CHEMICALS: A federal database on risk is in danger of having its funding cut by Congress
WASHINGTON — When floodwaters come up, seeping into industrial areas that turn out fuel or chemicals, public health officials look to a federal database known simply as IRIS.
Short for Integrated Risk Information System, the Environmental Protection Agency maintains the program to assess the health risks of various chemical compounds and as a go-to encyclopedia for state agencies on their impacts on human populations.
“These are the folks that are there when Corpus Christi, Texas, has a question about an inadvertent contamination of their water supply,” Thomas Burke, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University, testified Wednesday to Congress. “IRIS is an importation database that doesn’t just look at cancer and rats.”
Now in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey’s flooding of the Texas Gulf Coast, the future of that program is falling into question as Congress looks to cut the EPA’s budget.
Under President Donald Trump’s original budget released earlier this year, the agency would have seen its budget slashed more than 30 percent and IRIS eliminated altogether. But under a House appropriations bill released this summer, the EPA’s budget saw a far
smaller cut of $528 million — about 6 percent of its 2017 budget—leaving IRIS intact but financially weakened.
The program has long been controversial within the chemical industry, which has criticized the EPA’ s scientific methods and questioned I RI S’ s priorities.
“Everybody has a difference of opinion of what degree it needs to change,” said Ed Krenik, a lobbyist for the chemical industry.
At a hearing before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, Republicans echoed those concerns, calling for an overhaul in how IRIS goes about assessing the risk of chemicals that support an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
“IRIS assessments are not based on sound science ,” said Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Ill. “There are multiple instances of the IRIS program relying on outdated or flawed studies.”
Republicans pointed to a series of reports by both the Government Accountability Office and the National Academy of Sciences that recommended changes in IRIS’s scientific method, following a controversial 2010 assessment that the chemical formaldehyde caused cancer when inhaled.
Advocates for the program, like Burke, maintain that IRIS is addressing those areas of concern and improving its methods.
But James Bus, a toxicologist with the consulting firm Exponent, whose work is supported by the American Chemistry Council, a trade group representing the industry, testified the EPA had a history of reliance on health findings that could not be reproduced and rushing peer reviews of its scientific work.
“IRIS might be going down the right road, but they still have a lot of work ahead of them,” Bus said.