In 2003 the Center for Disease Control (CDC) undertook the most extensive study to date of pesticides and industrial chemicals in the bodies of people across the US. The scientists looked for just 116 of the thousands of chemicals in modern use and they found all 116 of these chemicals the blood and urine of the random people they tested. One of these, chlorpyrifos (also known as Dursban), was found in 93% of the American population, and a 2004 study by the Pesticide Action Network North America, Chemical Trespass: Pesticides in Our Bodies and Corporate Accountability, quantifies this contamination and concludes that Dow is responsible for 80% of the U.S. population's

In a July 2005 study spearheaded by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in collaboration with Commonweal, researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September of 2004 in U.S. hospitals. Tests revealed a total of 287 chemicals in the group. The umbilical cord blood of these 10 children, collected by Red Cross after the cord was cut, harbored pesticides, consumer product ingredients, and wastes from burning coal, gasoline, and garbage.

More Information
..........• More information is available at www.chemicalbodyburden.org.
..........• The CHE Toxicant and Disease Database is a one-stop shop which compiles all the latest research between chemicals and the human health effects they cause.

More Information
..........• The Implant Veterans of Toxic Exposure maintain an excellent site that features a number of internal Dow documents. http://yukonmom47.tripod.com/index.html

..........• Another great site is Info-Implants Mammaires.

http://www.info-implants.com/

..........• Also see the Coalition of Silicone Survivors. http://www.siliconesurvivors.net/

..........• More information is also available at Life After Breast Implants.

http://community.webtv.net/@Lookup/lany25/LifeAfterBreast0/

Dow’s idea of a dialogue appears to be money changing hands. Dow and its subsidiaries manage a massive full- and part-time lobbying force. From 1998 to 2002, Dow spent $12,210,000 on Washington lobbying - an average of more than $2.4 million per year. (41) According to federal lobbying reports, in 1997 Dow spent over $2.1 million lobbying on issues as disparate as Most Favored Nation status for China, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and Alaskan Wetlands.

At times, Dow’s behavior has been criminal. On February 13, 2007, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced that Dow would pay a $325,000 civil penalty to settle charges that its subsidiary made improper payments to Indian government officials who held sway over regulatory approvals for the company's pesticides.

The SEC found that, from 1996 through 2001, Dow Chemical's DE-Nocil Crop Protection Ltd. unit paid an estimated $200,000 in improper payments and gifts to Indian state and federal officials as it sought to register several products in time for India's growing season. The SEC said these payments weren't adequately reflected in Dow Chemical's books and records, and that the company's system of internal controls failed to prevent the payments.

The nastiness and cruelty of Dow’s attacks on its critics has often been breathtaking. In 1985, in one of its harshest attacks, Dow once famously tried to discredit Melissa Ortquist, a Greenpeace activist who had plugged Dow's chemical outflow pipes at the company's Midland, MI headquarters. After her arrest for trespass, city police illegally sampled her blood and tested it for venereal disease. When the test came back positive - in error, as it later turned out - Dow, which had somehow obtained the results, gleefully publicized them. Aside from exposing a vile streak in Dow's mentality, the incident raised a disturbing question: if Dow could get past privacy laws to see those test results from the Midland health department, did that mean the company could see - and possibly edit - county health statistics? Letters asking that question began to appear in the Midland Daily News (along with a full-page apology to Ortquist from the Dow Chairman, apologizing for the company's "serious error of judgment").

More recently, in 2004, Dow led twenty of the biggest chemical companies in the United States in an effort to discredit two historians who studied the industry's decision to conceal links between their products and cancer. In an unprecedented move, attorneys for Dow, Monsanto, Goodrich, Goodyear, Union Carbide and others have subpoenaed and deposed five academics who recommended that the University of California Press publish the book Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. The companies have also recruited their own historian to argue that Markowitz and Rosner have engaged in unethical conduct. Markowitz is a professor of history at the CUNY Grad Center; Rosner is a professor of history and public health at Columbia University and director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia's School of Public Health. The reasons for the companies' actions are not hard to find: they face potentially massive liability claims on the order of the tobacco litigation if cancer is linked to vinyl chloride-based consumer products such as hairspray. The stakes are high also for publishers of controversial books, and for historians who write them, because when authors are charged with ethical violations and manuscript readers are subpoenaed, that has a chilling effect. The stakes are highest for the public, because this dispute centers on access to information about cancer-causing chemicals in consumer products.

According to a 2004 report by Rep. Henry Waxman, The Chemical Industry, the Bush Administration, and European Efforts to Regulate Chemicals, Dow and other chemical companies successfully pressured the Bush Administration to lobby against the European Union’s new chemicals policy, REACH (Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals). REACH would require stricter management of chemicals depending on their risk and require companies to provide scientific data on the intrinsic properties and hazards of each substance. The European Commission estimates REACH could prevent between 2,200 to 4,300 occupational cancer cases per year. Health benefits of REACH could be up to $61 billion over a 30-year period.

Twenty years after the Union Carbide uranium mill in Uravan, Colorado, closed in 1984, a group of 82 former Uravan residents and descendants of company employees is suing the company, blaming it for a variety of suspected mining- and milling-related illnesses and genetic disorders. The lawsuit charges that Union Carbide dumped liquid uranium wastes directly into the San Miguel River from 1936 to the mid-1950s. The company began putting liquid and solid wastes into containment ponds in the mid-1950s, the suit said, but those ponds were unlined - meaning the wastes could seep down into the soil and contaminate groundwater. Because Union Carbide didn't supply water for Long Park, a mining camp of tents and shacks, its residents often drank water from the uranium mines, the suit said. The suit also alleges that Union Carbide permitted employees to leave its mines and the mill without showering or changing clothes. Workers' clothes were covered in uranium dust and were washed along with the family's clothing.

Clopyralid, an herbicide manufactured by Dow AgroSciences and sold under the names of 'Confront' and 'Stinger' is so toxic to some plants that it can harm them at concentrations as low as 1 part per billion. Commonly used on lawns to kill weeds such as clover, thistle, dandelions, knapweed and hawkweed, clopyralid usually remains in yard clippings, and when these are composted, the soil that comes out is contaminated. This has caused innumerable problems for organic farmers, small farmers, and anyone who relies on natural compost to fertilize their crops. Instead of fertilizing crops, compost contaminated with clopyralid kills them, particularly sensitive crops such as peas, beans, tomatoes, potatoes and sunflowers. Clopyralid has been found at harmful levels in commercial and municipal compost in Washington, California, Pennsylvania and New Zealand; (42) in response to growing pressure from composters and organic farmers, Dow withdrew clopyralid from use on residential lawns in the U.S. in 2002, although this use may persist). (43) For more information on the magnitude of the problem, see the GRRN network.A Deadly Product Line

In addition to those mentioned above, Dow manufactures a wide range of chemicals with dangerous environmental and human health effects, including 2,4-D (one of two active ingredients in Agent Orange and Agent White; a possible carcinogen, suspected endocrine disruptor and potential ground water contaminant); 2,4,5-T (the other active ingredient of Agent Orange; a carcinogen and suspected endocrine disruptor; in 1977, a lawsuit and subsequent scientific studies linked 2,4,5-T crop spraying to miscarriages in Oregon); Ethylene Dibromide, or EDB (a carcinogen, ground water contaminant, developmental / reproductive toxin and suspected endocrine disruptor that was used as a nematicide, rodenticide and insecticide until it was banned in the U.S. in 1983); Haloxyfop (a probable human carcinogen that is not registered in the United States, but is sold throughout the world as Gallant and Verdict; one of many "circle of poison" pesticides that can be manufactured in the U.S., applied abroad and returned as residue on imported foods); Nuarimol (a fungicide that causes cancer and birth defects in animals; although it is not registered in the U.S. it is sold in Africa, Colombia, Honduras and Europe); Oxyfluorfen (an herbicide classified by the EPA a possible human carcinogen); Picloram (an herbicide chemically similar to clopyralid, which poses a threat to composters and contains the contaminant hexachlorobenzene (HCB), a probable human carcinogen; it was also one of two active ingredients in Agent White and is a potential ground water contaminant); Telone (a soil fumigant, carcinogen, and ground water contaminant; one of its active ingredients, 1,3-dichloropropene, produces cancer and birth defects in test animals); Strongarm (an herbicide that harmed peanut crops, prompting Texas farmers to sue in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court); and Sulfuryl fluoride, or Vikane (a fumigant used to kill termites and other pests that has been restricted for extreme acute toxicity).

2,4,5-T Poisons Globe, Arizona
In 1970, miscarriages and illnesses, linked to the spraying of Dow’s pesticide 2,4,5-T (half of Agent Orange) by the Forest Service in Globe, Arizona, resulted in a court case between Dow and the local community. Though Dow knew about the dangerous effects of this herbicide, it first refused to accept liability and finally settled in 1980. The same situation arose in the Alsea Valley in Oregon, prompting the Environmental Protection Agency to ban 2,4,5-T. Dow unsuccessfully sued the EPA to repeal the ban and dropped the case in 1983.

Hemlock, Michigan
"Everyone remembers the goose. Publications ranging from prestigious to prurient lavished coverage on a Hemlock-area honker with its wings on backward. The town of Hemlock, Michigan - named after a long-gone canopy of evergreen trees - quickly became the dateline in macabre reports of fouled fowl, cows with purple teeth, green-gutted rabbits and wilted houseplants. Less tabloid-worthy yet worrisome human symptoms also plagued residents southeast of the village, who by 1977 feared Dow Chemical Co.'s deep brine disposal had contaminated their drinking water. This 25-year-old story, which bubbled up in 1978, stands out as a chemical mystery by sparking a far-flung pollution probe that left residents with no easy answers. ‘You had to keep the focus, and I couldn't spend my whole life doing this,’ says Carol Jean Kruger, now 68, who spent years seeking information."

Dow responded by calling the members of the jury stupid: "Dow will vigorously challenge this baseless jury verdict and if necessary in the appellate courts," said Dow Chemical spokesman Scot Wheeler. "The jury's verdict, particularly with respect to punitive damages, is clearly erroneous."

Exporting Unregistered Pesticides to Africa, Latin America
In 1990, Dow's joint venture with Eli Lilly, DowElanco, exported two pesticides from the United States which were not registered by the EPA. The EPA refused to register DowElanco's herbicide haloxyfop, marketed under the names "Gallant" and "Verdict," and has classified it as a "probable human carcinogen." According to a July 1990 Greenpeace report, "Never-Registered Pesticides," DowElanco nevertheless exported haloxyfop for sale in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe. The EPA refused to set a permissible residue standard (known as food residue tolerances) for both haloxyfop and nuarimol - another DowElanco product sold under the trade names "Gauntlet" and "Tridal" - because it causes cancer and birth defects in laboratory animals. Nevertheless, DowElanco continued to export nuarimol for use in Africa, Colombia and Honduras and Europe.

As a former member of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), Dow opposed restrictions on the greenhouse gas emissions that lead to global warming and climate change, and tried to obscure scientific evidence provided by 2,500 of the world’s leading climate change scientists that global worming is a reality. Dow's interest in undermining climate change science is clear: it produces chlorine which is used in the manufacture of greenhouse gases like hydrofluorocarbons and halocarbons, and manufactures feedstocks and chemicals used by oil, gas and auto industries—industries that contribute to climate change.

PVC: The Poison Plastic
PVC, or vinyl, produces dioxin throughout its lifecycle and is thought to be a larger source of dioxin formation than any other single material. Dow is the world’s largest producer of materials that are used to produce PVC (chlorine, ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride monomer). Dow’s total vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) production capacity globally is approximately 2.5 million metric tons per year.

Chlorinated Solvents and Dioxin
Dow is the largest producer of chlorinated solvents, which are used for cleaning and coating in industries ranging from automobile manufacturing to dry cleaning. As with PVC, chlorinated solvents produce dioxin at multiple points throughout their life cycles.

Price Fixing
Dow, along with other chemical giants including DuPont and Bayer, engaged in a price-fixing conspiracy to set prices in a half-dozen chemicals, according to U.S. and European investigators and the DowJones news service. The chemicals were used in plastics, rubber, and synthetic materials in industries as wide-ranging as automobiles, furniture, and flooring. Among the deals discovered was a conspiracy to hike the price of neoprene, a synthetic rubber used in auto manufacture and in electronics, and the widely-used plastic urethane. Another area was in the pricing of EPDM, a synthetic rubber. In that case, competitors kept factories running well below capacity and hiked the price based on an artificial shortage. At least four grand-jury investigations stemming from the investigations currently are underway in San Francisco. In May, purchasers of neoprene filed suit against Dow and DuPont, which had formed a joint venture to produce and sell the synthetic material. The purchasers claimed the two companies met secretly with global rivals to fix prices and divide the sales of neoprene. It wasn't long before DuPont Dow Elastomers agreed to settle, in June, for $36 million, but other cases are still ongoing. According to the Baltimore Sun, DuPont Dow Elastomers LLC, a joint venture of DuPont Co. and Dow Chemical Co., agreed in January 2005 to pay an $84 million criminal fine and plead guilty to price fixing.

Poisoning the Public
Dow is profiting from a decision by the US Forest Service to pursue an extensive herbicide program surrounding Missoula, Montana, using several Dow pesticides that have multiple documented health effects. This USFS decision was made in the face of significant public opposition to the spraying, but was made in close consultation with Dow AgroSciences. Read more in Montana's War on Weeds, a report by Beyond Pesticides.

http://www.beyondpesticides.org/infoservices/pesticidesandyou/Fall%2004/Montanas%20War%20On%20Weeds.pdf