Environmental Health Sciences, University of Michigan School of Public Health, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America.
Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, San Francisco, California, United States of America.
PLoS Biol. 2019 Aug 29;17(8):e3000372. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000372. eCollection 2019 Aug.
The 2016 Frank Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (Lautenberg TSCA) amended the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to mandate protection of susceptible and highly exposed populations. Program implementation entails a myriad of choices that can lead to different degrees of public health protections. Well-documented exposures to multiple industrial chemicals occur from air, soil, water, food, and products in our workplaces, schools, and homes. Many hazardous chemicals are associated with or known to cause health risks; for other industrial chemicals, no data exist to confirm their safety because of flaws in 1976 TSCA. Under the 2016 Lautenberg amendments, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must evaluate chemicals against risk-based safety standards under enforceable deadlines, with an explicit mandate to identify and assess risks to susceptible and highly exposed populations. Effective public health protection requires EPA to implement the Lautenberg TSCA requirements by incorporating intrinsic and extrinsic factors that affect susceptibility, adequately assessing exposure among vulnerable groups, and accurately identifying highly exposed groups. We recommend key scientific and risk assessment principles to inform health-protective chemical policy such as consideration of aggregate exposures from all pathways and, when data are lacking, the use of health-protective defaults.
2016 年《弗兰克·劳滕伯格 21 世纪化学安全法》（Lautenberg TSCA）修订了 1976 年《有毒物质控制法》（TSCA），要求保护易受伤害和高度暴露的人群。计划的实施需要做出无数的选择，这些选择可能会导致不同程度的公共卫生保护。有充分文件记录的接触多种工业化学品的情况发生在空气、土壤、水、食物以及我们工作场所、学校和家庭中的产品中。许多危险化学品与健康风险有关或已知会造成健康风险；对于其他工业化学品，由于 1976 年 TSCA 的缺陷，没有数据可以确认其安全性。根据 2016 年《劳滕伯格修正案》，美国环境保护署（EPA）必须根据可执行的最后期限，根据基于风险的安全标准对化学品进行评估，并明确授权确定和评估易受伤害和高度暴露人群的风险。有效的公共卫生保护要求 EPA 通过纳入影响易感性的内在和外在因素、充分评估脆弱群体的暴露情况以及准确识别高度暴露群体来实施 Lautenberg TSCA 要求。我们建议关键的科学和风险评估原则，为健康保护化学政策提供信息，例如考虑所有途径的总暴露量，并且在缺乏数据时，使用健康保护默认值。
