At the beginning of May, The Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would divide the main arm of the agency devoted to scientific research. According to report From NPR, scientists in the 1500-person Office of Research and Development were told that they would apply for about 500 up-to-date scientific research positions that would be sprinkled to other areas of the agency-and expect further cuts in their organization in the coming weeks.
This reorganization threatens the existence of a miniature but key program placed in this office: the program of the integrated risk information system, commonly called IRIS. This program is responsible for ensuring independent research on the risk of chemicals, helping other offices in determining the provisions on chemicals and relationships that may pose a danger to human health. Program leader He left recently, before the restructuring.
Experts say that the reorganization of EPA will probably break this key program-which has been a target through the chemical industry and right-wing interests for decades.
“Unfortunately, now it seems that they won the pollutant,” says Thomas Burke, founder and retired director Johns Hopkins Risk Sciences and Public Policy Institute and former deputy administrator of the EPA Research and Development Office.
“The announcement of May 2 is part of a larger, comprehensive effort to restructure the entire agency,” spokeswoman Epa Molly Vaseliou said Wired We -Mail. “EPA works quickly through the reorganization process and provides additional information when it is available.”
The Iris program created in the mid -eighties was designed to examine the impact of chemicals on health, compare the best available research from around the world to ensure analyzes of potential threats from up-to-date and existing substances. The program awards with other offices in EPA to identify the most critical chemicals of fears that deserve further research and research.
Unlike other offices in EPA, Iris has no regulatory duties; Rather, it only exists to ensure learning, on which potential up-to-date recipes can be based. Experts say that this isolation is the assessments produced by the iris from external pressure, which could affect the research conducted in other agency areas.
“There is independence” in a centralized program, such as Iris, says Jennifer Orme-Zavalet, also the main deputy administrator of the Research and Development Office and a former EPA science advisor. “They do not try to assess the risk for a specific purpose. They simply assess the risk and provide basic information.”
Since the creation of Iris has created a database Over 570 Chemicals and relationships with the assessments of their potential health effects of people. This group of research is not only on federal policy, but also helps to conduct state and international regulations.
The Iris database is “the golden standard of health assessments for chemical pollution,” says Burke. “Virtually all our regulated impurities, virtually all our cleaning, virtually all our main successes in the regulation of toxic chemicals have been affected by Iris or Iris staff.”
However, in recent years Iris has met a significant battle uphill. First of all, there is the very number of chemicals that she had to review with confined labor. They are there Over 80,000 chemicals which have been registered for apply in the US, and chemical companies record hundreds more each year. Some of the chemicals that Iris has been working on research has been disturbing substances for years, and some have recently drawn up-to-date control. For example, chemicals forever – synthetic materials so named because of their durability in the environment – it was used for decades, but their recent spread in water and soil tests caused a iris 2019 To start creating a grade sketch for five typical types of these chemicals.