Brodeur - Whatever Happened to The New Yorker that Published Carson's Silent Spring?

[Guest guest]

March 1, 1999

Whatever Happened to The New Yorker that Published Carson's " Silent

Spring? "

by Brodeur

The January 11, 1999 issue of The New Yorker contains a Comment piece (the

magazine's equivalent of an editorial) in which a staff writer named Malcolm

Gladwell delivers some opinions about the carcinogenicity of

trichlorethylene (TCE), the chemical that a jury, in 1986, found W. R. Grace

& Company responsible for dumping into open ground and contaminating

drinking water supplies in Woburn, Massachusetts. W. R. Grace subsequently

settled the case by paying eight million dollars to the families of eight

leukemia victims (most of them children), who had lived in the neighborhood

where the dumping had occurred, and had allegedly drunk water from

TCE-contaminated wells.

In his New Yorker Comment piece, Gladwell uses the movie " A Civil

Action, " --an account of the Woburn tragedy based upon Harr's book

of the same title, and starring Travolta--as the starting point for the

following statement regarding the carcinogenicity of TCE:

" It is taken as a given that the chemical allegedly dumped, trichlorethylene

(TCE), is a human carcinogen--even though, in point of fact, TCE is only a

probable human carcinogen: tests have been made on animals, but no

human-based data have tied it to cancer. [Emphasis added.]

On January 15th, after checking with officials of the National Institute of

Environmental Health Sciences' National Toxicology Program, I wrote to

Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, asking him to consider an accompanying

letter to The Mail, a section of the magazine that publishes letters from

readers to the editor. In my letter to The Mail, I pointed out that several

studies published in the peer-reviewed medical literature had tied TCE to

the development of cancer in humans, and cited by volume, number, and page

one that had appeared, in 1998, in the highly respected Journal of Cancer

Research and Clinical Oncology. I went on to point out that more than half

a dozen studies published in the peer-reviewed medical literature show that

TCE causes liver tumors in mice and kidney tumors in rats. The fact that

TCE is a carcinogen in multiple species, I explained, is why the

International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has listed it as a

probable (more likely than not) cancer-producing agent in humans. I ended

the letter by saying that TCE was widely used in the electronic industry as

a solvent for cleaning circuit boards.

On January 22nd, an associate editor at The New Yorker, to whom Remnick had

referred my letter, wrote to inform me that the magazine's fact checker had

done some further research, and that " The study you cite was the only one we

could find that turned up a link between TCE and cancer. " The associate

editor then cited a 1991 study that had been conducted by researchers from

the National Cancer Institute, and had appeared in the prestigious British

Journal of Medicine, which showed that " 'Detailed analysis of the 6,929

employees [of an aircraft maintenance facility] occupationally exposed to

trichlorethylene... did not show any significant or persuasive association'

between TCE and cancer of any type. " She went on to inform me that " Given

that there is the one study showing a link, what Gladwell wrote may seem

like a semantic wriggle, but I really think that it isn't, and that there

isn't enough data to show a 'tie.' " She told me that as a result the

magazine would not be able to run my letter.

During the next ten days, I was travelling. Before leaving home, however, I

asked a medical-scientist friend to download MEDLINE and provide me with

copies of any studies that had been published in the peer-reviewed medical

and scientific literature regarding the capacity of TCE to produce cancer or

other disease in humans. When I returned, a thick envelope awaited me. It

contained copies or abstracts of 42 studies--ten of which suggested that TCE

was carcinogenic in humans. One of the studies was entitled " An Analysis of

Contaminated Well Water and Health Effects in Woburn, Massachusetts. " It

had been published in September, 1986, in Volume 81, No. 395 of the Journal

of the American Statistical Association, and it had been conducted by

researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and Boston's

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who had found that drinking water from the

very same TCE-contaminated wells described in " A Civil Action " was at least

partly responsible for elevated incidence rates of childhood leukemia in

Woburn.

Among the other studies downloaded from MEDLINE was a copy of the 1991

investigation cited by The New Yorker associate editor as having shown no

persuasive association between TCE and cancer of any type, as well as a copy

of a follow-up study of the same workers that had been conducted by

researchers for the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and published in

Occupational and Environmental Medicine, in 1998. Reading both studies in

their entirety proved interesting. For example, the 1991 study found almost

twice as many deaths as expected from cancer of the biliary passages and the

liver among white male workers exposed to TCE, who had died after 1980. In

the follow-up study, non- significant excesses for non-Hodgkins lymphoma and

for cancers of the oesophagus, colon, primary liver, breast, cervix, kidney,

and bone were found workers exposed to TCE. In the conclusion section of

the follow-up study, the NCI researchers stated that their findings did not

" strongly support a causal link with trichlorethylene because the

associations were not significant, not clearly dose related, and

inconsistent between men and women. " However, they went on to declare that

" Because findings from experimental investigations and other epidemiological

studies on solvents other than trichlorethylene provide some biological

plausibility, the suggested links between these chemicals and non-Hodgkins

lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and breast cancer found here deserve further

attention. "

Meanwhile, the issue of The New Yorker dated February 8 had come out with an

article entitled " The Cancer-Cluster Myth " by Atul Gawande, a research

fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, who declared in a

parenthetical statement on page 36 that a sevenfold increase in the

occurrence of a cancer is " a rate of increase not considered particularly

high by epidemiologists. "

On February 8, I wrote a second letter to Remnick in which I enclosed

the abstracts or copies of five studies showing a link between exposure to

trichlorethylene and the development of cancer in humans. I drew his

attention to the fact that one of these studies dealt with the wells in

Woburn that W. R. Grace had been found responsible for contaminating with

TCE. I pointed out that since TCE and similar halogenated hydrocarbons are

widely used as pesticides, solvents, cleaning agents, degreasing agents,

cutting fluids, propellants, and refrigerants, millions of Americans are

being exposed to them on a daily basis.

In my letter of February 8, I went on to tell Remnick that Gawande's

assertion in " The Cancer-Cluster Myth " that a sevenfold increase in the

occurrence of a cancer is " a rate of increase not considered particularly

high by epidemiologists " was absurd on the face of it. In this regard, I

drew his attention to a second letter to The Mail that I was enclosing.

The final paragraph of my letter to Remnick read as follows: " Finally, let

me say that I trust my pointing out errors of fact in two recent issues of

The New Yorker will be taken by you in the spirit in which it has been

given. I have high regard for the magazine on whose staff I served for

thirty-eight years, and I wish you great success in your stewardship of it. "

In my accompanying letter to The Mail, I once again pointed out that

Gladwell was in error when he claimed that no human-based data have tied

trichlorethylene to cancer, and cited five medical or scientific journals in

which such data had been published in recent years. As for Gawande's

dismissal of the importance of a sevenfold increase in the occurrence of a

cancer, I pointed out that " Non-smoking workers exposed to asbestos--one of

the most deadly industrial carcinogens ever discovered--suffer a fivefold

increase in lung cancer, " and that " one-pack-a-day smokers of

cigarettes--far and away the most deadly carcinogen ever discovered--suffer

a tenfold increased incidence of lung cancer. " After reminding the reader

that occupational exposure to asbestos has killed at least half a million

workers in America in recent years, and that cigarettes have and will

continue to kill millions upon millions of people in the general population,

I pointed out that " Obviously...a sevenfold increase in the occurrence of a

cancer caused by a single carcinogen has to be considered dangerously high,

particularly if significant numbers of people are exposed to that

carcinogen. "

My letter to The Mail concluded as follows:

" Not to consider it [a sevenfold increase] as such would be a way of

overlooking the fact that one in every three American men and one out of

every four American women is today developing cancer in his or her lifetime.

There's a word for that kind of incidence--no matter what the disease. The

word is epidemic. "

On February 10, Remnick wrote me a letter of reply that read as

follows:

" Thank you for your letters and the attached excerpts and information. It

seems to me what we have here is not a matter of right and wrong and fact

versus, well, something else, but rather a legitimate debate in which you

disagree with both Gladwell and Gawande. You ask if I mind your sending

them: Of course, I don't. But I also trust you know I am sincere when I say

that we went to great lengths to ensure the accuracy, as best it can be

established, of both pieces. The traditions at The New Yorker have not

changed where that is concerned. "

Alas, Mr. Remnick, they have. Slowly but surely, ever since Tina Brown took

over the magazine in the autumn of 1992.

Under the 35-year editorship of , from 1952 to 1987,and under

the five-year editorship of Gottlieb, from 1987 to 1992, errors of

such magnitude as I have pointed out to you would have been highly unlikely.

But, had they occurred, for the editor of The New Yorker not to have

acknowledged them--either in a Department of Amplification or a statement of

correction issued to avoid the appearance of downgrading a major potential

public health hazard--would have been unthinkable.

The magazine that published Carson's seminal " Silent Spring " has lost

its way. It is not too late, however, for you to bring it back.

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Respond to: paulbrodeur@...

Brodeur was a staff writer at The New Yorker for almost forty years.

In 1968, he alerted the nation to the massive public health hazard posed by

asbestos, and has written four books on that subject, including " Expendable

Americans " and " Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial. " The

articles in The New Yorker upon which those books were based won a National

Magazine Award, a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, and the Silver Gavel

Award of the American Bar Association.

Brodeur's pioneering articles on the destruction of the ozone layer by

man-made chemicals won the Journalism Award of the American Association for

the Advancement of Science. As a result of these articles, he was named to

the United Nations Environment Program's Global 500 Roll of Honour for

outstanding environmental achievements.

His articles on the health hazards associated with exposure to microwave

radiation were published as a book entitled " The Zapping of America, " which

was listed in the New York Times Book Review as one of the notable books of

1977. His three-part series of articles on the cancer hazard associated

with exposure to the electromagnetic fields given off by power lines won a

public service award from the American Society of Professional Journalists.

These articles were published as a book entitled " Currents of Death. "

Subsequent articles on the power-line hazard that appeared in The New Yorker

were published as a book entitled " The Great Power-Line Cover-Up. "

Brodeur's memoir, " Secrets: A Writer in the Cold War, " was published in

1997. It recounts his experiences as a counter-intelligence agent in

Post-War Germany and as a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and it

was listed in the New York Times Book Review as one of the notable books of

1997.

paulbrodeur@...