The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

dioxin: a polluter working with the pentagon 37fected workers who were still suffering from the mysterious skin disease ayear after the accident and were also experiencing respiratory, central nervoussystem, and liver troubles, and impotence. The doctor went so far as torecommend “special treatment” for a worker who had developed an acutepsychological pathology because his skin had darkened so much that he was“mistaken for a Negro and forced to conform with the racial segregation customsof the area on buses or in the theatres.” 7In 1953, Suskind widened his study to thirty-six workers, ten of whomwere exposed in the 1949 accident and twenty-six others working in the productionunit. He reported that thirty-one of them had very severe skin lesions,accompanied by irritability, insomnia, and depression. Twenty-threeyears later, in a confidential report disclosed at the Kemner trial, he again reported,with equal detachment, that of the thirty-six workers, thirteen hadalready died at an average age of fifty-four.Through all these years, Monsanto adopted the same attitude as forPCBs: it hid the data in a drawer and said nothing to the health authoritiesand certainly not to its workers. But it seems highly improbable that its managerswere unaware of a study published in 1957 by Karl-Heinz Schulz, a researcherin Hamburg, who had done follow-up on the workers in a BASFfactory that manufactured 2,4,5-T after an accident on November 17, 1953,similar to the one in Nitro. 8 This work had made it possible to identify theTCDD (dioxin) molecule and to provide a definitive name for the diseasethat characterized it: chloracne.Long Live WarNot only did Monsanto fail to call into question the manufacture of 2,4,5-T,but the company did not hesitate to work closely with Pentagon strategiststo develop its use as a chemical weapon. Following a Freedom of InformationAct request to the Pentagon, the St. Louis Journalism Review revealed in1998 that Monsanto had conducted a regular correspondence beginning in1950 with the Chemical Warfare Service dealing with the military use of theherbicide. 9 According to Cary Conn of the National Archives and RecordsAdministration, the file contained 597 pages divided into four sections, including“laboratory development” and “pilot plant demonstration.” However,