TORTINI

For your delectation and delight, desultory dicta on the law of delicts.

Regressive Methodology in Pharmaco-Epidemiology

October 24th, 2020

Medications are rigorously tested for safety and efficacy in clinical trials before approval by regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) or the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The approval process, however, contemplates that more data about safety and efficacy will emerge from the use of approved medications in pharmacoepidemiologic studies conducted outside of clinical trials. Litigation of safety outcomes rarely arises from claims based upon the pivotal clinical trials that were conducted for regulatory approval and licensing. The typical courtroom scenario is that a safety outcome is called into question by pharmacoepidemiologic studies that purport to find associations or causality between the use of a specific medication and the claimed harm.

The International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE), established in 1989, describes itself as an international professional organization intent on advancing health through pharmacoepidemiology, and related areas of pharmacovigilance. The ISPE website defines pharmacoepidemiology as

“the science that applies epidemiologic approaches to studying the use, effectiveness, value and safety of pharmaceuticals.”

The ISPE conceptualizes pharmacoepidemiology as “real-world” evidence, in contrast to randomized clinical trials:

“Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have served and will continue to serve as the major evidentiary standard for regulatory approvals of new molecular entities and other health technology. Nonetheless, RWE derived from well-designed studies, with application of rigorous epidemiologic methods, combined with judicious interpretation, can offer robust evidence regarding safety and effectiveness. Such evidence contributes to the development, approval, and post-marketing evaluation of medicines and other health technology. It enables patient, clinician, payer, and regulatory decision-making when a traditional RCT is not feasible or not appropriate.”

ISPE Position on Real-World Evidence (Feb. 12, 2020) (emphasis in original).

The ISPE publishes an official journal, Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, and sponsors conferences and seminars, all of which are watched by lawyers pursuing and defending drug and device health safety claims. The endorsement by the ISPE of the American Statistical Association’s 2016 statement on p-values is thus of interest not only to statisticians, but to lawyers and claimants involved in drug safety litigation.

The ISPE, through its board of directors, formally endorsed the ASA 2016 p-value statement on April 1, 2017 (no fooling) in a statement that can be found at its website:

The International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology, ISPE, formally endorses the ASA statement on the misuse of p-values and accepts it as an important step forward in the pursuit of reasonable and appropriate interpretation of data.

On March 7, 2016, the American Statistical Association (ASA) issued a policy statement that warned the scientific community about the use P-values and statistical significance for interpretation of reported associations. The policy statement was accompanied by an introduction that characterized the reliance on significance testing as a vicious cycle of teaching significance testing because it was expected, and using it because that was what was taught. The statement and many accompanying commentaries illustrated that p-values were commonly misinterpreted to imply conclusions that they cannot imply. Most notably, “p-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone.” Also, “a p-value does not provide a good measure of evidence regarding a model or hypothesis.” Furthermore, reliance on p-values for data

interpretation has exacerbated the replication problem of scientific work, as replication of a finding is often confused with replicating the statistical significance of a finding, on the erroneous assumption that replication should lead to studies getting similar p-values.

This official statement from the ASA has ramifications for a broad range of disciplines, including pharmacoepidemiology, where use of significance testing and misinterpretation of data based on P-values is still common. ISPE has already adopted a similar stance and incorporated it into our GPP [ref] guidelines. The ASA statement, however, carries weight on this topic that other organizations cannot, and will inevitably lead to changes in journals and classrooms.

There are points of interpretation of the ASA Statement, which can be discussed and debated. What is clear, however, is that the ASA never urged the abandonment of p-values or even of statistical significance. The Statement contained six principles, some of which did nothing other than to attempt to correct prevalent misunderstandings of p-values. The third principle stated that “[s]cientific conclusions and business or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.” (emphasis added).

This principle, as stated, thus hardly advocated for the abandonment of a threshold in testing; rather it made the unexceptional point that the ultimate scientific conclusion (say about causality) required more assessment than only determining whether a p-value passed a specified threshold.

Presumably, the ISPE’s endorsement of the ASA’s 2016 Statement embraces all six of the articulated principles, including the ASA’s fourth principle:

4. Proper inference requires full reporting and transparency

P-values and related analyses should not be reported selectively. Conducting multiple analyses of the data and reporting only those with certain p-values (typically those passing a significance threshold) renders the reported p-values essentially uninterpretable. Cherry-picking promising findings, also known by such terms as data dredging, significance chasing, significance questing, selective inference, and “p-hacking,” leads to a spurious excess of statistically significant results in the published literature and should be vigorously avoided. One need not formally carry out multiple statistical tests for this problem to arise: Whenever a researcher chooses what to present based on statistical results, valid interpretation of those results is severely compromised if the reader is not informed of the choice and its basis. Researchers should disclose the number of hypotheses explored during the study, all data collection decisions, all statistical analyses conducted, and all p-values computed. Valid scientific conclusions based on p-values and related statistics cannot be drawn without at least knowing how many and which analyses were conducted, and how those analyses (including p-values) were selected for reporting.”

The ISPE’s endorsement of the ASA 2016 Statement references the ISPE’s own

Guidelines for Good Pharmacoepidemiology Practices (GPP),” which were promulgated initially in 1996, and revised as recently as June 2015. Good practices, as of 2015, provided that:

“Interpretation of statistical measures, including confidence intervals, should be tempered with appropriate judgment and acknowledgements of potential sources of error and limitations of the analysis, and should never be taken as the sole or rigid basis for concluding that there is or is not a relation between an exposure and outcome. Sensitivity analyses should be conducted to examine the effect of varying potentially critical assumptions of the analysis.”

All well and good, but this “good practices” statement might be taken as a bit anemic, given that it contains no mention of, or caution against, unqualified or unadjusted confidence intervals or p-values that come from multiple testing or comparisons. The ISPE endorsement of the ASA Statement now expands upon the ISPE’s good practices to include the avoidance of multiplicity and the disclosure of the full extent of analyses conducted in a study.

What happens in the “real world” of publishing, outside the board room?

Last month, the ISPE conducted its (virtual) 36th International Conference on Pharmacoepidemiology & Therapeutic Risk Management. The abstracts and poster presentations from this Conference were published last week as a Special Issue of the ISPE journal. I spot checked the journal contents to see how well the presentations lived up to the ISPE’s statistical aspirations.

One poster presentation addressed statin use and skin cancer risk in a French prospective cohort.[1]  The authors described their cohort of French women, who were 40 to 65 years old, in 1990, and were followed forward. Exposure to statin medications was assessed from 2004 through 2014. The analysis included outcomes of any skin cancer, melanoma, basal-cell carcinoma (BCC), and squamous-call carcinoma (SCC), among 66,916 women. Here is how the authors describe their findings:

There was no association between ever use of statins and skin cancer risk: the HRs were 0.96 (95% CI = 0.87-1.05) for overall skin cancer, 1.18 (95% CI = 0.96-1.47) for melanoma, 0.89 (95% CI = 0.79-1.01) for BCC, and 0.90 (95% CI = 0.67-1.21) for SCC. Associations did not differ by statin molecule nor by duration or dose of use. However, women who started to use statins before age 60 were at increased risk of BCC (HR = 1.45, 95% CI = 1.07-1.96 for ever vs never use).

To be fair, this was a poster presentation, but this short description of findings makes clear that the investigators looked at least at the following subgroups:

Exposure subgroups:

  • specific statin drug
  • duration of use
  • dosage
  • age strata

and

Outcome subgroups:

  • melanoma
  • basal-cell carcinoma
  • squamous-cell carcinoma

The reader is not told how many specific statins, how many duration groups, dosage groups, and age strata were involved in the exposure analysis. My estimate is that the exposure subgroups were likely in excess of 100. With three disease outcome subgroups, the total subgroup analyses thus likely exceeded 300. The authors did not provide any information about the full extent of their analyses.

Here is how the authors reported their conclusion:

“These findings of increased BCC risk in statin users before age 60 deserve further investigations.”

Now, the authors did not use the phrase “statistically significant,” but it is clear that they have characterized a finding of “increased BCC risk in statin users before age 60,” and in no other subgroup, and they have done so based upon a reported nominal “HR = 1.45, 95% CI = 1.07-1.96 for ever vs never use.” It is also clear that the authors have made no allowance, adjustment, modification, or qualification, for the wild multiplicity arising from their estimated 300 or so subgroups. Instead, they made an unqualified statement about “increased BCC risk,” and they offered an opinion about the warrant for further studies.

Endorsement of good statistical practices is a welcome professional organizational activity, but it is rather meaningless unless the professional societies begin to implement the good practices in their article selection, editing, and publishing activities.


[1]  Marie Al Rahmoun, Yahya Mahamat-Saleh, Iris Cervenka, Gianluca Severi, Marie-Christine Boutron-Ruault, Marina Kvaskoff, and Agnès Fournier, “Statin use and skin cancer risk: A French prospective cohort study,” 29 Pharmacoepidemiol. & Drug Safety s645 (2020).

SKAPPOLOGY

May 26th, 2020

The Genetic Literacy Project (GLP) asks:

“Who is David and who is Goliath in the lobbying battle over agricultural biotechnology? Activists? Agro-business? In a commitment to transparency, the GLP has mined 5 years of data to help the public understand the funding network that shapes the biotechnology debate.”

The amount of money flowing into the campaign against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is astonishing, but it does not stop the hypocritical complaints against industry’s sponsorship of studies to help show the safety of GMOs. In a recent on-line article, the GLP has published charts to map contributions from not-for-profit non-governmental organizations to anti-biotechnology advocacy groups. Close to a billion dollars ($850M) flowed into the coffers of these organizations from 2012 to 2016. The GLP’s work on tracking this funding is commendable for bringing balance to the debate about the effect of corporate money on health and environmental issues. Corporate includes the lawsuit industry and the advocacy industries.

Well actually, it would be a wonderful world if the GLP’s tracking were unnecessary. In one such alternative universe, people would ask to examine the evidence for and against claims, and they would have a healthy respect for uncertainty.

Studies funded by parties are routinely relied upon in litigation, and they are often pivotal in how courts decide significant claims of environmental or occupational harm.[1] Unfortunately, the sponsorship of studies by plaintiffs’ counsel, third-party litigation funding entities, and advocacy groups is often obscured or hidden.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

I recently happened upon an article of interest in an obscure journal, by a well-known author.[2]  The author, John C. Bailar, formerly an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, was  professor emeritus in the University of Chicago’s Department of Public Health Sciences. He died in September 2016. Bailar was a graduate of the Yale University medical school, and also held a doctorate in statistics.

There is nothing ground breaking in Bailar’s article, but it is a nice summary of the ways that errors can creep into the scientific literature, short of actual fabrication or falsification of data.[3] It is also worth reading because it is an article that comes from one of the several Coronado Conferences, sponsored by an advocacy organization that has fraudulently concealed its funding, The Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy, aka SKAPP.

To be sure, authors of SKAPP-funded articles have invariably cited their funding from SKAPP, and Bailar was no exception. Bailar made the following acknowledgements:

“Support for this paper was provided by The Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP) at The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. It is revised from a paper presented at SKAPP’s March 2006 Coronado Conference “Truth and Advocacy: The Quality and Nature of Litigation and Regulatory Science.” The papers from that conference will be published elsewhere.”[4]

The acknowledgement of support was rather anemic by SKAPP standards.  Most SKAPP-funded articles recited something closer to the following provided by David Michaels, who headed up SKAPP and worked as an expert witness for the litigation industry, until becoming the Administrator of the Occupational Health & Safety Administration, in President Obama’s administration:[5]

“DM [David Michaels] and CM [Celeste Monforton] are employed by the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services as part of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP). Their salaries, in part, are funded by the Common Benefit Litigation Expense Trust, a fund established pursuant to a court order in the Silicone Gel Breast Implant Products Liability litigation. SKAPP’s funding is unrestricted; its funders are not given advance notice or the opportunity to review or approve any documents produced by the project. PL [Peter Lurie] is with Public Citizen’s Health Research Group.”

Michaels’ statement was perhaps a little more forthcoming, but few scientists or lay persons would know that his salary, and support, came from plaintiffs’ lawyers as part of an active litigation effort. Although Michaels claimed that the funding was unrestricted, like Big Tobacco funding, the sponsor, plaintiffs’ counsel, created a substantial selection effect in choosing beneficiaries who would deliver its pre-approved message. The Common Benefit Trust may sound like an eleemosynary, public-spirited, organization, with the imprimatur of the federal court system.  It was not.

Was Bailar influenced by his source of funding?  His topic would have permitted him many examples from the annals of science or litigation, but interestingly one of the few examples Bailar chose to give details about was a scientific dispute between the semiconductor industry and Richard Clapp, who was acting as an expert witness in litigation against that industry.  Although Clapp used a study design known to be inaccurate and biased, Bailar touted Clapp’s research over that sponsored by members of the industry.  Richard Clapp, in addition to have been an expert witness for the litigation industry on many occasions, also happened to have been a member of the SKAPP’s advisory committee. Hmmm.

Whence comes SKAPP funding?  SKAPP trades on most readers’ lack of familiarity with how “common benefit funds” are established.  They sound like some sort of disembodied charitable trust, such as the Pew. In fact, the silicone common benefit trust was nothing more than a funding device for mass federal litigation involving silicone breast implants. Ironically, the funding came from a litigation in which one leading judge described plaintiffs’ expert witnesses as “charlatans,” and the litigation claims as largely based upon fraud.[6] Cynics might believe that Bailar’s choice of Clapp versus the semiconductor industry, regardless of the merits, was driven by a desire to please SKAPP & Clapp.

The common benefit fund for the silicone-gel breast implant litigation was created by Order 13, “Establishing Plaintiffs’ Litigation Expense Fund to Compensate and Reimburse Attorneys for Services Performed and Expenses Incurred for Common Benefit.” The late Judge Sam Pointer, appointed to preside over MDL 926, In re Silicone Gel Breast Implants Products Liability Litigation, Master File No. CV 92-P-10000-S, entered the order on July 23, 1993.  Some of the pertinent terms of Order 13 illustrate how it was supposed to operate:

This order is entered in order to provide for the fair and equitable sharing among plaintiffs of the cost of special services performed and expenses incurred by attorneys acting for the common benefit of all plaintiffs.

  1. Plaintiffs’ Litigation Expense Fund to be Established. Plaintiffs’ National Liaison Counsel … are directed to establish an interest-bearing account to receive and disburse funds as provided in this order.

***

  1. Assessment.

(a)    All plaintiffs and their attorneys who, after this date, either agree — for a monetary consideration — to settle, compromise, dismiss, or reduce the amount of a claim or, with or without a trial, recover a judgment for monetary damages or other monetary relief, including both compensatory and punitive damages, with respect to a breast implant claim are hereby assessed:

(1)    5% of the “gross monetary recovery,” if the agreement is made or the judgment is entered after this date and before November 1, 1993, or

(2)    6% of the “gross monetary recovery,” if the agreement is made or the judgment is entered after October 31, 1993.

Defendants are directed to withhold this assessment from amounts paid to plaintiffs and their counsel, and to pay the assessment into the fund as a credit against the settlement or judgment.  ***

  1. Disbursements.

(a)    Payments may be made from the fund to attorneys who provide services or incur expenses for the joint and common benefit of plaintiffs in addition to their own client or clients.  Attorneys eligible are not limited to Plaintiffs’ National Liaison Counsel and members of Plaintiffs’ National Steering Committee, but include, for example, other attorneys called upon by them to assist in performing their responsibilities, State Liaison Counsel, and other attorneys performing similar responsibilities in state court actions in which the presiding state-court judge has imposed similar obligations upon plaintiffs to contribute to the fund.

(b)    Payments will be allowed only to compensate for special services performed, and to reimburse for special expenses incurred, for the joint and common benefit of all plaintiffs.

***

(c)    No amounts will be disbursed without review and approval by a committee of federal and state judicial officers to be designated by the court.  The committee may, however, utilize the services of a special master to assist in this review, and may authorize one or more of its members to act for the committee in approving particular types of applications for disbursement.

(d)    If the fund exceeds the amount needed to make payments as provided in this order, the court will order an refund to those who have contributed to the fund.  Any such refund will be made in proportion to the amount of the contributions.”

For a while, a defense lawyer, representing the defendants in the silicone MDL, participated in discussions concerning MDL 926 Order 13 funds, until the plaintiffs’ lawyers decided that his services were not needed, and excluded him from discussions of the use of the monies. The reality is that the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the silicone litigation were able to bamboozle the slim oversight committee into approving a propaganda campaign against Daubert gatekeeping, and that recipients of the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ largesse were able to misrepresent their funding as though it were from a federal court.

There are further ironies connected with the silicone common benefit trust.  First, the silicone litigation was effectively over when the court-appointed expert witnesses’ reports that announced that the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses lacked sound scientific evidence to support conclusions of causation.  SKAPP’s website reports that its activities started around 2002, by which time both the court-appointed witnesses, as well as the British Ministry of Health, and the Institute of Medicine’s select committee had reported that there was no basis for the plaintiffs’ causal claims in litigation.[7] The second irony is that SKAPP, through its sponsorship of various research and writing projects, had made the recipients of SKAPP money, by the terms of Order 13, agents of the silicone plaintiffs’ lawyers and their clients. Recipients of SKAPP funding who did not disclose that their support or salaries come from the coffers of plaintiffs’ counsel were engaged in misleading their readers and the scientific and legal communities.

I have written often in the past about SKAPP as an agent of plaintiffs’ counsel in mass tort litigation.[8] The concern is not new, but it has continuing significance because of the asymmetrical standard advanced by the lawsuit industry and its scientific advisors who seek to disqualify manufacturing industry and its scientific advisors from participating in scientific debate and argument about various health claims.[9]


[1]  See, e.g., Leaf River Forest Prods. v. Ferguson, 662 So. 2d 648, 657 (Miss. 1995) (litigation involving defense expert witness’s reliance upon dioxin studies funded by defendant paper mills); Maurer v. Heyer-Schulte Corp., No. Civ. A. 92-3485, 2002 WL 31819160 at *3 (E.D. La. Dec. 13, 2002) (granting defendant’s summary judgment against plaintiff’s claim that breast implants caused her harm; citing defendants’ sponsored epidemiologic studies showing no causal link, including epidemiologic study conducted in Sweden); Nat’l Res. Def. Council v. Evans, 232 F. Supp. 2d 1003, 1013 (N.D. Cal. 2002) (“commend[ing] defendants’ sponsorship of independent scientific research…”); FTC v. Pantron I, Corp., 1991 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21858 (C.D. Cal. Sept 6, 1991) (finding study funded by defendants met “basic and fundamental requirements for scientific validity and reliability”).

[2]  John C. Bailar, “How to distort the scientific record without actually lying: truth, and the arts of science,” 11 European J. Oncol. 217 (2006).

[3]  Id. at 218.

[4]  Id. at 223.

[5]  David Michaels, Celeste Monforton & Peter Lurie, “Selected science: an industry campaign to undermine an OSHA hexavalent chromium standard,” 65 Envt’l Health 5 (2006).

[6]     Hon. Jack B. Weinstein, “Preliminary Reflections on Administration of Complex Litigation” 2009 Cardozo L. Rev. de novo 1, 14 (2009).

[7]   Independent Review Group, Silicone Breast Implants: The Report of the Independent Review Group 8, 22-23 (July 1998) (concluding that there was no demonstrable risk of connective tissue disease from silicone breast implants); Stuart Bondurant, Virginia Ernster, and Roger Herdman, eds., Safety of Silicone Breast Implants (1999) (rejecting plaintiffs’ theories and litigation claims of systemic disease).

[8]   “SKAPP A LOT” (April 30, 2010); “Manufacturing Certainty” (Oct. 25, 2011); “David Michaels’ Public Relations Problem” (Dec. 2, 2011); “Conflicted Public Interest Groups” (Nov. 3, 2013). See also Walter Olson, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America 121-22 (2011); David E. Bernstein & Eric G. Lasker, “Defending Daubert: It’s Time to Amend Federal Rule of Evidence 702,” 57 William & Mary L. Rev. 1, 39 & n.211 (2015); Ted Frank, “Daubert Debate,” Overlawyered (July 5, 2003); Peter Nordberg, “Bernstein on SKAPP (part 1),” Daubert on the Web (Jul)y 02, 2003).

[9]   Consider the media hysteria over former President Obama’s nomination of Dr. Robert Califf, to serve as Chair of the Food and Drug Administration.[9] The criticism was based upon his having served as the founding director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute, which received funding directly from pharmaceutical companies. The Senate confirmed Califf (89 to 4), but the controversy highlights the hypocrisy in play. Brady Dennis, “Senate confirms Robert Califf as new FDA commissioner,” Wash. Post (Feb. 24, 2016).

Data Games – A Techno Thriller

April 22nd, 2020

Data Games – A Techno Thriller

Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Father Brown, Harry Bosch, Nancy Drew, Joe and Frank Hardy, Sam Spade, Columbo, Lennie Briscoe, Inspector Clouseau, and Dominic Da Vinci:

Move over; there is a new super sleuth in town.

Meet Professor Ken Wheeler.

Ken is a statistician, and so by profession, he is a data detective. In his day job, he teaches at a northeastern university, where his biggest challenges are managing the expectations of students and administrators, while trying to impart statistical learning. At home, Ken rarely manages to meet the expectations of his wife and son. But as some statisticians are wont to do, Ken sometimes takes on consulting gigs that require him to use his statistical skills to help litigants sort out the role of chance in cases that run from discrimination claims to rare health effects. In this contentious, sharp-elbowed environment, Ken excels. And truth be told, Ken actually finds great satisfaction in identifying the egregious errors and distortions of adversary statisticians

Wheeler’s sleuthing usually involves ascertaining random error or uncovering a lurking variable, but in Herberg I. Weisberg’s just-published novel, Data Games: A Techno Thriller, Wheeler is drawn into a high-stakes conspiracy of intrigue, violence, and fraud that goes way beyond the run-of-the-mine p-hacking and data dredging.

An urgent call from a scientific consulting firm puts Ken Wheeler in the midst of imminent disaster for a pharmaceutical manufacturer, whose immunotherapy anti-cancer wonder drug, Verbana, is under attack. A group of apparently legitimate scientists have obtained the dataset from Verbana’s pivotal clinical trial, and they appear on the verge of blowing Verbana out of the formulary with a devastating analysis that will show that the drug causes early dementia. Wheeler’s mission is to debunk the debunking analysis when it comes.

For those readers who are engaged in the litigation defense of products liability claims against medications, the scenario is familiar enough. The scientific group studying Verbana’s alleged side effect seems on the up-and-up, but they appear to engaged in a cherry-picking exercise, guided by a dubious theory of biological plausibility, known as the “Kreutzfeld hypothesis.”

It is not often that mystery novels turn on surrogate outcomes, biomarkers, genomic medicine, and predictive analytics, but Data Games is no ordinary mystery. And Wheeler is no ordinary detective. To be sure, the middle-aged Wheeler drives a middle-aged BMW, not a Bond car, and certainly not a Bonferroni. And Wheeler’s toolkit may not include a Glock, but he can handle the lasso, the jacknife, and the logit, and serve them up with SAS. Wheeler sees patterns where others see only chaos.

Unlike the typical Hollywood rubbish about stereotyped evil pharmaceutical companies, the hero of Data Games finds that there are sinister forces behind what looks like an honest attempt to uncover safety problems with Verbana. These sinister forces will use anything to achieve their illicit ends, including superficially honest academics with white hats. The attack on Verbana gets the FDA’s attention and an urgent hearing in White Oak, where Wheeler shines.

The author of Data Games, Herbert I. Weisberg, is himself a statistician, and a veteran of some of the dramatic data games he writes about in this novel. Weisberg is perhaps better known for his “homework” books, such asWillful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of Uncertainty (2014), and Bias and Causation: Models and Judgment for Valid Comparisons (2010). If, however, you ever find yourself in a pandemic lockdown, Weisberg’s Data Games: A Techno Thriller is a perfect way to escape. For under $3, you will be entertained, and you might even learn something about probability and statistics.

Dark Money, Scott Augustine, and Hot Air

April 11th, 2020

Fraud by the litigation industry takes many different forms. In the massive silicosis litigation unleashed in Mississippi and Texas in the early 2000s, plaintiffs’ lawyers colluded with physicians to concoct dubious diagnoses of silicosis. Fraudulent diagnoses of silicosis led to dismissals of thousands of cases, as well as the professional defrocking of some physician witnesses.[1] For those trying to keep up with lawsuit industry’s publishing arm, discussion of the Great Silicosis Fraud is completely absent from David Michaels’ recent book, The Triumph of Doubt.[2] So too is any mention of “dark money” that propelled the recently concluded Bair Hugger litigation.

Back in 2017, I wrote about the denial of a Rule 702 motion in the Bair Hugger litigation.[3] At the time, I viewed the trial court’s denial, on the facts of the case, to be a typical failure of gatekeeping.[4] Events in the Bair Hugger cases were only warming up in 2017.

After the court’s ruling, 3M took the first bellwether case to trial and won the case with jury, on May 30, 2018. Perhaps this jury verdict encouraged the MDL trial judge to take 3M’s motion for reconsideration of the Rule 702 motion seriously. In July 2019, the MDL court granted 3M’s motion to exclude the opinion testimony of plaintiffs’ general causation and mechanism expert witnesses, Drs. Jarvis, Samet, Stonnington, and Elghobashi.[5] Without these witnesses, over 5,000 plaintiffs, who had been misled about the merits of their cases, were stranded and set up for dismissal. On August 2, 2019, the MDL cases were dismissed for want of evidentiary support on causation. On August 29, 2019, plaintiffs filed a joint notice of appeal to the Eight Circuit.

The two Bair Hugger Rule 702 federal court decisions focused (or failed to focus) on scientific considerations. Most of the story of “dark money” and the manufacturing of science to support the litigation were suppressed in the Rule 702 motion practice, and in the federal jury trial. In her second Rule 702 reconsideration opinion, the MDL judge did mention undisclosed conflicts of interest by authors of the key studies relied upon by plaintiffs’ witnesses.[6]

To understand how the Bair Hugger litigation got started, and to obtain a full understanding of the nature of the scientific evidence was, a disinterested observer will have to read the state court decisions. Defendant 3M moved to exclude plaintiffs’ causation expert witnesses, in its Minnesota state court cases, under the so-called Frye standard. In response, the state judge excluded plaintiffs’ witnesses for advancing a novel scientific theory that lacked acceptance in the relevant scientific community. The Minnesota Court of Appeals affirmed, with a decision that talked rather more freely about the plaintiffs’ counsel’s dark money. In re 3M Bair Hugger Litig., 924 N.W.2d 16 (Minn. App. 2019) [cited as Bair Hugger].

As the Minnesota Court of Appeals explained, a forced-air warming device (FAWD) is a very important, useful device to keep patients’ body temperatures normal during surgery. The “Bair Hugger” is a FAWD, which was invented in 1987, by Dr. Scott Augustine, an anesthesiologist, who at the time was the chief executive officer of Augustine Medical, Inc. Bair Hugger at 19.

In the following 15 years, the Bair Hugger became the leading FAWD in the world. In 2002, the federal government notified Augustine that it was investigating him for Medicare fraud. Augustine resigned from the company that bore his name, and the company purged the taint by reorganizing as Arizant Healthcare Inc. (Arizant), which continued to make the Bair Hugger. In the following year, 2003, Augustine pleaded guilty to fraud and paid a $2 million fine. His sentence included a five-year ban from involvement in federal health-care programs.

During the years of his banishment, fraudfeasor Augustine developed a rival product and then embarked upon a global attack on the safety of his own earlier invention, the Bair Hugger. In the United Kingdom, his claim that the Bair Hugger increased risks of surgical site infections attacks was rejected by the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. A German court enjoined Augustine from falsely claiming that the Bair Hugger led to increased bacterial contamination.[7] The United States FDA considered and rejected Augustine’s claims, and recommended the use of FAWDs.

In 2009, Augustine began to work as a non-testifying expert witness with the Houston, Texas, plaintiffs’ law firm of Kennedy Hodges LLP. A series of publications resulted in which the authors attempted to raise questions about the safety of the Bair Hugger. By 2013, with the medical literature “seeded” with several studies attacking the Bair Hugger, the Kennedy Hodges law firm began to manufacture law suits against Arizant and 3M (which had bought the Bair Hugger product line from Arizant in 2010). Bair Hugger at 20.

The seeding studies were marketing and litigation propaganda used by Augustine to encourage the all-too-complicit lawsuit industry to ramp up production of complaints against 3M over the Bair Hugger. Several of the plaintiffs’ studies included as an author a young statistician, Mark Albrecht, an employee of, or a contractor for, Augustine’s new companies, Augustine Temperature Management and Augustine Medical. Even when disclosures were made, they were at best “anemic”:

“The author or one or more of the authors have received or will receive benefits for personal or professional use from a commercial party related directly or indirectly to the subject of this article.”[8]

Some of these studies generally included a disclosure that Albrecht was funded or employed by Augustine, but they did not disclose the protracted, bitter feud or Augustine’s confessed fraudulent conduct. Another author of some of the plaintiffs’ studies included David Leaper, who was a highly paid “consultant’’ to Augustine at the time of the work on the study. None of the studies disclosed Leaper’s consultancy for Augustin:

  1. Mark Albrecht, Robert Gauthier, and David Leaper, “Forced air warming, a source of airborne contamination in the operating room?” 1 Orthopedic Rev. (Pavia) e28 (2009)
  2. Mark Albrecht, Robert L. Gauthier, Kumar Belani, Mark Litchy, and David Leaper, “Forced-air warming blowers: An evaluation of filtration adequacy and airborne contamination emissions in the operating room,” 39 Am. J. Infection Control 321 (2011)
  3. P.D. McGovern, Mark Albrecht, Kumar Belani, C. Nachtsheim, “Forced-air warming and ultra-clean ventilation do not mix,” 93 J. Bone & Joint Surg. – British 1537 (2011)
  4. K.B. Dasari, Mark Albrecht, and M. Harper, “Effect of forced-air warming on the performance of operating-theatre laminar-flow ventilation,” 67 Anaesthesia 244 (2012)
  5. Mike Reed, Oliver Kimberger, Paul D. McGovern, and Mark C. Albrecht, “Forced-Air Warming Design: Evaluation of Intake Filtration, Internal Microbial Buildup, and Airborne-Contamination Emissions,” 81 Am. Ass’n Nurse Anesthetists 275 (2013)
  6. Kumar Belani, Mark Albrecht, Paul McGovern, Mike Reed, and Christopher Nachtsheim, “Patient warming excess heat: the effects on orthopedic operating room ventilation performance,” 117 Anesthesia & Analgesia 406 (2013)

In one study, Augustine’s employee Mark Albrecht conducted the experiment with one of the authors, but was not listed as an author although he wrote an early draft of the study. Augustine provided all the equipment used in the experiment. The published paper failed to disclose any of these questionable activities:

  1. A.J. Legg & A.J. Hammer, “Forced-air patient warming blankets disrupt unidirectional flow,” 95 Bone & Joint J. 407 (2013)

Another study had more peripheral but still questionable involvement of Augustine, whose company lent the authors equipment used to conduct the study, without proper acknowledgment and disclosure:

  1. A.J. Legg, T. Cannon, and A. J. Hamer, “Do forced-air warming devices disrupt unidirectional downward airflow?” 94 J. Bone & Joint Surg. – British 254 (2012)

In addition to the defects in the authors’ disclosures, 3M discovered that two of the studies had investigated whether the Bair Hugger spread bacteria in the surgical area. Although the experiments found no spread with the Bair Hugger, the researchers never publicly disclosed their exculpatory evidence.[9]

Augustine’s marketing campaign, through these studies, ultimately fell flat at the FDA, which denied his citizen’s petition and recommended that surgeons continue to use FAWDs such as the Bair Hugger.[10] Augustine’s proxy litigation war against 3M also fizzled, unless the 8th Circuit revives his vendetta. Nonetheless, the Augustine saga raises serious questions about how litigation funding of “scientific studies” will vex the search for the truth in pharmaceutical products litigation. The Augustine attempt to pollute the medical literature was relatively apparent, but dark money from undisclosed financiers may require greater attention from litigants and from journal editors.


[1]  In re Silica Products Liab. Litig., MDL No. 1553, 398 F. Supp. 2d 563 (S.D.Tex. 2005).

[2]  David Michaels, The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception (2020).

[3]  In re Bair Hugger Forced Air Warming, MDL No. 15-2666, 2017 WL 6397721 (D. Minn. Dec. 13, 2017).

[4]  “Gatekeeping of Expert Witnesses Needs a Bair Hug” (Dec. 20, 2017).

[5]  In re Bair Hugger Forced Air Warming Devices Prods. Liab. Litig., MDL No. 15-2666, 2019 WL 4394812 (D. Minn. July 31, 2019). See Joe G. Hollingsworth & Caroline Barker, “Exclusion of Junk Science in ‘Bair Hugger’ MDL Shows Daubert Is Still Breathing,” Wash. Leg. Foundation (Jan 23, 2020); Christine Kain, Patrick Reilly, Hannah Anderson and Isabelle Chammas, “Top 5 Drug And Medical Device Developments Of 2019,” Law360 (Jan. 9, 2020).

[6]  In re Bair Hugger Forced Air Warming Devices Prods. Liab. Litig., 2019 WL 4394812, at *10 n.13 (D. Minn. July 31, 2019) (observing that “[i]n the published study, the authors originally declared no conflicts of interest”).

[7]  Dr. Augustine has never been a stranger to the judicial system. See, e.g., Augustine Medical, Inc. v. Gaymar Industries, Inc., 181 F.3d 1291 (Fed. Cir. 1999); Augustine Medical, Inc. v. Progressive Dynamics, Inc., 194 F.3d 1367 (Fed. Cir. 1999); Cincinnati Sub-Zero Products, Inc. v. Augustine Medical, Inc., 800 F. Supp. 1549 (S.D. Ohio 1992).

[8]  P.D. McGovern, Mark Albrecht, Kumar Belani, and C. Nachtsheim, “Forced-air warming and ultra-clean ventilation do not mix,” 93 J. Bone & Joint Surg. – British 1537, 1544 (2011).

[9]  See https://www.truthaboutbairhugger.com/truth-science-behind-claims-3m-bair-hugger-system-look-augustine-connections-research-studies/.

[10]  William Maisel, “Information about the Use of Forced Air Thermal Regulating Systems – Letter to Health Care Providers”; Center for Devices and Radiological Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (Aug. 30, 2017).

April Fool – Zambelli-Weiner Must Disclose

April 2nd, 2020

Back in the summer of 2019, Judge Saylor, the MDL judge presiding over the Zofran birth defect cases, ordered epidemiologist, Dr. Zambelli-Weiner to produce documents relating to an epidemiologic study of Zofran,[1] as well as her claimed confidential consulting relationship with plaintiffs’ counsel.[2]

This previous round of motion practice and discovery established that Zambelli-Weiner was a paid consultant in advance of litigation, that her Zofran study was funded by plaintiffs’ counsel, and that she presented at a Las Vegas conference, for plaintiffs’ counsel only, on [sic] how to make mass torts perfect. Furthermore, she had made false statements to the court about her activities.[3]

Zambelli-Weiner ultimately responded to the discovery requests but she and plaintiffs’ counsel withheld several documents as confidential, pursuant to the MDL’s procedure for protective orders. Yesterday, April 1, 2020, Judge Saylor entered granted GlaxoSmithKline’s motion to de-designate four documents that plaintiffs claimed to be confidential.[4]

Zambelli-Weiner sought to resist GSK’s motion to compel disclosure of the documents on a claim that GSK was seeking the documents to advance its own litigation strategy. Judge Saylor acknowledged that Zambelli-Weiner’s psycho-analysis might be correct, but that GSK’s motive was not the critical issue. According to Judge Saylor, the proper inquiry was whether the claim of confidentiality was proper in the first place, and whether removing the cloak of secrecy was appropriate under the facts and circumstances of the case. Indeed, the court found “persuasive public-interest reasons” to support disclosure, including providing the FDA and the EMA a complete, unvarnished view of Zambelli-Weiner’s research.[5] Of course, the plaintiffs’ counsel, in close concert with Zambelli-Weiner, had created GSK’s need for the documents.

This discovery battle has no doubt been fought because plaintiffs and their testifying expert witnesses rely heavily upon the Zambelli-Weiner study to support their claim that Zofran causes birth defects. The present issue is whether four of the documents produced by Dr. Zambelli-Weiner pursuant to subpoena should continue to enjoy confidential status under the court’s protective order. GSK argued that the documents were never properly designated as confidential, and alternatively, the court should de-designate the documents because, among other things, the documents would disclose information important to medical researchers and regulators.

Judge Saylor’s Order considered GSK’s objections to plaintiffs’ and Zambelli-Weiner’s withholding four documents:

(1) Zambelli-Weiner’s Zofran study protocol;

(2) Undisclosed, hidden analyses that compared birth defects rates for children born to mothers who used Zofran with the rates seen with the use of other anti-emetic medications;

(3) An earlier draft Zambelli-Weiner’s Zofran study, which she had prepared to submit to the New England Journal of Medicine; and

(4) Zambelli-Weiner’s advocacy document, a “Causation Briefing Document,” which she prepared for plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Judge Saylor noted that none of the withheld documents would typically be viewed as confidential. None contained “sensitive personal, financial, or medical information.”[6]  The court dismissed Zambelli-Weiner’s contention that the documents all contained “business and proprietary information,” as conclusory and meritless. Neither she nor plaintiffs’ counsel explained how the requested documents implicated proprietary information when Zambelli-Weiner’s only business at issue is to assist in making lawsuits. The court observed that she is not “engaged in the business of conducting research to develop a pharmaceutical drug or other proprietary medical product or device,” and is related solely to her paid consultancy to plaintiffs’ lawyers. Neither she nor the plaintiffs’ lawyers showed how public disclosure would hurt her proprietary or business interests. Of course, if Zambelli-Weiner had been dishonest in carrying out the Zofran study, as reflected in study deviations from its protocol, her professional credibility and her business of conducting such studies might well suffer. Zambelli-Weiner, however, was not prepared to affirm the antecedent of that hypothetical. In any event, the court found that whatever right Zambelli-Weiner might have enjoyed to avoid discovery evaporated with her previous dishonest representations to the MDL court.[7]

The Zofran Study Protocol

GSK sought production of the Zofran study protocol, which in theory contained the research plan for the Zofran study and the analyses the researchers intended to conduct. Zambelli-Weiner attempted to resist production on the specious theory that she had not published the protocol, but the court found this “non-publication” irrelevant to the claim of confidentiality. Most professional organizations, such as the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology (“ISPE”), which ultimately published Zambelli-Weiner’s study, encourage the publication and sharing of study protocols.[8] Disclosure of protocols helps ensure the integrity of studies by allowing readers to assess whether the researchers have adhered to their study plan, or have engaged in ad hoc data dredging in search for a desired result.[9]

The Secret, Undisclosed Analyses

Perhaps even more egregious than withholding the study protocol was the refusal to disclose unpublished analyses comparing the rate of birth defects among children born to mothers who used Zofran with the birth defect rates of children with in utero exposure to other anti-emetic medications.  In ruling that Zambelli-Weiner must produce the unpublished analyses, the court expressed its skepticism over whether these analyses could ever have been confidential. Under ISPE guidelines, researchers must report findings that significantly affect public health, and the relative safety of Zofran is essential to its evaluation by regulators and prescribing physicians.

Not only was Zambelli-Weiner’s failure to include these analyses in her published article ethically problematic, but she apparently hid these analyses from the Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee (PRAC) of the European Medicines Agency, which specifically inquired of Zambelli-Weiner whether she had performed such analyses. As a result, the PRAC recommended a label change based upon Zambelli-Weiner’s failure to disclosure material information. Furthermore, the plaintiffs’ counsel represented they intended to oppose GSK’s citizen petition to the FDA, based upon the Zambelli-Weiner study. The apparently fraudulent non-disclosure of relevant analyses could not have been more fraught for public health significance. The MDL court found that the public health need trumped any (doubtful) claim to confidentiality.[10] Against the obvious public interest, Zambelli-Weiner offered no “compelling countervailing interest” in keeping her secret analyses confidential.

There were other aspects to the data-dredging rationale not discussed in the court’s order. Without seeing the secret analyses of other anti-emetics, readers were deprive of an important opportunity to assess actual and potential confounding in her study. Perhaps even more important, the statistical tools that Zambelli-Weiner used, including any measurements of p-values and confidence intervals, and any declarations of “statistical significance,” were rendered meaningless by her secret, undisclosed, multiple testing. As noted by the American Statistical Association (ASA) in its 2016 position statement, “4. Proper inference requires full reporting and transparency.”

The ASA explains that the proper inference from a p-value can be completely undermined by “multiple analyses” of study data, with selective reporting of sample statistics that have attractively low p-values, or cherry picking of suggestive study findings. The ASA points out that common practices of selective reporting compromises valid interpretation. Hence the correlative recommendation:

“Researchers should disclose the number of hypotheses explored during the study, all data collection decisions, all statistical analyses conducted and all p-values computed. Valid scientific conclusions based on p-values and related statistics cannot be drawn without at least knowing how many and which analyses were conducted, and how those analyses (including p-values) were selected for reporting.”[11]

The Draft Manuscript for the New England Journal of Medicine

The MDL court wasted little time and ink in dispatching Zambelli-Weiner’s claim of confidentiality for her draft New England Journal of Medicine manuscript. The court found that she failed to explain how any differences in content between this manuscript and the published version constituted “proprietary business information,” or how disclosure would cause her any actual prejudice.

Zambelli-Weiner’s Litigation Road Map

In a world where social justice warriors complain about organizations such as Exponent, for its litigation support of defense efforts, the revelation that Zambelli-Weiner was helping to quarterback the plaintiffs’ offense deserves greater recognition. Zambelli-Weiner’s litigation road map was clearly created to help Grant & Eisenhofer, P.A., the plaintiffs’ lawyers,, create a causation strategy (to which she would add her Zofran study). Such a document from a consulting expert witness is typically the sort of document that enjoys confidentiality and protection from litigation discovery. The MDL court, however, looked beyond Zambelli-Weiner’s role as a “consulting witness” to her involvement in designing and conducting research. The broader extent of her involvement in producing studies and communicating with regulators made her litigation “strategery” “almost certainly relevant to scientists and regulatory authorities” charged with evaluating her study.”[12]

Despite Zambelli-Weiner’s protestations that she had made a disclosure of conflict of interest, the MDL court found her disclosure anemic and the public interest in knowing the full extent of her involvement in advising plaintiffs’ counsel, long before the study was conducted, great.[13]

The legal media has been uncommonly quiet about the rulings on April Zambelli-Weiner, in the Zofran litigation. From the Union of Concerned Scientists, and other industry scolds such as David Egilman, David Michaels, and Carl Cranor – crickets. Meanwhile, while the appeal over the admissibility of her testimony is pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court,[14] Zambelli-Weiner continues to create an unenviable record in Zofran, Accutane,[15] Mirena,[16] and other litigations.


[1]  April Zambelli‐Weiner, Christina Via, Matt Yuen, Daniel Weiner, and Russell S. Kirby, “First Trimester Pregnancy Exposure to Ondansetron and Risk of Structural Birth Defects,” 83 Reproductive Toxicology 14 (2019).

[2]  See In re Zofran (Ondansetron) Prod. Liab. Litig., 392 F. Supp. 3d 179, 182-84 (D. Mass. 2019) (MDL 2657) [cited as In re Zofran].

[3]  “Litigation Science – In re Zambelli-Weiner” (April 8, 2019); “Mass Torts Made Less Bad – The Zambelli-Weiner Affair in the Zofran MDL” (July 30, 2019). See also Nate Raymond, “GSK accuses Zofran plaintiffs’ law firms of funding academic study,” Reuters (Mar. 5, 2019).

[4]  In re Zofran Prods. Liab. Litig., MDL No. 1:15-md-2657-FDS, Order on Defendant’s Motion to De-Designate Certain Documents as Confidential Under the Protective Order (D.Mass. Apr. 1, 2020) [Order].

[5]  Order at n.3

[6]  Order at 3.

[7]  See In re Zofran, 392 F. Supp. 3d at 186.

[8]  Order at 4. See also Xavier Kurz, Susana Perez-Gutthann, the ENCePP Steering Group, “Strengthening standards, transparency, and collaboration to support medicine evaluation: Ten years of the European Network of Centres for Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacovigilance (ENCePP),” 27 Pharmacoepidemiology & Drug Safety 245 (2018).

[9]  Order at note 2 (citing Charles J. Walsh & Marc S. Klein, “From Dog Food to Prescription Drug Advertising: Litigating False Scientific Establishment Claims Under the Lanham Act,” 22 Seton Hall L. Rev. 389, 431 (1992) (noting that adherence to study protocol “is essential to avoid ‘data dredging’—looking through results without a predetermined plan until one finds data to support a claim”).

[10]  Order at 5, citing Anderson v. Cryovac, Inc., 805 F.2d 1, 8 (1st Cir. 1986) (describing public-health concerns as “compelling justification” for requiring disclosing of confidential information).

[11]  Ronald L. Wasserstein & Nicole A. Lazar, “The ASA’s Statement on p-Values: Context, Process, and Purpose,” 70 The American Statistician 129 (2016)

See alsoThe American Statistical Association’s Statement on and of Significance” (March 17, 2016).“Courts Can and Must Acknowledge Multiple Comparisons in Statistical Analyses (Oct. 14, 2014).

[12]  Order at 6.

[13]  Cf. Elizabeth J. Cabraser, Fabrice Vincent & Alexandra Foote, “Ethics and Admissibility: Failure to Disclose Conflicts of Interest in and/or Funding of Scientific Studies and/or Data May Warrant Evidentiary Exclusions,” Mealey’s Emerging Drugs Reporter (Dec. 2002) (arguing that failure to disclose conflicts of interest and study funding should result in evidentiary exclusions).

[14]  Walsh v. BASF Corp., GD #10-018588 (Oct. 5, 2016, Pa. Ct. C.P. Allegheny Cty., Pa.) (finding that Zambelli-Weiner’s and Nachman Brautbar’s opinions that pesticides generally cause acute myelogenous leukemia, that even the smallest exposure to benzene increases the risk of leukemia offended generally accepted scientific methodology), rev’d, 2018 Pa. Super. 174, 191 A.3d 838, 842-43 (Pa. Super. 2018), appeal granted, 203 A.3d 976 (Pa. 2019).

[15]  In re Accutane Litig., No. A-4952-16T1, (Jan. 17, 2020 N.J. App. Div.) (affirming exclusion of Zambelli-Weiner as an expert witness).

[16]  In re Mirena IUD Prods. Liab. Litig., 169 F. Supp. 3d 396 (S.D.N.Y. 2016) (excluding Zambelli-Weiner in part).

Practical Solutions for the Irreproducibility Crisis

March 3rd, 2020

I have previously praised the efforts of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) for its efforts to sponsor a conference on “Fixing Science: Practical Solutions for the Irreproducibility Crisis.” The conference was a remarkable event, with a good deal of diverse view points, civil discussion and debate, and collegiality.

The NAS has now posted a follow up to its conference, with a link to slide presentations, and to a You Tube page with videos of the presentations. The NAS, along with The Independent Institute, should be commended for their organizational efforts, and their transparency in making the conference contents available now to a wider audience.

The conference took place on February 7th and 8th, and I had the privilege of starting the event with my presentation, “Not Just an Academic Dispute: Irreproducible Scientific Evidence Renders Legal Judgments Unsafe”.

Some, but not all, of the interesting presentations that followed:

Tim Edgell, “Stylistic Bias, Selective Reporting, and Climate Science” (Feb. 7, 2020)

Patrick J. Michaels, “Biased Climate Science” (Feb. 7, 2020)

Daniele Fanelli, “Reproducibility Reforms if there is no Irreproducibility Crisis” (Feb. 8, 2020)

On Saturday, I had the additional privilege of moderating a panel on “Group Think” in science, and its potential for skewing research focus and publication:

Lee Jussim, “Intellectual Diversity Limits Groupthink in Scientific Psychology” (Feb. 8, 2020)

Mark Regnerus, “Groupthink in Sociology” (Feb. 8, 2020)

Michael Shermer, “Giving the Devil His Due” (Feb. 8, 2020)

Later on Saturday, the presenters turned to methodological issues, many of which are key to understanding ongoing scientific and legal controversies:

Stanley Young, “Prevention and Management of Acute and Late Toxicities in Radiation Oncology

James E. Enstrom, “Reproducibility is Essential to Combating Environmental Lysenkoism

Deborah Mayo, “P-Value ‘Reforms’: Fixing Science or Threats to Replication and Falsification?” (Feb. 8, 2020)

Ronald L. Wasserstein, “What Professional Organizations Can Do To Fix The Irreproducibility Crisis” (Feb. 8, 2020)

Louis Anthony Cox, Jr., “Causality, Reproducibility, and Scientific Generalization in Public Health” (Feb. 8, 2020)

David Trafimow, “What Journals Can Do To Fix The Irreproducibility Crisis” (Feb. 8, 2020)

David Randall, “Regulatory Science and the Irreproducibility Crisis” (Feb. 8, 2020)

Good Night Styrene

April 18th, 2019

Perri Klass is a pediatrician who writes fiction and non-fiction. Her editorial article on “disruptive chemicals,” in this week’s Science Section of the New York Times contained large segments of fiction.[1]  The Times gives Dr. Klass, along with Nicholas Kristof and others, a generous platform to advance their chemophobic propaganda, on pesticides, phthalates, bisphenols, and flame retardants, without the bother of having to cite evidence. It has been just two weeks since the Times published another Klass fear piece on hormone disrupters.[2]

In her Science Times piece, Klass plugged Leonardo Trasande’s book, Sicker, Fatter, Poorer: The Urgent Threat of Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals to Our Health and Future . . . and What We Can Do About It (2019), to help wind up parents about chemical threats everywhere. Trasande, is “an internationally renowned leader in environmental health” expert; his website tells us so. Klass relies so extensively upon Trasande that it is difficult to discern whether she is presenting anything other than his opinions, which in some places she notes he has qualified as disputed and dependent upon correlational associations that have not established causal associations.

When it comes to recyclable plastic, number 6, Klass throws all journalistic caution and scientific scruple aside and tells us that “[a] number 6 denotes styrene, which is a known carcinogen.”[3] Known to whom? To Trasande? To Klass? To eco-zealots?

The first gaffe is that number 6 plastic, of course, is not styrene; rather it is polystyrene. Leaching of monomer certainly can occur,[4] and is worth noting, but equating polystyrene with styrene is simply wrong. The second gaffe, more serious yet, is that styrene is not a “known” carcinogen.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, which has been known to engage in epistemic inflation about carcinogenicity, addressed styrene in its monograph 82.[5] Styrene was labeled a “2B” carcinogen, that is possible, not probable, and certainly not “known.” Last year, an IARC working group revisited the assessment of styrene, and in keeping with its current practice of grade inflation bumped styrene up to Group 2A, “probably carcinogenic to humans” based upon limited evidence in human being and sufficient evidence in rats and close relatives.[6] In any event, the IARC Monograph number 121, which will address styrene, is under preparation.

A responsible journalist, or scientist, regulator, or lawyer, is obligated however to note tha “probably” does not mean “more likely than not” in IARC-jargon.[7] Given that all empirical propositions have a probability of being true, somewhere between 0 and 100%, but never actually equal to 0 or 100%, the IARC classifications of “probably” causing cancer are probably not particularly meaningful.  Everything “probably” causes cancer, in this mathematical sense.[8]

In the meanwhile, what does the scientific community have to say about the carcinogenicity of styrene?

Recent reviews and systematic reviews of the styrene carcinogenicity issue have mostly concluded that there is no causal relationship between styrene exposure and any form of cancer in humans.[9] Of course, the “Lobby,” scientists in service to the litigation industry, disagree.[10]


[1]  Perri Klass, “Beware of Disruptive Chemicals,” N.Y. Times (April 16, 2019).

[2] Perri Klass, “How to Minimize Exposures to Hormone Disrupters,” N.Y. Times (April 1, 2019).

[3]  Klass (April 16, 2019), at D6, col. 3.

[4]  See, e.g., Despoina Paraskevopoulou, Dimitris Achiliasa, and Adamantini Paraskevopoulou, “Migration of styrene from plastic packaging based on polystyrene into food simulants,” 61 Polymers Internatl’l 141 (2012); J. R. Withey, “Quantitative Analysis of Styrene Monomerin Polystyrene and Foods Including Some Preliminary Studies of the Uptake and Pharmacodynamics of the Monomer in Rats,” 17 Envt’l Health Persp. 125 (1976).

[5]  IARC Monograph No. 82, at 437-78 (2002).

[6]  IARC Working Group, “Carcinogenicity of quinoline, styrene, and styrene-7,8-oxide,” 19 Lancet Oncology 728 (2018).

[7]  The IARC Preamble definition of probable reveals that “probable” does not mean greater than 50%. See also “The IARC Process is Broken” (May 4, 2016).

[8] See Ed Yong, “Beefing With the World Health Organization’s Cancer Warnings,” The Atlantic (Oct 26, 2015).

[9]  Boffetta, P., Adami, H. O., Cole, P., Trichopoulos, D. and Mandel, J. S., “Epidemiologic studies of styrene and cancer: a review of the literature,” 51 J. Occup. & Envt’l Med. 1275 (2009) (“The available epidemiologic evidence does not support a causal relationship between styrene exposure and any type of human cancer.”); James J. Collins & Elizabeth Delzell, “A systematic review of epidemiologic studies of styrene and cancer,” 48 Critical Revs. Toxicol. 443 (2018)  (“Consideration of all pertinent data, including substantial recent research, indicates that the epidemiologic evidence on the potential carcinogenicity of styrene is inconclusive and does not establish that styrene causes any form of cancer in humans.”).

[10] James Huff & Peter F. Infante, “Styrene exposure and risk of cancer,” 26 Mutagenesis 583 (2011).

Passing Hypotheses Off as Causal Conclusions – Allen v. Martin Surfacing

November 11th, 2018

The November 2018 issue of the American Bar Association Journal (ABAJ) featured an exposé-style article on the hazards of our chemical environment, worthy of Mother Jones, or the International Journal of Health Nostrums, by a lawyer, Alan Bell.1 Alan Bell, according to his website, is a self-described “environmental health warrior.” Channeling Chuck McGill, Bell also describes himself as a:

[v]ictim, survivor, advocate and avenger. This former organized crime prosecutor almost died from an environmentally linked illness. He now devotes his life to giving a voice for those too weak or sick to fight for themselves.”

Bell apparently is not so ill that he cannot also serve as “a fierce advocate” for victims of chemicals. Here is how Mr. Bell described his own “environmentally linked illness” (emphasis added):

Over the following months, Alan developed high fevers, sore throats, swollen glands and impaired breathing. Eventually, he experienced seizures and could barely walk. His health continued to worsen until he became so ill he was forced to stop working. Despite being examined and tested by numerous world-renowned doctors, none of them could help. Finally, a doctor diagnosed him with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, a devastating illness caused by exposure to environmental toxins. The medical profession had no treatment to offer Alan: no cure, and no hope. Doctors could only advise him to avoid all synthetic chemicals and live in complete isolation within a totally organic environment.”

Multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS)? Does anyone still remember “clinical ecology”? Despite the strident advocacy of support groups and self-proclaimed victims, MCS is not recognized as a chemically caused illness by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Allergy and Immunology, and the American College of Physicians.2 Double-blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trials have shown that putative MCS patients respond to placebo as strongly as they react to chemicals.3

Still, Bell’s claims must be true; Bell has written a book, Poisoned, about his ordeal and that of others.4 After recounting his bizarre medical symptoms, he describes his miraculous cure in a sterile bubble in the Arizona desert. From safe within his bubble, Bell has managed to create the “Environmental Health Foundation,” which is difficult if not impossible to find on the internet, although there are some cheesy endorsements to be found on YouTube.

According to Bell’s narrative, Daniel Allen, the football coach of the College of the Holy Cross was experiencing neurological signs and symptoms that could not be explained by physicians in the Boston area, home to some of the greatest teaching hospitals in the world. Allen and his wife, Laura, reached out Bell through his Foundation. Bell describes how he put the Allens in touch with Marcia Ratner, who sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of his Environmental Health Foundation. Bell sent the Allens to see “the world renown” Marcia Ratner, who diagnosed Mr. Allen with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Bell’s story may strike some as odd, considering that Ratner is not a physician. Ratner could not provide a cure for Mr. Allen’s tragic disease, but she could help provide the Allens with a lawsuit.

According to Bell:

Testimony from a sympathetic widow, combined with powerful evidence that the chemicals Dan was exposed to caused him to die long before his time, would smash their case to bits. The defense opted to seek a settlement. The case settled in 2009.5

The ABAJ article on the Allen case is a reprise of chapter 15 of Bell’s book “Chemicals Take Down a Football Coach.” Shame on the A.B.A. for not marking the article as unpaid advertising. More shame on the A.B.A. for not fact checking the glib causal claims made in the article, some of which have been the subject of a recently published “case report” in the red journal, the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, by Dr. Ratner and some, but not all, of the other expert witnesses for Mr. Allen’s litigation team.6 Had the editors of the ABAJ compared Mr. Bell’s statements and claims about the Allen case, they would have seen that Dr. Ratner, et al., ten years after beating back the defendants’ Daubert motion in the Allen case, described their literature review and assessment of Mr. Allen’s case, as merely “hypothesis generating”:

This literature review and clinical case report about a 45-year-old man with no family history of motor neuron disease who developed overt symptoms of a neuromuscular disorder in close temporal association with his unwitting occupational exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) puts forth the hypothesis that exposure to VOCs such as toluene, which disrupt motor function and increase oxidative stress, can unmask latent ALS type neuromuscular disorder in susceptible individuals.”7

         * * * * * * *

In conclusion, this hypothesis generating case report provides additional support for the suggestion that exposure to chemicals that share common mechanisms of action with those implicated in the pathogenesis of ALS type neuromuscular disorders can unmask latent disease in susceptible persons. Further research is needed to elucidate these relationships.”8

So in 2018, the Allen case was merely a “hypothesis generating” case report. Ten years earlier, however, in 2008, when Ratner, Abou-Donia, Oliver, Ewing, and Clapp gave solemn oaths and testified under penalty of perjury to a federal district judge, the facts of the same case warranted a claim to scientific knowledge, under Rule 702. Judges, lawyers, and legal reformers should take note of how expert witnesses will characterize facile opinions as causal conclusions when speaking as paid witnesses, and as mere hypotheses in need of evidentiary support when speaking in professional journals to scientists. You’re shocked; eh?

Sometimes when federal courts permit dubious causation opinion testimony over Rule 702 objections, the culprit is bad lawyering by the opponent of the proffered testimony. The published case report by Ratner helps demonstrate that Allen v. Martin Surfacing, 263 F.R.D. 47 (D. Mass. 2009), was the result of litigation overreach by plaintiffs’ counsel and their paid expert witnesses, and a failure of organized skepticism by defense counsel and the judiciary.

Marcia H. Ratner, Ph.D.

I first encountered Dr. Ratner as an expert witness for the litigation industry in cases involving manganese-containing welding rods. Plaintiffs’ counsel, Dickie Scruggs, et al., withdrew her before the defense could conduct an examination before trial. When I came across the Daubert decision in the Allen case, I was intrigued because I had read Ratner’s dissertation9 and her welding litigation report, and saw what appeared to be fallacies10 similar to those that plagued the research of Dr. Brad Racette, who also had worked with Scruggs in conducting screenings, from which he extracted “data” for a study, which for a while became the center piece of Scruggs’ claims.11

The Allen case provoked some research on my part, and then a blog post about that case and Dr. Ratner.12 Dr. Ratner took umbrage to my blog post; and in email correspondence, she threatened to sue me for tortious interference with her prospective business opportunities. She also felt that the blog post had put her in a bad light by commenting upon her criminal conviction for unlawful gun possession.13 As a result of our correspondence, and seeing that Dr. Ratner was no stranger to the courtroom,14 I wrote a post-script to add some context and her perspective on my original post.15

One fact Dr Ratner wished me to include in the blog post-script was that plaintiffs’ counsel in the Allen case had pressured her to opine that toluene and isocyanates caused Mr. Allen’s ALS, and that she had refused. Dr. Ratner of course was making a virtue of necessity since there was, and is, a mountain of medical opinion, authoritative and well-supportive, that there is no known cause of sporadic ALS.16 Dr. Ratner was very proud, however, of having devised a work-around, by proffering an opinion that toluene caused the acceleration of Mr. Allen’s ALS. This causal claim about accelerated onset could have been tested with an observational study, but the litigation claim about earlier onset was as lacking in evidential support as the more straightforward claim of causation.

Bell’s article in the ABAJ – or rather his advertisement17 – cited an unpublished write up of the Allen case, by Ratner, The Allen Case: Our Daubert Strategy, Victory, and Its Legal and Medical Landmark Ramifications, in which she kvelled about how the Allen case was cited in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The Manual’s citations, however, were about the admissibility of the industrial hygienist’s proffered testimony on exposure, based in turn on Mr. Allen’s account of acute-onset symptoms.18 The Manual does not address the dubious acceleration aspect of Ratner’s causal opinion in the Allen case.

The puff piece in the ABAJ caused me to look again at Dr. Ratner’s activities. According to the Better Business Bureau reports that Dr. Marcia Ratner is a medical consultant in occupational and environmental toxicology. Since early 2016, she has been the sole proprietor of a consulting firm, Neurotoxicants.com, located in Mendon, Vermont. The firm’s website advertises that:

The Principals and Consultants of Neurotoxicants.com provide expert consulting in neurotoxicology and the relationships between neurotoxic chemical exposures and neurodegenerative disease onset and progression.

Only Ratner is identified as working on consulting through the firm. According to the LinkedIn entry for Neurotoxicants.com, Ratner is the also founder and director of Medical-Legal Research at Neurotoxicants.com. Ratner’s website advertises her involvement in occupational exposure litigation as an expert witness for claimants.19 Previously, Ratner was the Vice President and Director of Research at Chemical Safety Net, Inc., another consulting firm that she had founded with the late Robert G. Feldman, MD.

Conflict of Interest

The authors of the published Allen case report gave a curious conflict-of-interest disclosure at the end of their article:

The authors have no current specific competing interests to declare. However, Drs. Ratner, Abou-Donia and Oliver, and Mr. Ewing all served as expert witnesses in this case which settled favorably for the patient over 10 years ago with an outcome that is a fully disclosed matter of public record. Drs. Ratner, Abou-Donia and Oliver and Mr. Ewing are occasionally asked to serve as expert witnesses and/or consultants in occupational and environmental chemical exposure injury cases.”20

The disclosure conveniently omitted that Dr. Ratner owns a business that she set up to provide medico-legal consulting, and that Dr. Oliver testifies with some frequency in asbestos cases. None of the authors was, or is, an expert in the neuroepidemiology of ALS. Dr. Ratner’s conflict-of-interest disclosure in the Allen case report was, however, better than her efforts in previous publications that touched on the subject matter of her commercial consulting practice.21


1 Alan Bell, “Devastated by office chemicals, an attorney helps others fight toxic torts,Am. Bar. Ass’n J. (Nov. 2018).

2 See, e.g., American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, “Idiopathic environmental intolerances,” 103 J. Allergy Clin. Immunol. 36 (1999).

3 See Susanne Bornschein, Constanze Hausteiner, Horst Römmelt, Dennis Nowak, Hans Förstl, and Thomas Zilker, “Double-blind placebo-controlled provocation study in patients with subjective Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and matched control subjects,” 46 Clin. Toxicol. 443 (2008); Susanne Bornschein, Hans Förstl, and Thomas Zilker, “Idiopathic environmental intolerances (formerly multiple chemical sensitivity) psychiatric perspectives,” 250 J. Intern. Med. 309 (2001).

4 Poisoned: How a Crime-Busting Prosecutor Turned His Medical Mystery into a Crusade for Environmental Victims (Skyhorse Publishing 2017).

5 Steven H. Foskett Jr., “Late Holy Cross coach’s family, insurers settle lawsuit for $681K,” Telegram & Gazette (Oct. 1, 2009). Obviously, the settlement amount represented a deep compromise over any plaintiff’s verdict.

6 Marcia H. Ratner, Joe F. Jabre, William M. Ewing, Mohamed Abou-Donia, and L. Christine Oliver, “Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—A case report and mechanistic review of the association with toluene and other volatile organic compounds,” 61 Am. J. Ind. Med. 251 (2018).

7 Id. at 251.

8 Id. at 258 (emphasis added).

9 Marcia Hillary Ratner, Age at Onset of Parkinson’s Disease Among Subjects Occupationally Exposed to Metals and Pesticides; Doctoral Dissertation, UMI Number 3125932, Boston University (2004). Neither Ratner’s dissertation supervisor nor her three readers were epidemiologists.

11 See Brad A. Racette, S.D. Tabbal, D. Jennings, L. Good, Joel S. Perlmutter, and Brad Evanoff, “Prevalence of parkinsonism and relationship to exposure in a large sample of Alabama welders,” 64 Neurology 230 (2005).

13 See Quincy District Court News,” Patriot Ledger June 09, 2010 (reporting that Ratner pleaded guilty to criminal possession of mace and a firearm).

14 Ratner v. Village Square at Pico Condominium Owners Ass’n, Inc., No. 91-2-11 Rdcv (Teachout, J., Aug. 28, 2012).

17 Bell is a client of the Worthy Marketing Group.

18 RMSE3d at 505-06 n.5, 512-13 n. 26, 540 n.88; see also Allen v. Martin Surfacing, 2009 WL 3461145, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 111658, 263 F.R.D. 47 (D. Mass. 2008) (holding that an industrial hygienist was qualified to testify about the concentration and duration of plaintiffs’ exposure to toluene and isocyanates).

20 Id. at 259. One of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses, Richard W. Clapp, opted out of co-author status on this publication.

21 See Marcia H. Ratner & Edward Fitzgerald, “Understanding of the role of manganese in parkinsonism and Parkinson disease,” 88 Neurology 338 (2017) (claiming no relevant conflicts of interest); Marcia H. Ratner, David H. Farb, Josef Ozer, Robert G. Feldman, and Raymon Durso, “Younger age at onset of sporadic Parkinson’s disease among subjects occupationally exposed to metals and pesticides,” 7 Interdiscip. Toxicol. 123 (2014) (failing to make any disclosure of conflicts of interest). In one short case report written with Dr. Jonathan Rutchik, another expert witness actively participated for the plaintiffs’ litigation industry in welding fume cases, Dr. Ratner let on that she “occasionally” is asked to serve as an expert witness, but she failed to disclose that she has a business enterprise set up to commercialize her expert witness work. Jonathan Rutchik & Marcia H. Ratner, “Is it Possible for Late-Onset Schizophrenia to Masquerade as Manganese Psychosis?” 60 J. Occup. & Envt’l Med. E207 (2018) (“The authors have no current specific competing interests to declare. However, Dr. Rutchik served as expert witnesses [sic] in this case. Drs. Rutchik and Ratner are occasionally asked to serve as expert witnesses and/or consultants in occupational and environmental chemical exposure injury cases.”)

Welding Litigation – Another Positive Example of Litigation-Generated Science

July 11th, 2017

In a recent post1, I noted Samuel Tarry’s valuable article2 for its helpful, contrarian discussion of the importance of some scientific articles with litigation provenances. Public health debates can spill over to the courtroom, and developments in the courtroom can, on occasion, inform and even resolve those public health debates that gave rise to the litigation. Tarry provided an account of three such articles, and I provided a brief account of another article, a published meta-analysis, from the welding fume litigation.

The welding litigation actually accounted for several studies, but in this post, I detail the background of another published study, this one an epidemiologic study by a noted Harvard epidemiologist. Not every expert witness’s report has the making of a published paper. In theory, if the expert witness has conducted a systematic review, and reached a conclusion that is not populated among already published papers, we might well expect that the witness had achieved the “least publishable unit.” The reality is that most causal claims are not based upon what could even remotely be called a systematic review. Given the lack of credibility to the causal claim, rebuttal reports are likely to have little interest to serious scientists.

Martin Wells

In the welding fume cases, one of plaintiffs’ hired expert witnesses, Martin Wells, a statistician, proffered an analysis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) mortality among welders and welding tradesmen. Using the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) database, Wells aggregated data from 1993 to 1999, for PD among welders and compared this to PD mortality among non-welders. Wells claimed to find an increased risk of PD mortality among younger (under age 65 at death) welders and welding tradesmen in this dataset.

The defense sought discovery of Wells’s methods and materials, and obtained the underlying data from the NCHS. Wells had no protocol, no pre-stated commitment to which years in the dataset he would use, and no pre-stated statistical analysis plan. At a Rule 702 hearing, Wells was unable to state how many welders were included in his analysis, why he selected some years but not others, or why he had selected age 65 as the cut off. His analyses appeared to be pure data dredging.

As the defense discovered, the NCHS dataset contained mortality data for many more years than the limited range employed by Wells in his analysis. Working with an expert witness at the Harvard School of Public Health, the defense discovered that Wells had gerrymandered the years included (and excluded) in his analysis in a way that just happened to generate a marginally, nominally statistically significant association.

NCHS Welder Age Distribution

The defense was thus able to show that the data overall, and in each year, were very sparse. For most years, the value was either 0 or 1, for PD deaths under age 65. Because of the huge denominators, however, the calculated mortality odds ratios were nominally statistically significant. The value of four PD deaths in 1998 is clearly an outlier. If the value were three rather than four, the statistical significance of the calculated OR would have been lost. Alternatively, a simple sensitivity test suggests that if instead of overall n = 7, n were 6, statistical significance would have been lost. The chart below, prepared at the time with help from Dr. David Schwartzof Innovative Science solutions, shows the actual number of “underlying cause” PD deaths that were in the dataset for each year in the NCHS dataset, and how sparse and granular” these data were:

A couple of years later, the Wells’ litigation analysis showed up as a manuscript, with only minor changes in its analyses, and with authors listed as Martin T. Wells and Katherine W. Eisenberg, in the editorial offices of Neurology. Katherine W. Eisenberg, AB and Martin T. Wells, Ph.D., “A Mortality Odds Ratio Study of Welders and Parkinson Disease.” Wells disclosed that he had testified for plaintiffs in the welding fume litigation, but Eisenberg declared no conflicts. Having only an undergraduate degree, and attending medical school at the time of submission, Ms. Eisenberg would not seem to have had the opportunity to accumulate any conflicts of interest. Undisclosed to the editors of Neurology, however, was that Ms. Eisenberg was the daughter of Theodore (Ted) Eisenberg, a lawyer who taught at Cornell University and who represented plaintiffs in the same welding MDL as the one in which Wells testified. Inquiring minds might have wondered whether Ms. Eisenberg’s tuition, room, and board were subsidized by Ted’s earnings in the welding fume and other litigations. Ted Eisenberg and Martin Wells had collaborated on many other projects, but in the welding fume litigation, Ted worked as an attorney for MDL welding plaintiffs, and Martin Wells was compensated handsomely as an expert witness. The acknowledgment at the end of the manuscript thanked Theodore Eisenberg for his thoughtful comments and discussion, without noting that he had been a paid member of the plaintiff’s litigation team. Nor did Wells and Eisenberg tells the Neurology editors that the article had grown out of Wells’ 2005 litigation report in the welding MDL.

The disclosure lapses and oversights by Wells and the younger Eisenberg proved harmless error because Neurology rejected the Wells and Eisenberg paper for publication, and it was never submitted elsewhere. The paper used the same restricted set of years of NCHS data, 1993-1999. The defense had already shown, through its own expert witness’s rebuttal report, that the manuscript’s analysis achieved statistical significance only because it omitted years from the analysis. For instance, if the authors had analyzed 1992 through 1999, their Parkinson’s disease mortality point estimate for younger welding tradesmen would no longer have been statistically significant.

Robert Park

One reason that Wells and Eisenberg may have abandoned their gerrymandered statistical analysis of the NCHS dataset was that an ostensibly independent group3 of investigators published a paper that presented a competing analysis. Robert M. Park, Paul A. Schulte, Joseph D. Bowman, James T. Walker, Stephen C. Bondy, Michael G. Yost, Jennifer A. Touchstone, and Mustafa Dosemeci, “Potential Occupational Risks for Neurodegenerative Diseases,” 48 Am. J. Ind. Med. 63 (2005) [cited as Park (2005)]. The authors accessed the same NCHS dataset, and looked at hundreds of different occupations, including welding tradesmen, and four neurodegenerative diseases.

Park, et al., claimed that they looked at occupations that had previously shown elevated proportional mortality ratios (PMR) in a previous publication of the NIOSH. A few other occupations were included; in all their were hundreds of independent analyses, without any adjustment for multiple testing. Welding occupations4 were included “[b]ecause of reports of Parkinsonism in welders [Racette et al.,, 2001; Levy and Nassetta, 2003], possibly attributable to manganese exposure (from welding rods and steel alloys)… .”5 Racette was a consultant for the Lawsuit Industry, which had been funded his research on parkinsonism among welders. Levy was a testifying expert witness for Lawsuit, Inc. A betting person would conclude that Park had consulted with Wells and Eisenberg, and their colleagues.

These authors looked at four neurological degenerative diseases (NDDs), Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, motor neuron disease, and pre-senile dementia. The authors looked at NCHS death certificate occupational information from 1992 to 1998, which was remarkable because Wells had insisted that 1992 somehow was not available for inclusion in his analyses. During 1992 to 1998, in 22 states, there were 2,614,346 deaths with 33,678 from Parkinson’s diseases. (p. 65b). Then for each of the four disease outcomes, the authors conducted an analysis for deaths below age 65. For the welding tradesmen, none of the four NDDs showed any associations. Park went on to conduct subgroup analyses for each of the four NDDs for death below age 65. In these subgroup analyses for welding tradesmen, the authors purported to find only an association only with Parkinson’s disease:

Of the four NDDs under study, only PD was associated with occupations where arc-welding of steel is performed, and only for the 20 PD deaths below age 65 (MOR=1.77, 95% CI=1.08-2.75) (Table V).”

Park (2005), at 70.

The exact nature of the subgroup was obscure, to say the least. Remarkably, Park and his colleagues had not calculated an odds ratio for welding tradesmen under age 65 at death compared with non-welding tradesmen under age 65 at death. The table’s legend attempts to explain the authors’ calculation:

Adjusted for age, race, gender, region and SES. Model contains multiplicative terms for exposure and for exposure if age at death <65; thus MOR is estimate for deaths occurring age 65+, and MOR, age <65 is estimate of enhanced risk: age <65 versus age 65+”

In other words, Park looked to see whether welding tradesmen who died at a younger age (below age 65) were more likely to have a PD cause of death than welding tradesmen who died an older age (over age 65). The meaning of this internal comparison is totally unclear, but it cannot represent a comparison of welder’s with non-welders. Indeed, every time, Park and his colleagues calculated and reported this strange odds ratio for any occupational group in the published paper, the odds ratio was elevated. If the odds ratio means anything, it is that younger Parkinson’s patients, regardless of occupation, are more likely to die of their neurological disease than older patients. Older men, regardless of occupation, are more likely to die of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic diseases. Furthermore, this age association within (not between) an occupational groups may be nothing other than a reflection of the greater severity of early-onset Parkinson’s disease in anyone, regardless of their occupation.

Like the manuscript by Eisenberg and Wells, the Park paper was an exercise in data dredging. The Park study reported increased odds ratios for Parkinson’s disease among the following groups on the primary analysis:

biological, medical scientists [MOR 2.04 (95% CI, 1.37-2.92)]

clergy [MOR 1.79 (95% CI, 1.58-2.02)]

religious workers [MOR 1.70 (95% CI, 1.27-2.21)]

college teachers [MOR 1.61 (95% CI, 1.39-1.85)]

social workers [MOR 1.44 (95% CI, 1.14-1.80)]

As noted above, the Park paper reported all of the internal mortality odds ratios for below versus above age 65, within occupational groups were nominally statistically significantly elevated. Nonetheless, the Park authors were on a mission, and determined to make something out of nothing, at least when it came to welding and Parkinson’s disease among younger patients. The authors’ conclusion reflected stunningly poor scholarship:

Studies in the US, Europe, and Korea implicate manganese fumes from arc-welding of steel in the development of a Parkinson’s-like disorder, probably a manifestation of manganism [Sjogren et al., 1990; Kim et al., 1999; Luccini, et al., 1999; Moon et al., 1999]. The observation here that PD mortality is elevated among workers with likely manganese exposures from welding, below age 65 (based on 20 deaths), supports the welding-Parkinsonism connection.”

Park (2005) at 73.

Stunningly bad because the cited papers by Sjogren, Luccini, Kim, and Moon did not examine Parkinson’s disease as an outcome; indeed, they did not even examine a parkinsonian movement disorder. More egregious, however, was the authors’ assertion that their analysis, which compared the odds of Parkinson’s disease mortality between welders under age 65 to that mortality for welders over age 65, supported an association between welding and “Parkinsonism.” 

Every time the authors conducted this analysis internal to an occupational group, they found an elevation among under age 65 deaths compared with over age 65 deaths within the occupational group. They did not report comparisons of any age-defined subgroup of a single occupational group with similarly aged mortality in the remaining dataset.

Elan Louis

The plaintiffs’ lawyers used the Park paper as “evidence” of an association that they claimed was causal. They were aided by a cadre of expert witnesses who could cite to a paper’s conclusions, but could not understand its methods. Occasionally, one of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses would confess ignorance about exactly what Robert Park had done in this paper. Elan Louis, one of the better qualified expert witnesses on the side of claimants, for instance, testified in the plaintiffs’ attempt to certify a national medical monitoring class action for welding tradesmen. His testimony about what to make of the Park paper was more honest than most of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses:

Q. My question to you is, is it true that that 1.77 point estimate of risk, is not a comparison of this welder and allied tradesmen under this age 65 mortality, compared with non-welders and allied tradesmen who die under age 65?

A. I think it’s not clear that the footnote — I think that the footnote is not clearly written. When you read the footnote, you didn’t read the punctuation that there are semicolons and colons and commas in the same sentence. And it’s not a well constructed sentence. And I’ve gone through this sentence many times. And I’ve gone through this sentence with Ted Eisenberg many times. This is a topic of our discussion. One of the topics of our discussions. And it’s not clear from this sentence that that’s the appropriate interpretation. *  *  *  However, the footnote, because it’s so poorly written, it obscures what he actually did. And then I think it opens up alternative interpretations.

Q. And if we can pursue that for a moment. If you look at other tables for other occupational titles, or exposure related variables, is it true that every time that Mr. Park reports on that MOR age under 65, that the estimate is elevated and statistically significantly so?

A. Yes. And he uses the same footnote every time. He’s obviously cut and paste that footnote every single time, down to the punctuation is exactly the same. And I would agree that if you look for example at table 4, the mortality odds ratios are elevated in that manner for Parkinson’s Disease, with reference to farming, with reference to pesticides, and with reference to farmers excluding horticultural deaths.

Deposition testimony of Elan Louis, at p. 401-04, in Steele v. A. O. Smith Corp., no. 1:03 CV-17000, MDL 1535 (Jan. 18, 2007). Other less qualified, or less honest expert witnesses on the plaintiffs’ side were content to cite Park (2005) as support for their causal opinions.

Meir Stampfer

The empathetic MDL trial judge denied the plaintiffs’ request for class certification in Steele, but individual personal injury cases continued to be litigated. Steele v. A.O. Smith Corp., 245 F.R.D. 279 (N.D. Ohio 2007) (denying class certification); In re Welding Fume Prods. Liab. Litig., No. 1:03-CV-17000, MDL 1535, 2008 WL 3166309 (N.D. Ohio Aug. 4, 2008) (striking pendent state-law class actions claims)

Although Elan Louis was honest enough to acknowledge his own confusion about the Park paper, other expert witnesses continued to rely upon it, and plaintiffs’ counsel continued to cite the paper in their briefs and to use the apparently elevated point estimate for welders in their cross-examinations of defense expert witnesses. With the NCHS data in hand (on a DVD), defense counsel returned to Meir Stampfer, who had helped them unravel the Martin Wells’ litigation analysis. The question for Professor Stampfer was whether Park’s reported point estimate for PD mortality odds ratio was truly a comparison of welders versus non-welders, or whether it was some uninformative internal comparison of younger welders versus older welders.

The one certainty available to the defense is that it had the same dataset that had been used by Martin Wells in the earlier litigation analysis, and now by Robert Park and his colleagues in their published analysis. Using the NCHS dataset, and Park’s definition of a welder or a welding tradesman, Professor Stampfer calculated PD mortality odds ratios for each definition, as well as for each definition for deaths under age 65. None of these analyses yielded statistically significant associations. Park’s curious results could not be replicated from the NCHS dataset.

For welders, the overall PD mortality odds ratio (MOR) was 0.85 (95% CI, 0.77–0.94), for years 1985 through 1999, in the NCHS dataset. If the definition of welders was expanded to including welding tradesmen, as used by Robert Park, the MOR was 0.83 (95% CI, 0.78–0.88) for all years available in the NCHS dataset.

When Stampfer conducted an age-restricted analysis, which properly compared welders or welding tradesmen with non-welding tradesmen, with death under age 65, he similarly obtained no associations for PD MOR. For the years 1985-1991, death under 65 from PD, Stampfer found MORs 0.99 (95% CI, 0.44–2.22) for just welders, and 0.83 (95% CI, 0.48–1.44) all welding tradesmen.

And for 1992-1999, the years used by Park (2005), and similar to the date range used by Martin Wells, for PD deaths at under age 65, for welders only, Stampfer found a MOR of 1.44 (95% CI, 0.79–2.62), and for all welding tradesmen, 1.20 (95% CI, 0.79–1.84)

None of Park’s slicing, dicing, and subgrouping of welding and PD results could be replicated. Although Dr. Stampfer submitted a report in Steele, there remained the problem that Park (2005) was a peer-reviewed paper, and that plaintiffs’ counsel, expert witnesses, and other published papers were citing it for its claimed results and errant discussion. The defense asked Dr. Stampfer whether the “least publishable unit” had been achieved, and Stampfer reluctantly agreed. He wrote up his analysis, and published it in 2009, with an appropriate disclosure6. Meir J. Stampfer, “Welding Occupations and Mortality from Parkinson’s Disease and Other Neurodegenerative Diseases Among United States Men, 1985–1999,” 6 J. Occup. & Envt’l Hygiene 267 (2009).

Professor Stampfer’s paper may not be the most important contribution to the epidemiology of Parkinson’s disease, but it corrected the distortions and misrepresentations of data in Robert Park’s paper. His paper has since been cited by well-known researchers in support of their conclusion that there is no association between welding and Parkinson’s disease7. Park’s paper has been criticized on PubPeer, with no rebuttal8.

Almost comically, Park has cited Stampfer’s study tendentiously for a claim that there is a healthy worker bias present in the available epidemiology of welding and PD, without noting, or responding to, the devastating criticism of his own Park (2005) work:

For a mortality study of neurodegenerative disease deaths in the United States during 1985 – 1999, Stampfer [61] used the Cause of Death database of the US National Center for Health Statistics and observed adjusted mortality odds ratios for PD of 0.85 (95% CI, 0.77 – 0.94) and 0.83 (95% CI, 0.78 – 0.88) in welders, using two definitions of welding occupations [61]. This supports the presence of a significant HWE [healthy worker effect] among welders. An even stronger effect was observed in welders for motor neuron disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, OR 0.71, 95% CI, 0.56 – 0.89), a chronic condition that clearly would affect welders’ ability to work.”

Robert M. Park, “Neurobehavioral Deficits and Parkinsonism in Occupations with Manganese Exposure: A Review of Methodological Issues in the Epidemiological Literature,” 4 Safety & Health at Work 123, 126 (2013). Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has a sudden onset, usually in middle age, without any real prodomal signs or symptoms, which would keep a young man from entering welding as a trade. Just shows you can get any opinion published in a peer-reviewed journal, somewhere. Stampfer’s paper, along with Mortimer’s meta-analysis helped put the kabosh on welding fume litigation.

Addendum

A few weeks ago, the Sixth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a class action that was attempted based upon claims of environmental manganese exposure. Abrams v. Nucor Steel Marion, Inc., Case No. 3:13 CV 137, 2015 WL 6872511 (N. D. Ohio Nov. 9, 2015) (finding testimony of neurologist Jonathan Rutchik to be nugatory, and excluding his proffered opinions), aff’d, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 9323 (6th Cir. May 25, 2017). Class plaintiffs employed one of the regulators, Jonathan Rutchik, from the welding fume parkinsonism litigation).


2 Samuel L. Tarry, Jr., “Can Litigation-Generated Science Promote Public Health?” 33 Am. J. Trial Advocacy 315 (2009)

3 Ostensibly, but not really. Robert M. Park was an employee of NIOSH, but he had spent most of his career working as an employee for the United Autoworkers labor union. The paper acknowledged help from Ed Baker, David Savitz, and Kyle Steenland. Baker is a colleague and associate of B.S. Levy, who was an expert witness for plaintiffs in the welding fume litigation, as well as many others. The article was published in the “red” journal, the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.

4 The welding tradesmen included in the analyses were welders and cutters, boilermakers, structural metal workers, millwrights, plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters. Robert M. Park, Paul A. Schulte, Joseph D. Bowman, James T. Walker, Stephen C. Bondy, Michael G. Yost, Jennifer A. Touchstone, and Mustafa Dosemeci, “Potential Occupational Risks for Neurodegenerative Diseases,” 48 Am. J. Ind. Med. 63, 65a, ¶2 (2005).

5 Id.

6 “The project was supported in part through a consulting agreement with a group of manufacturers of welding consumables who had no role in the analysis, or in preparing this report, did not see any draft of this manuscript prior to submission for publication, and had no control over any aspect of the work or its publication.” Stampfer, at 272.

7 Karin Wirdefeldt, Hans-Olov Adami, Philip Cole, Dimitrios Trichopoulos, and Jack Mandel, “Epidemiology and etiology of Parkinson’s disease: a review of the evidence,” 26 Eur. J. Epidemiol. S1 (2011).

8 The criticisms can be found at <https://pubpeer.com/publications/798F9D98B5D2E5A832136C0A4AD261>, last visited on July 10, 2017.

David Egilman and Friends Circle the Wagons at the International Journal of Occupational & Environmental Health

May 4th, 2017

Andrew Maier is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health, in the University of Cincinnati. Maier received his Ph.D. degree in toxicology, with a master’s degree in industrial health. He is a Certified Industrial Hygienest and has published widely on occupational health issues. Earlier this year, Maier was named the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health (IJOEH). See Casey Allen, “Andy Maier Named Editor of Environmental Health Journal(Jan. 18, 2017).

Before Maier’s appointment, the IJOEH was, for the last several years, the vanity press for former editor-in-chief David Egilman and “The Lobby,” the expert witness brigade of the lawsuit industry. Egilman’s replacement with Andrew Maier apparently took place after the IJOEH was acquired by the scientific publishing company Taylor & Francis, from the former publisher, Maney.

The new owner, however, left the former IJOEH editorial board, largely a gaggle of Egilman friends and fellow travelers in place. Last week, the editorial board revoltingly wrote [contact information redacted] to Roger Horton, Chief Executive Officer of Taylor & Francis, to request that Egilman be restored to power, or that the current Editorial Board be empowered to choose Egilman’s successor. With Trump-like disdain for evidence, the Board characterized the new Editor as a “corporate consultant.” If Maier has consulted with corporations, his work appears to have rarely if ever landed him in a courtroom at the request of a corporate defendant. And with knickers tightly knotted, the Board also made several other demands for control over Board membership and journal content.

Andrew Watterson wrote to Horton on behalf of all current and former IJOEH Editorial Board members, a group heavily populated by plaintiffs’ litigation expert witnesses and “political” scientists, including among others:

Arthur Frank

Morris Greenberg

Barry S. Levy

David Madigan

Jock McCulloch

David Wegman

Barry Castleman

Peter Infante

Ron Melnick

Daniel Teitelbaum

None of the signatories apparently disclosed their affiliations as corporate consultants for the lawsuit industry.

Removing Egilman from control was bad enough, but the coup de grâce for the Lobby came earlier in April 2016, when Taylor & Francis notified Egilman that a paper that he had published in IJOEH was being withdrawn. According to the petitioners, the paper, “The production of corporate research to manufacture doubt about the health hazards of products: an overview of the Exponent Bakelite simulation study,” was removed without explanation. See Public health journal’s editorial board tells publisher they have ‘grave concerns’ over new editor,” Retraction Watch (April 27, 2017).

According to Taylor & Francis, the Egilman article was “published inadvertently, before the review process had been completed. On completing that review, it was decided the article was unsuitable for publication in the journal.” Id. Well, of course, Egilman’s article was unlikely to receive much analytical scrutiny at a journal where he was Editor-in-Chief, and where the Board was populated by his buddies. The same could be said for many articles published under Egilman’s tenure at the IJOEH. Taylor & Francis owes Egilman and the scientific and legal community a detailed statement of what was in the article, which was “unsuitable,” and why. Certainly, the law department at Taylor & Francis should make sure that it does not give Egilman and his former Board of Editors grounds for litigation. They are, after all, tight with the lawsuit industry. More important, Taylor & Francis owes Dr. Egilman, as well as the scientific and legal community, a full explanation of why the article in question was unsuitable for publication in the IJOEH.