Tag Archive for: Screening

EPA Draft (IRIS) Ammonia Assessment Available for Public Comment

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Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS):

Today, EPA released for a 60-day public comment period the draft IRIS assessment for ammonia.   Excerpts from the agency’s press release are provided below, and a copy of the draft assessment is avaialble here. 

IRIS is a human health assessment program that evaluates information on health effects that may result from exposure to environmental contaminants. Through the IRIS Program, EPA attempts to provide the highest quality science-based human health assessments to support the Agency’s regulatory activities.  The IRIS database is web-accessible and contains information on more than 550 chemical substances.  Readers familiar with IRIS will recall the various criticisms of the agency’s evaluation process, which EPA has been attempting to address, as described in further detail here.  General background information on IRIS is available here.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 1, 2012 

EPA Draft Ammonia Assessment Available for Public Comment

Draft assessment continues agency’s responsiveness to NAS recommendations 

WASHINGTON – The U.S Environmental Protection Agency today announced the release of its draft Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) health assessment for ammonia. The draft assessment will be available for public comment for 60 days and will be sent for independent expert peer review.

Ammonia is used in agricultural fertilizers, the manufacture of pharmaceuticals and explosives, water purification, household cleaners, as a refrigerant, and in many industries. Scientific studies show that ammonia can affect the respiratory system. The draft assessment includes an estimate of the amount of ammonia a person can inhale daily throughout a lifetime that is not likely to cause harmful health effects, which is less stringent than the current value for ammonia on IRIS.

 The draft IRIS assessment for ammonia represents major progress for EPA in implementing the April 2011 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommendations for improving IRIS assessments. The draft assessment uses a new streamlined document structure that is more transparent and clear; includes a template for describing the literature search approach; identifies the strengths and weaknesses of analyzed studies; and describes how EPA applied their guidance, methods, and criteria in developing the assessment.

 When the assessment is final it will be posted to the IRIS database. IRIS is a publicly available online database that provides high quality science-based human health assessments used to inform the agency’s decisions on protecting public health and the environment.

  The IRIS database contains crucial information on more than 550 chemical substances and their impacts on human health. Governments and private entities use data from IRIS in conjunction with exposure information to help characterize the public health risks of chemical substances. These characterizations are then considered in risk management decisions to protect public health. 

EPA Budget Would Increase Spending on Chemical Assessment and Control

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EPA Budget/Chemical Control

According to an EPA press release, today the Obama Administration proposed a FY 2013 budget of $8.344 billion for the agency. The budget is $105 million below the EPA’s enacted level for FY 2012, but it increases spending by $11 million, or approximately 16%, to “protect … Americans from harmful chemicals.”  This increase for chemical assessment and control signals a clear intention to promote regulatory TSCA reform and related efforts in the absence of legislative reform. 

The press release states – “EPA is proposing $68 million, an increase of $11 million from FY 2012, to reduce chemical risks, increase the pace of chemical hazard assessments, and provide the public with greater access to toxic chemical information. Funding will sustain the agency’s successes in managing the potential risks of new chemicals coming into the market and accelerating the progress to help ensure the safety of chemicals on the market that have not been tested for adverse human health and environmental impacts.”

A complete copy of the agency’s budget proposal is available here.

EPA Awards Contracts to U.S. Companies to Screen Chemicals for Human Health Impacts

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Chemical Screening:

EPA continues in its laudable quest to screen thousands of chemicals.  See press release below.

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EPA Awards Contracts to U.S. Companies to Screen Chemicals for Human Health Impacts

WASHINGTON— The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ToxCast chemical screening program has awarded contracts to four United States-based companies to test up to 10,000 chemicals for potential toxicity to people and the environment. ToxCast is designed to determine how chemical exposures affect human health.  When fully implemented, ToxCast will be able to screen thousands of chemicals in fast, cost-effective tests.

The four companies will initially screen up to 1,000 chemicals currently in the ToxCast program using innovative technologies such as stem cell toxicity tests. These new technologies can quickly determine the potential for a chemical to cause harm to the human body.  Screening results from the new technologies will be combined with data already being generated by the other 500 rapid chemical tests used by EPA’s ToxCast program.

The chemicals ToxCast is now screening are found in industrial and consumer products, food additives and drugs. ToxCast’s goal is to reduce EPA’s reliance on slow and expensive animal toxicity tests, enabling the agency to screen chemicals more quickly and to predict and identify potential risks to Americans.

EPA scientific studies using ToxCast have already been published in peer-reviewed science journals, and demonstrate the ability of ToxCast to predict a chemical’s potential to cause several diseases.

The four companies awarded the contracts have offices throughout the country and plan to hire new scientific staff to help with the project. The companies are Vala Sciences, Cee Tox, CellzDirect and BioReliance.  Two of the companies, Vala Sciences and BioReliance are small businesses based in San Diego, Calif. and Kalamazoo, Mich. All four companies plan to hire new employees as a result of these contracts.

More information on ToxCast:  http://epa.gov/ncct/toxcast/

More information on ToxCast database:  http://actor.epa.gov/actor/faces/ToxCastDB/Home.jsp

 

EPA's Chemical Screening Gets a Big Boost – From a Robot!

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Chemical Screening:

On March 10, 2011, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially launched a robust new tool for screening chemicals for health and environmental hazards.  It’s a robot called the Tox21 Robotic Testing System, or “ToRTS” for readers preferring acronyms.  Robots have been used previously for chemical testing, but ToRTs appears to be one of the bigger systems.  EPA says it will use the robot to test 10,000 different chemicals for potential toxicity.  A video of the robot is available here.

ToRTS is located at the National Institutes for Health (NIH) Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) in Rockville, MD.  It is part of the Tox21 project, which merges existing agency resources (research, funding, and testing tools) to develop ways to more effectively predict how chemicals will affect human health and the environment. The ToRTS system marks the beginning of a new phase of the Tox21 collaboration, which aims to working to protect human health by improving how chemicals are tested in the United States.

Tox21 was established in 2008 between the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences National Toxicology Program (NTP), the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), and the EPA.  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) joined in 2010.  More information on Tox21 is available here.