We're used to hearing about double standards within government agencies, but the one uncovered by the good folks at the Environmental Working Group last week seems even more egregious than most. The group discovered that lobbyists at the American Chemistry Council convinced the U.S. EPA last summer to remove the chair of an expert peer review panel charged with setting safe exposure levels for a toxic fire retardant.

The ACC managed to convince EPA bigshots that toxicologist Deborah Rice -- who formerly worked at the EPA's National Center for Environmental Assessment and now works in Maine's Center for Disease Control and Prevention -- could not lead in an unbiased fashion because she once testified before the Maine Legislature in favor of restricting use of the chemical.

Rice has studied the effects of the chemical, deca, in animals and reported that it affected their neurological systems. The brominated compound, which is used in televisions, is also known to contaminate human blood and breast milk.

At face value, the ACC has a point about Rice. EPA's Peer Review Handbook does say that "EPA should always make every effort to use peer reviewers who do not have any conflict of interest or an appearance of a lack of impartiality, and who are completely independent”

But here's the thing: EWG reviewed seven EPA panels created last year and found 17 panelists who were employed or funded by the chemical industry or had made public statements that the chemicals they were reviewing were safe. We're just guessing here, but the ACC probably didn't complain when an ExxonMobil employee served on a similar EPA panel responsible for deciding whether ethylene oxide, a chemical manufactured by ExxonMobil, is a carcinogen.

So the lesson here seems to be that you've got talented, high-priced lobbyists working for you, all those pesky opposing voices can be silenced, while your people can keep on giving advice. This development would not appear to bode well for consumer health.

As for Rice, the EPA has retroactively stripped all of her comments from the panel’s published report and republished the altered document. The agency plans to propose a new safety standard for the chemical at the end of this month. Don't be surprised if it's not exactly stringent.

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