The following story illustrates the enormous pressure EPA scientists are under to approve new chemicals for sale, so much so that between 2016 and 2020 NONE of the 3,835  new chemicals were stopped from being sold despite concerns that at least some were harmful. It’s despicable and abhorrent, yet even without those shady dealings, the agency is not set up to protect health and prevent harm. It is set up to permit harm–to allow a limited amount with permits. We don’t need that. We need to stop harm. We must reassert our authority over companies who wish to profit from poisons.

When industry wants a chemical safety assessment done yesterday, EPA managers classify it as “hair on fire.”

By Sharon Lerner, published by The Intercept on August 4, 2021.

Whistleblowers speak out about the Environmental Protection Agency’s practice of routinely approving dangerous chemicals.

William Irwin’s supervisors had a simple request. They just wanted him, a scientist who assesses the safety of chemicals at the Environmental Protection Agency, to sign off on a report that would give a chemical the agency’s OK to enter the market. It would have been easy for him to affix his signature to the document, which would have allowed him to finally get the project he had worked on for months off his desk.

The only problem? The science didn’t show that the chemical was safe.

Irwin, who has a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology and three board certifications in toxicology and has worked at the EPA for 12 years, was asked to greenlight the chemical in May 2020. But he had already found reason to be concerned about the chemical’s effects on developing fetuses. Because the manufacturer hadn’t submitted any health studies, he had found an analog — a structurally similar chemical to help predict its effects. That compound was bisphenol A, or BPA, an additive to plastics that is well known to cause reproductive problems as well as immune and neurological effects. Irwin had noted his concerns and a lack of studies that could allay them. His work on the assessment, a document that determines if and how a chemical is allowed to be used, also pointed out that workers faced risks from both breathing and touching the chemicals.

Hair on Fire

But because the chemical fell into a category known within his division as “hair-on-fire” cases, high-priority situations in which manufacturers object to scientists’ findings that their chemicals pose hazards, the conclusions Irwin reached in the assessment were scrutinized and ultimately changed. After he refused to sign off on the altered findings, a higher-ranked employee in the division took over the case and used a different — and, according to Irwin, scientifically inappropriate — approach that allowed the agency to avoid calculating the developmental risks posed by the chemical. On June 15, 2020, the agency posted the final risk assessment of the chemical, which minimized risks to the general population and didn’t calculate the risks to workers that Irwin had highlighted…

See the rest of the  Intercept article HERE.

Photo credit: “Poison” by ˙Cаvin 〄 is licensed under CC BY 2.0