The Federal Government Gets On Board with Second Hand Smoke
Back on January, I wrote about the state of California deciding to regulate environmental tobacco smoke (or second hand smoke) as a toxic air contaminant, just like benzene from oil refineries or hexavalent chromium from chrome plating operations. I speculated at the time that the federal government under the Bush Administration was going to be a long time in following the state’s lead.
Things happened a little more quickly than I expected. Today’s WaPo notes that the Surgeon General has issued a report on second hand smoke. The report, The Health Consequences of Involuntary Exposure to Tobacco Smoke, finds that even brief secondhand smoke exposure can harm human health, and concludes that eliminating indoor smoking is necessary to protect nonsmokers from exposure to second hand smoke.
“The health effects of secondhand smoke exposure are more pervasive than we previously thought,” said Surgeon General Carmona, vice admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service. “The scientific evidence is now indisputable: secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance. It is a serious health hazard that can lead to disease and premature death in children and nonsmoking adults.” Secondhand smoke contains more than 50 cancer-causing chemicals, and is itself a known human carcinogen. Nonsmokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke inhale many of the same toxins as smokers. Even brief exposure to secondhand smoke has immediate adverse effects on the cardiovascular system and increases risk for heart disease and lung cancer, the report says. In addition, the report notes that because the bodies of infants and children are still developing, they are especially vulnerable to the poisons in secondhand smoke.
“The good news is that, unlike some public health hazards, secondhand smoke exposure is easily prevented,” Surgeon General Carmona said. “Smoke-free indoor environments are proven, simple approaches that prevent exposure and harm.” The report finds that even the most sophisticated ventilation systems cannot completely eliminate secondhand smoke exposure and that only smoke-free environments afford full protection.
Easily prevented, unless you’re a state legislature that serves the tobacco industry and the Chamber of Commerce rather than the voters. The full report can be found here.
According to the LA Times yesterday, Senator Barbara Boxer accused the Environmental Protection Agency of not disclosing information on about 140 Superfund sites where human exposures remained uncontrolled. EPA’s response is that they’ve limited access only to enforcement-related data, and not health or exposure-related information. It sounds like one of the issues of contention is data on the estimated time to achieve cleanup, which arguably could have both enforcement and public health consequences.
As expected, Senate Republicans accused the Democrats of trying to manufacture a political issue, and of “seeking to reinstate a controversial tax in which chemical manufacturers and other companies were forced to pay a fee to contribute to cleaning up waste sites, even if the firms played no role in creating the mess”. . .
. . . controversial tax?
That wouldn’t happen to be referring to the taxes on chemical manufacturing, oil refining and corporate profits that historically provided the funding for Superfund, and that expired in 1995. The Republican leadership in Congress has opposed reinstatement of the taxes without changes (or reforms, depending on your spot in the political spectrum) in the liability provisions in Superfund. The debate has brought Superfund reauthorization to a halt for over 10 years. Further description of the taxes can be found here.
There was a bit of a ripple in the blogs over this story, focusing on the aspect of EPA “hiding” data from Congress. Without more specifics about what was or wasn’t being disclosed, it’s hard for me to get too worked up about this particular issue. It seems that Sen. Boxer has had a running battle with EPA over disclosure issues. Actually, what’s more interesting to me is the fact this was the first oversight hearing on Superfund by the Senate Subcommittee on Superfund and Waste Management in four years. I had given up hope long ago that Congress was going to take up the subject of Superfund reauthorization, though as you can see here, it hasn’t been entirely inactive on this subject.
Superfund has grown beyond a cleanup program to potentially become a tool for economic revitalization (through the provisions designed to address brownfields and worker training), but the issues of risk assessment, cleanup standards and remedy selection are what give Superfund its mission to protect public health. The debate will go on about whether or not risks from hazardous waste sites are over- or understated, but at some point, we as Americans need to reach a consensus about how to address the hazardous waste site legacy, whether it’s treat, dig up, pump out, fence off or leave alone.
We’ve already explored the lessons on how to reach this consensus – we just need to pick them up again. For example, back in the dimly-remember mid-1990s, several documents were published that discussed how the assessment of environmental health risks could be improved. Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society published in 1996 by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) addresses the topic of using risk assessment to make better informed and more trustworthy decisions about human and environmental health risks. While the book focuses on the limitations of risk assessment that cause it to fall short of these expectations, it makes a key point that “[a]cceptance of risk decisions by a broad spectrum of the interested and affected parties is usually critical to their implementation”.
The Presidential and Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management (1996-1997) published a report intended to stimulate agency policies, legislation, and private sector activities to improve risk assessment and risk management (a quick summary is here). A core element of the risk assessment framework articulated by this commission was stakeholder involvement. The guidelines laid out in the report included clarifying the goals for stakeholder involvement, and involving stakeholders early in a risk decision-making process; attempt to engage all potentially affected stakeholders and solicit a diversity of perspectives, even using “appropriate incentives to encourage stakeholder participation”.
A thorough examination of the Superfund program was conducted in 2001 by Resources for the Future, which particularly gets at the answer of how much money is needed by EPA to finish the job of cleaning up hazardous waste sites.
Ok, I’m glad that Congress is paying more attention to Superfund, but it’s still annoying that it took more than 10 years for it to happen and it would be nice if there could be more dialog with EPA rather than “you don’t tell me anything”.
One of the character in Douglas Adam’s novel Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an interstellar traveler observing Earth from afar, concluded that motor vehicles are the dominant form of life on the planet. Sometimes it’s easy to become blind to the obvious, such as the pervasive influence of automobiles on public health. It’s such a concern there’s even an institute devoted to its study.
One of the enduring memories of the past two weeks of travel in California and Arizona was the endless streams of motor vehicles flowing over the roads, either as a raging torrent or a trickle. The most substantial reminder about the environmental health impact came after my arrival at the Phoenix airport. Upon departing the baggage claim area to the area where arrivals are picked up, I encountered the spectacle of six lanes packed with idling vehicles between the tall baggage claim building and a tall parking structure, constituting an area source of emissions producing a nice air toxics hot spot. While searching for a taxi, I became aware of my eyes smarting a bit after a few minutes in this atmosphere. Automobiles produce a number of combustion products that are eye irritants. The best recognized one is acrolein. The lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL) associated with mild eye irritation was 60 ppb, following a 5-minute exposure period. Unless I was unusually sensitive to eye irritation, which I doubt, I had been exposed to something above 60 ppb for some five to ten minutes. Short-term concentrations in air can fluctuate a few orders of magnitude above a long-term average, which the California Air Resources Board reported to be 0.6 ppb in 2005 based on a 24-hour sample (EPA’s Urban Air Toxics Monitoring Program doesn’t measure acrolein in air). If this two order of magnitude relationship holds up for the other combustion products, I wonder how much benzene, 1,3-butadiene or formaldehyde I inhaled during my brief stint in the arrival area. Understanding these things intellectually is one thing. It’s another to get a visceral reminder, such as a good dose of emissions right in the face.
Good thing there weren’t a lot of diesel-powered vehicles operating there (there were some buses running to long-term parking and rental car areas and I don’t think there were natural-gas fueled). Diesel exhaust particulates are reasonably anticipated to be, or likely to be human carcinogens, according to the National Toxicology Program’s 11th Annual Report of Carcinogens and EPA. EPA isn’t sufficiently confident in the data to calculate a unit risk factor for quantifying the cancer risk from inhalation, but the State of California routinely quantifies the cancer risk from diesel inhalation. Statistics published by the California Air Resources Board show that the estimated lifetime cancer risk from diesel particulates routinely exceeds the risks from the other combustion products related to automobile emissions. These days, the average estimated lifetime cancer risk from toxic air pollutants in California is around 200 in one million (possibly double or triple that when the risks from diesel particulate matter are included), again with most of the emissions related to mobile sources.
I didn’t even touch the contribution of motor vehicles on criteria pollutants that principally affect respiratory health, such as ozone, particulate matter and oxides of nitrogen, or the resource impact of all our vehicles (currently accounting for 45% of our total petroleum consumption), or the greenhouse gas impact (in 2004, accounting for 33% of the total carbon dioxide emissions). A side benefit from James Howard Kunstler’s efforts to bestir us and release ourselves from thralldom to our cars could eventually be better health.
Someone else gets to blog about the traffic accident injuries and fatalities piece.
