defense includes published science.
A good example is bisphenol A (BPA), a toxic component of many plastics that also contaminates the bodies of most Americans, and has rightly got the public up in arms. The Washington Post reported this weekend that BPA industry executives huddled to frantically find a strategy to defend its chemical, including finding a 'pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA'. This kind of blatant denial of harm is the first step in a well-worn three-dog defense. It goes something like this:
1) It's not my dog (i.e. product).
2) Okay, it's my dog, but it didn't bite (i.e. harm) you.
3) Okay, my dog bit you, but it was your fault (i.e. you smoke, other chemical exposures, family history of cancer, etc.)
The first defense, denial, can buy some time while the second and third defenses are being prepared. And, it's these last two defenses that are the subject of this blog. That is, the generation of evidence, preferably including lots of published scientific data, suggesting either that the product is not harmful, or that it is not harmful under the conditions it is being used. For example, maybe it causes cancer at higher doses, but not at whatever doses people are exposed to (see my documented review of EPA's re-analysis of the pesticide captan, in discussion with the manufacturer, as an example).
One of the most outrageous examples of this dog-defense is the industry-science that only some types of asbestos fibers cause cancer, but not all types (see this documented as the ABC Myth, Anything But Chrysotile). In reality, whatever you may think of this argument, the fact is that asbestos does not occur as a pure sample of one fiber type, so the risk of cancer is always present.
Journals that require authors to disclose the funding source for the work, and any other financial conflicts or non-monetary competing interests of the author, provide a measure of scientific honesty for their readers.
