Protecting Our Food By Empowering Whistleblowers

Renee Dufault

In January 2008, Renee Dufault retired after 20 years of federal service from the Public Health Service (PHS), the last part of which was spent working at the FDA Office of the Commissioner. There, while conducting research on mercury, she discovered low levels of the toxic substance in samples of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). When she and others took steps to publish a paper of their findings, instead of being praised for protecting the public, she was denied use of the federal extramural data for publication purposes and encouraged to retire when meaningful work was suddenly no longer supported by management.


Background

In 2004, Dufault began researching the mercury cycle from an environmental management perspective for the FDA. With an extramural colleague, she analyzed a number of food products listing HFCS as either the first or second ingredient on the label and organic food products for mercury. Shockingly, results pointed to low levels of mercury in all of the products they analyzed containing HFCS while the organic foods did not contain any detectable levels of mercury. To confirm that HFCS was the source of mercury, Dufault sent virgin HFCS samples to two different extramural laboratories, one federal and one academic, for mercury analyses. Acting as third parties, both laboratories independently and conclusively found in 2005 low levels of mercury in the HFCS samples.
In October 2005, Dufault and her extramural academic colleagues presented some of their preliminary findings to FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN). According to Dufault, after the presentation, she was told by the head of the Food Additives division to stop investigating the matter. The pressure to “back off” was obvious. However, Dufault and her colleagues chose to pursue the truth.

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