U.S. Lags in Toxicity Data

Wednesday, May 3, 2000 

U.S. Lags in Toxicity Data, Report Says
Health: There's not enough monitoring of 
chemical exposure to allow researchers to 
measure the effect on humans, a study by 
the GAO finds. 

By SUNNY KAPLAN, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON--The nation's health experts are 
unable to gauge the effect of many potentially toxic 
chemicals on humans because the federal government 
has failed to study such exposure and has "a long way 
to go" before remedying the situation, according to a 
report released Tuesday by the research arm of Congress. 

The study by the General Accounting Office was 
begun nearly two years ago at the request of 
Democratic Reps. Henry A. Waxman and Maxine 
Waters, both of Los Angeles, Nancy Pelosi of 
San Francisco and other members of Congress. 
Pelosi announced the findings Tuesday at a House 
subcommittee hearing on children and environmental 
health. 

The study concluded that the Department of Health 
and Human Services and the Environmental Protection 
Agency should "develop a coordinated federal strategy 
for short- and long-term monitoring and reporting of human 
exposures to potentially toxic chemicals." 

"Millions of Americans work and live in environments full of 
dangerous contaminants," Pelosi said. "We must make a 
commitment to do the research and gather the data that will 
help us understand the effect of chemicals on human health." 

The study reviewed more than 1,400 chemicals that pose 
potential threats to human health and found that only 6% are 
being tracked by HHS and the EPA. And only a small percentage 
of the chemicals known or thought to be carcinogenic are being 
tracked by the government, the study found. 

In some situations where medical experts wanted to collect 
"human exposure" data--from blood, hair or urine, for example
and examine it for chemicals, they were constrained by financial 
resources, the study found. Such situations included suspected 
"cancer clusters" or contact with toxic chemicals. State and 
federal environmental health officials said that current budgets 
allow them to collect or use such data in less than half the cases 
where they thought it to be necessary. 

Even when laboratories have the capacity to collect the data, 
no laboratory method has been developed for assessing exposure 
levels in human tissue for many of the 1,400 chemicals known to 
pose a threat to human health, the report said. 

Public health officials said that, to put local data into context, 
they need more information on typical exposures in the general 
population. 

"The release of the GAO study today sends a serious and direct 
message to Congress that we must do more to protect our 
communities," Pelosi said. "We must provide the resources 
that will enable federal and state officials to address these 
barriers." Breast cancer will be diagnosed in about 180,000 
women this year, and prostate cancer will be diagnosed in 
about the same number of men, according to the American 
Cancer Society. Some medical researchers suspect 
environmental factors have contributed to the high numbers. 

"There are increasing concerns about cancer rates being linked 
to environmental exposures," said Katherine Iritani, the lead 
evaluator for the GAO study. 

Data on how environmental toxins affect children are particularly 
lacking, according to physicians and public health officials who 
testified at Tuesday's hearing before the labor, health and human 
services and education subcommittee of the Appropriations 
Committee. "Children have been data orphans," said Dr. Richard 
Jackson, director of the National Center for Environmental Health 
at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Data do exist in some areas--infant mortality, for example, is at 
a record low. Cases of lead poisoning among children are on the 
decline, Jackson said, and the CDC hopes to eradicate them completely 
by 2010. 

However, childhood asthma is on the increase. In the last two 
decades, the number of asthmatic children has doubled to about 
4 million, and officials are unsure why the number of cases is on 
the rise. 

In addition, only 10 states have a surveillance system in place to 
monitor birth defects, Jackson said, and data on autistic children 
are only being collected in the city of Atlanta. He said that the cost 
of establishing surveillance systems to monitor childhood illnesses 
could reach an estimated $500,000 per state. 

Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times