[CPEO-BIF] Report on the NAS Committee meeting on TCE

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

The National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council (NRC) 
Committee on the Human Health Risks of Trichloroethylene (TCE) held its 
first meeting in Washington, DC on Wednesday, March 23 and Thursday, 
March 24, 2005. The Wednesday meeting included two public sessions.

At the morning session, Richard Canady of the White House Office of 
Science and Technology Policy explained that the Inter-Agency Working 
Group IAWG) - a group which previously discussed the federal view on 
perchlorate - had asked the NRC to convene the Committee to answer a 
series of scientific questions related to the toxicity of TCE. The 
Committee was not, he explained, to conduct a health risk assessment.

Then Peter Preuss and Weihsueh Chiu, of EPA's National Center for 
Environmental Assessment, explained EPA's 2001 Human Health Risk 
Assessment as well as the scientific issues they expected the Committee 
to address. Their remarks were neither a spirited defense of the 2001 
Assessment nor a capitulation to EPA's critics at other federal agencies.

Then Canady moderated a panel that took questions from members of the 
NRC Committee. Panelists included Preuss and representatives of the 
other IAWG sponsoring agencies, the Department of Defense, the 
Department of Energy, and NASA. The most remarkable thing about the 
panel was the appearance of enforced consensus. That is, the speakers 
seemed to take great pains not to disagree with each other. When a 
question appeared to generate possible differences, they promised to 
discuss the issue among themselves before getting back to the Committee.

Overall, the morning session was dry and technical, with no indication 
that the question of TCE's risk to humans has been the subject of 
intense debate between EPA and federal polluting agencies. It left open 
the possibility that EPA scientists might not be allowed to defend the 
groundbreaking work included in the 2001 Assessment, for the sake of 
presenting a common Executive Branch position to the Committee.

In the afternoon, more than a dozen public speakers addressed the 
Committee from the open microphone. The Halogenated Solvents Industry 
Association requested time for three detailed presentations at the next 
Committee meeting. The TCE Issues Group - an innocuous sounding name for 
large, private responsible parties (polluters) - requested time for its 
own scientific presentations. Both groups believe EPA's 2001 Assessment 
is overly conservative (protective).

Most of the remaining speakers were grassroots activists and local 
elected officials from TCE-impacted communities in New York, New Jersey, 
and Tennessee. They told of TCE exposures, from both vapor intrusion and 
drinking water contamination, in their communities. They reported what 
they considered large numbers of cancers and other diseases in their 
neighborhoods. They described the combination of chemicals to which 
they, their families, and their neighbors are exposed. And they 
explained that more of them would be protected if EPA's 2001 Assessment 
were implemented as a health standard for air and water.

The next meeting of the NRC Committee on TCE is April 20, 2005. It is 
tasked to issue a report in about 18 months.

LS
--
Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org


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