Why is EPA’s Children’s Health Advisory Committee Asking EPA to Restrict Perchlorate Exposure to a Level Below the Reference Dose? Part 2
29 Mar 2006 in Regulatory Science, Peer Review
According to the March 3 BNA Environment Reporter article by Pat Phibbs, EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee formed a “task group” to address the matter of perchlorate. The task group was led by Gary Ginsberg, whom Phibbs identifies as “a senior toxicologist with the Connecticut Department of Public Health.”
State regulators are a well-identified stakeholder group with respect to federal children’s health policy. It is reasonable to infer that in his role as chairman of the task group Ginsberg had substantial influence over its policy recommendations.
We don’t know about other members of the task group; they are not identified in the BNA article. But for Ginsberg, perchlorate was a well-known environmental health issue. Ginsberg served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee on perchlorate for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. MA DEP issued a final risk assessment for perchlorate in May 2004, and in this report MA DEP derived a reference dose of 0.00003 mg/kg-day (drinking water exposure level = 1 ppb).
This was nine months before the National Academy of Sciences issued its report in January 2005 and 10 months before EPA adopted the NAS’ recommended reference dose. We have uncovered no evidence suggesting that Ginsberg disagreed with MA DEP’s position. In fact, there is persuasive evidence that he agreed with it fully. In 2005 Ginsberg and co-author Deborah Rice published a peer-reviewed commentary challenging the conclusions of the NAS panel and the main study on which it relied.
We still have not yet reviewed the CHPAC report. Once we do, we will compare and contrast it with the commentary by Ginsberg and Rice and post an update. It is plausible that the CHPAC essentially task force simply adopted the views of its chairman, and that CHPAC as a whole did much the same thing.
