Industry-Funded Pesticide Data Problematic, Study Shows

Scrutinizing a company’s study on a widely used pesticide, chlorpyrifos, academic researchers find shortcomings in analyses and public disclosures of results.

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Getting their hands on raw, industry-funded data on the widely used pesticide, chlorpyrifos, researchers uncover evidence of neurotoxicity in animals that had not been publicly disclosed. The results were published last week (November 16) in Environmental Health.

“This study is unique as this type of analysis, at the intersection of policy and regulatory science is generally not considered ‘research’ by academic journals, and is not often published in the peer-reviewed literature,” Veena Singla, the associate director of Science & Policy at the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, who has also conducted reviews of chlorpyrifos toxicity data, writes in an email to The Scientist.

The organophosphate is currently sold under the brand name Lorsban by DowDuPont and by several other chemical companies, and is use to control a variety of pests including termites, mosquitoes, and roundworms found on ...

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    Anna Azvolinsky

    Anna Azvolinsky is a freelance science writer based in New York City.
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