The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

50 the world according to monsantoand published between 1980 and 1984 were misleading. If they had beenconducted properly, they would have produced a diametrically opposed conclusion,namely, that dioxin is a powerful carcinogen. Demonstrated by thelawyer Rex Carr, the fraud was later confirmed by several scientific bodies,including the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)and the National Research Council (NRC). 4 The NRC determined that theMonsanto studies were “plagued with errors in classification of exposed andunexposed groups . . . and hence [were] biased toward a finding of no effect.”5 It was also confirmed by Greenpeace, which presented a very detailedaccount in 1990 that was widely covered in the press, whereas the revelationsproduced at the Kemner trial had gone largely unnoticed. 6Greenpeace showed that the study published in 1980 by Raymond Suskindand his colleague from Monsanto, Judith Zack, suffered, to put it mildly,from a lack of rigor in the definition of individuals considered “exposed” or“not exposed.” According to the explanations Suskind provided to the court,the two researchers had adopted as a preliminary hypothesis that “the groupthat was exposed to the runaway reaction and who could be identified aswell by their development of chloracne was probably the most heavily exposedgroup in the Nitro population.” 7 Hence, the group of those “exposed”included only the workers present on the day of the accident who had alsocontracted chloracne; those who had been present but had not gotten thedisease were excluded from the group, whereas Suskind knew perfectly wellthat the absence of chloracne did not necessarily imply lack of exposure.Conversely, anyone with skin problems (psoriasis, acne, and the like) wasincluded in the cohort of the “exposed,” whereas workers on the productionline who were absent on the day of the accident were systematically placedin the control group of the “not exposed,” even if they were suffering fromchloracne. In a letter to Nature in 1986, the toxicologists Alastair Hay andEllen Silberberg noted that “the total cohort of workers exposed to dioxin atMonsanto should be considered as a whole without making a distinction betweenworkers exposed to dioxin in the process accident or when making2,4,5-T.” This was especially true because the data gathered by Suskind inhis 1953 study showed that “the incidence of chloracne was approximatelythe same in the two groups” and that “notably serious diseases of long latency,such as cancer, may be expected to result from lower and morechronic exposure.” 8