Why endocrine disruption challenges current approaches to regulation of chemicals. They mean that the current protective structure used to protect people from contaminants in the United States are fundamentally flawed. The levels of contamination known to cause effects are dramatically lower than current testing procedures examine . New data examining hormonal effects of bisphenol A, for example, suggest federal tolerances should be at least 25,000 times lower than current approaches would determine.
Endocrine disrupting chemicals violate a basic assumption of toxicology and modern risk assessment.
As the dose increases so too does the effect. Dose - response is understood as a linear relationship. This means that high dose testing, the standard procedure of risk assessment, cannot reveal the health risks posed by endocrine disrupters. In the meantime, this means the US EPA, FDA, and industry are utterly lacking in scientific guidance for regulatory decisions about endocrine disrupters. Traditional toxicology often assumes that there is some level of exposure, a threshold, beneath which small amounts of a contaminant have no effect.