The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun closing its nationwide network of scientific libraries, effectively preventing EPA scientists and the public from accessing vast amounts of data and information on issues from toxicology to pollution. Several libraries have already been dismantled, with their contents either destroyed or shipped to repositories where they are uncataloged and inaccessible.
Members of Congress have asked the EPA to cease and desist. While the agency claims that it has postponed further destruction of documents, we need you to tell the EPA that scientists and the public need unconstrained access to this critical information to protect our health and environment. Please call EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson at (202) 564-4700 and urge him to keep the library system open until all materials are available online and sufficient research assistance is available.
Please Note: We've received reports that some EPA receptionists are telling UCS supporters that the EPA is simply restructuring and modernizing the system.
Click here for evidence of why this argument doesn't hold water.
Comment:
nktulloch: I guess they realized that their data, while sometimes informative, was increasingly skewed towards the corporate interests anyway. They knew which side the bread was buttered on. I guess there are well-meaning people in the EPA but many just 'do time' there before making contacts and moving on to industry. Now they are blatantly moving on without leaving the EPA. That is what this is about. It should be called CPA- corporate protection agency.
An example of the ineffectiveness of the EPA is that non EPA research labs are discovering the more damaging effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs). I know from controlled studies that the effect of doses much lower than what the EPA has said was ok for years now, is absolutely not ok. They are often very neurotoxic. Chronic low dose EDCs alter cognitive and behavioral processes in humans. Lab studies with rodents show that these changes continue in the offspring of those exposed. That is in addition to what was already known about physical effects like immune system dysfunctions and cancer.
We are chronically exposed just by eating, drinking and using common household products.
I had a long and strange conversation with an EPA rep at an endocrine society conference last year. I believe these people are either completely stupid or are deliberately evil. EDC exposed subjects show more cognitive deficits and aggressive behavior compared to non-exposed subjects (conduct disorder and ADHD comes to mind). I think people at the EPA ingested more than average amounts of the stuff over the years.
You can be exposed to all kinds of horrible things in your food, water and household products, but for goodness sake, don't smoke! If anybody still believes that the anti-smoking campaign is anything more than a smokescreen to cover the fact that the illnesses and deaths are really being caused by industrial chemicals and pollutants, they they have already ingested way too much EDC.
Comment: You can be exposed to all kinds of horrible things in your food, water and household products, but for goodness sake, don't smoke! If anybody still believes that the anti-smoking campaign is anything more than a smokescreen to cover the fact that the illnesses and deaths are really being caused by industrial chemicals and pollutants, they they have already ingested way too much EDC.