Chemical Screening By EPA Questioned

By Sue Goetinck Ambrose

DALLAS – Scientists say the Bush administration is developing a chemical testing program that favors the chemical industry when it comes to judging whether certain substances in the environment might cause cancer, infertility, or harm to babies in the womb.

What’s billed as one of the most comprehensive screening programs ever to check whether chemicals can disrupt human hormones, scientists say, may instead prove to be a misleading $76 million waste. Federal officials defend the program, which aims to identify “endocrine disruptors.” They say that no tests can cover everything, and that the process of setting up the program has been open and transparent.

The critics agree that much is known about the tests – and, they say, the publicly available information is precisely what causes their concern. They say the Environmental Protection Agency has:

* Allowed lab tests, using rodents, that are so badly designed, they’re almost certain to miss harmful chemicals. For instance, the EPA favors using a breed of rat that is relatively insensitive to several known hormone-disrupting chemicals. And the EPA plans to allow those rats to be fed chow that could mask the effect of some chemicals.

* Failed to guarantee that tests will be conducted on prenatal exposure to chemicals. Last week, a group of 200 scientists signed a declaration warning that exposure to chemicals in the womb may make babies more likely to develop diabetes, obesity, attention deficit disorder and infertility. The group urged action from governments around the world.

* Demanded the wrong dosage range, also raising the odds that harmful effects will be missed.

* Said it might allow chemical companies to tailor certain aspects of the tests.

“If your objective is not to find anything, that’s the perfect way to do it,” said Fred vom Saal, a developmental biologist at the University of Missouri.

The National Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, says the EPA is bending to special interests. “There certainly is industry influence,” said Dr. Sarah Janssen, a reproductive biologist with the group in San Francisco. “What really is driving [the decisions] is the industry focus of the administration. That’s why the EPA listens to them.”

EPA officials respond that they have developed the program – called the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program – in an open manner to protect it from special interests. “You’re always going to find people that think their issue is not given appropriate attention,” said EPA biologist James Kariya, a coordinator of the screening program. “But if anything, this program has been very transparent, very open.”

EPA officials say the agency has thoroughly and openly considered the test animal, test dose and animal chow issues. As for allowing the chemical industry to make decisions on how to test chemicals, the EPA said it is not worried about foul play.

“There are dishonest people, but that’s not the experience with the community that we’ve been working with,” Kariya said.

The EPA plans to begin chemical screening in 2008.

Scientists began to suspect that manmade chemicals could interfere with hormones in the 1960s. Since then, scientists have documented wildlife abnormalities in areas contaminated with industrial chemicals.

For example, in a Florida lake contaminated with pesticides, male alligators produced female levels of testosterone, made abnormal sperm and had stunted sex organs. In ponds across the Midwest, male frogs are making eggs. Lab studies point to the herbicide atrazine as the culprit. In seagull eggs exposed to the pesticide DDT, male chicks hatched with sex organs that were part female.

In all these cases, manmade chemicals interfered with the creatures’ sex hormones, blurring the line between male and female.

Lab studies have also established that hormone-disrupting chemicals can cause abnormalities in mammals, namely rats and mice. And some studies have made correlations – but not cause-and-effect links – between hormone-disrupting chemicals and human deformities. As one example, reproductive organ abnormalities in baby boys track with levels of known hormone-disrupting chemicals in their mothers, according to 2005 research led by a scientist at the University of Rochester in New York.

Based on these multiple lines of evidence, researchers suspect long-term effects on people – such as lower sperm counts, abnormal genitals, infertility and cancer.

But because it’s impractical – not to mention unethical – to do experiments on people, human effects are hard to assess.

As part of the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, Congress ordered the EPA to come up with an animal-screening program.

(c) 2007 Sunday Gazette – Mail; Charleston, W.V.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.