Talk:Nancy Balter

Adding back info deleted by Sschwa without explanation.

Please explain in detail any deletions from SourceWatch articles, on the associated talk page. Thanks.

Diane Farsetta 11:02, 8 May 2008 (EDT)

Factual error deletions.

Neither Nancy Balter nor I EVER testified in court against anyone making claims of cigarette smoking-related health disturbances against the tobacco industry --- not for 20 years, not for 20 nanoseconds. The position of IAPAG on active smoking was made clear to the Tobacco Institute at the time I set forth the conditions for IAPAG testimony at legislative hearings on ETS. In fact, TI officials said that they would not allow IAPAG members to admit that there were health disturbances associated with active smoking. My response was good bye! They then abandoned that position. It eventually became known by legislative committee staff that if an IAPAG witness was asked about the health effects of active smoking, the answer would be that thewre was no disagreement with the prevailing view on the health effects of ciagrette smoking. Thus, the question was frequently asked, causing no little consternation for many of the state TI directors.

Nor did Dr. Balter ever testify in a court case on the health effects of ETS. I did once --- concerning the case of a bar waitress who attributed her laryngeal cancer to on-th-job ETS exposure. I was retained by an Australian workers compensation body. (At the outset, I required and received written affirmation that the attorneys were not representing the tobacco industry.)

Dr. Balter was not a principal in the International Center of Toxicology and Medicine.

S.L. Schwartz Georgetown University

From:  sschwa01@georgetown.edu Date: October 3, 2008 11:22:05 PM MDT Subject: Balter To:  anne@sourcewatch.org Ms. Landman:

Not sure how to make an entry on user talk, so I am using this means.

I made edits in the Nancy Balter page that corrected factual errors and tenses.

To my knowledge, she was not paid to be on the Environmental Toxicology Letters editorial board. I know of no journal that pays its editorial board members. It is true that ETL published papers that were favorable to the tobacco industry's ETS position, reflecting a bias of its editor (now deceased) but it was hardly the journal's specialty.

The ETS literature database was NEVER intended for use in cigarette smoking litigation because the papers in the database dealt only with indoor air pollution and ETS. If someone in industry gave a lawyer involved in cigarette smoking litigation a literature reference from the database, it could not have been relevant to whatever case was at the bar.

The ETS literature database was never on the Georgetown mainframe. It was stored on a hard drive in a Compaq PC and occupied less than 20 MB space (those were the years of MSDOS, before the exponential space needs of GUI operating systems) The database was nothing more than a bibliography of the published ETS and indoor air pollution literature categorized as to relevance to particular questions at hand. --- Dr. Schwartz,

I copied your email onto the "Discussion" page of Nancy Balter's article, so there is a record/explanation for your changes. For the most part it seems your changes change the tone of the article to sound more objective, but I will take more time to look them over more closely.

We did copy some of the information in TobaccoWiki over from a source/database that had a lower standard of referencing, so some of it may not be up to par. But Sourcewatch itself does require information added to be referenced to an authoritiative source, so please keep that in mind for your edits..

Thanks for contributing, Anne