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In EPA’s newly released PFAS Strategic Roadmap:  EPA’s Commitments to Action 2021-2024, EPA details its planned efforts over the next 3 years to address per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are ubiquitous in the environment and present in a wide variety of products used around the world. The roadmap describes EPA’s plans to reduce the presence of PFAS in the environment and decrease human exposures. This approach will account for the life cycle of PFAS, to read more…

ToxStrategies/21CT scientists are among the authors of a poster for the Annual Meeting of the American College of Toxicology, to be held virtually on November 10 through 19, 2021. The poster (by Amy Kimzey, Brian Welsh, and Marcie Wood) discusses the process of deriving exposure-based limits for impurities that might be encountered in pharmaceuticals for direct-to-brain administration and presents relevant case studies. The poster reviews three case studies—a salt, an alcohol, and an endogenous molecule—that read more…

  A new article by ToxStrategies authors (available from the Journal of Food Science online ahead of print) looks at the potential for the naturally occurring mycotoxin ochratoxin A (OTA) in coffee to produce adverse effects in consumers through the lens of a food safety plan. The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) names OTA among the listed chemical hazards that should be considered as part of a food safety plan, and animal studies have shown read more…

The U.S. FDA and the food industry shared a victory as a federal judge dismissed a suit seeking to find unlawful the process by which companies have been allowed to determine, without notification to FDA, that a food or supplement ingredient is Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS). Such self-determinations, in use for more than six decades, can exempt substances from pre-market review by FDA and had drawn the ire of (and a lawsuit from) the read more…

The Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) will have its SETAC North America 42nd Annual Meeting (also known as SciCon4) this year on November 14–18. Dr. Bill Rish of ToxStrategies will chair a session titled “Environmental Justice: Methodologies to Incorporate Environmental Justice into Human Health Risk Assessment.” The conference will be virtual, and the session presentations will be available on demand. In addition to chairing the session, two of the nine presentations will be read more…

With the increasing prevalence of systematic reviews in toxicology and environmental research, a team of prominent scientists in the field convened a workshop to address the issue of ensuring scientific quality and integrity in this body of study. Dr. Daniele Wikoff, of ToxStrategies, was a member of this team, helping to apply the principles and methods of systematic review to the review process itself. The team proposed 58 editorial interventions, of which 26 were assessed read more…

            Plans for a return to the Moon in 2024 and manned exploration of Mars, as well as a burgeoning commercial space tourism movement, have renewed concern about human exposure to radiation in space. There are several sources of space radiation[1]: Radiation belts caused by Earth’s magnetic field (i.e., the inner “Van Allen” radiation belt and the outer radiation belt Galactic cosmic radiation Sporadic solar particle events, when particles emitted read more…

On June 30, 2021, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced important policy changes surrounding risk evaluations issued under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) by the previous administration and the path forward for the first 10 chemicals that have already undergone risk evaluations.  These changes include:  1) expanding consideration of exposure pathways and fenceline community exposure screening level approach; 2) revisiting the assumption that PPE is always used in occupational settings when making risk read more…