1. How is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) beneficial to controlling en
ID: 111257 • Letter: 1
Question
1. How is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) beneficial to controlling environmental issues on human health? Provide examples.
2. What is the effect of asbestos on human health? How can you prevent asbestos? Provide examples.
3. What is an example of an environmental policy that reduces air pollution? Provide examples.
4. What are strategies to reduce air pollution that comes from transportation? Provide examples.
5. What pollutants in indoor air may be dangerous to human health?
6. What is the greatest indoor air problem globally? Provide examples.
Please please provide references and citation.... Thank you.....
Explanation / Answer
1. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is tasked with protecting human health and the environment through research, monitoring, standard-setting and enforcement. Its Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention focuses on the risks posed by pesticides and toxic chemicals and relies primarily on the results of animal tests to establish “acceptable” exposure levels for these chemicals. While millions of animals have been killed in toxicity tests over the course of its history, EPA has banned only a handful of toxic chemicals using its authority under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976..
Example -
The Chemical Industry and Animal Testing
The chemical industry has long benefited from EPA’s reliance on animal testing because the results of these tests are always subject to interpretation. On one hand, if a chemical is shown to cause harmful effects in animal tests, industry representatives claim that the results are not applicable to humans. A perfect example is the herbicide atrazine, which has been repeatedly shown to cause negative health effects in tests on animals. Yet it remains on the market and in extremely widespread use due to company claims that the effects seen in animals do not extend to humans, although mounting evidence is now suggesting otherwise.
At the same time, however, company officials stand by the results of EPA-required animal studies that show that their products are safe for humans. This is what happened with cigarettes for more than 20 years as industry scientists claimed that tobacco was safe for humans because animals who were forced to inhale cigarette smoke in laboratory experiments did not develop cancer. The inability of animal tests to reliably predict what happens in humans can lead to products being exempt from regulation for years while they are tested and retested on animals.
Even in cases where the government used animal studies to regulate products for human use, there have been problems. In the late 1970s, huge doses of saccharin were shown to cause bladder cancer in rats, and products containing saccharin were required to be labeled with a cancer warning. Subsequent “mechanistic” studies (studies that examine how a substance actually works in the body) showed that the cancer results applied only to rats and, supported by human epidemiology studies that found no consistent link between saccharin and bladder cancer, the substance was removed from the government’s list of possible human carcinogens in 2000.
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