Public interest groups will meet with White House officials later this week in an attempt to delay the congressionally-mandated August implementation of EPA's upcoming endocrine disruptor screening program (EDSP), which is intended to narrow a list of chemicals that require additional testing to determine their endocrine disrupting effects.

Sources say that representatives from Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) will meet July 16 with White House Office of Management & Budget officials to urge them to postpone implementation of the EDSP, due to concerns about the validity of the tests that EPA is proposing to use for evaluating whether pesticides and other chemicals are endocrine disrupting compounds.

The meeting comes just days after the industry-funded Center for Regulatory Effectiveness filed a  July 10 Data Quality Act (DQA) petition asking EPA to correct its statements on the validity of a frog assay that is a key component of the upcoming EDSP. An informed source says that the agency is making "inaccurate and misleading" comments on the accuracy of the frog study, and lingering scientific uncertainty over the assay renders the entire first tier of the EDSP "useless."

Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that mimic or block normal functioning of hormones, inducing a variety of developmental and other health effects. In a bid to improve understanding of the compounds, Congress ordered EPA in the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act to assess the endocrine-disrupting potential of all pesticides. But EPA has struggled to create the program. In EPA's fiscal year 2008 appropriations bill, Congress ordered the agency to issue in August orders for industry to begin the screenings. EPA also must finalize in August the list of pesticides that will go through the screening program first. Industrial and other chemicals will be tested later.

One activist says that officials from PETA and PCRM will urge the White House and EPA to explore ways to delay issuing the final list of pesticides and hold back on implementing the EDSP over concerns about the accuracy of the frog and other assays.

The source says activists "completely agree" with the questions that the DQA petition raises over the frog assay's accuracy, and says that EPA appears to be "more interested in pushing this program through" to meet the congressionally-mandated August deadline "than on the accuracy" of the assays.

The source adds that while it is unclear how EPA could work around its legislative deadline, PETA and PCRM will continue to press their case for a delay. The groups want EPA to delay the EDSP until such time as sufficient, comprehensive peer reviews of all the 12 assays in the first tier of the program are complete -- something that the source says could take up to two years.

Source Inside EPA