The EPA's Commitment to Children's Environmental Health: History and Current Challenges.

Children's environmental health (CEH) has a 25-year history at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), during which the agency has advanced CEH through research, policy, and programs that address children's special vulnerability to environmental harm. However, the Trump administration took many actions that weakened efforts to improve CEH. The actions included downgrading or ignoring CEH concerns in decision-making, defunding research, sidelining the Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee, and rescinding regulations that were written in part to protect children. To improve CEH, federal environmental statutes should be reviewed to ensure they are sufficiently protective. The administrator should ensure the EPA's children's health agenda encompasses the most important current challenges and that there is accountability for improvement. Guidance documents should be reviewed and updated to be protective of CEH and the federal lead strategy refocused on primary prevention. The Office of Children's Health Protection's historically low funding and staffing should be remedied. Finally, the EPA should update CEH data systems, reinvigorate the role of the Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee, and restore funding for CEH research that is aligned with environmental justice and regulatory decision-making needs. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(1):124-134. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306537).

Mixture toxicity, cumulative risk, and environmental justice in United States federal policy, 1980-2016 : Why, with much known, was little done?

Toxic chemicals - "toxicants" - have been studied and regulated as single entities, and, carcinogens aside, almost all toxicants, single or mixed and however altered, have been thought harmless in very low doses or very weak concentrations. Yet much work in recent decades has shown that toxicants can injure wildlife, laboratory animals, and humans following exposures previously expected to be harmless. Additional work has shown that toxicants can act not only individually and cumulatively but also collectively and even synergistically and that they affect disadvantaged communities inordinately - and therefore, as argued by reformers, unjustly. As late as December 2016, the last full month before the inauguration of a president promising to rescind major environmental regulations, the United States federal environmental-health establishment, as led by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), had not developed coherent strategies to mitigate such risks, to alert the public to their plausibility, or to advise leadership in government and industry about their implications. To understand why, we examined archival materials, reviewed online databases, read internal industry communications, and interviewed experts. We confirmed that external constraints, statutory and judicial, had been in place prior to EPA's earliest interest in mixture toxicity, but we found no overt effort, certainly no successful effort, to loosen those constraints. We also found internal constraints: concerns that fully committing to the study of complex mixtures involving numerous toxicants would lead to methodological drift within the toxicological community and that trying to act on insights from such study could lead only to regulatory futility. Interaction of these constraints, external and internal, shielded the EPA by circumscribing its responsibilities and by impeding movement toward paradigmatic adjustment, but it also perpetuated scientifically dubious policies, such as those limiting the evaluation of commercial chemical formulations, including pesticide formulations, to only those ingredients said by their manufacturers to be active. In this context, regulators' disregard of synergism contrasted irreconcilably with biocide manufacturers' understanding that synergism enhanced lethality and patentability. In the end, an effective national response to mixture toxicity, cumulative risk, and environmental injustice did not emerge. In parallel, though, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which was less constrained, pursued with scientific investigation what the EPA had not pursued with regulatory action.

A century of the Archives of Environmental & Occupational Health.

With this issue, the Archives of Environmental & Occupational Health celebrates 100 years of continuous publication since its foundation as the Journal of Industrial Hygiene in 1919. During its first century, the Archives established an extraordinary legacy in the development of no less than three fields of research and practice: (1) occupational medicine, (2) industrial hygiene, and (3) air pollution studies and regulation. Its contribution to American environmental protection standards in air quality was particularly important, as the journal served as a major outlet for crucial air pollution research during the early years of the new United States Environmental Protection Agency. Its pages also chart the development of occupational health as an independent field, as well as the later emergence of modern environmental health as a related co-discipline. As the Archives moves into its second century of continuous publication, the journal will continue shaping the fields of environmental and occupational health; building on the solid foundation of evidence-based research from which humankind continues to benefit.

Two Cheers for Air Pollution Control: Triumphs and Limits of the Mid-Century Fight for Air Quality.

This article analyzes the early years of 20th-century air pollution control in Los Angeles. In both scholarship and public memory, mid-century efforts at the regional level were overshadowed by major federal developments, namely the Clean Air Act and creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Yet the mid-century local experience was highly consequential and presaged many subsequent challenges that persist today. The article begins with an exploration of the existential, on-the-ground misery of smog in Los Angeles during the 1940s and 1950s. The article examines the role that scientific evidence on smog did and did not play in regulation, the reasons smog control galvanized support across various constituencies in the region, and, finally, some of mid-century air pollution's limits.

EPA at 40: bringing environmental protection into the 21st century.

Sustainability science suggests that effective environmental protection requires an integrated systems approach.

Ecological risk assessment in the United States environmental protection agency: a historical overview.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is 1 of 4 papers from the US Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board's Ecological Processes and Effects Committee workshop on the current and future practice of ecological risk assessment. The workshop was held in Washington, DC in February 2006. Risk assessment originated with the insurance industry and spread to the estimation of risks to people and property in other contexts, including the regulation of environmental contamination. Ecological assessment became an important component of environmental management in the United States with the legal mandate for environmental impact assessment in 1970. Risk assessment and ecological assessment merged in the 1980s to form ecological risk assessment (ERA). Since then, ERA has been institutionalized with the development of the US Environmental Protection Agency's (hereafter, USEPA or Agency) framework and guidance documents. Ecological risk assessment has been adapted by the Agency's program offices to fit their legal and policy contexts. The future of ERA will inevitably include the incorporation of more complex and demanding methods. However, the biggest challenge for future risk assessors will be to make ecological risks more compelling to decision makers.

US regulatory system for genetically modified [genetically modified organism (GMO), rDNA or transgenic] crop cultivars.

This paper reviews the history of the federal regulatory oversight of plant agricultural biotechnology in the USA, focusing on the scientific and political forces moulding the continually evolving regulatory structure in place today. Unlike most other jurisdictions, the USA decided to adapt pre-existing legislation to encompass products of biotechnology. In so doing, it established an overarching committee (Office of Science and Technology Policy) to study and distribute various regulatory responsibilities amongst relevant agencies: the Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and US Department of Agriculture. This paper reviews the history and procedures of each agency in the execution of its regulatory duties and investigates the advantages and disadvantages of the US regulatory strategy.

Uncertain exposures and the privilege of imperception: activist scientists and race at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

This paper locates the EPA national headquarters within the racialized local geography of southwest Washington, D.C. By focusing on the formation of a scientist union and the union's struggle to make visible an episode of chemical exposure in its own offices, the paper connects the work of racialized privilege with the difficulty of proving chemical exposures in the 1980s.

The removal of lead from gasoline: historical and personal reflections.

Tetraethyllead (TEL) was first fabricated for use in gasoline in 1923. Shortly after manufacture began, workers at all three plants began to become floridly psychotic and die. A moratorium on TEL production was put into place, but was lifted in 1926. Between 1926 and 1965, the prevailing consensus was that lead toxicity occurred only at high levels of exposure and that lead in the atmosphere was harmless. Most of the data on lead toxicity issued from a single source, the Kettering Laboratory in Cincinnati. In 1959, the first warnings of adverse health effects of lead at silent doses were raised by Clair Patterson, a geochemist. In hearings before the Senate Committee on Public Works, Senator Edward Muskie raised the question of adverse health effects from airborne lead. As new data accumulated on health effects of lead at lower doses, the movement to remove lead from gasoline gained momentum, and the Environmental Protection Agency examined the question. The removal of lead would take place over the next 25 years, and its accomplishment would require a severe change in the federal stance regarding its hazard. This article details the interaction of various forces, industrial, regulatory, judicial, public health, and public interest, that were engaged in this contest and estimates the value of this step.

Historical relationship between performance assessment for radioactive waste disposal and other types of risk assessment.

This article describes the evolution of the process for assessing the hazards of a geologic disposal system for radioactive waste and, similarly, nuclear power reactors, and the relationship of this process with other assessments of risk, particularly assessments of hazards from manufactured carcinogenic chemicals during use and disposal. This perspective reviews the common history of scientific concepts for risk assessment developed until the 1950s. Computational tools and techniques developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s to analyze the reliability of nuclear weapon delivery systems were adopted in the early 1970s for probabilistic risk assessment of nuclear power reactors, a technology for which behavior was unknown. In turn, these analyses became an important foundation for performance assessment of nuclear waste disposal in the late 1970s. The evaluation of risk to human health and the environment from chemical hazards is built on methods for assessing the dose response of radionuclides in the 1950s. Despite a shared background, however, societal events, often in the form of legislation, have affected the development path for risk assessment for human health, producing dissimilarities between these risk assessments and those for nuclear facilities. An important difference is the regulator's interest in accounting for uncertainty.

On intergenerational equity and its clash with intragenerational equity and on the need for policies to guide the regulation of disposal of wastes and other activities posing very long-term risks.

This article begins with some history of the derivation of 40 CFR Part 191, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standard that governs the geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level and transuranic radioactive wastes. This is followed by criticisms of the standard that were made by a Sub-Committee of the EPA Science Advisory Board, by the staff of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and by a panel of the National Academies of Science and Engineering. The large disparity in the EPA approaches to regulation of disposal of radioactive wastes and disposal of hazardous, long-lived, nonradioactive chemical waste is illustrated. An examination of the intertwined matters of intergenerational equity and the discounting of future health effects follows, together with a discussion of the conflict between intergenerational equity and intragenerational equity. Finally, issues related to assumptions in the regulations concerning the future state of society and the biosphere are treated, as is the absence of any national philosophy or guiding policy for how to deal with societal activities that pose very long-term risks.

Current and historical American asbestos regulations.

Asbestos, and asbestos-containing materials, are subject to regulation in the USA by both the federal government and each of the 50 state governments. This paper summarizes the federal government asbestos regulations which apply to the use of asbestos, asbestos-containing products, and asbestos fiber releases, in the workplace and in the ambient environment through the USA. Regulations by the 50 states apply only within the jurisdiction of each state and, to a large extent, mimic those of the federal government. The state regulations are not discussed in this paper. The principal American government agencies that deal with asbestos regulation are the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Generally, OSHA regulations apply to regulate asbestos exposures, and potential asbestos exposures, in the occupational workplace while EPA regulations apply to asbestos exposures, and potential asbestos exposures, in the nonoccupational setting. Both agencies set regulatory levels for allowable asbestos exposure. Those levels have changed, in a decreasing progression, since their enactment in the early 1970s. This paper discusses those levels and traces their progression over time.

PHS in the Queen City: a watershed development.

For over a century, Cincinnati, Ohio, has been at the center of the nation's efforts to control water pollution. Site and subject of PHS activities to understand, manage, and prevent pollution, Cincinnati now carries on this public health legacy as home to EPA's water pollution programs. From ante-bellum way station for primary care and the seat of early 20th century scientific contributions to vibrant center for the development of environmental health programs after World War II, the Queen City has truly provided a number of watershed developments in the history of public health.