An engineer who believes the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fudged a study of lead in drinking water is suing the agency under the US Freedom of Information Act.
In a complaint filed 13 September in federal district court in Washington DC, Marc Edwards of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University alleges that the CDC failed to respond to his 2009 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents despite, in 2010, cashing a $1905.07 check for fees to cover search and copying.
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment by Nature’s deadline.
Edwards is the author of a 2009 paper that found a correlation between levels of lead in blood of young children in the DC area and lead levels in their water supply. A 2004 article published by the CDC in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) appeared to downplay the issue and has been widely cited as evidence that lead in drinking water is not a major concern.
Edwards’ paper prompted a 2010 congressional probe into the CDC’s report that concluded that an author of it had excluded a child from the dataset who had high levels of lead in his blood, as well as that some of the relevant data were missing and that key information suggesting that some of the patients without elevated lead levels had been drinking bottled water, had been withheld.
Edwards subsequently made allegations of research misconduct that he says the CDC refused to investigate, in part because it decided its report in MMWR did not count as “research” as defined by US federal policy. He has since made a number of FOIA requests in an attempt to understand how this conclusion was reached, which he says have not been responded to satisfactorily.
The particular records he is suing for include e-mails between officials at the CDC and officials from advocacy group the Alliance for Healthy Homes, that he hopes could, if provided, confirm or deny the allegation, originally reported by The Washington Post, that an activist at the organization lost his job because the CDC was displeased by the activist’s challenges to its position on lead in drinking water. If true, “it would be enlightening about the mentality of the lead poisoning prevention branch of the CDC”, Edwards says. More broadly, however, Edwards hopes, by suing, to escalate the issue through the government so that his other FOIA requests relating to the handling of his misconduct allegations will be fulfilled as well.
In March, the Government Accountability Office of the US Congress criticized the CDC’s handling of the case, saying it did not have policies in place to deal with confusion that could arise about its intended message.
Update: 3.40pm A CDC spokeswoman notes that it is the agency’s policy not to discuss pending litigation.
Image: Marc Edwards / Virginia Tech