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Endocrine Disrupters and the Pill
- Introduction
- How EDs Work
- Our Stolen Future
- Drugs in the Environment
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Examples of EDs
- Government Testing
- Laws
- The Pill as an ED
- History of the Pill
- Case Study: Coastal Waters
- Case Study: Fish
- Case Study: Men in Italy
- Solutions
- What you can do!
- Further Information
Comments & questions to:
khornbach@macalester.edu
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Laws
While the EPA has done little to actually
solve the problem of endocrine disrupters (EDs) in the environment, there are clear legal
obligations that they fall under to find ways to help find and remove
EDs. Here I will discuss several of these different acts and discuss
their implications in regards to EDs.
The Clean Water Act is
considered a break through as it works to protect the quality of the
nations drinking water. The Act was shaped largely in two major
years, in its original inception in 1972, when it was known as the
Federal Water Pollution Control Act, and then in 1977 when it was
amended and became known as the Clean Water Act. The Act established a
structure for regulating the amount of pollutants that were entering
the waterways of the US. The Act gave the EPA the power to set water
quality standards for contaminants in surface waters. It became illegal
for a person to pollute waters without a permit. The Act also helped
build better sewage treatment plants. However, the waters included in
the EPA's jurisdiction in the Act are only interstate waters,
tributaries, territorial seas, and wetlands adjacent to the above
listed. The Act does not attempt to control the water quality of ground
water or any private areas, meaning that a watershed could be affected
from a private source.
The EPA is required to monitor and control
the quality of American water, yet the current course of testing does
not help to deal with the immediate problem of EDs in the water supply.
In other words, the EPA is failing because they are taking to long
dealing with toxics that are affecting America's waterways. Also, the
fact that the EPA does not include ground water in the Act is worrisome
as ground water is immensely important and is one of the major things
affected by pesticide use. Many pesticides have been found to be EDs as
noted earlier. In other words there are serious implications as there
are EDs in the current water systems, and in accordance with the Clean
Water Act, the EPA should be attempting to remove this pollutant from
our waters. While these laws do not apply to drinking water,
contaminated waters can lead to contaminated wildlife which through
biomagnification can be even more detrimental.
Hand in hand with the Clean Water Act is the Safe Drinking Water Act
(SDWA) of 1974. The Act has been amended twice, once in 1986 and then
in 1996. In its most basic form, the SDWA works to protect drinking
water sources from rivers, lakes, reservoirs, springs, and ground water
wells (that serve more than 25 people). SDWA ensures that high quality
drinking water will be protected from source to tap from improperly
disposed chemicals, animal waste, pesticides, human waste, waste
injected underground, and natural occurring contaminates. The Act sets
national standards for drinking water, which are then used to set
maximum contaminant levels for particular contaminants in drinking
water. These standards also include testing requirements to ensure
contaminates are not in the drinking water.
While the SDWA sets limits on contaminants,
the problem is that with EDs even small doses can have disastrous
results. As Colborn discovered in Our Stolen Future even the smallest
amounts of EDs can prove to be highly problematic to the endocrine
system. However, even with its problems, the SDWA requires that the EPA
regulate the quality of our drinking water at all its steps and ensure
that this water is safe to consume. Once again the EPA is not reaching
their duties, by becoming wrapped up in the administrational problems
of creating new research and governing groups, the EPA has not made
progress in actually solving the problem of EDs in the water supply.
The next law is the Toxic Substance
Control Act (TSCA) of 1976. This act was put into place by Congress
allowing the EPA to track industrial chemicals produced or imported
into the US. The EPA has the power to require testing of chemicals that
it considers an environmental or human-health risk. The EPA can ban
these chemicals if they believe they pose a major risk. The
implementation here for EDs seems quite clear. There are several
industrial chemicals (See examples of EDs) that are known EDs, yet many
of these are not banned. The EPA should use its jurisdiction and ban
these chemicals to ensure environmental and human-health safety.
The Resource Conservation and Recovery
Act (RCRA) of 1976 gave the EPA the power to control hazardous chemicals
from their inception to their destruction. They can control the ways
that hazardous chemicals are dealt with and as see from TSCA can eve
ban them. The EPA has the power to deal with EDs in a much more
effective way. They are simply not using at this time. They are so
caught up in ensuring the correct testing of chemicals that these
hazards are allowed to continue, instead of being banned like they
should.
Finally, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic
Act of 1938 is technically under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) but is also applicable in the problem of EDs. The
act put into effect extensive restrictions on what regulations should
be enacted for food safety, and also the creation of drugs: Some foods,
such as fish can contain EDs, some drugs are EDs themselves. It seems
that the EPA is not the only government agency not properly dealing
with the problems of EDs. They are a part of our world, our food, our
water, our medicine, and the proper laws are in place to govern EDs,
and they are simply not being governed properly at this time. The
government must be held accountable for their own laws, and find an
effective way to deal with EDs, and allow them to be considered as an
important part of each of the above laws.
All Information on this page from the EPA's website on major Environmental Laws
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Last updated: 5/2/2006
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