Health Notice

["bill london" <bill_london@hotmail.com>]

here's an advance copy of an article I wrote for the February issue of 
the Moscow Food Co-op's newsletter. BL
--

On Wednesday, January 6, subscribers to the Moscow-Pullman Daily News 
also received a tan single-sheet advertising insert in their newspapers 
(headlined "Health Notice") that attacked organic foods as a serious 
health risk. 
The claims made in that advertisement were totally bogus.
The warning presented in that ad was that the US Centers for Disease 
Control (CDC) had compiled "recent data" that indicated that "people who 
eat organic and 'natural' foods are eight times as likely as the rest of 
the population to be attacked by a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria 
(O157:H7)."  That statement just ain't true.
I called the CDC (their phone number is 800-311-3435) and talked with 
the media relations office.  I was told that the CDC has never compiled 
data about any bacteria outbreaks comparing organic and non-organic food 
sources.  The press officer explained that the CDC had been fielding 
calls on this topic ever since the claims repeated in the Daily News 
were originally printed.  The CDC had created a public statement on this 
issue, which they obligingly sent to me.
The CDC statement is short, and includes the following core message: The 
CDC "has not conducted any study that compares or quantifies the 
specific risk of infection with E. coli O157:H7 and eating either 
traditionally produced or organic/natural foods."
So how did this bogus statement about the CDC finding organic food 
dangerous get into print?  Well, the statement was originally written by 
Dennis T. Avery.  Avery is an employee of the Hudson Institute, a very 
wealthy think-tank with a strong pro-agribusiness perspective.   I 
visited the institute's website (www.hudson.org).  They don't list their 
sources of funding, but I checked out the board of directors.  The board 
includes representatives from across the American corporate elite, many 
from chemical and advertising companies.  For example, some board 
members are: Dan Quayle, former Republican Vice-President; Thomas Bell, 
CEO of Young & Rubican ad agency; Linden Blue, vice-chairman of General 
Atomics; Mitchell Daniels, senior vice-president of Eli Lilly & Company; 
and Thomas Donahue, CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce.
Avery is the author of the book (I swear that I am not making this up) 
entitled: "Saving the World with Pesticides and Plastics".
So, it started with Avery making this claim about the danger of organic 
food in print in the Hudson Institute's magazine, American Outlook, in 
the fall of 1998.  He and his corporate friends managed to get the Wall 
Street Journal to publish five paragraphs from the article on the 
editorial page in the December 8, 1998 edition.  
Then these people who are so anxious to discredit organic foods could 
write that this statement appeared in the Wall Street Journal.  The 
statement is so bogus that the reporters from the Journal would never 
have written it.  The only place it appeared was in the editorial page 
in the tiny "quotable" column, which is about the size and credibility 
of a letter to the editor.  But they could now wrap this statement in 
the respectability of the Journal.
Then they spread this out to their supporters, including some in Moscow, 
who paid to have it put in our newspaper.
Perhaps this all proves that you can't always believe everything you 
read.  Or maybe it indicates that if you have enough money, you can get 
the most outrageous things printed.
Which reminds me of another aspect of this story that still bothers me.  
While I fully support the rights of anyone to buy advertising space in 
the Daily News, I think the newspaper was remiss in not clearly labeling 
the insert a paid advertisement.  The page was headed only by the words, 
"Health Notice," and as a whole, looked semi-official, like it was a 
real warning and not a political diatribe.






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