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

Chemical industry representatives and their consultants often argue that they should be on panels reviewing government assessments of their chemicals because “they know their chemicals best.”  Well, the mother of a young man accused of a crime may well know her son better than anyone – but that doesn’t mean we should seat mom on the jury.

I made that comment as part of my public comments delivered at this week’s meeting of a new committee formed by EPA’s Science Advisory Board, which has a charge of peer reviewing chemical assessments developed by EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) program.  (If you’re a regular reader of this blog and you feel like you’re having a déjà vu, yes, this is yet another panel set up to oversee or assess IRIS; see this earlier post.)  I felt compelled to make that comment in part because in the preceding day and a half of the meeting, well over half of the comments offered by the 26-member committee came from just four of those members, all of them industry consultants.

It turns out that the assigned members of the committee, named the Chemical Assessment Advisory Committee, or CAAC (I recommend just saying C-A-A-C, rather than trying to pronounce the acronym), have not yet been screened for potential conflicts of interest (COI) or lack of impartiality.  This step won’t happen until later, when a subset of committee members are tapped to serve on a review panel for a specific IRIS assessment.  But this process made for an awkward meeting, which was supposed to be limited to a “fact-finding” briefing by the IRIS program, but constantly veered into territory verging on providing advice to EPA (again dominated by the industry consultants).  Federal law requires that any committee offering such advice be free of conflicts of interest in all but the most exceptional of circumstances.

In my comments, I raised concerns about the high potential for conflicts of interest to arise, given the composition of the committee.  I also reiterated the points I have made to other similar panels that getting the science right in IRIS needs to be balanced with ensuring that IRIS assessments are completed in a timely manner — because there are real-world adverse public health consequences to the delays that have plagued the IRIS program.

Read on for my full comments. Read More »