PHA-Exchange> Texaco and environmental pollution in Ecuador

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Scientists Denounce Tactics of Texaco and Its Academic Consultants in 
Ecuadorean Oil Dispute
By LILA GUTERMAN 
Fifty scientists have sent a letter to a journal of environmental and 
occupational health to decry the behavior of other researchers who have acted 
as consultants to ChevronTexaco in a dispute over oil drilling in Ecuador. The 
consultants were quoted in newspaper advertisements and on Texaco's Web site 
during a legal battle between the oil company and residents of the South 
American country. 
Texaco drilled in the Ecuadorean Amazon from 1964 to 1992, and residents have 
sued the company in Ecuador's courts, saying that the pollution left behind 
has caused cancer and other illnesses, spoiled the environment, and 
destabilized communities. They argue that the oil company, which in 2001 
merged with Chevron, should pay $6-billion to clean up the mess. 
But ChevronTexaco insists that the pollution is not nearly as widespread as 
claimed, and that other factors are likely to have caused the health problems. 
Backing up those assertions are reports produced for the company by six 
scientists whom the oil company hired as consultants, including faculty 
members at Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and 
the University of Texas School of Public Health. 
Other scientists cried foul when quotations from the consultants' reports 
appeared in February on Texaco's Web site and, they say, in full-page 
advertisements in newspapers in Ecuador. The online statements criticize 
earlier studies, some of them published in the scientific literature, that 
showed connections between oil pollution and disease. The Web site, for 
instance, quotes Lowell E. Sever, a professor of epidemiology at Texas, as 
saying, "There is little or no evidence that would support a causal 
relationship between oil contamination and health effects." 
The upset scientists are striking back with a letter to the editor of the 
International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, a quarterly 
peer-reviewed journal. In the letter, which is scheduled to appear in June, 
they call Texaco's advertisements "a blatant effort by the company to sway 
public opinion as the legal case was being heard." The 50 signers of the 
letter, most of them academics, work in 17 countries on five continents. 
Their concern extends to the actions of Texaco's consultants. In the letter, 
the researchers respond to some of Texaco's scientific criticisms and assert 
that "the place to air legitimate scientific concerns about the quality of 
published research is in the research literature itself." 


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