A highly influential occupational health journal has had to retract a paper on risks posed by cancer-causing chromium after it emerged the paper was not written by the scientists credited, but by consulting firm which has chromium industry clients. The fraudulent paper had been cited by official agencies to justify continued use of a chromium containing wood preservative. The retraction follows a six-month internal review by the journal, prompted by an Environmental Working Group (EWG) investigation. The July issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM), the official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, will carry a retraction of a 1997 article published under the byline of two Chinese scientists, JianDong Zhang and ShuKun Li.

The paper contradicted an earlier paper by Zhang which had linked chromium pollution to certain cancers. In an email to the JOEM editorial board, JOEM editor Dr Paul Brandt-Rauf acknowledged that there would be a retraction, but for legal reasons it would be 'carefully worded and kept to the barest minimum of facts.' EWG had obtained records from the courts and regulators that showed the article was actually the work of ChemRisk, a San Francisco-based consulting firm whose clients include corporations responsible for chromium pollution. The article was cited by the US Environmental Protection Agency in its decision to allow continued use of chromium in a wood preservative, and by the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in a report that discounted chromium-6 as an oral carcinogen. Chrome-6 compounds are classed as 'group 1' human carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, its highest risk category.

• EWG news release
• JOEM notice of retraction