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Companies Secretly Fund Purported Objective Studies to Support Legal DefensesThursday, July 3, 2008
I have long suspected that certain industries fund studies that have the appearance of independence from companies, yet it turns out are directly connected to those industries. The pharmaceutical industry comes to mind. We have seen corporate lobbyists writing bills that have been passed by Congress and State Legislatures, especially in the past 14 years after the Republicans won the House and the Senate in 1994.

In the latest edition of Mother Jones magazine in a story by Jim Morris (Sarah Laskow contributing to the research) (link), the welding-products industry is shown to have been funding studies by purported independent researching experts in various fields. It should be no surprise, that those researchers have concluded that victims (welders) of exposure to manganese, who have suffered from a disease similar to Parkinson's disease, called "parkinsonism" or "manganism", were malingering or that no causal relationship could be proven.
Court documents obtained by Mother Jones show that the welding companies paid more than $12.5 million to 25 organizations and 33 researchers, virtually all of whom have published papers dismissing connections between welding fumes and workers' ailments. Most of the money, $11 million, was spent after the litigation achieved critical mass in 2003; attorneys for the welders, meanwhile, spent about half a million.
The information was revealed during the discovery phase of a court case in federal court in Ohio, after a wise judge, Kathleen O'Malley, ordered the two sides to "provide a full and complete accounting" of payments to individuals or entities that had done studies. I must admit that I am shocked that the defendant corporations actually produced the documents which showed how they had been manipulating the studies to say what they wanted them to say.

The most blatant example in the Mother Jones article involved a researcher named Jon Fryzek, who Judge O'Malley referred to:
...whose large studies of Swedish and Danish welders found no significant link between welding fumes and Parkinson's symptoms­—but the studies, based almost solely on hospital records, ignored welders who were never hospitalized. O'Malley was particularly troubled to learn that industry lawyers had reviewed a prepublication draft of the Danish study. "[T]here is no doubt that this was not simply an independent study," she wrote, "and that the experts who participated in the study are continuing to act in an advocacy capacity." Fryzek worked for Maryland's International Epidemiology Institute (iei)­—known for its industry-commissioned studies, including one that found no link between radiation and cancer in uranium millers. The institute received more than $971,000 from welding defendants.
The astounding part of this whole story is that the corporate defendants in these manganese cases which relied on these biased reports have won 16 of 17 trials. I think these cases should be retried. I firmly believe that Congress needs to pass a law prohibiting the funding of studies in this way, with strict parameters being set as to how studies are funded. Unfortunately, politicians and the U.S. Supreme Court have been going out of their way to protect corporations who negligently kill and injure American citizens.