EDF Health

The beat goes on with 13 new additions to the Candidate List under REACH

By Allison Tracy / Published: June 18, 2012

Allison Tracy is a Chemicals Policy Fellow. Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist.

The number of chemicals identified as “substances of very high concern” (SVHCs) in the European Union continues to grow.  With today’s addition of 13 new chemicals, there are now 84 entries (representing 92 Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) registration numbers) on REACH’s Candidate List for Substances of Very High Concern for Authorisation.

The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) added the 13 chemicals based on each chemical’s classification as Carcinogenic, Mutagenic, or Toxic for Reproduction (CMR).  [UPDATE:  Of the new batch, two are among the 83 TSCA workplan chemicals recently identified by EPA as priorities for risk assessment, and five were reported as being in U.S. commerce in 2006.  With the new addition, a total of 48 of the 92 CAS numbers on the Candidate List were reported as in commerce in the U.S. in 2006.  Additionally, 20 of the 92 CAS numbers on the Candidate List are included among the TSCA workplan chemicals.] Read More »

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Joe Chemical — Ring a bell?

By / Published: June 13, 2012

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

I’ve blogged earlier about the chemical industry’s campaign of deception exposed by the Chicago Tribune last month in a jaw-dropping series titled “Playing with Fire.”  That in-depth series ran into the tens of thousands of words and included many extras such as video interviews.

EDF and the Safer Chemicals Healthy Families coalition decided it should be boiled down to its essence.  That’s why we produced this ad, which is running full page today in Politico:

[click to enlarge]

For more on this, check out www.saferchemicals.org/JoeChemical.

 

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Labor and public health advocates to the chemical industry: Stop bullying federal scientists!

By / Published: May 21, 2012

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

After my long post this morning, I’ll keep this one brief:  The United Steelworkers, one of the nation’s top occupational physicians and EDF, represented by Earthjustice, have filed a motion to intervene in D.C. District Court, seeking to help defend the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ listing of styrene as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.”  The motion is in response to a chemical industry lawsuit attempting to force the agency’s National Toxicology Program to withdraw the styrene warning, which was published in the 12th edition of the Congressionally mandated Report on Carcinogens.

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No shame: ACC plunges to new low in fighting your right to know

By / Published: May 21, 2012

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

This post is longer than usual and starts with a rather esoteric topic, but I urge you to read it through, as it vividly shows there is no limit to the lengths to which the American Chemistry Council (ACC) will go to squirm out of a regulatory requirement, even if it means violating rules by which ACC had agreed to abide.

But that’s far from the worst of it.  Going farther than even I could imagine when I blogged earlier about its tactics, ACC is sparing no effort to deny your right to know about the health impacts of chemicals, by mustering every argument it can invent – however far-fetched – to  keep health and safety studies from being shared with the public.

ACC insists that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should hassle the European Union (EU) instead of its members for the health and safety data ACC promised to provide – despite the fact that the chemical industry itself has thrown up major roadblocks to such sharing.  And reaching a new low in tortured logic, ACC argues that, should EPA succeed in getting its hands on the health and safety data submitted to the EU, EPA can and should deny the public access to those data – despite the fact that the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) clearly prohibits EPA from withholding such information.  Read More »

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A ray of sunlight up ahead: ECHA to release more information through REACH dossiers

By Allison Tracy / Published: April 26, 2012

Allison Tracy is a Chemicals Policy Fellow.

After many months of increasing the quantity but not the quality of dossiers available to the public for chemicals registered under REACH, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has recently announced two improvements.  (REACH is the European Union’s regulation for the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals.)  According to the agency, the public will soon have access to more data from the dossiers that were submitted by companies as part of the first wave of REACH’s Registration process.

In a press release issued a couple of weeks ago, ECHA announced that it will publish information from registered chemicals’ Safety Data Sheets – including the identity of the registrant and whether the chemical was found to be Persistent, Bioaccumulative and Toxic (PBT).  And last week, ECHA said it will also publish (by June) the aggregate production volume ranges (called “tonnage bands”) for chemicals registered under REACH.  These decisions will improve ECHA’s record on disclosure and transparency by increasing the amount of both hazard and exposure data available to the public on chemicals in use.  Read More »

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Estimating chemical risk: Breadth (prevalence) may be just as important as depth (magnitude of effect)

By Jennifer McPartland / Published: April 23, 2012

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

Earlier this month Dr. David Bellinger at Boston Children’s Hospital published a very interesting paper in Environmental Health Perspectives offering a new way to consider the importance of various risk factors for child neurodevelopment—such as pre-existing medical conditions, poor nutritional status or harmful chemical exposures—at the population level.  “A Strategy for Comparing the Contributions of Environmental Chemicals and Other Risk Factors to Neurodevelopment of Children” argues that, in evaluating the contribution of a risk factor to a health outcome, it is critical to consider not only the magnitude of its effect on the health outcome, but also the prevalence of that risk factor in the population.

Dr. Bellinger argues: “Although a factor associated with a large impact would be a significant burden to a patient, it might not be a major contributor to the population if it occurs rarely.  Conversely, a factor associated with a modest but frequently occurring impact could contribute significantly to population burden.”  The former “disease-oriented” approach has generally been used to estimate the burden of harmful chemical exposures to population health, rather than the latter “population-oriented” approach.  Relying solely on the former approach, he contends, may result in an underestimation of the impact of a chemical exposure or other risk factor on public health.  Read More »

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