This is quite a telling story. Why would a rep do this?  Yep, it's a Republican.

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How Senator Vitter Battled the EPA Over Formaldehyde’s Link to Cancer

by Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica - April 15, 2010 3:30 am EDT


When Sen. David Vitter persuaded the EPA to agree to yet another review of its long-delayed assessment of the health risks of formaldehyde, he was praised by companies that use or manufacture a chemical found in everything from plywood to carpet.

As long as the studies continue, the EPA will still list formaldehyde as a "probable" rather than a "known" carcinogen, even though three major scientific reviews now link it to leukemia and have strengthened its ties to other forms of cancer. The chemical industry is fighting to avoid that designation, because it could lead to tighter regulations and require costly pollution controls.

"Delay means money. The longer they can delay labeling something a known carcinogen, the more money they can make," said James Huff, associate director for chemical carcinogenesis at the National Institute for Environmental Health in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The EPA’s chemical risk assessments are crucial to protecting the public’s health because they are the government’s most comprehensive analysis of the dangers the chemicals present and are used as the scientific foundation for state and federal regulations. But it usually takes years or even decades to get an assessment done, or to revise one that is outdated. Often the industry spends millions on lobbying and on scientific studies that counter the government’s conclusions.

The EPA has been trying since 1998 to update the formaldehyde assessment [1], which was first written in 1989. But the agency’s efforts have repeatedly been stalled by the industry and Congress.

This time, the resistance came from Vitter, a Republican senator from Louisiana, where, ironically, thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims claim they suffered respiratory problems after being housed in government trailers contaminated with formaldehyde. Last year Vitter blocked the nomination of a key EPA official until the agency agreed to ask the National Academy of Sciences to weigh in on the assessment. Vitter’s spokesman, Joel DiGrado told the media that "Because of the FEMA trailer debacle, we need to get absolutely reliable information to the public about formaldehyde risk as soon as possible."

Vitter’s ties to the formaldehyde industry are well known. According to Talking Points Memo [2], his election campaign received about $20,500 last year from companies that produce large amounts of formaldehyde waste in Louisiana. But ProPublica found that Vitter actually took in nearly twice that amount if contributions from other companies, trade groups and lobbyists with interests in formaldehyde regulation are included. Among those contributors is Charles Grizzle, a top-paid lobbyist [3] for the Formaldehyde Council, an industry trade group that had long sought [4] a National Academy review of the chemical.

Congress stalled the formaldehyde risk assessment once before. In 2004, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., persuaded [5] (PDF) the EPA to delay it, even though preliminary findings from a National Cancer Institute study had already linked formaldehyde to leukemia. Inhofe insisted that the EPA wait for a more "robust set of findings" from the Institute.

Koch Industries, a large chemical manufacturer and one of Inhofe’s biggest campaign contributors [6], gave [7]Inhofe $6,000 that year. That same year Koch bought two pulp mills [8] from Georgia-Pacific, a major formaldehyde producer and one of the world’s largest plywood manufacturers. The next year Koch bought all of Georgia-Pacific.

 

The "more robust" findings that Inhofe asked for weren’t released until five years later– May, 2009 – and they reinforced [9] the 2004 findings. Of the nearly 25,000 workers the National Cancer Institute had tracked for 30 years, those exposed to higher amounts of formaldehyde had a 37 percent greater risk of death [10] from blood and lymphatic cancers and a 78 percent greater risk of leukemia than those exposed to lower amounts.

The Formaldehyde Council immediately released a statement [11] disputing those findings and calling for a full review by the National Academy of Sciences. Such an evaluation could take as long as four years, according to an EPA spokesperson.

But this time it wasn’t Inhofe who stepped in on the industry’s behalf, but Vitter, who like Inhofe sits on the Environment and Public Works Committee.

Continues @ ProPublica.org

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Just amazing!  He certainly is not putting people first.   Let's see.. Is he impacting just his constituency? No!

The formaldehyde issue is huge in Louisiana in the trailers.  But it also affects all of us.

Please note that many of the glues used in building products have formaldehyde.  When you enter a building products outlet, the overwhelming smell especially in the lumber area is of formaldehyde.

Be sure to get in as much sun as possible in the warmer days into the house and ventilate your house and to get the formaldehyde out of the subfloor and out of the house.

-- Edited by Sanders on Thursday 15th of April 2010 10:28:25 AM