GAO Report Scolds the EPA for Not Keeping Kids Safe From Toxins
The report questions the EPA's efforts to keep kids safe from toxic chemicals.
March 19, 2010 -- During the past decade, the Environmental Protection Agency's commitment to keeping children safe from toxic chemicals has lapsed, and top officials routinely ignored scores of recommendations by the agency's own children's health advisory committee, according to a report released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office.
The consequences are substantial, health experts told lawmakers Wednesday, during a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Children breathe more air in proportion to their weight than do adults, and because their bodies are still developing, toxic chemicals affect them more profoundly. Exposures to chemicals today portend a "flood of chronic disease" tomorrow, said Ted Schettler, science director for the advocacy group Science and Environmental Health Network.
Schettler, who has served on EPA and National Academy of Sciences advisory committees, testified that the problems "are setting the stage for an overwhelming wave of disease and disability ... in the coming decades." Of particular concern: the lack of information about thousands of chemicals and how they interact with each other.
The GAO report documents a "reduced emphasis on children" throughout the EPA and "high-level" failures to ensure that the interests of children were considered when the agency acted.
In testimony, the GAO's director of natural resources and environment, John Stephenson, told lawmakers that efforts to protect children from environmental threats "waned during the last decade."
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., was more pointed. He said efforts to protect children from environmental hazards "ground to a halt during the Bush administration" and the EPA office for children's health "withered on the vine."
"The good news is: Things have turned around," he said.
On Tuesday, for instance, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson sent a memo to her staff reminding them that "protecting children's environmental health is central to our work at EPA."
"Let me reaffirm that it is EPA's policy to consider the health of pregnant women, infants and children consistently and explicitly in all activities we undertake related to human-health protection, both domestically and internationally," the memo said. "We must be diligent in our efforts to ensure that dangerous exposures and health risks to children are prevented."
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