Fw: TRADE SECRETS: A MOYERS REPORT PBS Monday, March 26 at 9 p.m.

[Guest guest]

I've seen more letters about this upcoming show......sounds like a good one...

PattyTRADE SECRETS: A MOYERS REPORT Premieres on PBS Monday, March 26 at 9 p.m.

INVESTIGATIVE REPORT OPENS CHEMICAL INDUSTRY SECRET ARCHIVE AND REVEALS HOW THE PUBLIC WAS KEPT IN THE DARK ABOUT THE DANGERS OF TOXIC CHEMICALS

More than ten years after her husband's death, Elaine Ross is still haunted by her final vow to him: "I promised I would never, ever let the chemical industry forget who he was. Never." Twenty-three years to the day after he went to work with vinyl chloride and other toxic chemicals at a plant in Lake , Louisiana, Dan Ross died of a rare brain cancer. He was 46 years old, convinced that his job had killed him. He died without knowing just how right he was. Elaine Ross sued her husband's former employer and over the next decade, the process of legal discovery led deeper and deeper into the inner chambers of the chemical industry and its Washington trade association. Hundreds of thousands of pages of documents were collected - minutes from board meetings, reports from industry scientists, and internal corporate memoranda - that now occupy stacks of cardboard boxes in storage rooms. To the naked eye, those boxes look innocent enough. But as reported in TRADE SECRETS: A MOYERS REPORT, an investigation by producer Sherry and journalist Bill Moyers, the secret archives contain a shocking story. The archives reveal the industry's early knowledge of vinyl chloride's dangerous effects, as well as the industry's long silence on the subject, but they also report a much larger story. Buried in the thousands of pages is a never-before-told account of a campaign by the chemical industry to limit the regulation of toxic chemicals and any liability for their effects, while the companies work to withhold vital information about risks from workers, the government, and the public. TRADE SECRETS: A MOYERS REPORT premieres on PBS Monday, March 26, 2001, 9:00 p.m. ET (check local listings). "Almost everyone understands that the chemical revolution of the last 50 years has improved the standard of living for millions of people and contributed substantially to the economy," says Bill Moyers. "The industry has made sure we know how much they have done for us. But over the past several decades more than 75,000 man-made chemicals have been produced, turned into consumer products, or released into the environment. Every man, woman and child now has synthetic chemicals in their bodies. Are they safe?" As part of the investigation for TRADE SECRETS, Moyers took part in a pilot study sponsored by the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine designed to measure the synthetic chemicals in the human body - a measurement known as the "chemical body burden." Even though Moyers has never worked in a chemical plant - or lived near one - he learns that his body contains a soup of industrial chemicals, including 31 different types of PCBs, 13 different dioxins, and pesticides such as DDT. When he asks how his results compare with others around the country and whether these chemicals have been tested in combination or on vulnerable populations like pregnant women and children, the study's lead doctor tells him that the scientific data simply does not exist to answer this question. But, Dr. McCally, deputy chairman of preventive medicine at Mt. Sinai, tells Moyers, "we do know enough now to know that it doesn't make a lot of sense to make chemicals that are carcinogenic and add them to our bodies, and then argue about how much we are adding. Suddenly, we find that the industry has put a bunch of chemicals in our body that are not good for us, and we didn't have any say in that." Why the public has had such little say is revealed in the confidential documents examined in TRADE SECRETS . Marked "internal correspondence" or "strictly confidential," the documents speak for themselves. Even as laboratory research provided industry executives with growing evidence that chemicals like vinyl chloride were carcinogenic or caused other human health problems, the companies agreed among themselves to keep the findings from their workers and the public. One document describes a vote by industry executives to reject the recommendations of a scientific report the industry itself had commissioned. The researchers recommend significantly reducing worker exposure levels to vinyl chloride on the factory floor. But minutes of a meeting of the trade association's Occupational Health and Safety Committee show that its members, many of them medical doctors, voted no. One public health official in TRADE SECRETS tells Moyers: "This is a fundamental problem that we've had in public health for a long time. Who is more important? Is it the chemical being produced or is it the human being producing the chemical?" The revelations in the secret archive are not just of historical interest. They describe how the chemical industry focused resources on the political and regulatory process as public concern grew about the health impact of pollutants. "Gentlemen," declares one document from a trade association Board of Directors meeting, "this is a campaign that has the dimension and detail of a war. The dollars expended in offense are token compared to future costs." The archives detail strategies and investments used to defeat public interest campaigns that would have better informed citizens about chemical exposures and risks. And the efforts to create a regulatory system that the industry could control are described, for the first time, in the industry's own words. "If workers, the public, journalists and government regulators had known what the industry knew about the health risks of its products - when the industry knew it - our laws today might be profoundly more protective of human health than they are," says Moyers. "We designed the broadcast to include a half-hour discussion of the questions raised by our team's reporting. What do scientists know about the health effects of chemicals? What does it mean to have unprecedented combinations of chemicals in our blood? How are we exposed to them? Which are the most dangerous and how can we avoid them? Why are women and children most at risk? What is industry doing to keep us fully informed about the safety of chemicals? Can we trust what the industry tells us? How thoroughly are these chemicals tested before they come to market? These are important questions of public health and public policy, and I hope industry representatives will agree to discuss them with me." A companion Web site for TRADE SECRETS: A MOYERS REPORT will launch on PBS.org in conjunction with the premiere on March 26. Along with additional information on the issues raised in the investigative report, the TRADE SECRETS Web site provides the full text of all documents cited in the program. The Web site also features a bulletin board where viewers, as well as individuals in the chemical industry, environmental organizations, and public health fields, can post their thoughts. Bill Moyers and Sherry have collaborated on previous PBS programs. Their last production, WASHINGTON'S OTHER SCANDAL, an investigation of the campaign finance scandals of the Clinton Administration, won a Peabody Award. HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, an earlier collaboration for the PBS FRONTLINE series, garnered three Emmy Awards as well as a DuPont-Columbia Silver baton. Underwriters: Park Foundation, The Herb Alpert Foundation, Kohlberg Foundation, Inc., Surdna Foundation, The D. and T. MacArthur Foundation, Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation and Mutual of America Life Insurance Company. Producer: Public Affairs Television, Inc. in association with Washington Media Associates. Presenter: Thirteen/WNET New York. Executive editor: Bill Moyers. Executive producers: Judy Doctoroff O'Neill and Judith son Moyers. Producer: Sherry . Writers: Sherry and Bill Moyers. Editors: Kris Kral and Ritsher. Associate producer: Lori Shinseki. Director of production: Felice Firestone. Director of special projects: Deborah stein. Format: CC STEREO. Online: PBS.org