Volume 2 of Risk Commission Report Names Indoor Pollution as Top Risk

By Amy Charlene Reed, RiskWorld staff
E-mail to: reed@tec-com.com.

March 27, 1997 -- Volume 2 of the final report of the Presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management, which is currently being released to the public, names indoor air pollution as one of the greatest risks to human health.

"Indoor air pollution often poses a greater health risk than outdoor air pollution," said Gilbert S. Omenn, chairman of the Commission and dean of the University of Washington’s School of Public Health and Community Medicine in Seattle. "Unregulated use of pesticides, cleaning chemicals, deodorants, and emissions from gas and wood stoves generate high concentrations of potentially toxic indoor air pollutants."

The Commission found that indoor air pollution is largely unregulated and calls for Congress and the White House administration to craft legislation requiring the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to work together to address the issue.

"CPSC looks at indoor contaminants from consumer products, EPA looks mostly at outdoor air and not indoor air, and OSHA only looks at workplace air. We think that all three of these agencies should have an integrated approach to indoor air pollution," said Gail Charnley, executive director of the Commission.

In addition to targeting particular environmental or public health risks such as indoor air pollution, the report’s 71 recommendations also cover the methods and application of risk assessment and management.

Broad risk assessment and management recommendations include:

• Regulatory agencies should distinguish between chemical tests involving laboratory animals that develop cancerous tumors only as a result of mechanisms or doses that clearly are not relevant to humans and test results that are predictive of possible effects on humans. A chemical that causes effects that are not relevant to humans "should not be regulated as a carcinogen and should not require extensive risk assessment."
• Risk assessment should identify particular groups of susceptible people -- such as those in specific occupations or residents of low socioeconomic areas -- who are likely to have higher exposure to chemicals being assessed. The affected people should be consulted early in the assessment process for information on all known sources of exposure to that chemical and related chemicals.
• Congress should reject proposals to subject risk assessment and benefit-cost analysis "to expanded judicial review." Instead, court involvement should be minimized while 'consensual' approaches such as alternative dispute resolution techniques, negotiated rule-making and expert peer review should be increased. * Risk managers and those with a stake in their decisions should "aggressively seek alternatives to command-and-control regulation to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health and environmental protection and to reduce compliance and litigation costs."

Recommendations regarding specific public health and environmental risks include:

• Superfund site cleanups should be based on "reasonably anticipated current and future use of a site." Congress "should encourage reuse of brownfields," those urban sites "where economic use is avoided because of liability concerns,' and give the EPA "broader authority to develop enforceable institutional controls" to ensure land use doesn't change.
• The Clean Water Act should be amended to replace its "fragmented programs" with a comprehensive, integrated watershed-management approach to maintain and improve water quality.
• To foster the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) accelerated review and approval of new drugs, the FDA ought to "update criteria for toxicity-testing and clinical-trial protocols" with its counterpart agencies in foreign countries "so that properly documented studies...in other countries can be used as evidence for FDA review." The FDA's accelerated approvals of new drugs "should be linked to rigorous post-marketing surveillance." In addition, the FDA should be given back the power to require scientific evidence of the health claims for dietary supplements.
• The Delaney Clause, which is a federal law requiring a ban on food additives or chemical residues that might possibly cause cancer, should undergo "substantial modification ... to a standard of reasonable certainty of no harm for all population groups."
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture should replace its "rudimentary, conflicting..., inadequate" methods for assessing such microbiological risks to food as E. coli contamination of ground beef and other products. * OSHA should establish guidelines for agency risk assessments and streamline the process for developing permissible exposure limits for air contaminants in the workplace. OSHA also should cooperate more with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Volume 2 of its two-part report culminates the work of the Commission, which Congress established under the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. The Commission’s goal was "to review the procedures for devising and enforcing the regulations that protect humans and the environment from substances that degrade ecosystems or cause cancer and other chronic health effects - effects that result from cumulative, repeated exposures but may not appear for months, years or decades," according to a March 7, 1997, press release.

In Volume 1 of its final report, the Commission dealt with its recommendations for establishing a six-stage risk management framework to define a problem and put it in context, analyze the risks associated with the problem, examine options for addressing the risks, make decisions about which options to implement, take actions to implement the options selected, and then conduct an evaluation of the results.

"Volume 1 responded to the requests we received for more guidance on how to implement the risk management framework that we proposed in the draft report," Charnley said. "Volume 1 provides real world examples, guidelines for implementation, and principles for risk management decision making. It is written to help regulators."

The Commission will remain active until June 1997 to assist Congress, the White House administration and other interested parties in considering its recommendations and finding common ground with relevant proposals from others.

Links to Related Documents

Volume 1 of the final report of the Presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management

Volume 2 of the final report of the Presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management

Mandate of the Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management

List of Commission Members and Staff

Biographies of Commission Members

Press Release Dated March 7, 1997

The Presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management's home page

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Last modified March 27, 1997.

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