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Whistleblower Watch Spotlighting people within industry and government who bring toxic threats to public light. Exposing Unreported Health Hazards Over a 20-year period the DuPont Company failed to reveal to federal health agencies that it knew a chemical it manufactured and used in hundreds of consumer products, including pizza boxes, fast food wrappers, and microwave popcorn bags, leached into food and then into the human body at levels three times higher than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considered safe for human health. During this same period, Glenn Evers was a DuPont chemical engineer helping the company to develop new products. He has claimed in media reports since 2005 that he knew about company studies that had been suppressed showing that the chemical called Zonyl, which lines food containers and makes them grease resistant, broke down into another chemical known as PFOA once it entered the human body. PFOA has been detected in the blood of 95 percent of Americans. Whether PFOA is a threat to human health remains a point of contention between DuPont and federal health agencies. In February 2006, an EPA science advisory panel concluded that PFOA, which is also used in the manufacture of Teflon, constitutes a 'likely' human carcinogen and urged DuPont to phase out its manufacture and use.  A question lingers about why Evers failed to publicly reveal these revelations during his employment with DuPont. He was released by the company in 2002, allegedly as part of a restructuring, according to the company. But Evers claims he was fired after he raised concerns within the company about the chemical's safety. The actual timing of disclosure of this coverup information came in a 2001 class action lawsuit against DuPont filed by residents who lived near a West Virginia plant operated by the company. They accused DuPont of contaminating local waters with PFOA and won a $107 million settlement. The EPA then took legal action against DuPont for the unreporting of health risks and in 2005 extracted a $16.5 million fine from the company. What motivates people to blow the whistle on wrongdoing often depends on complex psychological factors. Sometimes the whistleblowers are motivated by the desire for personal gain, or to seek revenge for their own job loss or other perceived mistreatment. Sometimes they act purely out of integrity. Evers says he came forward in the wake of the class action lawsuit, after so many years of remaining quiet, because "my personal convictions do not allow me to not tell what I know." We must wait for Evers to clarify why it took him to long to speak out, but meanwhile perhaps congratulations are in order, if only in the spirit of 'better late than never.' 
Testing Toxins On People Pesticides may be tested on children and pregnant women to determine their health risks, according to final regulatory rules adopted by the EPA in January 2006. Because testing on laboratory animals has proven to be so problematic when the results are extrapolated to human health, as The Hundred Year Lie points out, manufacturers of toxins are eager to find ways to experiment on humans before their products hit the marketplace and become subject to liability lawsuits. What is particularly disturbing about these rules is that the ethical guidelines — such as they are — don't apply to some overseas testing. If you've seen the movie The Constant Gardener, based on the novel by John Le Carre, you know what scenarios can result, even taking into account how this was a work of fiction. In that book and film the pharmaceutical companies use the poor and desperate villagers of an African country as unknowing guinea pigs to test drugs before they are marketed in richer countries. Dozens of people young and old die from these experiments. If there was ever a subject area that cried out for the emergence of whistleblowers, the testing of toxins on humans is it! The potential for wrongdoing and harm and 'ethical lapses' should stagger the consciences of everyone associated with these dubious endeavors.
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