Thursday, August 27, 2009

Former EPA Official Defends Dioxin Assessment

By Michelle Williams  

William H. Farland

Former EPA deputy assistant administrator for science

The Government Accountability Office has expressed concern that the Environmental Protection Agency's Integrated Risk Information System database might become obsolete because the agency hasn't been able to complete timely and credible chemical assessments. EPA uses the database to determine how to best regulate chemicals. According to GAO, some of the chemicals that have been in the assessment process the longest may pose major health risks.

NationalJournal.com recently spoke with former EPA official William Farland about the process -- and about dioxin, a dangerous chemical that's been in the assessment process for almost two decades. Farland, now on the faculty of Colorado State University, spent 27 years with the EPA, serving as deputy assistant administrator for science throughout the Bush administration, and earlier as director of the National Center for Environmental Assessment.

NJ: GAO put EPA's chemical assessment process on its high-risk list along with modernizing the financial regulatory system. Is EPA's process as big a deal as the financial crisis?

Farland: Well, I think the GAO was looking at some important issues, and I think this question of environmental public health is an important issue. And this is one that has been raised on a number of occasions -- that there is a need to streamline some of the processes, to increase the transparency of assessment work and to really look hard at how that information feeds into timely decisions. I don't think it's a bad thing for this to be put on the table for EPA to look at and continue to work at. It is an important issue for us, and it's something that the public is concerned about. So from that standpoint, it is consistent with what GAO tries to do with this kind of a list.

NJ: The assessment for dioxin has taken almost two decades. Why?

Farland: Well, as you probably know, I was very heavily involved with the dioxin assessment. We originally started the current version of the assessment in 1988. And it has gone through a number of iterations and reviews. In each case, the reviews have suggested changes or suggested additional information that might be useful. Other federal agencies that were interested in the topic, and the industries that were interested in the topic, continued to push for incorporating information.

I think the good news about a story like that is we have learned a tremendous amount about how dioxin works and the risks of exposure, and being able to put them in perspective. And frankly, not all of the decisions that could have been made have been put on hold. Many of the decisions were being made as the assessment was going through the process. So simply to provide a perspective that says nothing has happened over that 18-year period is not correct.

NJ: GAO said that Dioxin has been banned in other countries.

Farland: Well, the issue of banning dioxin is a very interesting one, because dioxin is a substance that is very persistent in the environment. So that means it lasts for decades in the environment. It comes from natural and man-made sources. And it has found its way into the food supply because it is a fat-loving chemical that moves up through the food chain with fats, so that if cows, for instance, are ingesting some lightly contaminated soils they'll actually concentrate dioxin in their fats, and of course that will be passed on in the milk or in the fats in the meat. So the point there is that even though some countries have taken steps to ban compounds like dioxins, the ability to actually ban them -- meaning to completely stop exposure -- is just not possible.

So taking that on as a strategy is not a good strategy from my perspective because it's already out there in the environment. And while there were some known sources of dioxins that were controllable and, in fact, have been controlled -- some of the dioxin that's produced, or dioxin-related chemicals that are produced through incomplete combustion, are being controlled by the pollution-control devices that are going on incinerators these days. A number of the chemical sources of dioxins in herbicides have been recognized and controlled with process changes. ...

And so what we have seen is that the levels of dioxins in people have gone down very substantially since the 1970s. It doesn't mean that we don't all have some dioxin in our bodies, and those of us like myself who are little bit older are likely to have more than the younger generation. That's probably a good thing; I mean, it demonstrates that we really are dealing with some of those recognized problems. But trying to essentially ban dioxin doesn't make a lot of sense.

NJ: So is the public at risk because these assessments are taking a while?

Farland: We have tried to put in perspective who might be at risk. And while very often the interested public might want to protect every individual, the regulatory structure is not set up to protect every individual. So there's a real difference in saying, is the public at risk from exposure to some of these chemicals -- because we have to define who that public is and whether we're going to protect the longest tails of the exposure curves, or whether or not we're going to be satisfied with a clear protection of 90 to 95 percent of the population or maybe even more and then still being uncertain about how well we're protecting the others and making recommendations on how they might reduce their exposure.

NJ: Should the assessments really take that long?

Farland: Well, in some cases, there will always be new science that will be emerging. And so the question of how long an assessment takes or when is it finished is a little hard to answer. Because dioxin is such a powerful regulator of biology, it's used by many investigators as a scientific tool in the laboratory. And so there have been thousands of papers that have been published on dioxin -- not necessarily designed to address public health risks, but really looking at the way that dioxin affects biological systems as a model toxic compound to understand how the system works. So the likelihood that we would essentially declare we're finished is pretty slim. There always will be emerging information.

In a related video, NationalJournal.com's Michelle Williams asks whether she and others should be worried about EPA's backlog of chemical assessments.