EPA Wants to Rely Less on Animal Testing

It's not a move based on compassion, but efficiency. I'll take what I can get though, even if it's not an immediate eradication of a despicable practice.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is reducing its reliance on animal testing to assess human risk of chemical toxicity and will instead focus more heavily on the tools made possible by advances in molecular biology, genomics and computational modeling.

The move is part of the EPA's effort to find better, cheaper and faster ways to screen thousands of chemicals for human risk, including the ways in which toxicity occurs, the impact of long-term exposure to various chemicals, and how chemicals effect genetic variations of the population....

It expects the new approach will yield significant savings. For example, companies may have to pay upwards of a half-million dollars to perform an endocrine disruption screening on individual chemicals, as may be required by the end of the year for chemicals that include food use pesticides, but the new approach may trim the cost to about $20,000.

The EPA will still use animal testing for the foreseeable future, but in smarter ways, Kavlock said. "For a long time there will be a need for animal testing," he said. "They've served their purpose well. The only way we can study some things is in animals."

Kavlock expects the testing strategy to be fully deployed within 10 years but believes useful applications will be released within two years.

Obama Overturns Last Minute EPA Rule Change Made By America's Worst President

President Obama overturned a last minute Bush regulation that would have allowed agencies to skip consulting with govt. scientists when reviewing EPA rules. Because science, like facts, have a liberal bias.

I am so glad this dim-witted moron is back in Texas. It will take a generation to clean up the damage he has done to this country.

More Regulation Needed for Factory Farm Waste

The US General Accountability Office (GAO) is not happy with the EPA.They've issued a report that throws a negative light on the EPA trying to ELIMINATE EVEN MORE REGULATION of factory farms.

Deregulation is EVERYWHERE.

Some huge livestock farms produce more raw waste than cities as large as Philadelphia or Houston. But federal regulators are failing to control pollution from the gigantic operations or assess health risks from the enormous quantities of manure they produce, according to congressional investigators.

The Government Accountability Office report on the raw waste is to be released Wednesday to a House committee hearing on federal oversight of factory farms.

The conclusions fueled concerns about a proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule change that would eliminate one of the few federal oversight mechanisms over air and water pollution from big farms.

The rule would eliminate a requirement that farms report to federal, state and local officials when air emissions of hazardous substances like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide exceed certain levels.