NARRATION: They are everywhere in our daily lives - often where we least expect them.
DR. PHILIP LANDRIGAN, CHAIRMAN, PREVENTIVE MEDICINE, MT. SINAI SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: We are conducting a vast toxicological experiment, and we are using our children as the experimental animals.
NARRATION: Not a single child today is born free of synthetic chemicals.
AL MEYERHOFF, FORMER ATTORNEY FOR THE NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL: With chemicals, it's shoot first and ask questions later.
NARRATION: We think we are protected but, in fact, chemicals are presumed safe - innocent - until proven guilty.
SANDY BUCHANAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, OHIO CITIZEN ACTION: Years of documents have shown that they knew they were hurting people, much like the tobacco industry.
PROFESSOR GERALD MARKOWITZ Ph.D, JOHN JAY COLLEGE: Historians don't like to use broad political terms like "cover-up," but there's really no other term that you can use for this.
NARRATION: In this special investigation, we will reveal the secrets that a powerful industry has kept hidden for almost fifty years.
TRADE SECRETS: A Moyers Report
https://billmoyers.com/content/trade-secrets/TEST RESULTS
NARRATION: Today, an average of twenty new chemicals enter the marketplace every week. We don't know much about them - and we don't know what they might be doing to us.
Back at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Michael McCally was ready to tell me if residues of the chemical revolution had been found in my blood.
BILL MOYERS: So what's the news?
DR. MICHAEL McCALLY, VICE-CHAIRMAN, PREVENTIVE MEDICINE, MT. SINAI SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: We tested for 150 different industrial chemicals, and you have 84 of those 150.
BILL MOYERS: Wow. Eighty-four.
MICHAEL McCALLY: Eighty-four.
BILL MOYERS: If you had tested me sixty years ago when I was six years old, would you have found those chemicals?
MICHAEL McCALLY: No. No. With one exception.
BILL MOYERS: What's that?
MICHAEL McCALLY: Lead.
BILL MOYERS: Lead.
MICHAEL McCALLY: Lead. Lead's been around -- we've been -- we've been poisoning ourselves with lead since, you know, practically the cave ages.
BILL MOYERS: So 83 of these 84 chemicals you found in my blood are there because of the chemical revolution -
MICHAEL McCALLY: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: -- over the last sixty years.
MICHAEL McCALLY: That's correct. That's correct. And we didn't know this until we looked, but suddenly we find out that the industry has put a bunch of chemicals in our body that, you know, are not good for us, and we didn't have any say in that. That just happened.
BILL MOYERS: What kind of chemicals?
MICHAEL McCALLY: In the PCB case, you have 31 different PCBs of this whole family of similar chemicals. They are all over the place. And it's probably a function of where you lived. You lived in some locale where PCBs were in the environment, and you got them into you through the air you breathed. Some of them get down in groundwater. Some of them get coated on food. You didn't get them sort of in one afternoon because you ate a poisoned apple.
BILL MOYERS: And dioxins?
MICHAEL McCALLY: And dioxins, of all that we measured, you had 13, 13 different dioxins.
BILL MOYERS: You tested for some pesticides.
MICHAEL McCALLY: Yes. The organophosphates -- malathion is one we may have heard of because we're spraying it here in New York because of mosquitoes.
BILL MOYERS: I used to spray malathion on my house in Long -- on my yard in Long Island.
MICHAEL McCALLY: We also measured organochlorine pesticides. The best known is DDT. DDT hasn't been produced in this country for several decades.
BILL MOYERS: Yes. So where would I have gotten that?
MICHAEL McCALLY: Did you ever, you know, watch them spray the trees when you were a little kid?
BILL MOYERS: Young man.
MICHAEL McCALLY: A young man? Yes. Okay.
BILL MOYERS: And I lived around places that had used it.
MICHAEL McCALLY: Well, that's enough, because again, like PCBs, these are very persistent chemicals. They don't -- the body doesn't metabolize them, doesn't break them down into little pieces and get rid of them.
BILL MOYERS: How do the results of my test compare with others around the country?
MICHAEL McCALLY: I wish we had more data. I wish I could give you a clear answer to that. The burdens that you carry are probably biologically less important than if you were, you know, a 21-year-old woman who was in her ninth week of pregnancy. And then the fact that you were circulating some DDT might really be important.
BILL MOYERS: Have these chemicals been tested in terms of what happens when they are combined?
MICHAEL McCALLY: No. No. That is a complexity that we haven't even looked at.
BILL MOYERS: Have they been tested on vulnerable populations like children?
MICHAEL McCALLY: No. We are just beginning to do that science.
BILL MOYERS: Is it fair to say from all of this that we are, as human beings, being unwittingly exposed to hundreds of toxic chemicals which have been tested enough just to know that they're toxic, but not tested enough to know the risks?
MICHAEL McCALLY: That's a fine summary of the current state of affairs. We know enough now to know that it doesn't make a lot of sense to make chemicals that are carcinogenic and add them to our bodies and then argue about how much we are adding. It just isn't a good idea. Particularly when there are perfectly acceptable alternatives, and if the industry chose, it could change our exposures dramatically by its own actions.
NARRATION: Three years ago - on the eve of Earth Day - the Chemical Manufacturers Association promised that its member companies would begin to voluntarily test one hundred chemicals a year at an estimated cost of 26 million dollars.
FRED WEBBER, PRESIDENT, CHEMICAL MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION: Our vision is that we will be highly valued by society for our leadership, for the benefits of our products and for the responsible and ethical way in which we conduct our business. It's as simple as that.
NARRATION: Today, we are still waiting for the results of even one of those tests. During those three years, the industry poured more than 33 million dollars into the election campaigns of friendly politicians.
NARRATION: As the secret documents reveal, the promise to test - voluntarily - was part of a strategy hatched almost a decade ago. September 15, 1992
"A general CMA policy on voluntary development of health, safety and environmental information will...potentially avert restrictive regulatory actions and legislative initiatives."
AL MEYERHOFF:The idea of a chemical company voluntarily testing its product is not unlike efforts to voluntarily regulate their products. It is an attempt to pre-empt effective government. It is an attempt to try to stop the government from doing its job by doing half-baked measures and then claiming that we're protecting the public.
DR. PHILIP LANDRIGAN, CHAIRMAN, PREVENTIVE MEDICINE, MT. SINAI SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: There are 80,000 different man-made chemicals that have been registered with the EPA for possible use in commerce. Of those 80,000, there are about 15,000 that are actually produced each year in major quantities, and of those 15,000, only about 43 percent have ever been properly tested to see whether or not they can cause injury to humans.
NARRATION: The industry's own documents confirm just how little we know. Meeting of the CMA Board of Directors. Pebble Beach. Report of Health Effects Committee. "The chemical industry has contended that while a few substances pose a real risk to human health when sufficient exposure occurs, the vast majority of chemicals do not pose any substantial threat to health. However, the problem is, very little data exists to broadly respond to the public's perception and the charges of our opponents."
NARRATION: That is worth repeating. "The problem is, very little data exists." In other words, the industry itself acknowledged it could not prove the majority of chemicals safe.
https://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/proble ... bb_03.html