Favorable Reactions Researchers and industry representatives are reacting positively to the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recently proposed revised guidelines for carcinogen risk assessment. That approval is somewhat tempered by warnings sounded by environmental and consumer-education groups regarding the interpretation of certain suggestions in the long-awaited document.
OPPORTUNITY: The revisions encourage use of new data notes Bernard Goldstein. The guidelines, released in mid-April, incorporate recommendations from several scientific review boards and a National Academy of Sciences panel on changing EPA's methods for assessing human cancer risk from pollutants and industrial chemicals (see story on page 7). The document calls for infusing modern molecular biological information, such as how a chemical may alter DNA, into the agency's 10-year-old policy for measuring toxicity. EPA currently relies on experiments in which rodents are exposed to high doses of chemicals. The measurement practice, which has been a subject of much scientific and regulatory debate, is ...
