An array of U.S. scientists’ groups are calling on federal regulators to take a more comprehensive approach to evaluating whether chemicals pose health hazards.
As the The Washington Post reports, the plea was made by organizations representing some 40,000 American scientists in an open letter to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration that was published in the journal Science. The scientists are urging regulators to draw on a broad range of scientific disciplines to evaluate the subtle impact a chemical might have on the human body, a departure from the current approach of simply judging whether a substance is toxic.
“Although chemical testing and risk assessment have long been the domain of toxicologists, it is clear that the development of improved testing guidelines and better methods of assessing risks posed by common chemicals to which all Americans are exposed requires the expertise of a broad range of scientific and clinical disciplines,” the letter stated.
A prime example of what the scientists are concerned about is the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, a common component of plastics often used in the lining of food cans and in kitchen tools and appliances. While it is not officially considered toxic in the U.S. — which is to say, it doesn’t kill humans at the levels in which it is used — BPA has been demonstrated to harm laboratory animals and causes changes in cellular activity.
What this might mean to Americans, 90 percent of whom have BPA in their urine, is not entirely clear, although the federal government recently commissioned studies to examine the impact.
Patricia Hunt, a molecular biologist at Washington State University who participated in the writing of the open letter, told the Post that the scientists’ overall aim is to broaden the way chemicals are assessed. “We’re talking about picking the best geneticists, endocrinologists, reproductive biologists to consider new ways of testing these chemicals for safety. The old toxicology paradigm doesn’t work anymore.”
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So you don’t like what the FDA and others report, so you want to change the rules on how we determine toxicity….”the old paradigm does not work”. Who will set the rules…NGO’s, von Saal, or mommy blogs? The best nugget of information I ever heard, was we have to remember that our bodies are chemical processing machines….end of story….there is no such thing as natural because everything is either an element or a compound and our bodies are very good at processing these chemicals.