By now you're probably familiar with the controversy around the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) failure to consider all available, credible scientific evidence before it reassured the public that chemicals used in baby bottles and other plastics were safe. In other words, it relied on industry-sponsored studies to reach a conclusion that its Science Board has since rebuked.
So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did the very same thing when deciding whether to regulate perchlorate in our drinking water. In this case, agency leaders chose to ignore authoritative studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and instead relied on a chemical industry-funded consulting firm. Sounds all too familiar, doesn't it?
And it makes me more than a little upset because perchlorate interferes with normal thyroid function (right, my kids), may cause cancer and persists indefinitely in the environment, but is currently unregulated by state or federal authorities. Terrific! And the evidence that it's a health risk is strong:
In 2006 the CDC published the results of a study of 1,100 women that showed clear clinical signs of perchlorate toxicity at real-world exposure levels. When pressed by congressional allies of perchlorate polluters at a hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, the CDC said that decreases in critical thyroid hormone levels in women exposed to perchlorate were "consistent with causation" -- in other words, that perchlorate probably caused their hormone deficiencies.