The Environmental Protection Agency’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) is considered by many to be the gold standard database for toxicological information and human health effects data, used by risk assessors around the world. Information on chemicals in the database carries the imprimatur of EPA, and is thus considered authoritative. Accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, IRIS profiles of individual chemicals are a cornerstone for a host of activity in the public and private sector, including regulation decisions by government, safety approaches by industry, and evidence offered in litigation.
Unfortunately, IRIS is woefully incomplete. It is riddled with disturbing gaps in the data in its chemical profiles, and it is missing profiles for many dangerous chemicals altogether. In June 2009, a white paper from the Center for Progressive Reform, The IRIS Information Roadblock: How Gaps in EPA’s Main Toxicological Database Weaken Environmental Protection, warned that the database was “outdated, incomplete, and ultimately ineffective.”
The white paper notes that in 1990 Congress directed EPA to develop rapid regulatory controls for 188 hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), and required EPA to conduct follow-up assessments to see how effective the safeguards were at protecting Americans. “Today, nearly 20 years after Congress gave EPA a list of priority chemicals, some 17 percent are not listed in IRIS at all. Worse, two-thirds of the Clean Air Act HAPs do not have inhalation [standards] listed in the database.” Among the hazardous air pollutants for which IRIS profiles are either incomplete or nonexistent are hydrogen fluoride and chloroprene (no profile for either) and formaldehyde and methanol (missing key data on inhalation doses). High exposures to chloroprene, formaldehyde, and methanol can be deadly; exposure to hydrogen fluoride can damage the bones and heart.
EPA’s efforts to fill IRIS’s data gaps were largely stymied during the Bush Administration, and not by accident. The Administration imposed “reforms” designed to subject EPA’s scientists – the ones who should be making final decisions on the safety of chemicals – to a host of political pressures from government agencies with neither scientific expertise nor an interest in protecting the environment. Most notably, the Department of Defense, the nation’s largest toxic polluter, had an opportunity to help water down EPA’s scientific findings.
The Obama Administration recognized the problem, but its May 2009 revisions to the IRIS process did left key issues unaddressed, according to the CPR report’s authors, Member Scholars Rena Steinzor and Wendy Wagner and Policy Analyst Matthew Shudtz. Specifically, the report called on EPA to abandon the Bush era interagency review process for IRIS listings, a process designed to compromise IRIS’s scientific integrity. In addition, the report called on EPA to establish priorities from among the many chemicals not yet listed in IRIS, and to commitg to completing IRIS profiles on them within reasonable periods of time.
Protesting Bush 'Reforms.' Read CPR Member Scholar Rena Steinzor and CPR Policy Analyst Matthew Shudtz's April 2008 letter to EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson, about proposed “Integrated Risk Information System Assessment Development Procedures” that would slow the process of filling significant gaps.
Data Gaps. Read Closing Data Gaps (400 kb download), CPR Member Scholar John Applegate's innovative proposal for addressing the difficult problem of the significant gaps in what EPA knows about the dangers of chemicals now used in commerce. Or read the news release. (April 2006) Or read Rena Steinzor, Katherine Baer, and Matt Shudtz's 2005 white paper on the significant gaps in what EPA knows about the dangers of chemicals now on the market and in common use, gaps reflected in EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), arguably the world's most prominent toxicological database: Overcoming Environmental Data Gaps: Why What EPA Doesn't Know about Toxic Chemicals Can Hurt (CPR White Paper #510, July 2005).
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