Environment in Crisis

Dioxin Controversy
Dioxin

Background
Early Research
Paper Industry
Public Relations

EPA Assessment
Chlorine Industry


More PR
MBD
Schools and Parents

Coordinated Support
Advisory Board
Congress

 

Back to Main Menu..

Scientific Advisory Board

 

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)

...back to top


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.

 


© 2003 Sharon Beder