The fight to limit regulation of a military pollutant-science, the EPA and the Pentagon
- From: mmlevy46@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 29 Dec 2005 15:47:30 -0800
The fight to limit regulation of a military pollutant
Thursday, December 29, 2005
By Peter Waldman, The Wall Street Journal
Four years ago, while U.S. troops were toppling the Taliban in
Afghanistan, the Environmental Protection Agency lobbed a different
sort of bombshell at the Defense Department. EPA scientists recommended
strictly regulating a chemical that is a key component of munitions,
but that has seeped into drinking-water supplies.
The EPA said it had determined that the chemical, called perchlorate,
endangers babies' brain development when present even at trace levels.
As a prelude to possible formal regulation, it proposed declaring that
a safe level of the chemical in drinking water would be just one part
per billion. That's an amount so minute it wouldn't even have been
detectable a few years ago.
Pentagon officials were aghast. Defense suppliers had discharged
massive quantities of the chemical into soil and streams during the
Cold War, and they still need it for weaponry. Such a strict limit
could mean the Pentagon and defense contractors would have to clean up
scores of water sources in 35 states and even the mighty Colorado
River, with its water flow of 67,000 gallons a second at the Hoover
Dam.
Fearing both costs and possible curbs on arms production, the Pentagon
took its case to the White House, which told the EPA to stand down
while an outside scientific panel looked at the issues. The panel then
issued a middle-ground report that has left some senior EPA scientists
deeply unhappy and the Pentagon still pressing for the minimum possible
cleanup.
The standoff, involving two high-profile federal agencies, shows how
the burgeoning science of low-dose chemical exposure is raising both
the stakes and the stratagems in today's pollution fights. There's no
question perchlorate interferes with the body's ability to make thyroid
hormone, a substance that everyone needs but babies especially so. The
question is how much exposure it takes to do harm. The controversy has
intensified with science's growing ability to detect and test chemicals
at extraordinarily low exposure levels.
The appeal to the White House was just one of the several moves by
defense interests in a long struggle with the EPA over whether and how
to regulate perchlorate. Among other tactics: Perchlorate users
financed a study of the chemical's health effects -- then undermined
their own study when results went against them.
Perchlorate, used chiefly in solid rocket fuel, first polluted
groundwater decades ago at a munitions plant outside Sacramento,
Calif., triggering years of resistance by the plant's operator to state
regulatory efforts. Then in 1997, after technical breakthroughs allowed
detection of the chemical at far lower levels than before, it began to
be found in water supplies in Southern California.
EPA scientists traced one plume up the Colorado River aqueduct to Las
Vegas. There they found the source in an old plant that once
manufactured the missile propellant. The soil beneath was tainted and
the chemical was seeping into the river.
In the human body, perchlorate blocks the thyroid gland from absorbing
iodide, which the gland needs to make thyroid hormone. The Pentagon and
defense industry say such interference isn't dangerous, at least so
long as it's only partial, because most adults produce plenty of the
hormone.
The EPA, however, focused on fetuses and infants. They need thyroid
hormone every day, because it is critical during brain development. And
unlike adults, they can't store a supply. Because risk levels weren't
well understood, the EPA and the Pentagon agreed in the late 1990s to
cooperate to find answers. Several defense contractors, linked in what
was called the Perchlorate Study Group, agreed to pay for new research.
The centerpiece was a $3 million experiment involving 3,000 mother,
infant and fetal rats. Pregnant rats and pups were fed varying levels
of perchlorate for several months. Scientists then dissected the rats'
thyroid glands and brains. Researchers started with the rats that got
the largest dose of perchlorate, intending to work downward until they
found a dose so small that it had no effect.
They never found such a dose. Even at the lowest dose tested -- 0.01
milligrams per kilogram of rat weight per day -- the scientists saw a
pattern of altered growth in several regions of the baby rats' brains.
They also saw effects on their thyroid cells and hormone output.
Chemicals don't necessarily affect rats and humans the same way. Still,
the test results would be considered "adverse effects" under EPA
policy, the agency's team leader, Ann Jarabek, warned the defense
interests. She told them the results would tend to reduce the level of
perchlorate exposure the EPA ultimately would deem safe.
Sponsors of the study then did something unusual. Instead of submitting
the final results of the study to the EPA, the defense companies that
paid for the study commissioned a critique of their own research. They
hired a consulting firm, which asked five academic scientists to study
the study.
A few months later, in May 2001, the defense contractors delivered to
the EPA a 200-page critique of their own study. It found fault with the
study's design, with the handling of rat pups, with what the pups were
fed and with the way rat brains were sliced and preserved. Conclusion:
They said the multimillion-dollar study they financed was highly
flawed.
The agency's chief of neurotoxicology, William Boyes, says he had never
seen sponsors of a study attack their own work. "Usually," he says,
they either "stand behind their data or they go back and do another
study."
Also puzzling: The head of the consulting firm the defense industry
hired to critique the original study had been that study's science
adviser.
This consultant is Michael Dourson, who leads a nonprofit science
consulting firm called Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, or
TERA. Dr. Dourson says the critique wasn't an attempt to discredit the
rat study, but simply to explain its "biological significance."
The laboratory that had done the rat study says it stood ready to do it
over if necessary to correct any flaws identified. But the defense
industry didn't ask the lab, Argus Research Laboratories in Horsham,
Pa., to do it over. Asked why not, an executive of one major user of
perchlorate, the Aerojet missile unit of GenCorp Inc., said it was
because EPA guidelines regarded animal studies as inferior to human
ones anyway. So, he said, the industry had by this time decided to
focus on human research.
In early 2002, the EPA, equipped with the rat study's final results and
also the critique of it, issued a draft risk assessment for
perchlorate, proposing a safe limit for the chemical in drinking-water
supplies. This would constitute the first step toward possible
regulation, which can occur only after further study, including a
cost-benefit analysis. The EPA's proposed safe limit was quite strict:
a mere one part per billion.
Pentagon officials felt sandbagged. The defense industry paid for the
rat study in the expectation that they would hear privately from the
EPA about any problems it presented. Instead, they learned at the same
time as the public of the strict safe limit the EPA now wanted.
"All of a sudden, up on the screen popped this one parts per billion
standard -- where did that come from?" says Raymond DuBois, a former
deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense who's now acting under secretary
of the army. This limit, he says, "had no consistent scientific
confirmation."
EPA officials, asked why they didn't warn the industry the strict
proposal was impending, said that while they cooperate with industry on
research, the job of setting safe exposure levels is theirs alone.
"Perchlorate is now among the better understood compounds," says Paul
Gilman, the EPA's former chief scientist. "At some point, the agency
had to step inside itself as a regulatory body and determine the weight
of the evidence."
The furor the EPA had stirred was soon evident at a gathering known as
a peer-review workshop, where a panel of scientists discussed the
proposal. The workshop took place in early 2002 in Sacramento, near the
site of decades of groundwater perchlorate pollution from an Aerojet
missile factory.
The session was tumultuous, featuring environmentalists, regulators,
consultants and lobbyists. Among the speakers was La Donna White,
president of an African-American doctors' group, who said the EPA
proposal would divert funds from "real health issues" affecting blacks
and "scare the public." She later repeated her points in an op-ed essay
in a local newspaper -- and in a news release put out by a lobbying
group for perchlorate users, the Council on Water Quality.
Dr. White, a family physician, says she had learned about the issues
from a guest at one of her medical-society meetings, Eric Newman. He is
a lobbyist for a Sacramento firm that has lobbied on perchlorate
matters for defense contractors. Dr. White says she didn't know he was
a lobbyist when he asked her to speak to the EPA. She didn't reply to
an email asking whether anyone had helped her draft her perchlorate
commentaries -- two of which misspelled her first name. Mr. Newman
didn't return messages left for him.
Perchlorate users and the Pentagon said the chemical was safe in
drinking water at 200 times the safe limit the EPA wanted, that is, at
up to 200 parts per billion. The Pentagon's Mr. DuBois appealed in
early 2003 to the White House Office of Management and Budget, which
referees inter-agency disputes. Given the strict limit the EPA was
pushing, he says, "I said, 'Time out!' "
The White House told the EPA to halt further action on the chemical,
and arranged for the EPA and three other agencies to sponsor further
review by the National Research Council, a federally funded group that
vets issues for the government and others. The council, in turn, named
a panel of scientists, who did a wide-ranging assessment that included
public hearings in 2003 and 2004.
At the hearings, the EPA came in for harsh criticism from perchlorate
users and consultants working for them. An Air Force colonel, Daniel
Rogers, termed the EPA's work "biased, unrealistic and scientifically
imbalanced." Col. Rogers also said perchlorate is critical to U.S.
security because while highly explosive, it is stable during handling
and storage. Besides missiles, it is used in various battlefield
weapons and flares and in munitions for training.
In January 2005, the National Research Council panel announced its
conclusions. It called the rat research inconclusive and said
perchlorate's key effect of blocking iodide from entering the thyroid
gland, and thereby interfering with production of thyroid hormone, was
not in itself dangerous. Still, it said, exposure to perchlorate should
be restricted because of the high stakes for babies.
The panel recommended a maximum safe exposure level of 0.0007
milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day, based on a small study
of human volunteers. For an adult drinking a normal amount of water,
that would permit about 24 parts per billion of perchlorate in drinking
water -- assuming people ingested no perchlorate from any source except
water.
In fact, however, the EPA's working assumption in such cases is that
drinking water accounts for only 20 percent of people's exposure to a
waterborne contaminant. Recent studies indicate that small amounts of
the chemical are in a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, possibly
from irrigation water, as well as in some dairy products and breast
milk.
Some EPA staffers assumed their agency would reduce the safe level in
drinking water well below 24 ppb to adjust for several factors,
including exposure through food. Instead, the EPA quickly adopted the
panel's assessment as its own, eschewing the internal and external peer
reviews that normally precede a formal EPA listing of a safe level for
a chemical.
An EPA spokeswoman said no additional reviews were needed before
adopting the 24 ppb safe limit because of extensive internal and
external scrutiny of the chemical done several years ago. She also said
it was natural to use the National Research Council's conclusion as the
EPA's own because the EPA was among those who sponsored the review.
Some state agencies criticized both the National Research Council
assessment and the EPA for quickly adopting it. Massachusetts
complained to the EPA that the research-council panel had based its
analysis on a study of just seven adults, rather than on babies.
Massachusetts reaffirmed its own health advisory that is as strict as
the safe limit the EPA envisioned in 2002: one part per billion in
water. Meanwhile, two regulators from Connecticut and Maine wrote a
science-journal commentary accusing the EPA of superseding its own
scientific judgment with a flawed review by an outside body.
Today, Pentagon and White House officials are drafting new guidance for
toxic-site cleanup officials. Intended to go out under the EPA's name,
the guidance under consideration would effectively fix the cleanup
standard for federal pollution sites at 24 ppb. The result is that many
water bodies with less perchlorate than that would escape cleanup.
Several senior EPA staffers believe the agency would be better off with
no perchlorate cleanup policy than with this one, emails reviewed by
The Wall Street Journal show. "We got a very ugly set of comments from
Office of Management and Budget last week that eviscerated the
guidance" to be given to cleanup officials in the field, one senior EPA
staffer emailed a colleague this fall. "Doing nothing was better than
accommodating those comments." EPA spokeswoman Eryn Witcher said the
policy is still undergoing internal deliberation.
All the skirmishing thus far still doesn't determine whether the
federal government ever will actually regulate perchlorate with a
mandatory water standard. To help decide that, the EPA plans to test
drinking-water supplies nationwide over the next several years. It is
also monitoring blood and urine screenings and tests of food, to
measure Americans' exposure from sources other than drinking water.
The arms industry thinks even the safe limit of 24 parts per billion is
far too strict. It notes that the National Research Council said the
effect on the thyroid wasn't itself adverse to health, but merely could
possibly lead to ill effects, in a chain of events. Says Dr. Dourson,
the defense-industry consultant: "The committee chose a precursor to a
precursor to a precursor to an adverse effect in the development of its
safe dose."
.
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