Breaking the Mold: When Silence Isn’t Golden

[Guest guest]

Breaking the Mold: When Silence Isn't Golden

Carl Grimes

President

Healthy Habitats

Denver, Colo.

http://www.ieconnections.com/archive/jan_07/jan_07.htm#article7

I don't know about you, but I found the implications of the claims

by Sharon Kramer in my last column very disturbing. To refresh your

memory, Sharon offered severe criticism about the American College

of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and its role in the

evidence-based statement of Oct. 27, 2002, " Adverse Human Health

Effects Associated with Molds in the Indoor Environment. "

In her interview, she claimed to have read court documents that

their " evidence-based " statement was intended from the beginning as

a legal defense argument. Further, that the writers of the document

were outsiders to ACOEM and were in fact from Big Tobacco. Major

clues she cited for initially suspecting non-science in the guise of

science were tone and pattern of documents.

So, I decided to conduct some of my own research. I'm no

investigative reporter and am not qualified to evaluate the science

of the report, but perhaps I could find other patterns to support

either ACOEM or Mrs. Kramer.

I started by going back to a source article I identified in my May

2006 Breaking the Mold column on causality; that article, published

in Environmental Health Perspectives, was called " Causality and the

Interpretation of Epidemiological Evidence. " (The abstract and full

article are available at

www.ehponline.org/docs/2006/8297/abstract.html for free.)

Its author is Dr. Kundi, with the Medical University of

Vienna, Austria. Dr. Kundi discusses what has been called

the " criteria of causation " for disease. To summarize the professor,

there are five possible definitions of causality, each with a fatal

flaw. The flaws include circular logic, criteria so loose they

cannot differentiate diseases, and criteria so restrictive that they

exclude known diseases.

Even without a useable definition of causation, wrote Dr. Kundi,

causation can still be utilized within what he identified as the

Bradford-Hill criteria. To paraphrase, any of the five possible

arguments for causation cannot prove a cause (only strengthen

support of a relationship), nor can they dismiss a factor as a cause

(only weaken support of a relationship).

While the ACOEM's conclusion of not plausible may fit the Bradford-

Hill criteria, Kramer asserted that defense witnesses don't stop

at " not plausible, " but instead claim " not possible. "

Simultaneously, I was aware of a court case and a workman's

compensation case where the ACOEM paper was cited by the defense. In

both instances, it was reported to me that the defense witness

invoking the document gave testimony that included unequivocal

conclusions of " no causation " rather than " not plausible. "

My next step as an amateur investigative reporter was to

Google " health consensus statements. " This opened a whole new world

to me that for several hours distracted me from my task of

specifically exploring ACOEM.

The first major find was the Vallombrosa Consensus Statement on

Environmental Contaminants and Human Fertility Compromise, October

2005. See

www.healthandenvironment.org/infertility/vallombrosa_documents/.

At first glance, this seems to have nothing to do with our industry

of the indoor environment. But closer examination led to direct

statements implicating building materials, cleaning products and

personal care products as containing the very chemicals their

consensus statement implicated as impacting human fertility.

Even more revealing was how they identified and considered

information that was known versus information they needed to know.

The pattern and tone was exactly like Sharon Kramer identified in

her interview as a science-based statement rather than a legal- or

marketing-based statement.

Other Google results led me to numerous documents all with similar

tone and pattern about school athletes, mental health and tobacco

hazards. You have to read this one:

www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/0000605-200612050-00141v1/. It

strongly reinforces the Surgeon General's recent report.

And then I found, right on the ACOEM Web site:

www.acoem.org/health_productivity/consensus.asp – Consensus Opinion

Statement, Health and Productivity.

As I read through this document, I mentally compared it to the

documents above and to the ACOEM mold statement. As I read them, I

developed an additional appreciation of Mrs. Kramer's words. To my

layman's mind, the ACOEM mold statement is unlike any of the others

I read, including those from ACOEM itself.

So, what have I proven so far? Not a thing, at least in terms of the

type of evidence that would stand up in a court of law. My

information was composed entirely of gossip and reports I'm not sure

I fully comprehended. But it certainly raised questions in my mind

about how much trust I might be willing to place in the ACOEM

document or others with similar tone and pattern. I'd first want

more authoritative opinions.

And then, as luck would have it, I struck gold. It started with a

conversation in Nashville at the Indoor Air Quality Association

conference – if you weren't there you missed a show and half! – and

the ACOEM paper was mentioned. Several people were all vociferously

arguing but in a strange way. It took me several minutes to realize

they were not disputing each other; they were trying to outdo each

other on what were the most critical flaws of the study.

Over the next couple of weeks, I called a variety of legitimate

experts and asked them their professional opinion of the ACOEM

position on mold. Their professional opinions and insider specifics

ranged from " strong doubts, " at best, to unprintable diatribes.

Aha! Now I had specifics from qualified experts that I could report.

No more laymen's self-interpretation, no more third-hand gossip. I

now had the " smoking gun " of exactly how they would demolish the

farce. With each interview, my adrenaline was pumping, and I was

ready for my first journalistic scoop! All I needed was permission

to quote them.

Thud.

That's the sound of a lead balloon solidly hitting an impenetrable

surface. No one, not a single expert, would go public. In fact, as

soon as they denied me permission to identify them, they would

quickly specify which key facts to leave out because they might be

clues that would identify them.

But, I'd ask, how can you stand by while the harm continues if you

feel so strongly about it? The answers could all be generally summed

up as " fear of reprisal. "

It was then I remembered a quote or a phrase from somewhere that I

can't quite place, that goes kind of like this: Evil does not

perpetuate evil. Silence does.

Carl Grimes is president of Healthy Habitats LLC, an indoor-

environmental consulting firm in Denver, Colo. He is the author of

the book " Starting Points for a Healthy Habitat " and serves on the

Editorial Advisory Board of IE Connections. Grimes can be reached by

e-mail at grimes@... or by phone at (303) 671-9653.

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