Jim Cooper wrote:
>The HPV Challenge is a voluntary effort. There is no EPA rule
>telling industry that they have to test the 2,000 chemicals.
>Industry is doing this on a voluntary basis. This can be
>verified through the HPV Branch at EPA's Office of Pollution
>Prevention and Toxics.
Since I was at many of the meetings at which the groundwork for the HPV challenge was laid, I know that EPA basically presented industry with a choice; industry could either agree to do these tests "voluntarily", or EPA would force them to do the tests under the same TSCA authority that should have been used a long time ago. This is much the same choice that high-level employees are given when they are asked whether they would like to resign rather than being fired.
It's odd that industry would do them voluntarily when, as you say, industry toxicologists seem to beleive that structure-activity relationships are good enough. Why would they waste your stockholders' money on truly voluntary testing if they believe that it isn't needed?
I persist in this thread, even though it is drifting further and further away from libraries, because I want to illustrate to the other readers that the collection and distribution of data is a highly politically fought matter. Members of the public sometimes seem to beleive that regulation may be affected by politics, but that data collection and distribution is blissfully technocratic and unaffected by lobbying. That isn't true; there are almost as many struggles over whether to collect and release data as there are over whether to tighten air or water pollution permit standards.
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