Science
She Lobbied for Formaldehyde. Now She’s at E.P.A. Approving New Chemicals.
Formaldehyde, the chemical of choice for undertakers and embalmers, is also used in products like furniture and clothes. But it can also cause cancer and severe respiratory problems. So, in 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency began a new effort to regulate it.
The chemicals industry fought back with an intensity that astonished even seasoned agency officials. Its campaign was led by Lynn Dekleva, then a lobbyist at the American Chemistry Council, an industry group that spends millions of dollars on government lobbying.
Dr. Dekleva is now at the E.P.A. in a crucial job: She runs an office that has the authority to approve new chemicals for use. Earlier she spent 32 years at Dupont, the chemical maker, before joining the E.P.A. in the first Trump administration.
Her most recent employer, the chemicals lobbying group, has made reversing the Environmental Protection Agency’s course on formaldehyde a priority and is pushing to abolish a program under which the agency assess the risks of chemicals to human health. In recent weeks it has urged the agency to discard its work on formaldehyde entirely and start from scratch in assessing the risks.
The American Chemistry Council is also seeking to change the agency’s approval process for new chemicals and speed up E.P.A.’s safety reviews. That review process is a key part of Dr. Dekelva’s purview at the agency.
Another former chemistry council lobbyist, Nancy Beck, is back alongside Dr. Dekleva at the E.P.A. in a role regulating existing chemicals. The council’s president, Chris Jahn, told a Senate hearing shortly after the Trump inauguration that his group intended to tackle the “unnecessary regulation” of chemicals in the United States. “A healthy nation, a secure nation, an economically vibrant nation relies on chemistry,” he said.
It is not unusual or unlawful for industry groups to seek to influence public policy in the interest of their member companies. The A.C.C. estimates that products using formaldehyde support more than 1.5 million jobs in the United States.
What has been extraordinary, health and legal experts said, is the extent of the industry’s effort to block the E.P.A.’s scientific work on a chemical long acknowledged as a carcinogen, and how the architect of the effort was back at the agency as a regulator of chemicals. At the same time, the Trump administration has moved to sharply reduce the federal scientific work force.
“They already have a track record of ignoring the science,” said Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco. “Now, they’re in charge of government agencies that decide the rules.”
While leading the chemistry council’s fight to limit formaldehyde regulation, Dr. Dekleva called for investigations of federal officials for potential bias. The industry group used freedom of information laws to obtain emails of federal employees and criticized them in public statements for what they had written. It submitted dozens of industry-funded research papers to agencies that minimized the risks of formaldehyde.
The A.C.C. also sued both the E.P.A. and the National Academies, which advises the nation on scientific questions, accusing researchers of a lack of scientific integrity.
Allison Edwards, a chemistry council spokeswoman, said officials from the group had regularly met with E.P.A. staff members “to share critical science and to try and ensure an assessment of any chemistry is objective, employs rigorous scientific standards, and is reflective of real-world human exposure.” She said, “We’re asking to be one of many stakeholders at the table.”
Molly Vaseliou, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said the agency would continue to make sure it “ensures chemicals do not pose an unreasonable risk to human health or the environment.” At the same time, the agency would also work to approve “chemicals that are needed to power American innovation and competitiveness,” she said.
Formaldehyde’s cancer risk
Formaldehyde’s fumes can cause wheezing and a burning sensation in the eyes, especially when they accumulate indoors. That danger was apparent when formaldehyde in plywood used to build temporary trailer homes for victims of Hurricane Katrina sickened dozens of people.
And there are longer-term dangers, namely several types of cancers. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded in 2004 that the chemical is a human carcinogen, and the U.S. Department of Health listed it as a human carcinogen in 2011.
The chemical is restricted in the workplace, in certain composite wood products, and in pesticides. Yet efforts to strengthen overall regulations in the United States have stalled in the face of industry opposition.
President Biden, whose “cancer moonshot” program had made reducing cancer deaths a priority, revived in 2021 an E.P.A. assessment of the health effects of the chemical, and published a draft the following year. That effort, under the agency’s Integrated Risk Information System, was the first step toward regulating formaldehyde.
The chemistry council led a coalition of industry groups, including the Composite Panel Association and Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers, arguing that formaldehyde had already been rigorously studied and that strict industry controls were in place.
In a half-dozen letters to the E.P.A., Dr. Dekleva, on behalf of a formaldehyde panel at the industry group, raised a list of complaints about the way the agency was carrying out its assessment.
She questioned research linking formaldehyde to leukemia, or cancer of the blood, and accused the agency of not relying on the best available science. There was a dose, she said, at which formaldehyde did not cause risk. There was also research, she said, that showed inhaled formaldehyde did not easily travel beyond the nose to cause harm to the body.
In light of these issues, Dr. Dekleva wrote, agency’s draft assessment was “flawed and unreliable without significant revision.”
To bolster its case, the industry group enlisted experts at consulting firms to submit opinions and studies to the E.P.A. minimizing formaldehyde’s risks. The firms included those previously commissioned by tobacco companies to help defend cigarettes.
The A.C.C. also submitted 41 peer-reviewed studies that it said refuted a link between formaldehyde and leukemia. A New York Times review found that the majority of the studies were funded by industry groups, including at least 11 from the Research Foundation for Health and Environmental Effects, an organization established by the American Chemistry Council.
David Michaels, an epidemiologist and professor at George Washington University School of Public Health and assistant secretary of labor under President Barack Obama, said the industry strategy was to create the appearance of disagreement among scientists.
While it’s true, he said, that inconsistencies can always exist in studies on humans, “there’s little disagreement among independent scientists that formaldehyde causes cancer.”
Scientists targeted
For more than 150 years, the National Academies has advised the U.S. government on science. In 2021, it was asked to weigh in on the E.P.A.’s work on formaldehyde.
It became a target of the American Chemistry Council.
The industry group used freedom of information laws to obtain internal emails of members and support staff of a panel assessing the E.P.A.’s formaldehyde review, and it accused one staff of showing “bias in favor of disputed research claiming formaldehyde causes leukemia.”
The staff member, a former Environmental Protection Agency scientist, had for example described as “wonderful” the news that Congress might try to replicate an influential Chinese study that had shown formaldehyde could cause leukemia.
Wendy E. Wagner, professor at the University of Texas School of Law and an expert on the use of science by environmental policymakers, said she did not see how the comment reflected bias. “After all, they don’t know what the results will be, do they?” she said. “I would expect all scientists to be enthusiastic about potential future research.”
Dr. Dekleva called for investigations at both the E.P.A. and the National Academies, and for the removal of potentially biased panel members and staff. That included scientists who had previously accepted federal research grants.
In July 2023, the industry group sued the E.P.A., as well as the National Academies, accusing researchers of a lack of scientific integrity. The chemistry council said that lack of integrity made the use of the National Academies research in regulating formaldehyde “arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful.”
“It was relentless, and beyond the pale,” said Maria Doa, a scientist at the E.P.A. for 30 years who is now senior director of chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. “They really ratcheted up their attacks on federal employees.”
The National Academies stood its ground, issuing a report the following month affirming the E.P.A.’s Integrated Risk Information System findings that formaldehyde is carcinogenic and increases leukemia risk.
Those conclusions are shared by other global health authorities.
Mary Schubauer-Berigan, the evidence-synthesis head at the World Health Organization’s Agency for Research on Cancer, said there was “sufficient evidence in humans” that formaldehyde causes leukemia as and nasopharynx cancer. Mikko Vaananen, a spokesman for the European Chemicals Agency, said that while some questions around specific links to leukemia remained unanswered, evidence was sufficient to classify formaldehyde as a carcinogen. Formaldehyde “cannot in principle be placed on the E.U. market,” he said.
In March 2024, a federal judge dismissed the chemistry council’s lawsuit. And early this year, near the end of the Biden administration, the E.P.A. issued a final risk determination, under the Toxic Substances Control Act: Formaldehyde “presents an unreasonable risk of injury to human health.”
Mary A. Fox, an expert in chemical risk assessment at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and a member of a committee that reviewed the E.P.A.’s research on formaldehyde, said agency scientists had accurately reflected the uncertainties around the links between formaldehyde and leukemia. But they had documented many other streams of evidence that indicated that link, Dr. Fox said.
“It’s an inevitable progress of science, that as we learn more over time, we generally learn that health effects appear at lower concentrations than we had thought,” she said.
Following Mr. Trump’s re-election, the American Chemistry Council signed onto a letter from a range of industry groups calling for broad changes to policy, specifically citing formaldehyde. “We urge your administration to pause and reconsider” the E.P.A. findings on formaldehyde, the Dec. 5 letter said.
The E.P.A. “should go back to the scientific drawing board,” chemistry council said in January. The group was particularly concerned about the workplace limits the agency was suggesting, which it said ignored steps companies were already taking to protect workers, like the use of personal protective equipment.
The A.C.C. is also supporting a bill from Republican members of Congress that would end the Integrated Risk Information System.
Soon after, Trump transition officials said Dr. Dekleva would be returning to the E.P.A. to run a program assessing chemicals for approval. The chemistry council, which has long complained of a backlog, is pushing the agency to speed up approvals.
During the first Trump administration, agency whistle-blowers described in an inspector general’s investigation how they had faced “intense” pressure to eliminate the backlog, sometimes at the expense of safety. Shortly after the inauguration, the Trump administration fired the inspector-general who carried out the investigation.
On Jan. 20, the A.C.C. welcomed President Trump. “Americans want a stronger, more affordable country,” said Mr. Jahn, the group’s president. “America’s chemical manufacturers can help.”
NEW YORK — Scientists have unearthed communities of marine life — including jellyfish, tubeworms and brittle stars — thriving on a whale graveyard that is millions of years old.
These graveyards form when whale carcasses fall to the sea floor, becoming a sustaining snack for nearby critters. This one, located up to 23,000 feet below the surface of the southeastern Indian Ocean, spans the largest area and is so far the deepest and oldest found.
A whale’s sheer size and the unique chemistry of its bones are the keys to forming these unique underwater neighborhoods, said Xikun Song, a biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering.
“At the same time, the very nature of the deep ocean makes these sites exceptionally difficult for scientists to locate,” Song, who was involved with the latest find, wrote in an email.
Researchers explored the remains during multiple deep-sea submersible trips in 2023, collecting samples and mapping the extent of the necropolis. They found five carcass sites and fossils, including skulls belonging to beaked and baleen whales. The oldest bones date back 5.3 million years.
Feeding and living on the carcasses were myriad creatures, large and small, including sea cucumbers, squat lobsters and saltwater clams. Many of them are likely species that have never been documented, according to findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“The potential number of specimens is just astounding,” said paleontologist Stephen Godfrey with the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Many factors likely conspired to preserve the bones for millions of years, according to the study authors. They’re dense enough to outlast attacks from bone-eating worms, and located deep enough in the ocean to avoid getting buried by dust and loose particles. The bones also were coated with a light layer of minerals from the surrounding seawater, which may have prevented them from degrading.
Why did so many whales die here? Maybe they were already living in the area and died of natural causes. A few could have perished from exhaustion or illness caused by deep-sea diving. The area’s shape, akin to the letter V, could also have funneled the remains to their resting spot, the authors wrote.
Such discoveries are important because they clue scientists into the vibrant communities that find a way to live even in remote, hard-to-reach environments.
Studying the whale graveyards “is important for understanding how life can adapt to such extreme conditions, not only due to the lack of light and oxygen but also to the incredibly high pressure,” said study co-author and paleontologist Giovanni Bianucci with the University of Pisa in Italy in an email.
Ramakrishnan writes for The Associated Press.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Science
El Niño turns crumbling California pier into climate battleground over what to save — and who pays
As a historic El Niño supercharges the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco experiences record high seasonal sea levels, the latest structural casualty of intense wave action is prompting Bay Area politicians to call for help from the state and federal governments.
They want to rebuild a concrete pier shut down this month after officials deemed it unsafe because of cracking from decades of pounding surf and storms.
As waves crashed against the derelict structure Monday morning, U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-San José) held a news conference and asked the federal government to follow through on $50 million in climate resilience funding promised by the Biden administration but terminated by the Trump administration in 2025.
The city of Pacifica had been on the shortlist for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, managed through FEMA. California and 22 other states successfully sued to reinstate the program, but the funding has yet to be allocated.
Liccardo also asked for nearly $1 million in promised funds from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a handrail project on the pier and an additional $9 million to protect coastal bluffs.
Coastlines are already being buffeted and inundated by rising seas. With the closed-off Pacifica Municipal Pier in the background, local politicians and community members said they’re on the front lines and want to rebuild.
“Pacifica is ground zero for coastal resilience,” said state Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), as he asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency and “help us fix this pier and help this community recover again.”
“This is very much a reminder that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said, noting that previous attempts for funding went unheeded. “We cannot wait until infrastructure fails before we invest in protecting it.”
As climate change starts to become expensive, it prompts questions about what to protect and what to abandon.
Chad Nelson, chief executive of the Surfrider Foundation, a coastal environmental advocacy organization, said city piers provide coastal access to people who can’t swim or walk on the beach; they are often popular fishing spots and tend to serve a broad swath of their communities.
On the flip side, he said, they keep getting beat up by the ocean and costing taxpayers millions of dollars to repair or replace.
In Santa Cruz, a public wharf damaged by storms in 2024 recently reopened after $1.3 million in repairs. In Capitola, a storm-damaged wharf reopened earlier this year after $10 million had been sunk into repairs. The city is now considering building an open-air restaurant, public bathrooms, a bait shop and a boat launch.
“I think the larger question is: Are we subsidizing bad responses to problems that we know are going to persist?” he said, responding to a question about infrastructure that won’t last.
Charles Lester, director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at UC Santa Barbara, agreed with Nelson that it’s important to distinguish public from private benefits.
“There’s a bit of a difference between a public recreational pier, for example, and your private development that’s going to impact the beach,” he said.
And at some point, he said, we have to acknowledge things are only going to get worse.
In a white paper authored by Lester and Nelson, the two described the coming El Niño as a “reckoning” for the California coast.
El Niños result in larger waves, elevated sea levels and powerful storms — “predictable signature(s) of a climate pattern that returns every two to seven years and is expected, as the planet warms, to intensify,” they wrote.
Wave energy along the shore can run 50% above average during an El Niño, while sea levels can climb 6 to 12 inches — flooding coastal homes, roads and infrastructure. Coastal erosion increases by more than 69% during extreme El Niño events, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
During the 1997-98 El Niño, seven Pacifica seaside houses were condemned after powerful waves and storms made them unsafe and irreparable. Seventeen people in the state died as a result of the historic flooding and storms.
The funding requests for the pier also come as San Francisco sees its highest summer water levels ever. On Saturday, the National Weather Service recorded levels 1.83 feet above normal high tide. Early Monday morning, the popular Pier 14 along the city’s Embarcadero waterfront was submerged.
High surf along the coast killed a young girl in Laguna Beach, and hundreds of people have been rescued at Newport Beach. Water stranded a hiker along the cliffs of San Francisco’s Presidio — requiring a seven-hour rescue mission that ultimately left the hiker and a rescuer injured as the waves crashed them into the rocks.
“This stretch of coast has been a continuous coastal emergency declaration for almost 10 years due to the repeat damage of storms in recent El Niño years,” the mayor of Pacifica, Christine Boles, said.
Pacifica has been planning for climate change for years, she said. But climate change is outstripping those efforts, and without financial and regulatory support from the federal and state governments, the battle will be all but lost.
Science
Californian is infected with rare tick-borne illness. What to know about the deadly bacteria
A Northern Californian has been confirmed as the fourth-ever person diagnosed with a newly recognized and rare tick-borne disease that causes symptoms similar to Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
The California Department of Public Health confirmed the latest case of Rickettsia lanei bacteria in a patient who was diagnosed in April of this year. Two other California cases were reported in 2004 and 2023.
Public health officials told The Times that the infected person “was seriously ill, hospitalized and has since been discharged and is recovering.”
It is unclear how long the person was in the hospital or what their symptoms were. The state agency said it could not disclose the home county of the person but confirmed the infected person lived and worked in Northern California.
Rickettsia lanei comes from the spotted fever group Rickettsia, bacteria transmitted to humans from the bite of an infected tick.
In California three types of ticks — the American dog tick (Dermacentor similis), the Pacific Coast tick (Dermacentor occidentalis) and the brown dog tick (Rhipicephalus sanguineus) — can transmit the bacteria that cause Rocky Mountain spotted fever in humans and dogs, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Symptoms of Rocky Mountain spotted fever can range from fever and a rash to long-term effects that include damage to internal organs or neurological disorders.
The tick-borne disease has been spreading globally since the early 2000s, most notably in Mexico and Brazil, with reported fatality rates that can exceed 50%, according to a study published by UC Davis.
What is Rickettsia lanei?
Rickettsia lanei bacteria were identified this year in a few Pacific Coast ticks, including a tick in Contra Costa County, according to SFGate, where the latest case was first reported in April.
The new bacterium was added to the list of potentially transmittable pathogens in 2024 by the state public health department after its severe symptoms were studied in two cases of infected men nearly 20 years apart, according to a report published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Emerging and Infectious Diseases journal.
“Sustained investment in public health has enabled development of the advanced molecular tools that detected these infections,” the California Department of Public Health said in a statement to The Times.
According to the report, both men fell ill after spending time outdoors, one playing golf at five courses in Alameda and Contra Costa counties within 14 days of the onset of his symptoms. This first patient had fever, headaches, muscle pain, malaise, loss of appetite, diarrhea and abdominal pain, among other symptoms. His condition worsened on his third day in the hospital, according to the report. The man was ultimately in the hospital for 22 days, including 11 in the intensive care unit with a primary diagnosis of rocky mountain spotted fever and a secondary diagnosis of acute kidney injury.
The other infected person had visited and camped at a county park and state beach in San Mateo and Marin counties. The second man reported a five-day history of headaches, vomiting, light sensitivity, neck pain and confusion, according to the report. On the third day of hospitalization, the man became comatose and was intubated, the report stated. After 13 days, he was discharged with a primary diagnosis of severe Rickettsia.
Researchers have known about Rickettsia lanei since 2018 when it was detected in rabbit ticks in Sonoma County, but they didn’t know its potential harm to humans because the rabbit tick rarely bites people.
“The Pacific Coast tick, which bites humans more frequently, may occasionally acquire the organism from an infected rabbit, which is the most likely route for the rare human infections that have been identified,” the state health agency said.
Should I be worried about contracting Rickettsia lanei?
Human infections are rare but could be underreported because Rickettsia lanei symptoms are very similar to those of rocky mountain spotted fever, said Janet Foley, veterinarian and disease ecologist at UC Davis.
“I think it’s so new that I don’t know if anybody’s really gotten a grant to study it or put it under a microscope,” Foley said.
Rickettsia lanei bacteria cases could also have gone undetected for so long because some cases were not severe, she said.
Foley said Californians should be aware of Rickettsia lanei and take precautions against tick bites.
How to keep disease-carrying ticks at bay
The best way to avoid ticks and tick bites is to be vigilant in your surroundings, Foley said, noting that ticks can transmit other diseases such as Lyme disease.
To keep a disease-carrying tick at bay, Foley recommends:
- Covering up your arms and legs when outdoors by wearing pants and long-sleeved shirts.
- Staying out of the grass where a tick can latch onto your clothing. Instead stay on a cleared path.
- Wearing light-colored clothing so it’s easier to spot a tick if one jumps on you.
- After an outdoor activity, take off your clothes, toss them in the wash and take a shower.
- If your dog goes with you for outdoor activities, give it a bath and then apply tick medication.
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