EPA Criticized on Risk Assessments

By Jerry Hagstrom
DTN Political Analyst

WASHINGTON (DTN) -- The Center for Biological Diversity on Wednesday criticized the Environmental Protection Agency for missing deadlines to complete risk assessments in 2015 for the pesticides atrazine, glyphosate and imidacloprid.

"These risk assessments aren't just bureaucratic boxes to be checked," said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "Every day that the EPA delays completing these much-needed reviews is a day that people and wildlife in the United States remain at risk from some of the most toxic chemicals in use today."

But an EPA spokeswoman said the analyses will be announced soon.

"EPA takes very seriously its commitments to produce scientifically strong risk assessments for pesticides in a timely manner," the spokeswoman said in an email to DTN.

"We have completed the preliminary pollinator risk assessment for imidacloprid, and plan to make it public in early January," she said.

"We have delayed the issuance of the glyphosate risk assessment in order to address the carcinogenicity of glyphosate in light of the assessment recently released by the International Agency for Research on Cancer," the EPA spokeswoman said. "The agency is revising the atrazine preliminary risk assessment to incorporate recently received data. Although we had hoped to make them public by the end of this year, we expect to release the preliminary risk assessments for glyphosate and atrazine for public comment in the early part of 2016."

(ES/AG)

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