Report: Chromium risks obscured

WASHINGTON – Scientists working for the chromium industry withheld data about the metal’s health risks while the industry campaigned to block strict new limits on the cancer-causing chemical, according to a scientific report published Thursday.

The allegations, by researchers at George Washington University and the Public Citizen Health Research Group, are based on secret industry documents obtained by the authors.

They come just days before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is scheduled to announce its new standard for workplace exposure to hexavalent chromium – a known carcinogen handled by 380,000 U.S. workers in the steel, aerospace and other industries.

Documents in the report, published in the online journal Environmental Health, show that the industry conducted a pivotal study that found a fivefold increase in lung cancer deaths from moderate exposures to chromium but never published the results or gave them to OSHA. Company-sponsored scientists later reworked the data in a way that made the risk disappear.

OSHA has not said what the new limit will be. But sources close to the agency have been told to expect a standard that would allow five times more exposure than it had initially proposed – a shift that would be a victory for the industry, saving it billions of dollars in upgrades and plant closures.

Company representatives and the contract scientist who led the reworked analysis denied any wrongdoing.

“The idea that there was a conspiracy here … is completely and utterly false,” said Kate McMahon-Lohrer, an attorney at Collier Shannon and counsel to the Chromium Coalition, an industry group that has worked for a decade to forestall tighter regulation.

But David Michaels, director of the project on scientific knowledge and public policy at GWU’s School of Public Health and a senior author of the report, compared the industry’s behavior to that of tobacco and pharmaceutical companies that were found to have withheld damning evidence of risks associated with their products.

“Participants in proceedings before OSHA and other regulatory agencies should be required to provide all relevant data,” Michaels said.