Addressing systemic problems with exposure assessments to protect the public's health.

Background: Understanding, characterizing, and quantifying human exposures to environmental chemicals is critical to protect public health. Exposure assessments are key to determining risks to the general population and for specific subpopulations given that exposures differ between groups. Exposure data are also important for understanding where interventions, including public policies, should be targeted and the extent to which interventions have been successful.

Does Hazardous-Waste Testing Follow Technical Guidance, Thus Help Protect Environmental Justice and Health?

Does representative hazardous-waste-site testing tend to follow or to violate government technical guidance? This is an important question, because following such guidance promotes reliable risk analysis, adequate remediation, and environmental-justice and -health protection. Yet only government documents typically address this question, usually only when it is too late, when citizens have already exhibited health harm, allegedly from living or working near current/former hazardous-waste sites. Because no systematic, representative, scientific analyses have answered the preceding question, this article begins to investigate it by posing a narrower part of the question: Does representative US testing of volatile-organic-compound (VOC) waste sites tend to follow or to violate government technical requirements? The article (i) outlines US/state-government technical guidance for VOC testing; (ii) develops criteria for discovering representative US cases of VOC testing; (iii) uses the dominant US Environmental Protection Agency method to assess whether these representative cases follow such guidance; (iv) employs the results of (iii) to begin to answer the preceding question; then (v) discusses the degree to which, if any, these results suggest threats to environmental health or justice.

Correction: Shrader-Frechette, K.; Biondo, A.M. Data-Quality Assessment Signals Toxic-Site Safety Threats and Environmental Injustices. 2021, , 2012.

The authors would like to make the following corrections (1 and 2) to this paper [...

Correction: Shrader-Frechette, K.; Biondo, A.M. Health Misinformation about Toxic-Site Harm: The Case for Independent-Party Testing to Confirm Safety. 2021, , 3882.

Because part of the text was unintentionally omitted, the first paragraph under Section 2.2.4.

Health Misinformation about Toxic-Site Harm: The Case for Independent-Party Testing to Confirm Safety.

Health misinformation can cause harm if regulators or private remediators falsely claim that a hazardous facility is safe. This misinformation especially threatens the health of children, minorities, and poor people, disproportionate numbers of whom live near toxic facilities. Yet, perhaps because of financial incentives, private remediators may use safety misinformation to justify reduced cleanup.

Data-Quality Assessment Signals Toxic-Site Safety Threats and Environmental Injustices.

Most hazardous-waste sites are located in urban areas populated by disproportionate numbers of children, minorities, and poor people who, as a result, face more severe pollution threats and environmental-health inequalities. Partly to address this harm, in 2017 the United Nations unanimously endorsed the New Urban Agenda, which includes redeveloping urban-infill-toxic-waste sites. However, no systematic, independent analyses assess the public-health adequacy of such hazardous-facility redevelopments.

Using routine, independent, scientific-data audits as an early-warning for potentially fraudulent toxic-site cleanup: PCE, TCE, and other VOCs at the former Naval-Ordnance Test Station, Pasadena, California.

Two of the most prevalent Superfund-site contaminants are carcinogenic solvents PCE (perchloroethylene) and TCE (trichloroethylene). Because their cleanup is difficult and costly, remediators have repeatedly falsified site-cleanup data, as Tetra Tech apparently did recently in San Francisco. Especially for difficult-to-remediate toxins, this paper hypothesizes that scientific misrepresentations occur in toxic-site assessments, before remediation even begins.

Pesticides, Neurodevelopmental Disagreement, and Bradford Hill's Guidelines.

Neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism affect one-eighth of all U.S. newborns.

Dispelling Stem-Cell Ideology.

Week-old embryos are considered the richest source of stem cells usable in medical treatments. Because the embryos are destroyed when the stem cells are removed, the debate over the embryo's legal, moral, political, and scientific status has exploded. In this debate, Sheldon Krimsky's Stem Cell Dialogues: A Philosophical and Scientific Inquiry into Medical Frontiers (Columbia UP, 2015) is the single best book.

Commentary: Flawed scientific-evidence standards delay diesel regulations.

Of 188 government-monitored air toxics, diesel particulate matter (DPM) causes seven times more cancer than all the other 187 air toxics combined, including benzene, lead, and mercury. Yet, DPM is the only air toxic not regulated more stringently under the Clean Air Act, as a hazardous air pollutant (HAP). One reason is that regulators use flawed standards of scientific evidence.

Commentary: flawed science delays smelter cleanup and worsens health.

For 6,000 years, humans have known about smelter hazards. Yet these metals threats continue. Why? This commentary provides one preliminary answer.

Taking action on developmental toxicity: scientists' duties to protect children.

Background: Although adaptation and proper biological functioning require developmental programming, pollutant interference can cause developmental toxicity or DT.

Objectives: This commentary assesses whether it is ethical for citizens/physicians/scientists to allow avoidable DT.

Methods: Using conceptual, economic, ethical, and logical analysis, the commentary assesses what major ethical theories and objectors would say regarding the defensibility of allowing avoidable DT.

Research integrity and conflicts of interest: the case of unethical research-misconduct charges filed by Edward Calabrese.

Special-interest polluters often file research-misconduct (RM) charges against scientists whose research suggests needed pollutant regulation. This article argues that U.S.

Climate change, nuclear economics, and conflicts of interest.

Merck suppressed data on harmful effects of its drug Vioxx, and Guidant suppressed data on electrical flaws in one of its heart-defibrillator models. Both cases reveal how financial conflicts of interest can skew biomedical research. Such conflicts also occur in electric-utility-related research.

Data trimming, nuclear emissions, and climate change.

Ethics requires good science. Many scientists, government leaders, and industry representatives support tripling of global-nuclear-energy capacity on the grounds that nuclear fission is "carbon free" and "releases no greenhouse gases." However, such claims are scientifically questionable (and thus likely to lead to ethically questionable energy choices) for at least 3 reasons.

EPA's 2006 human-subjects rule for pesticide experiments.

Arguing that the 2006 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) human-subjects rule allows use of unethical third-party research (on pregnant women and children) in setting pesticide regulations, this article first (a) provides a brief history of U.S. pesticide regulation, particularly regarding childhood safety.

Trimming exposure data, putting radiation workers at risk: improving disclosure and consent through a national radiation dose-registry.

In the United States, regulatory standards allow workers to be exposed to ionizing radiation that can cause 1 additional cancer fatality per 400 workers per year. Because radiation-dose limits cover only single sources (e.g.

Mortgaging the future: dumping ethics with nuclear waste.

On August 22, 2005 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued proposed new regulations for radiation releases from the planned permanent U.

Radiobiology and gray science: flaws in landmark new radiation protections.

The International Commission on Radiological Protection--whose regularly updated recommendations are routinely adopted as law throughout the globe--recently issued the first-ever ICRP protections for the environment. These draft 2005 proposals are significant both because they offer the commission's first radiation protections for any non-human parts of the planet and because they will influence both the quality of radiation risk assessment and environmental protection, as well as the global costs of nuclear-weapons cleanup, reactor decommissioning and radioactive waste management. This piece argues that the 2005 recommendations are scientifically and ethically flawed, or gray, in at least three respects: first, in largely ignoring scientific journals while employing mainly "gray literature;" second, in relying on non-transparent dose estimates and models, rather than on actual radiation measurements; and third, in ignoring classical ethical constraints on acceptable radiation risk.