{"id":36820,"date":"2024-10-29T00:01:30","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T04:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beyondpesticides.org\/dailynewsblog\/?p=36820"},"modified":"2024-10-28T07:34:23","modified_gmt":"2024-10-28T11:34:23","slug":"lawsuit-settlement-tackles-epas-dramatic-failure-to-regulate-endocrine-disruptors-despite-fed-mandate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beyondpesticides.org\/dailynewsblog\/2024\/10\/lawsuit-settlement-tackles-epas-dramatic-failure-to-regulate-endocrine-disruptors-despite-fed-mandate\/","title":{"rendered":"Lawsuit Settlement Tackles EPA\u2019s Dramatic Failure to Regulate Endocrine Disruptors, Despite Fed Mandate"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Beyond Pesticides<\/em>, October 29, 2024) STARTS TOMORROW<\/strong>\u2014NATIONAL FORUM: IMPERATIVES FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE<\/a>. A legal victory in federal court is the latest in a series of attempts to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to fulfill the mandate given to it by Congress in 1996 to test all pesticides for their endocrine disrupting effects and regulate them accordingly. The case<\/a> in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California was brought by the Center for Food Safety (CFS) and a collection of agricultural workers\u2019 organizations, farmers\u2019 groups, and pesticide activists.<\/p>\r\n

Beyond Pesticides wrote<\/a> in 2019, EPA\u2019s \u201cEndocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP) began, then virtually stopped, its review and regulation of endocrine disrupting pesticides, despite [its 1996 Congressional mandate] to develop a screening program within two years and then begin regulating.\u201d (See timeline<\/a>, Figure 2, p11.) After the release of a \u00a0a\u00a0damning 2021 Office of Inspector General (OIG) report<\/a>\u00a0(see Beyond Pesticides\u2019 reporting<\/a>) on the agency\u2019s lack of progress in protecting the population from potentially damaging endocrine disruption impacts of exposures to synthetic chemical pesticides (and other chemicals of concern), CFS wrote<\/a>: \u201cThe 2021 [OIG] report included the shocking revelation that some EPA staff were instructed to function as if the screening program had been eliminated from EPA\u2019s budget, despite a $7.5 million allocation that same year \u2014 raising the prospect of EPA\u2019s intentional violation of its statutory duty.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

CFS\u2019 most recent litigation closed with a tentative legal settlement, rather than a judge\u2019s ruling, as did a similar 1999 Natural Resources Defense Council suit. According to the CFS press release<\/a>, the agreement includes \u201cdeadlines by which EPA will implement the EDSP and assess pesticides\u2019 endocrine-disrupting effects. Under the terms of the proposed agreement, over the next five years, EPA will collect data on and assess the effects of endocrine-disrupting pesticides, either as part of the agency\u2019s registration review of registered pesticides or as a part of new pesticide approvals.\u201d EPA also promises to listen to farmworkers\u2019 input on specific pesticides, and to complete assessment of 86 pesticides by 2034.<\/p>\r\n

The case details EPA\u2019s behavior for more than 25 years: a combination of stubborn inaction and a succession of failed promises to do better. In the words of Maricel Maffini, PhD and Laura \u00a0Vandenberg, PhD, in Failure to Launch: the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency<\/a> (2022), \u201c[N]ot a single pesticide chemical has been determined to be an endocrine disruptor, and no regulatory actions have been taken.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

The reasoning for EPA\u2019s inaction has been murky and illogical. It has spent most of that time stalled, under chemical industry pressure, on the appropriate testing methods for determining whether a pesticide is an endocrine disruptor (ED), even though there are mountains of academic research demonstrating exactly that for numerous pesticides still in heavy use in the U.S. Currently the agency uses a two-tier system in which, if a chemical meets certain initial criteria in test tube assays, rats, amphibians and fish, it will then be bumped up to a second, more rigorous set of in vivo experiments using a few more species tested over two generations. Other proposed testing protocols have remained under discussion, but not put into practice.<\/p>\r\n

The original legislation mandating establishment of EPA\u2019s Endocrine Disruption Screening Program<\/a> (EDSP) took effect in 1998 as part of the Food Quality Protection Act<\/a><\/em> of 1996, itself an amendment of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act<\/em> (FIFRA). The legislation instructed EPA to implement the EDSP no later than August 1999 and test all registered pesticides. According to the CFS complaint<\/a>, to date, EPA has begun testing only four percent<\/em> of those pesticides. Of those, only half are finished and even that remnant requires more testing. EPA published one list of 52 candidate chemicals and a second list of 109 candidates, acknowledging that at least some of them were likely to disrupt hormones. It got through Tier 1 testing for the first 52 chemicals and then stopped. It has completed no testing for the second list. Yet during this same period EPA registered 425 new pesticides<\/em> without considering their potential endocrine effects. EPA has also acknowledged that more than 87,000 chemicals\u2014not just pesticides\u2014are eligible for EDSP evaluation. There is no way that EPA can ever fulfill the requirements of the enabling legislation with this kind of desultory inaction.<\/p>\r\n

One egregious example is atrazine, which EPA put through Tier 1 tests and found both male and female hormone effects, yet declined to move it up to Tier 2. In its 2015 EDSP Weight of Evidence Conclusions<\/a> for atrazine, EPA stated, \u201cEDSP Tier 2 testing with mammals, fish, amphibians or birds is not recommended for atrazine at this time because it is not expected to impact current EPA-established regulatory endpoints for human health or ecological risk assessment.\u201d Atrazine, an unambiguous endocrine disrupter, remains on the market in the U.S.<\/p>\r\n

Beyond Pesticides submitted a detailed commen<\/a>t to EPA regarding the agency\u2019s latest proposal to modify its implementation of the EDSP, which would narrow the scope to humans, limit testing to some active ingredients, and limit the data types considered. A Daily News<\/a> of February 5 details the proposal\u2019s weaknesses. Beyond Pesticides points out that EPA\u2019s mandate is to protect both the environment and humans, and that the elucidation of endocrine disruption came about through observation of chemicals\u2019 effects on animals as much as humans. The thinning of eagles\u2019 eggshells from DDT exposure is an iconic example, which the public became aware of in Rachel Carson\u2019s foundational book, Silent Spring<\/em>, in 1962<\/a>\u2014six decades ago. The term \u201cendocrine disruption\u201d emerged from work by the late Theo Colborn<\/a>, PhD and her 1996 book Our Stolen Future<\/em><\/a>. (See Dr. Colborn\u2019s talk to Beyond Pesticides\u2019 29th<\/sup> National Pesticide Forum<\/a> (2011) It soon became apparent that entire ecosystems are affected by chemicals that alter hormonal balances in mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, insects, and even plants<\/a>. There is no divorcing humans from the rest of the biosphere. It is Beyond Pesticides\u2019 position that \u201cmammalian data inform potential endocrine disruption in other vertebrate taxa (avian, amphibian, fish) and vice versa\u201d and therefore EDSP testing should not \u201cdecouple\u201d data on mammals from other vertebrates.<\/p>\r\n

[For a riveting talk by Tyrone Hayes, PhD, professor of Integrative Biology at University of California Berkeley and ground-breaking researcher on endocrine disruptors, see Protecting Life, From Frogs to the Human Family<\/a>\u2014delivered at Beyond Pesticides\u2019 36th National Pesticides (2018).]<\/p>\r\n

Beyond Pesticides has further noted that under FIFRA, \u201c[T]here is an inherent presumption of risk, a pesticide is presumed to pose an unreasonable risk until reliable data demonstrate otherwise. If the agency lacks the data and\/or resources to fully evaluate endocrine risks to human health and wildlife, then the agency is obliged to suspend or deny any pesticide registration until the agency has sufficient data to demonstrate no unreasonable adverse endocrine risk per the mandate in FIFRA.\u201d This means EPA must assume pesticides are EDs and the companies selling them must prove otherwise to be registered.<\/p>\r\n

EPA has taken the opposite approach all along. It has done very little to protect the public, farmworkers, and wildlife from endocrine-disrupting chemicals despite three lawsuits, at least two sharp admonitions from Congress, and three scathing inspector general reports. The CFS complaint cites the 2021 OIG report, which included interviews with EPA employees from the EDSP who were \u201cready to go\u2026but EPA lacked the institutional will to follow through with issuing test orders.\u201d In a 2011 report, the Inspector General (IG) attributed EPA\u2019s lack of progress to \u201clack of management.\u201d And the 2021 IG document reported that EPA instructed some staff to act as if the EDSP did not appear in the agency budget \u201ceven though we were fully funded by Congress,\u201d according to one employee.<\/p>\r\n

EPA\u2019s behavior is largely inexplicable to the uninitiated, but it is shaped by the shadowy influence of the pesticide industry, which is like an invisible planet whose existence must be deduced by the behavior of visible objects. In the CFS litigation, CropLife International intervened as a defendant. This gave it status as a party to the litigation, including the right to appeal. CropLife\u2019s filings served to distract the process from the main issue, which was the utter failure of the EDSP. CropLife\u2019s documents contained such ludicrous statements as:<\/p>\r\n