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« 12th Annual Heinz Women's Health and the Environment Conference | Main | Gulf War Illness: As clear as the nose on your face »
EPA widens rift with science advisers
The stress crack between Environmental Protection Agency and its outside science advisers just got a lot deeper. In fact, these days it looks a lot like a thousand-foot crevasse.
The proximate cause: perchlorate, a rocket fuel component, potent thyroid toxin and ubiquitous water and soil pollutant, thanks largely to improper storage at military and space installations over the past four decades. Federal government and academic scientists have detected perchlorate in the urine of every American tested, public water supplies in at least 26 states, many agricultural products and even breast milk. Based on data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Working Group has estimated that as many as 44 million women who are pregnant, thyroid deficient or have low iodine levels are at heightened risk of exposure to the chemical.
Because perchlorate disrupts the production of thyroid hormones essential to normal brain development and is especially dangerous to fetuses and newborn babies, EPA's 30-member Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee has spent two and a half years pressing the agency to crack down on perchlorate pollution in drinking water.
EPA managers said nothing until Oct. 3, when they made a surprise announcement: the chemical posed no threat to most Americans, they declared, so EPA did not need to regulate it. The decision by EPA's front office, set to become final sometime next month, represented a major victory for the Pentagon and its clients -- defense and aerospace contractors responsible for perchlorate spills and reluctant to pay clean-up costs that could mount into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Faced with what looked like a done deal, the children's health committee took the extraordinary step of posting a letter of protest on the EPA website.
The letter, signed by committee chair Melanie A. Marty, a senior career EPA official based in Oakland, warned that "the life-long consequences of impaired brain development are sufficient to merit" a federal safety standard for perchlorate pollution. Doing so, the letter said, "would mandate testing of public water supplies, and allow discovery of hot spots of contamination.
"This decision," the letter said, "does not recognize the science which supports the exquisite sensitivity of the developing brain to even small drops in thyroid hormone levels and the fact that neonates [newborn infants] have much diminished stores of thyroid hormone relative to adults." At stake, the letter said, were the fates of "millions of pregnant women and their fetuses, and lactating women and infants across the country."
EPA's 44-member Science Advisory Board [SAB] also filed a letter of protest, objecting to the agency's haste and lack of consultation with its science advisers. The letter, signed by board chair Deborah Swackhamer, a University of Minnesota environmental chemist, and Joan Rose, a Michigan State University microbiologist who chairs the science board's Drinking Water Committee, said that, "Given perchlorate's wide occurrence and well-documented toxicity to humans, the SAB strongly believes there must be a compelling basis to support a determination not to regulate perchlorate as a national drinking water contaminant."
The "compelling basis" standard, the letter implied, had not been met.
In an interview with EWG, Swackhamer says she and her colleagues on the science board did not understand why agency managers "seemed to be rushing to make a ruling on perchlorate.
"Whenever anything is contentious, it's appropriate to get more science input rather than less," Rose agreed. "Perchlorate is an issue in which there is industry and government involvement and strong opinions in the scientific community. We felt that all the science should be there, all the peer reviews should be out there, and there should be a lot of conversation before the determination moved forward."
Both panels criticized EPA's reliance on a computer model that is still undergoing peer review -- validation by disinterested specialists in the field of risk assessment. The children's health panel called the model's use "unorthodox" and "inappropriate." The model was devised by the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT), a controversial chemical industry-created entity suspected of low-balling risk assessments for other environmental pollutants.
The SAB has asked EPA managers to give it time to formulate a considered response, but the agency has so far refused, signaling it will soon close the books on the issue. After the Jan. 20 Presidential inauguration, the Obama administration can take a fresh look at perchlorate pollution. But first, EPA's front office is due for a major scrub.
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As someone who only drinks tap water because of the waste caused by bottled water, I get really ticked everytime I hear about the EPA playing fast and loose with our water supply. When I'm at home it's filtered, but we also drink from fountains. Plus, I kind of doubt that my fridge filters out perchlorate. Is there a public comment space at the EPA about this? AAAGGGHHHH< me, angry
Maxine - My family's been off bottled water for a while too. Even though we recycle, we know that not all plastic makes it through the recycling process. And we're also doing our best to avoid BPA, which is in many plastic bottled water bottles.
The EPA has set a deadline of Nov. 28 for comments on its proposal NOT to regulate perchlorate in drinking water.
The EPA docket number is EPA-HQ-OW-2008-0692.
For instructions on how to comment, go to this web page:
http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=0900006480762e21
You can see all the comments filed so far at this page: http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=0900006480762e21
Thanks for your interest in this important matter.
Elaine Shannon