As any emergency room physician will tell you, turpentine is poisonous to people. So is leaded gasoline. So is rat poison. We do not need to conduct painful, pointless acute toxicity tests on rats or mice to ascertain such well-established facts.Nevertheless, Vice President Al Gore has been pushing ill-advised plans to do animal tests on those toxins and thousands of other high-production volume (HPV) industrial chemicals. If that happens, perhaps 1 million or more birds, fish, rabbits, and other animals will die.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will squander an estimated $ 14 million in administrative costs over the six-year scheme. And chemical corporations will waste $ 500 million or more on the project.
Instead, that money could and should go toward much-needed, bona fide anti-pollution efforts.
Many of the 2,800 HPV chemicals, which U.S. firms import or make in annual quantities of 1 million pounds or more, pose well-known hazards.
Yet, EPA did extremely sloppy preliminary research, claiming that much of the available data on these chemicals do not exist.
Truth is, doctors already possess considerable medical data, from computer analyses, previous tests, and even accidental exposures and suicide attempts, on just how such chemicals affect human health. By contrast, data from other species yield unreliable results that poorly predict human reactions.
For example, the notorious "LD 50"test determines what force-fed dose of a given substance proves lethal to 50 percent of animals tested.
But such tests, Swedish researchers recently re-confirmed, are only about 65 percent accurate in estimating human risk.
However, a combination of three new human-cell tests predicts chemical toxicity to humans with almost 80 percent accuracy, with no animal corpses, faster results, and at much less expense.
Yet Gore and EPA, avidly abetted by the Environmental Defense Fund advocacy group and with backing from the Chemical Manufacturers Association, continue pressing chemical companies to"volunteer"by the Ides of March for the"High Production Volume Challenge." If firms do not, EPA threatens to forcibly conscript them under more rigid rules.
The EPA's whole attitude leaves much to be desired. During a break in a mid-December workshop on the program in Washington, for example, one EPA official remarked,"If saving one eagle means killing a million lab rats, so be it."Ironically, though at least 1 million animals will suffer and die because of this program, not one eagle will be saved.
EPA and EDF representatives worked out many of the HPV Challenge details in cozy, closed-door meetings, without public comment, expert testimony, congressional say-so, or press scrutiny. Neither EPA nor EDF has explained how this frenzied fiasco-in-the-making would safeguard the public health. And EPA and EDF publications fail to mention any measures to reduce exposures to these chemicals, which would actually protect workers, the public, and our environment.
It's naive, or much worse, to posit that horrific tests in the bowels of some dismal laboratory building will help save our environment. Every moment, every dollar, every mind wasted on this muddle is a moment, dollar, or mind not devoted to such vital "green" priorities as Superfund site decontaminations, clean-air and water initiatives, toxic-spill prevention, endangered-species protection, and renewable-energy research.
Influential U.S. Rep. George Brown, D-Calif., has publicly questioned the proposed project. So have environmental groups, such as the Earth Island Institute. So have health advocacy groups, such as the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and the Medical Research Modernization Committee. So has every major animal protection group. So have many companies, such as Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive.
Gore likes to portray himself as an environmentalist. However, he has backed Norway's commercial whaling, U.S. pig-farm bailouts, and ecologically destructive military activities around the globe. Now he is pushing this HPV Challenge as some sort of environmental plank in his forthcoming campaign for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination.
But it would be a terrible mistake to plunge into massive, needless testing. The general public and Congress must clearly, quickly say"no way"to this charade. And so should Al Gore, if he aspires to any environmental credibility whatsoever.
Dr. Richard F. Gartner is a member of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. A.R. Hogan is a science and health writer. Readers may write to them at: Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, 5100 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Suite 404, Washington, D.C. 20016.
Comments on this posting? Click here to post a public comment on the Trash Talk Bulletin Board. Click here to send a private comment to the Junkman.