February 4, 2008 - David Michaels, Director of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP), appeared on Public Health Reports' webcast to discuss “Beryllium’s 'Public Relations Problem': Protecting Workers When There is No Safe Exposure Level,” an article he co-authored with Celeste Monforton that was published in the January-February issue of Public Health Reports.

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 Department of Energy (DOE) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (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  The beryllium industry has been successful in slowing OSHA’s efforts, and that agency has still not updated its out-of-date and inadequate beryllium workplace exposure limit.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 their paper, 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.

In his webcast presentation, Dr. Michaels referenced the following documents:

1989 memo from Hill & Knowlton to Brush Wellman
"Public Relations Problems in Connection with Occupational Diseases in the Beryllium Industry," 1947
Brush Wellman's 1991 "Health, Safety and Environmental Strategic Plan"
1992 letter from Brush Wellman to the U.S. Department of Energy