News Coverage
New EPA Guidelines Would Better Gauge Chemicals' Danger to Kids
Published March 4, 2003
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Children are much more likely than adults to get cancer from exposure to certain chemicals, according to a new risk-assessment strategy proposed Monday by the federal government.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a final draft of new guidelines for evaluating the dangers posed by pesticides and other cancer-causing chemicals that officials said would be more accurate.
The guidelines would consider a variety of new factors when deciding safe levels of exposure, such as how a substance causes cancer. If implemented, they would be used to evaluate any new chemicals that come into use and to reevaluate others already in use.
As part of the new guidelines, the EPA for the first time proposed that regulators assume children are more vulnerable to the cancer-causing effects of chemicals that can cause genetic damage.
According to the proposal, children age 2 and younger would be considered to have 10 times the risk of adults, while children age 2 through 15 would be considered three times as vulnerable.
"We think this guidance on assessing children's cancer risk is going to evolve for a number of classes of compounds," said William Farland, acting deputy assistant administrator for science in the EPA's Office of Research and Development.
The proposal would update 1986 guidelines and comes after the agency spent years reviewing data on cancer-causing substances. It is designed to incorporate greater scientific understanding that has emerged since 1986 of how chemicals can cause cancer.
The agency concluded, based on that review, that children are much more sensitive than adults and tend to have higher exposure to substances for various reasons, including that they put things in their mouths.
Environmental groups generally praised the proposal.
"This really shows this front-end loading of cancer risk in the first two years of life," said Jane Houlihan, vice president for research at the Environmental Working Group.