Monthly Archives: September 2017

Michael Dourson’s Toxic Wake: Locations Across the US Contaminated by Eight Chemicals “Blessed” by Trump EPA Toxics Nominee

By Sam Lovell / Published: September 28, 2017

Samantha Lovell is a Project Specialist.

[Update added November 17: On October 25, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works voted to advance Michael Dourson’s nomination to oversee chemical safety at the EPA. The fight is now in the full Senate, where two Republican senators have already come out against Dourson. With Democrats standing in strong opposition to this toxic nominee, Dourson’s nomination will not move forward if one more Republican senator comes out against him.]

[Use this link to see all of our posts on Dourson.]

In past blogs, we have documented deep concerns about Dourson’s extensive, longstanding ties to the chemical industry in addition to his earlier work for the tobacco industry. Dourson and his company Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA) were paid for their work by more than three dozen companies or trade associations, involving at least three dozen different chemicals.

Several recent news stories and reports have identified examples where Dourson or TERA helped industry play down health concerns about chemicals, including Dourson’s work in West Virginia involving the “Teflon” chemical PFOA and his study funded by Koch Industries in Chicago involving petroleum coke.

To illustrate the real-world impacts of his work, we have identified locations across the country where eight of the chemicals that Dourson has “blessed” have stirred concerns from residents about polluted water, soil, and air or poisoned residents and workers.

Read More »

Posted in Health policy, Industry influence, TSCA reform / Tagged , , | Comments are closed

Podcast: How an ongoing collaboration can inform us about the quality of the air we breathe

By Ryan O'Connell / Published: September 28, 2017

Unraveling the relationship between air quality and human health has been a critically important task for protecting public health. Traditional stationary air monitors have played a central role in tracking toxic air pollutants and ensuring levels remain below legal standards, but the data they generate cannot be used to create fine-scale maps of air quality over local areas.

An ongoing, multi-group project initiated by Environmental Defense Fund and Google Earth Outreach aims to fill this information gap by deploying Google Street View cars equipped with air quality monitors to amass one of the largest sets of mobile air pollution measurements ever assembled.

In this episode of our podcast, we talked with one of our project partners, Dr. Joshua Apte, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, about the first round of data collection, which took place in West Oakland, California. Dr. Apte walked us through the initial findings and shared his thoughts on what they mean for public health, as well as for local communities that may be disproportionately affected by air pollution.

 

Want more? Subscribe and listen on iTunes or Google Play, or check out Podbean to listen via desktop!

Posted in Air pollution, Health policy, Health science / Tagged | Read 2 Responses

Proof in pudding: EPA toxics nominee Dourson has consistently recommended “safe” levels for chemicals that would weaken health protections

By Richard Denison / Published: September 22, 2017

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Lead Senior Scientist.

[Use this link to see all of our posts on Dourson.]

Earlier this week the New York Times ran an article on the Trump Administration’s nominee to run the EPA toxics office, Michael Dourson.  The article detailed Dourson’s longstanding ties to the chemical industry, citing examples of work he did on specific chemicals paid for by the companies that make or use them.

What is remarkable about Dourson’s work in light of his nomination is not just his conflicts, but the fact that his paid work consistently has led to him recommend “safe” levels of his clients’ chemicals that were less health-protective than government standards or guidelines prevailing at the time.  The Times article referred to an analysis by EDF in discussing the example of the pesticide chlorpyrifos.  Chlorpyrifos is one of 10 chemicals included in EDF’s analysis, which is provided in this post.   Read More »

Posted in Health policy, Health science, Industry influence, TSCA reform / Tagged , | Comments are closed

Modus operandi: How EPA toxics nominee Dourson carries out his work for the chemical industry

By Richard Denison / Published: September 18, 2017

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Lead Senior Scientist.

[Use this link to see all of our posts on Dourson.]

I’ve now examined dozens of papers and reports that EPA toxics nominee Michael Dourson and his firm, Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA), have published on chemicals over the past 15-20 years.  A remarkably consistent pattern of how Dourson conducts his paid work for the chemical and pesticide industries emerges from this examination.  I’ll use one example below to illustrate, but most or all of the steps I’ll describe have been followed over and over again.   Read More »

Posted in Health policy, Health science, Industry influence, TSCA reform / Tagged , | Comments are closed

New EPA model enables comparison of various sources of childhood exposure to lead

By Tom Neltner, Senior Director, Safer Chemicals Initiative / Published: September 14, 2017

Tom Neltner, J.D., is Chemicals Policy Director and Dr. Ananya Roy is Health Scientist

This week, Environmental Health Perspectives published an important article by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that sheds important light on the various sources of children’s lead exposure. Led by Valerie Zaltarian, the article shares an innovative multimedia model to quantify and compare relative contributions of lead from air, soil/dust, water and food to children’s blood lead level. The model couples existing SHEDS and IEUBK models to predict blood lead levels using information on concentrations of lead in different sources, intake and gut absorption. The predicted blood lead levels compared well with observed levels in the National Health and Nutrition Evaluation Survey population. Given the variety of independent sources of lead exposure, the model provides a critical tool that public health professionals can use to set priorities and evaluate the impact of various potential standards for all children and not just those with the greatest exposure.

This peer-reviewed article builds on a draft report EPA released in January 2017 evaluating different approaches to setting a health-based benchmark for lead in drinking water. The report has provided a wealth of insight into a complicated topic. Earlier this year, we used it to show that formula-fed infants get most of their lead exposure from water and toddlers from food, while the main source of lead for the highest exposed children is soil and dust. In our February blog, we provided our assessment of a health-based benchmark for lead in drinking water and explained how public health professionals could use it to evaluate homes. The information was also critical to identifying lead in food as an overlooked, but meaningful, source of children’s exposure to lead.

The new article reaffirms the analysis in the January 2017 EPA report and highlights that evaluating source contribution to blood lead in isolation versus aggregating across all sources can lead to very different answers and priorities. A health-based benchmark for lead in drinking water could vary from 0 to 46 ppb depending on age and whether all other sources of lead are considered. For example, a health-based benchmark for infants (birth to six months old) would be 4 ppb or 13 ppb depending on whether or not you consider all sources of exposure.

Read More »

Posted in Drinking water, Emerging science, Food, Health policy, Lead / Tagged , , , , , , , , | Authors: / Comments are closed

Shifting the burden for toxics with a sneaky website: one more reason Dourson shouldn’t lead EPA toxics office

By Jack Pratt / Published: September 14, 2017

Jack Pratt is Chemicals Campaign Director

[Use this link to see all of our posts on Dourson.]

With Congress back from recess, it is slated to take up the nomination of Michael Dourson to run the toxics office at EPA. Here are links to our recent blog posts documenting why we are deeply concerned about his nomination:

Starting with work he did for the tobacco industry, Dourson has made a career downplaying concerns about chemicals, from harmful pesticides to cancer-causing solvents, paid for that work by the same companies that make or use those chemicals.

In addition to his work as a toxicologist-for-hire, Dourson and his firm, TERA, have provided more public-facing services.  One of these, done with funding from the American Chemistry Council, was the “Kids+Chemicalsafety” website, now defunct, but still available online at the Internet Archive.

Read More »

Posted in Health policy, Regulation, TSCA reform / Tagged , , , | Comments are closed