All Knowledge & Insights By Date

Bergeson & Campbell P.C. (B&C®) was pleased to present “Food Safety Issues in the United States.” Thomas J. Dunn and Karin F. Baron discussed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and the incremental progress that the law has achieved in assuring food safety.  In addition, the webinar included a look at the New Era of Smarter Food Safety, a 2020 initiative meant to enhance FSMA, and improve food safety outcomes by leveraging technology.  Topics Covered: Speakers...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will hold a webinar on November 1, 2022, on a new research funding opportunity, “Developing and Demonstrating Nanosensor Technology to Detect, Monitor, and Degrade Pollutants.” EPA states that environmental pollutants such as pesticides, insecticides, dyes, phenols, endocrine disrupters, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), heavy metals, and nitrogen compounds can have adverse effects on human health...

In August, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced it is considering revisiting the Process Safety Management (PSM) standard. This column summarizes why OSHA is thinking of amending the standard and what you can do to engage in the process....

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will hold a webinar on October 27, 2022, in its Computational Toxicology and Exposure Communities of Practice (CompTox Communities of Practice) series on “Analysis of High-Throughput Profiling Assays in Chemical Safety Screening.” The abstract for the webinar states that recent technological advancements have led to the development of new high-throughput profiling methods, such as transcriptomics, that can be used to screen rapidly chemicals...

On October 18, 2022, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) New Chemicals Program held a webinar on EPA’s process for assessing the potential risks of new chemicals under Section 5 of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and the types of data EPA considers in this assessment. Specifically, the webinar covered examples of data (quantitative and qualitative) that are not likely to be accepted for engineering assessment, considerations EPA makes when evaluating data, and...

By Lynn L. Bergeson and Carla N. Hutton   The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announced on October 21, 2022, that it recently reviewed a corn plant and a potato plant that were modified using genetic engineering to determine whether they present an increased pest risk as compared to unmodified plants. APHIS has posted its Regulatory Status Review (RSR) responses on its website, as required under 7 C.F.R....

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...

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...