December 18 - In an article in the January-February 2008 issue of the journal Public Health Reports, David Michaels and Celeste Monforton of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP) explore how the beryllium industry fought efforts to lower workplace beryllium exposure limits, first by the Department of Energy (DOE) and then by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Beryllium is a metal used in the manufacturing of nuclear weapons and other products, and exposure to airborne beryllium can cause acute and chronic beryllium disease. The Atomic Energy Commission set an exposure limit of 2 μg/m3 (two micrograms of beryllium in each meter of air) – known as “the taxicab standard” because it came from a discussion in the back of a taxicab rather than from solid epidemiological evidence – in 1949, and OSHA adopted the same limit in 1971. By the 1980s, evidence had emerged that this standard was not fully protective.

Once the DOE and OSHA began the process of lowering their beryllium exposure limits, the beryllium industry turned to some of the standard industry tactics to oppose the change. First it denied the validity of the evidence the taxicab standard was not protective, and when that was no longer credible, it insisted that more research was needed before a new standard could be issued.

In late 1999, DOE rejected these tactics and issued a new rule reducing the level triggering protection from beryllium exposure  tenfold (to 0.2 μg/m3).  The beryllium industry has been successful in slowing OSHA’s efforts, and that agency has still not updated its out-of-date and inadequate beryllium workplace exposure limit.

In “Beryllium’s Public Relations Problem: Protecting Workers When There is No Safe Exposure Level,” Michaels and Monforton chronicle the ways in which the beryllium industry attempted to slow the adoption of stricter beryllium exposure limits. Two of the lessons they draw from it can apply to many other hazardous substances whose manufacturers argue against regulation: the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the interpretation of scientific data by those with financial incentives must be discounted.