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NRDC and coalition protest removal of prominent public health expert from EPA expert panel reviewing PBDE's
March 17, 2008
Posted by Jennifer Sass in Health and the Environment
Today, NRDC and a coalition of public interest science organizations sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) protesting the removal of Dr. Deborah Rice as Chair of the scientific panel reviewing safe exposure limits for the toxic brominated flame retardants.
The coalition included the Environmental Working Group (EWG) that had originally documented and publicized this story, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Union of Concerned Scientists, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and the Executive Vice President of the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 280 that represents EPA professional staff.
Dr. Rice was an external peer reviewer of the EPA human health assessment for the polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), a toxic class of chemicals that includes deca-BDE.
Today, Rep. John D. Dingell (D-MI), the Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Bart Stupak (D-MI), the Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee requested that EPA provide all its records relating to Rice's dismissal.
“The public depends on EPA peer review panels to help ensure the products they use every day are safe,” Dingell said in the media release. “The EPA seems to have a backwards way of composing these panels. EPA is disallowing scientists who have valid public health concerns about products, while encouraging participation by so-called experts who are paid by the chemical industry.”
“Dr. Rice’s dismissal from an EPA external peer review board at industry's request raises serious concerns about EPA’s scientific integrity,” Stupak said in the same media release. “External peer review boards are a valuable tool, but only if they are free from conflicts of interest. Thorough reviews by unbiased outside experts are critical to protecting the public’s health before new chemicals are placed on the market.”
PBDEs are brominated organic compounds. Global production of these chemicals is approximately 40,000 tons per year for use as fire retardants in plastics and textiles. These chemicals are environmentally persistent and are known to bioaccumulate. The EPA website says "environmental monitoring programs in Europe, Asia, North America, and the Arctic have found traces of several PBDEs in human breast milk, fish, aquatic birds, and elsewhere in the environment."
The effects of greatest concern to date are endocrine disruption effects and adverse effects on neurological development from early life exposures. Deca-BDE has been banned in Washington State and Maine.
As revealed and documented in the report by EWG, at the time Dr. Rice was removed from the expert review she had already completed her service to the EPA and had already submitted her comments on the assessment. Thanks to the investigations of the Environmental Working Group, many of the letters between the EPA and the PBDE industry are now publicly accessible on the EWG website, along with other helpful information.
Tellingly, the EPA action to remove Dr. Rice followed a letter to EPA from the American Chemistry Council’s Brominated Flame Retardant Industry Panel (BFRIP). The BFRIP letter illogically argues that Dr. Rice’s scientific publications should be seen as a ‘bias’, rather than evidence of her expertise. The chemical industry further questioned Dr. Rice’s impartiality by wrongly claiming that her testimony before the Maine legislature earlier in 2007 advocated a state phase-out of deca-BDE. In fact, Dr. Rice’s testimony was of a purely scientific nature. Dr. Rice testified on available alternatives to deca-BDE in her official capacity as a scientific expert employed by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Rice has no financial conflicts, and was never accused of that by the industry. Thus, she should never have been removed from the panel, according to the relevant EPA policies.
The industry letter specifically requested that Rice’s data, opinions, and conclusions not be considered by the Agency. In response to the ACC letter, EPA scrubbed every reference to Dr. Rice out of the final report, an action that as far as I know is unprecedented, and unnecessary since EPA is under no obligation to incorporate all the advice from any of its experts.
In stark contrast to EPA’s removal of a renowned and well-respected scientist who is free of financial conflicts, the Agency selected and retained Richard J. Bull of MoBull Consulting as a peer reviewer for the same assessment.
In 2004, Richard Bull had to resign from a National Academies committee after he failed to disclose industry ties as required by the law. NRDC met with the committee staff and produced paystubs from Lockheed Martin to Bull as evidence of these unacknowledged conflicts. Senators Boxer and Feinstein followed with a letter to the National Academies staff raising concern about Bull and the impartiality of the perchlorate committee. Finally, the National Academies asked Bull to resign from the committee.
The actions taken by EPA against Dr. Rice call into question the credibility of EPA management. The EPA is a publicly-funded regulatory Agency charged with protecting human health and the environment. When it allows itself to serve the interests of the polluting industries that it is charged with regulating, it has perverted its mission, compromised its credibility, and forsaken its mission.
The EWG report and the coalition letter requests that EPA immediately:
- reinstate Dr. Rice as the chairperson of the PBDE expert review panel;
- remove the altered panel review document from public record and restore the original panel review document that included Dr. Rice’s comments; and
- issue an updated health standard for deca-BDE that adequately protects public health and that thoroughly considers Dr. Rice’s comments, including the issue of additive risks from multiple related fire retardants that widely contaminate the U.S. population.
Anything less will compromise the ability of EPA to carry out its mission to protect human health and the environment.
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