EDF Health

A full month after West Virginia spill, many questions linger … along with the chemical’s distinctive odor

By / Published: February 9, 2014

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

Today marks exactly a month since what is now said to be 10,000 gallons of “crude MCHM” – mixed with what was later found to have included other chemicals – spilled into West Virginia’s Elk River, contaminated 1,700 miles of piping in the water distribution system for nine counties, and disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of the state’s residents. 

Despite declining levels of the chemical in the water being fed into the distribution system, late this past week five area schools were closed due to detection of the distinctive licorice-like odor of MCHM and multiple reports of symptoms such as eye irritation, nausea and dizziness among students and staff.

The latest sampling data (for February 7 and 8) at locations such as area fire hydrants and hospitals and at schools shows that MCHM is at non-detect levels (<10 parts per billion) in most samples, but the chemical is still being detected in a minority of the samples despite extensive flushing.  Despite repeated calls to do so, officials appear to have yet to conduct any sampling of taps in residents’ homes.

This past week also featured a press conference by state and federal officials seeking to explain their response to the spill (a video of the entire press conference is available in four parts here; it’s worth watching).  [UPDATE 3/29/14:  As this link no longer works, here are updated links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of the press conference.]

Today’s Charleston Gazette features the latest in a long series of outstanding front-line reports by Ken Ward, Jr., and his colleagues, who have closely followed every twist and turn of both the spill and the government’s response to it.  Today’s article makes clear the extent to which federal officials were winging it in the hours and days after the spill was discovered as they rushed to set a “safe” level for MCHM in tap water.

In this post I’ll delve a little deeper into CDC’s rush to set the “safe” level and the many ways in which CDC inadequately accounted for major data gaps and uncertainties.  I’ll end by saying what I think CDC should have done instead.  Read More »

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A REACH milestone: First authorisation application passes the European Chemicals Agency

By / Published: February 6, 2014

Alissa Sasso is a Chemicals Policy Fellow.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted an update on ongoing activities under the European Union’s Regulation on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH).  The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has been quite busy in recent months.

The first application for authorisation (we’ll be using the English spelling of this term, as it is spelled in REACH) to use a Substance of Very High Concern (SVHC) cleared ECHA’s Committees for Risk Assessment (RAC) and Socio-Economic Analysis (SEAC) on January 3rd. This is a significant step in the implementation of REACH in the EU. The authorisation process is intended both to manage the risks posed by SVHCs and to drive the replacement of these hazardous substances with safer alternatives.  And, as the final step in the process laid out under REACH for managing chemical substances, its execution is central to the success of REACH as a whole. This first application for authorisation was therefore a kind of test-run for ECHA, as well as the chemical industry, and sets the stage for the submission and review of future authorisation applications.

As we run through the details of this particular authorisation application, keep in mind that ECHA received seven other applications for authorisation last year, and will see even more activity in the coming year.  Read More »

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Should we be holding our breath waiting for more information on risks of the chemical spilled in West Virginia?

By / Published: January 30, 2014

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

A hearing held yesterday by the West Virginia Legislature’s Joint Legislative Oversight Commission on State Water Resources created quite a stir, when a witness – West Virginia Environmental Quality Board vice-chairman Scott Simonton – said that the human carcinogen formaldehyde had been detected in several water samples drawn from a Charleston, WV, restaurant, and that people in the area affected by the January 9 spill could be expected to have inhaled the chemical, which he identified as a likely breakdown product of the spilled material, crude MCHM.  See stories in the Charleston Gazette and USA Today.

State officials and the West Virginia American Water company were quick to call Simonton’s claims “unfounded” and “misleading and irresponsible,” respectively.  The controversy led even the American Chemistry Council – which has laid low ever since the spill – to quickly issue its first statement related to the spill through its Formaldehyde Panel.

While experts are noting that data are insufficient to identify the spill as the source of any formaldehyde detected in the water samples, this new kerfuffle does point to yet another major data gap on crude MCHM.

The one part-per-million (1 ppm) “safe” level state and federal officials set was based on limited data from studies in which rats were exposed to crude or pure MCHM through oral ingestion.  Absolutely no data are available on the chemical with respect to exposure through inhalation.  Yet officials did not hesitate to tell residents the 1 ppm level would be safe not only for drinking the water, but also for bathing and showering.

(It’s curious that the Eastman Chemical Company apparently performed no inhalation studies on crude or pure MCHM, given that Eastman said its motivation for the studies it did perform was to understand risks to workers in industrial settings, and its safety data sheet for crude MCHM prominently notes the potential for health concerns for workers from inhalation.)

[UPDATE 1/31/14:  This morning, Eastman posted an updated version of its Q&A document on its website (linked to in the above paragraph), and took down the earlier version.  Here is the original version, the updated version dated 1/31/14, and a redline comparison of the two versions.]

Clearly the material that spilled is volatile – that’s why people can smell it.  Taking a hot shower in such water means that people would clearly be exposed via inhalation of the vapor; how much exposure would occur has not been ascertained.  But in the absence of any data as to toxicity of the chemical via inhalation, there is simply no scientific basis on which to say or imply that showering in water contaminated at 1 ppm level was OK.

Chemicals can be more or less toxic by inhalation than by ingestion, with one study finding inhalation to be the more toxic route for half of the chemicals examined and oral ingestion to be the more toxic route for the other half.  Benzene, for example, is estimated to be several hundred times more toxic by inhalation than by ingestion, while inhalation of chloroform is estimated to be about 25-fold lower in toxicity than it is by ingestion.

What such comparisons indicate is that extrapolating from data on oral toxicity to predict inhalation toxicity – which is effectively what government officials did in this case – is about as accurate as flipping a coin.

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Getting the data on chemicals is just the beginning

By Jennifer McPartland / Published: January 30, 2014

Jennifer McPartland, Ph.D., is a Health Scientist.

Common sense tells us it’s impossible to evaluate the safety of a chemical without any data. We’ve repeatedly highlighted the scarcity of information available on the safety of chemicals found all around us (see for example, here and here).  Much of this problem can be attributed to our broken chemicals law, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA).

But even for those chemicals that have been studied, sometimes for decades, like formaldehyde and phthalates, debate persists about what the scientific data tell us about their specific hazards and risks.  Obtaining data on a chemical is clearly a necessary step for its evaluation, but interpreting and drawing conclusions from the data are equally critical steps – and arguably even more complicated and controversial. 

How should we evaluate the quality of data in a study? How should we compare data from one study relative to other studies? How should we handle discordant results across similar studies?  How should we integrate data across different study designs (e.g., a human epidemiological study and a fruit fly study)? These are just a few examples of key questions that must be grappled with when determining the toxicity or risks of a chemical.  And they lie at the heart of the controversy and criticism surrounding chemical assessment programs such as EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS). 

Recently, a number of efforts have been made to systematize the process of study evaluation, with the goal of creating a standardized approach for unbiased and objective identification, evaluation, and integration of available data on a chemical.  These approaches go by the name of systematic review. 

Groups like the National Toxicology Program’s Office of Health Assessment and Translation (OHAT) and the UCSF-led Navigation Guide collaboration have been working to adapt systematic review methodologies from the medical field for application to environmental chemicals.  IRIS has also begun an effort to integrate systematic review into its human health assessments. 

Recently a paper in Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) by Krauth et al. systematically identified and reviewed tools currently in use to evaluate the quality of toxicology studies conducted in laboratory animals.  The authors found significant variability across the tools; this finding has significant consequences when reviewing the evidence for chemical hazard or risk, as we pointed out in our subsequent commentary (“A Valuable Contribution toward Adopting Systematic Review in Environmental Health,” Dec 2013). 

EDF applauds these and other efforts to adopt systematic review in the evaluation of chemical safety.  Further elaboration of EDF’s perspective on systematic review can be found here. 

 

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“Epic fail” in West Virginia chemical spill: Poor information, poor communications, poor decisions

By / Published: January 26, 2014

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

[UPDATE 1/28/14:  See updates at several places in this post regarding a 2011 Eastman safety data sheet on crude MCHM – which, though more recent than the 2005 version initally circulated, still does not reference the additional oral toxicity studies conducted by Eastman in the 1990s.]

Little more than two weeks after the January 9, 2014, spill of multiple chemicals into West Virginia’s Elk River, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the private and public sectors at all levels failed miserably with regard to protecting the public’s health.  There is plenty of blame to go around.

Our focus in the blogging we’ve done about this terrible incident has been and remains on the lack of reliable information available on the chemicals involved in the spill, the failure to promptly share what was available with the public, and the shaky science upon which decisions and public communications as to the critical safety questions were based.  In this post, I revisit several aspects of the initial and ongoing information gaps to add some additional perspective. 

I discuss in some detail below two major problems that I believe demand close examination in the Chemical Safety Board’s and others’ investigations into the causes and consequences of the spill:

  1. State and federal officials appear to have initially relied on Eastman Chemical Company’s incomplete and out-of-date Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) on “crude MCHM,” and as a result sowed confusion from the outset that has led to widespread public mistrust.
  2. Those same officials appear to have accepted without scrutiny the adequacy, accuracy and relevance of Eastman’s additional toxicity studies of MCHM, based only on summaries of those studies when they were finally provided by Eastman.

I end by briefly describing some of the implications of this tragic incident that need to be addressed going forward.

One caveat:  Because information on this incident has emerged in a piecemeal and haphazard manner, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of every detail provided in this post.  I have strived to the best of my ability to accurately describe the sequence and nature of events based on the available information.  Read More »

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Another new wrinkle on the “new” mystery chemical in West Virginia spill

By / Published: January 22, 2014

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

Well, this story is rapidly evolving!  Even since my last blog post this morning, new information has come to light as to the identity of the “new” chemical that was present in the leaking tank that led to contamination of the drinking water in Charleston, WV.

The Charleston Gazette has now reported that Freedom Industries, the owner of the leaking tank, has told government officials that the “new” chemical is actually a mixture of two chemical products, both of them made by The Dow Chemical Company.  One of those is in fact the “DOWANOLTM PPh Glycol Ether” I discussed in my last post.  The second is a closely related Dow product called “DOWANOLTM DiPPh Glycol Ether.”   (These links are to Dow’s Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) for the two products.)

The first product consists almost entirely (>99.5%) of propylene glycol phenyl ether (CAS no. 770-35-4).  The second is a mixture (see its MSDS), the main component of which (≥60%) is di-propylene glycol phenyl ether (CAS no. 51730-94-0) – a closely related chemical.

My earlier post indicated that a Dow contact had told me this morning it does not make a “stripped” version of its PPh product, and hence did not believe it was the supplier of the material to Freedom Industries.  As I noted in that post, use of the “stripped” designation to describe the “proprietary” chemical listed in the MSDS supplied yesterday by Freedom Industries for the “new” chemical had suggested the substance had somehow been further distilled.

But the latest article in the Charleston Gazette helps to clarify the situation.  It cites State officials indicating that Freedom Industries’ “PPH, stripped” is in fact a mixture of the two Dow products.

Interestingly, the MSDSs for the two Dow products reference a considerably larger amount of toxicity data than does Freedom Industries’ MSDS.  It appears, therefore, that there may be more data for officials to go on to assess potential risks associated with this “new” chemical.

Dow’s Technical Data Sheet and Product Safety Assessment for “DOWANOLTM PPh Glycol Ether” list several uses for the product, none of which appear to explain why Freedom Industries would have added the product to the tank of MCHM, which is used to wash coal.

There appear to be some disconnects between Dow’s knowledge of how its own chemicals are being used and by whom, and also between the intended uses of such chemicals and their actual use.  These disconnects point to flaws in our current chemical safety policies:  chemical manufacturers often don’t have a full picture of how their chemicals are actually used, and downstream users may not have a clear picture of which uses of a chemical are appropriate or not.

The number of lessons to be drawn from this West Virginia chemical spill appears to be growing by the day.

 

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