Only a handful of chemicals have been proven to cause cancer in humans. Many more have been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals, but an army of scientists now makes a good living by arguing that animal tests don't tell us much about humans. While this debate rages, thunderous quantities of industrial poisons continue to spew into the environment. The environmental movement and the public have allowed the chemical industry and their friends in government to define the terms of the discussion. The result has been two decades of focus on cancer and not much else.
Cancer is important, of course, but so are other health problems caused by chemicals.
During 1992, non-cancer threats from chemicals began to get the attention they deserve. As the focus of concern shifted away from cancer, critics of risk assessment became more vocal. Risk assessment is now the main intellectual prop that allows industries to continue dumping billions of pounds of industrial poisons into public air and water supplies. EPA has blessed this as the official technique for showing that industrial poisons rarely, if ever, cause significant harm. In the desperate latter days of the Bush administration, William Reilly, chief of EPA, even went so far as to suggest that ALL EPA policy should be based on risk assessment.