Blogs

On October 19, 2022, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it activated its emerging viral pathogen (EVP) guidance in support of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) response to the Ebola virus cases in western Uganda. With EPA’s EVP guidance, additional disinfectants, for which EVP claims have been approved, can be used against the Ebola virus. According to EPA’s press release, EPA developed its EVP...

October 26, 202212:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. (EDT) The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports that 48 million people in the United States (1 in 6) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die each year from foodborne diseases. In 2011, President Obama signed into law the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in part to address this significant public health issue. FSMA is a comprehensive law intended to shift the focus of foodborne illness management from responding to outbreaks to...

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on October 19, 2022, entitled “Persistent Chemicals: EPA Should Use New Data to Analyze the Demographics of Communities with PFAS in Their Drinking Water.” The Congressional requesters asked GAO to examine per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) contamination in drinking water and related state actions. GAO’s report examines what recent data from selected states show about the occurrence of PFAS in drinking water; the...

By Lynn L. Bergeson and Carla N. Hutton   On October 6, 2022, the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) announced the availability of a report entitled Update on Potential of Biofuels in Shipping, updating a previous study developed by EMSA on biofuels and examining the full range of biofuels from the perspective of current production capacity, storage and distribution infrastructure, and power-generation technologies. According to EMSA, the report also features techno-economic analyses...

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development will hold a webinar on November 3, 2022, on the safer and sustainable innovation approach (SSIA) for more sustainable nanomaterials and nano-enabled products. According to OECD, SSIA is an approach aiming to boost safer and sustainable innovations by integrating safety and sustainability at an early stage of the design phase of innovative materials, products, applications, and processes. SSIA combines the...

On October 13, 2022, Earthjustice, on behalf of a coalition of environmental organizations and community advocates, petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to revoke the approval of approximately 600 per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that were granted through low volume exemptions (LVE) or low release and low exposure exemptions (LoREX) to the premanufacture notice (PMN) requirements of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). In its October 13,...

On October 7, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office (NNCO) made key announcements intended to advance the Biden Administration’s efforts “to leverage the promise of science and technology to benefit all Americans.” They also complement the Administration’s ongoing Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act implementation efforts “that will ensure the United...

On October 11, 2022, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) released its final investigative report into “a massive fire and explosions” at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refinery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that occurred in June 2019. According to CSB, the incident occurred when a corroded pipe elbow ruptured, releasing process fluid into the refinery’s hydrofluoric acid (HF) alkylation unit. CSB states that over 5,000 pounds of “highly toxic” HF were released, “a...

By Lynn L. Bergeson and Carla N. Hutton   The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Biotechnology Risk Assessment Research Grants (BRAG) program supports the generation of new information that will assist federal regulatory agencies in making science-based decisions about the environmental effects of introducing genetically engineered organisms. In an October 27, 2022, technical assistance webinar, staff will provide an overview of the program, which is jointly administered by...

According to a September 29, 2022, press release, the Japan Business Council in Europe (JBCE) has proposed a harmonization of the classification of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) “based on the latest knowledge on the effects of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in organisms.” JBCE notes that this classification is consistent with the classification of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). JBCE states that “the morphologies, physicochemical properties, and...