Too Little: The Consumer Product Safety Commission and Asbestos
Kurtz, Howie
Too Little: The Consumer Product Safety Commission and Asbestos by Howie Kurtz Last winter, in living rooms across the country, more than a million people warmed themselves in front of fires...
...Sinai School of Medicine, the country’s leading asbestos researcher, showed that people can get lung disease from brief exposure to free-floating asbestos fibers that break free from finished products...
...Asbestos was also found to cause mesothelioma, a particularly painful form of cancer that eats away at the lining of the lung or abdominal cavity and generally kills its victims within one year after its first symptoms appear...
...The talkative chairman, who is said to have political aspirations in Michigan, flew at taxpayer expense to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tokyo, Brussels, Geneva, Bonn, Hamburg, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands during his first ten months in office...
...In July 1976, the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, asked the commission to ban asbestos patching compounds, -which are widely used to repair crumbling ceilings, walls, and floors...
...The economic impact on business, Byington admitted, was a factor in his decision not to push for an immediate recall of asbestos products...
...The CPSC was first asked to ban artificial fireplace logs and ashes that contain free-floating asbestos in November 1975, in a petition from environmental writer Rachel Scott...
...The commission has been such an abysmal failure that it is at least as responsible as any other government agency for the plummeting popularity of consumer protection...
...But the commission, which is supposed to ban products that injure or kill people, has not acted against this hazard with any greater sense of urgency than federal officials displayed when workplace hazards were exposed in the 1930s...
...Cosmetic Changes’ Byington, a handsome young Republican from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who was appointed last year by President Ford, believes the commission’s shortcomings can be corrected through better management techniques...
...Despite this unequivocal warning, the commission did absolutely nothing for another year...
...Too Little: The Consumer Product Safety Commission and Asbestos by Howie Kurtz Last winter, in living rooms across the country, more than a million people warmed themselves in front of fires fed by artificial fireplace logs...
...He insists that he will cope more effectively with CPSC’s massive backlog of health and safety hazards now that he has reorganized the agency’s structure...
...The CPSC’s voluble chairman, S . John Byington, concedes that his agency wasn’t as aggressive as it might have been...
...Byington, meanwhile, has been far more energetic in pursuing his own career than dangerous products...
...safety standards to foreign officials-could have been accomplished just as well by long-distance phone calls...
...The following month, Robert Hehir, director of CPSC’s Bureau of Biomedical Science, warned in a memo: “Data demonstrating the adverse effects of asbestos in humans, as well as in experimental animal studies, is clear and irrefutable...
...But Byington claims he never received the scientific memo that detailed the risks of asbestos...
...The commission is so stricken with bureaucratic paralysis that it has not acted on a backlog of over 150 questionable products...
...one survey shows that 43 per cent of them don’t think their agency is doing a good job...
...It’s no secret that people have become increasingly fed up with meddlesome government bureaucrats issuing annoying minor regulations on such matters as interlocking seat belts and child-proof aspirin bottles...
...Asbestos is not a necessary component of these products, but manufacturers prefer it because it is much cheaper than its substitutes...
...What this means,” complains Castleman, “is that stores can have special sales on asbestos patching compounds, and a few more people will get cancer...
...Because the asbestos manufacturers deliberately ignored the mounting evidence, at least 400,000 workers-or four out of ten in the industry-are now expected to die from asbestos diseases...
...country beginning in 1930...
...Manufacturers are now rushing to obtain patents for dozens of new uses for asbestos, apparently secure in the knowledge that the CPSC is unlikely to act against them soon...
...By 1935, asbestos was found to cause lung cancer, and later it was linked to cancer of the stomach, intestine, and rectum...
...The commission’s own scientists readily agreed...
...But one CPSC member, R. David Pittle, told Byington in a private memo: “Except for a few cosmetic changes, you have not really reorganized the agency at all...
...While Byington has been fiddling with organizational charts, his commission has done very little research on other dangerous asbestos products...
...Oh sure, we could have moved faster,” he says...
...Nevertheless, it has been known since a landmark study in 1964 by Dr...
...When asbestos fibers are absorbed into the lungs, they cause a fatal disease that scientists first diagnosed in the late 1920s...
...Such hidden dangers in the marketplace are the reason that Congress decided five years ago to create the Consumer Product Safety Commission...
...Most of the commissioners are Republicans appointed during the Nixon-Ford years, and they often appear concerned more about the impact of their actions on corporate profits than their effect on public health...
...Hundreds of thousands of tons of asbestos also are used in textured paints, cement powders, brake linings, stove panels, wallboards, and floor tiles...
...Meaningless Mush’ Such incidents have demoralized many of the commission’s workers...
...He also spent $45,000 to make television commercials featuring a character named “Safety Sadie,” who offers friendly tips on matters like fireworks and bicycles...
...They were further aggravated by Byington’s expenditure of $500,000 on product profiles that turned out to be worthless...
...employees earn over $28,000-he has added five “supergrade” managers, who report directly to him...
...It made the case for them, but they spent a year quibbling with us...
...The scar tissue would thicken, even after the workers were no longer being exposed to asbestos, and the strain on their pulmonary systems became so great that they often died of heart failure before their lungs could give out...
...We never saw that memo...
...Instead of cracking down on dangers like asbestos, however, the CPSC has been so ineffective that even its most enthusiastic supporters have become disillusioned...
...Tiny asbestos fibers accumulated in their lungs and were soon covered by scar tissue that made breathing increasingly difficult...
...The growing asbestos industry, however, chose not to heed the alarming studies that were published in this Howie Kurtz is an investigutive reporter for columnist Jack Anderson...
...They had no sense of the consequences...
...Even very brief exposure to asbestos fibers such as those experienced by consumers of patching compounds have been shown to substantially increase the risk of cancer,” the group warned...
...Part of the reason for this is that the commission sees manufacturers, rather than their customers, as its most important constituency...
...You have simply added a layer of unneeded supergrade Associate Executive Directors over the technical bureaus...
...For example, asbestos remains a hidden ingredient in such innocuous products as children’s modeling clay and papier-mache...
...One CPSC staff member agrees: “We dragged our feet interminably...
...Several of them have voted to ban products only reluctantly and under the greatest public pressure...
...This has been dragging on for months and may not be completed for months more...
...They found that many asbestos workers were dying from a disease they called asbestosis...
...They took a calculated risk that the hapless bureaucrats in Washington would not take their products off the market in the near future...
...Asbestos, after all, is no borderline case about which reasonable people can disagree, and the most conscientious citizen has little way of knowing of the hidden ingredient in artifical fireplace logs and ashes...
...The manufacturers of these products have known for years that asbestos can hurt people, just as they knew 50 years ago that they were destroying the luqgs of their workers...
...So far, that risk has paid off...
...Instead, it is allowing sales to continue while it draws up regulations banning future use...
...Nobody told us it was a high Finally, the commission voted last April to ban patching compounds and fireplace logs and ashes that contain asbestos...
...Then he decided he didn’t like the actress who played Sadie, threw the commercials in the trash can, and led the search for a new Sadie, eventually settling on the wife of comedian Dom DeLuise...
...And today, millions of American consumers are unwittingly being exposed to this same deadly asbestos...
...It was not until the early 1970s that strict limits on the amount of asbestos to which workers could be exposed were imposed on the industry by federal law...
...Byington’s avowed mission-explaining U.S...
...Most of them did not realize that these artificial logs and ashes were emanating small particles of asbestos that floated slowly I through the air and into their lungs, where the deadly fibers became permanently embedded...
...They laughed at our first petition,” recalls Barry Castleman, the National Resources Defense Council lawyer who wrote it...
...Since its inception it has issued safety standards for only one product, swimming pool slides, and even that took two years...
...To put it bluntly, the CPSC has failed to reduce deaths and injuries to consumers because Byington and his colleagues have not been aggressive enough in banning the products that cause them...
...In the pursuit of profit, the companies have been willing not only to peddle harmful products, but to create a market for them through a gressive and sometimes misleading ad pv ertising that glosses over their dangers and defects...
...The staff still hasn’t looked at many products that contain asbestos...
...But even the consumer protection movement’s most ardent critics would have to concede that the government has a basic responsibility to stop companies from foisting dangerous products on an unsuspecting public...
...What happened after it was written, God only knows,” he says...
...Those artificial fireplace logs and ashes are just one of the more than 3,000 consumer products that, although most of the public doesn’t know it, contain asbestos...
...An angry letter from CPSC employees to Senator Wendell Ford, one of Byington’s harshest critics, explained: “At the direction of management the profiles were re-written numerous times . . . each time with additional facts and figures incorporated...
...Finally, senior staffers took the profiles and manipulated them into meaningless mush so that they would be innocuous enough to release under Freedom of Information...
...Selikoff discovered last year that thousands of pounds of modeling clay ordered by New York schools contained as much as 50 per cent asbestos...
...One possible reason for the delay is suggested in another internal memo: “The longer it takes to promulgate a ban and/or repurchase [of asbestos] , the smaller the economic effect on the industry will be...
...But although two million people a year are being exposed to these products, the CPSC didn’t order an immediate halt to sales and a recall of existing inventories...
...But as one CPSC official puts it, “John likes the spotlight, the travel, the glorification.,’ Another example of Byington’s passion for public relations over product safety is the $425,000 he paid an Atlanta advertising firm last year to promote the commission’s work-a strategy that, naturally, entailed more traveling and speeches for its chairman...
...To the second highest paid agency staff in Washingtonabout 200 of its 900...
...Exposure to consumer products containing [ free-floating asbestos] poses an unnecessary, unreasonable and completely avoidable potential risk to consumers that cannot be adequately controlled by warning labeling...
...Irving Selikoff of New York’s Mt...
Vol. 9 • December 1977 • No. 10
