Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist.
Imagine if someone spread a human carcinogen across millions of acres of land. Then imagine that the carcinogen was found to be entering surface waters due to runoff from the treated acreage. And then that the carcinogen was found to be accumulating in the dust in homes located near the treated acres.
Far-fetched? Hardly. Welcome to the good ol’ US of A. Read More
Jennifer McPartland, Ph.D., is a Health Scientist.
Parts in this series: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
This is the third in a series of blog posts on new approaches that federal agencies are exploring to improve how chemicals are evaluated for safety. Previous posts primarily focused on the scientific principles underlying these efforts. This post will take a pause from scientific fundamentals to discuss some of the opportunities presented by these more novel methods, while subsequent posts will address some of their limitations and remaining challenges. (Not to worry, though, I’ll soon get back to computer-simulated organs as promised.) Read More
Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist.
Health policy history of sorts was made this week: The prestigious journal Health Affairs, the nation’s leading journal of health policy, unveiled its first-ever issue devoted entirely to environmental health. It did so via a briefing held in Washington, DC on Wednesday that featured several pre-eminent environmental health experts, including David Fukuzawa, Program Director for Health at The Kresge Foundation; Linda Birnbaum, Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS); and Kenneth Olden, Professor and Founding Dean at the new City University of New York’s School of Public Health and former long-time NIEHS Director.
A sneak peak has been provided via advanced publication of some of the journal issue’s articles. Prominent among the themes of these articles: The high and increasing health and economic costs of unregulated exposures to unsafe and inadequately tested chemicals.
I’ll call attention here to two papers in particular: