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News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Making sure that nothing sticks: EPA and DuPont
EPA is rigging the game for a Bush administration industry ally, this time DuPont. The Environmental Working Group has analyzed EPA's draft risk assessment on perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a key ingredient of Teflon, and found that EPA has rigged the risk assessment in order to make its own brand of regulatory Teflon. The essence of the charge is that EPA "ignored its own science panel's guidance and internal industry research":
In March 2004, the EPA's Scientific Advisory Panel instructed the EPA that, when assessing the family of chemicals that include [PFOA], the agency had to consider that several types of cancers, including testicular and pancreatic cancers, are relevant to humans.
The Agency ignored the panel's instruction in [the resulting] risk assessment . . . .
Although EPA's own internal guidelines require that a chemical be considered carcinogenic when it meets any one of five criteria, it dodged the question with the Teflon ingredient -- which meets three out of the five criteria, according to EWG, which also noted that EPA ignored evidence "showing that people with high levels of this Teflon chemical in their blood had higher cholesterol rates — a widely known risk factor for heart attack and stroke."
Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group (EWG), said, "There's a big difference between sound science and tilted science, and at every turn in this important process, EPA officials favored DuPont."
Posted by Robert Shull
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