ScienceInsider

If you think home renovations are a headache, consider risk assessment at the Environmental Protection Agency. The process of determining the health risk of chemicals is often long, expensive, full of indecision, and fraught with politics. This morning, the National Academies' National Research Council released a major report giving EPA some advice.

A poster child of problems with risk assessment is a long-delayed report on trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial solvent linked to cancer. The Department of Defense, which faces huge bills to clean up facilities contaminated with TCE, has objected to EPA's draft assessments. One way to speed up the process, according to the panel, would be to get stakeholders and policymakers involved at the earliest stages of the assessment, then let staff scientists do their work without any interference. This "ground-breaking governance" is intended to: 

... focus the assessment on the relevant questions, discourage political interference or pre-determined policy biases, and promote senior-level oversight of the timeliness, relevance, and impact of decision-making.

The panel also makes technical suggestions. One major change would be the approach for calculating dose-response, the relationship between the amount of a chemical and the health effect. Instead of trying to find a threshold below which the chemical is safe for everyone, the panel recommends that EPA consider the harm to vulnerable populations. Jennifer Sass, a toxicologist with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., likes the idea. "This would be a great advancement in risk assessment, though really just keeps up with scientific advancements," she told ScienceInsider in an email.

What may be more difficult to implement is the new process. The committee said in a statement: 

EPA's current institutional structure and level of resources may pose a challenge to implementation of the report's recommendations, which are equivalent to major transformations in the agency's culture.

The report urges EPA to start slowly with demonstration projects to see how the process works and to check that policymakers "do not inappropriately influence the scientific conduct of risk assessments."

—Erik Stokstad