The
Scientific Advisory Board met in May 1995. It's recommendations
mainly addressed "refinements, corrections, and clarifications,
not substantive revisions." It agreed with the EPA position that
"current levels of dioxin-like compounds in the environment" are
derived from human activities. It also concurred that their estimate
of average dioxin exposure was reasonable. "Virtually all of the
committee" believed that dioxin and dioxin-like materials should
be classified as a probable human carcinogen (SAB 1995).
The
Board was less happy with the final concluding chapter of the
health document. Some of the committee felt that the chapter tended
to overstate the possibility for danger whilst others thought
the chapter was "appropriately conservative within the context
of public health protection." In the face of criticisms by the
Board that this chapter of the Reassessment, had not been adequately
peer-reviewed, the main authors of the concluding chapter published
it in a peer-reviewed journal in September 1995 (Cited in Montague,
1995a).
According
to the Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste:
When
the May 1995 meeting of the SAB's committee on the reassessment
failed to produce any significant challenge to the findings of
the reassessment, the CCC and its allies from the American Forest
and Paper Association (AFPA) made up their own story of what happened
at the panel's meeting and spun their own story to the Wall Street
Journal and other media outlets. (Gibbs & CCHW 1995, p. 278)
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References:
Environ
Dioxin Risk Characterization Expert Panel, 1995, 'EPA Assessment
Not Justified', Environmental Science & Technology,
Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 31A-32A.
Gibbs,
Lois Marie and The Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste,
1995, Dying from Dioxin (Boston, MA: South End Press).
Montague,
Peter, 1995a, Dioxin
and Health, Rachel's Hazardous Waste
News, No. 463.
Science
Advisory Board SAB, 1995, Dioxin
Reassessment Review, (Washington: US
EPA) , Executive Summary.