EDF Health

EPA’s announced changes to new chemicals review process put industry demands for ready market access above public health protection

By / Published: August 7, 2017

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

Last year’s Lautenberg Act, which overhauled the badly broken Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), made fundamental changes intended to improve EPA’s review of new chemicals prior to their commercialization, by requiring more scrutiny of those chemicals to better ensure they are safe.  Until recently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was on track in implementing the new requirements in a health-protective manner.  With the addition of more staff, EPA was also steadily reducing the temporary backlog in new chemical reviews that had developed – a result of the fact that the law’s new requirements took effect immediately upon passage.

In recent months, however, agency staff have faced relentless pressure from the chemical industry – and internally from new industry-friendly senior management – not only to speed up reviews, but to return the program to its pre-Lautenberg practices.  There were growing signs that EPA was considering changes that would circumvent the law’s requirements in the name of increasing program “throughput.”   The agency’s press release today makes clear that this is now happening.   Read More »

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

Fourteen communities set goal of replacing more than 240,000 lead pipes and 19 take important steps forward

By Tom Neltner, Senior Director, Safer Chemicals Initiative / Published: August 7, 2017

Tom Neltner, J.D., Chemicals Policy Director and Sam Lovell, Project Specialist

An estimated 6 to 10 million homes in the US still get their water from aging lead service lines (LSLs) – the lead pipes connecting the water main under the street to homes and other buildings. As the primary source of lead in drinking water, eliminating LSLs is essential to protecting public health and responding to community concerns.

Communities across the country are taking on the challenges posed by LSLs. EDF considers it important to recognize those leaders who are taking action. In a past blog, we highlighted the work of the Lead Service Line Replacement Collaborative and its 25 members, including EDF, in developing a toolkit to help communities accelerate replacement of LSLs. Additionally, the American Water Works Association – the main organization for drinking water professionals – deserves recognition for its declaration that LSLs need to be eliminated.

Through our review of publicly available information, EDF identified:

  • 14 communities that have publicly set a goal of eliminating LSLs in their jurisdiction – which collectively represents more than 240,000 LSLs. Setting a goal of full replacement is a critical step in the process—while clearly much work remains to ensure that LSLs are safely replaced.
  • 19 other communities that are taking important steps to replace LSLs, but may not yet be ready or willing to set a public goal of full replacement.

Read More »

Posted in Drinking water, Lead / Tagged , | Authors: / Comments are closed

Dr. Herbert Needleman, in memoriam

By / Published: July 31, 2017

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

At a time when public health and the environment, independent science and even basic truths are under sustained assault, we need more than ever to recognize scientists who persevered even in the face of concerted attacks by ideological and industry interests to discredit them and divert attention from the implications of their work.

Dr. Herbert Needleman, who passed away this month at the age of 89, was a shining example.   Read More »

Posted in Health policy, Health science, Lead / Tagged | Comments are closed

Podcast: You Make Me Sick! The mysteries of the epigenome

By / Published: July 27, 2017

Each type of cell in our body expresses our genes differently based on many things including what they are (skin or kidney cells) and how old we are (newborn or 65 years old). These differences are controlled by our epigenome – the set of molecular marks along our DNA that dictate which and when genes turn on and off. Turns out our environment can influence and alter these marks!

For this episode we talked to Dr. Dana Dolinoy of the University of Michigan about her work on the epigenome, including how twin mom mice can birth very different looking newborns—either yellow and obese or brown and normal weight—depending on what they ate during pregnancy.

Want more? Subscribe to us on iTunes or Google Play, or check out our SoundCloud to listen via desktop!

Posted in Emerging science, Health science / Tagged | Comments are closed

EPA toxics nominee has been paid by dozens of companies to work on dozens of chemicals

By / Published: July 24, 2017

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

[My colleagues Dr. Jennifer McPartland, Lindsay McCormick, Jon Choi and Ryan O’Connell assisted in the research described in this post.]

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

I blogged earlier about EDF’s strong concerns with Michael Dourson’s nomination to head the EPA office charged with implementing the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).  Among these concerns are his extensive, longstanding financial ties to the chemical industry – an industry that, if he is confirmed, he will be in charge of regulating.  And not only does Dourson have these financial ties to the industry, he has made a career of helping industry play down concerns about chemicals.

A case in point is described in an article published just last week in The Intercept about his work in the early 2000s in West Virginia on behalf of DuPont and its still ongoing woes over water contamination involving the “Teflon” chemical PFOA.

Dourson’s paid work for industry goes back over two decades, starting just after he left EPA in 1994, and it includes work he did for the tobacco industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  As I noted in my last post, his work for the chemical industry included developing a website, “kidschemicalsafety.org” (now defunct, but archived here), that consistently downplayed concerns about chemicals.

To illustrate the extent of his more recent conflicts, we examined the funding sources, where disclosed, for the several dozen papers he authored or co-authored that are listed in PubMed as published between 2005 and 2017.  Some of what we found is reported in this post; there will be more to come on the substance of these papers.   Read More »

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

A message to our RSS subscribers only:

By EDF Blogs / Published: July 18, 2017

A message to our RSS subscribers:


We are making a change to how our blog subscriptions are managed. Please update your RSS feed URL to: https://blogs.edf.org/health/feed/ by Thursday, July 27th to ensure you don’t miss a blog.

 

Posted in General interest / Comments are closed