would reduce the federal share for new mass transit projects to 50%, while maintaining federal funding for new road projects at 80%. “This would put local and state governments in a terrible spot when forced to choose between building a new freeway or building a new light rail line,” Replogle says. “We think it’s essential to keep a level playing field here.” Moreover, a number of studies have shown that increasing highway capacity only increases traffic and emissions. Likewise, the streamlining of environmental reviews under SAFETEA “chips away at the spirit, if not the letter, of the National Environmental Policy Act,” Lobaas says. The bill would allow environmental reviews to be conducted for a whole class of projects, rather than on an individual project basis, with environmental compliance regulation more centered at the state level, particularly with state transportation departments, “which don’t have the best track record when it comes to environmental protection,” Lobaas says. It’s unclear what will happen to the bill in Congress, where both chambers are recommending significantly higher funding levels and drafting their own reauthorization bills. A version being considered by the Senate Environment and Public Works committee would go even further than SAFETEA toward weakening CAA conformity provisions by granting the car industry exemptions to these requirements, public health groups say. For a copy of the president’s SAFETEA proposal, go to www.fhwa.dot.gov/ reauthorization/safetea.htm. —KRIS CHRISTEN
Androgenic activity found in air For the first time, researchers have used bioassays to screen biomass combustion and diesel emissions for androgenic activity. In a talk at the Air and Waste Management Association’s annual meeting in San Diego in June, Clyde Owens, a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. EPA’s National Risk Management Research
Laboratory (NRMRL) in Research Triangle Park, N.C., reported that preliminary tests of organic extracts from air samples confirm that these emissions contain compounds that can be classified as endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs). People have looked for EDCs in different sources—like wastewater
News Briefs Growing dependence on failing ecosystems “More concerted, focused action is urgently needed” to stop the continuing erosion and collapse of many of the earth’s systems that support life, says United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) Director Klaus Toepfer. Toepfer’s comments pertain to a report developed jointly by the World Bank, the nonprofit World Resources Institute, the United Nations Development Programme, and UNEP. Released on July 10, World Resources 2002–2004: Decisions for the Earth, Balance, Voice and Power includes statistics indicating growing human dependence on deteriorating ecosystems such as river basins and forests. The report authors suggest that governments and businesses should improve their solicitation and understanding of public opinion related to decisions that affect ecosystems and should consider environmental impacts when making economic decisions. The report can be downloaded at www.wri.org.
More fish with high PBDE levels Tests of fish in California’s San Francisco Bay area show that six of the most commonly eaten local species have rapidly rising body burdens of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), according to the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization. The tests, which were conducted by the California Department of Toxic Substance Control’s Hazardous Materials Laboratory in Berkeley, showed that all 22 of the fish collected last year contained 7 different PBDEs. Since 1997, the levels of PBDEs in striped bass have more than tripled, while levels in halibut have more than doubled. To read Tainted Catch, go to www.ewg.org.
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SAFETEA would shorten this horizon to 10 years. This change would allow the transportation sector to escape its long-range air quality impacts, particularly with bigger projects like outer beltways, shifting the burden of cleaning up emissions from cars and trucks to other sectors of the economy, Becker says. Equally troubling are the proposed changes to CMAQ, according to Becker and environmental and public health groups. This program was designed to help municipalities not meeting air quality standards to come into compliance by funding measures such as mass transit systems, bicycle routes, and other projects that reduce emissions. With new U.S. EPA standards for ozone and fine particulate matter on the way, the number of nonattainment areas is expected to triple, according to DOT documents. Nevertheless, the agency is only proposing a 9% increase in the program’s funding over SAFETEA’s 6-year life span, points out Michael Replogle of Environmental Defense. Additionally, DOT proposes opening the CMAQ program up to other emission control strategies such as diesel retrofits, notes Deron Lobaas, of the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council. These ideas, while good, increase competition for program funds, and unless CMAQ is at least doubled in size, there won’t be enough money to go around, he says. Another big concern is that under SAFETEA, mass transit would get an increasingly smaller portion of the funding pie. Currently, new projects under both the highway and transit programs are eligible for 80% federal funding, but SAFETEA
Environmental▼News treatment plants—but no one has looked for anything other than common EDCs, such as dioxins and furans, especially androgenic EDCs in emissions, says Brian Gullett, an environmental engineer at NRMRL and a coauthor of the talk. In certain parts of the world, people burn a lot of their own trash. Emissions from these sources and from other uncontrolled burns, such as forest fires, could mean combustion emissions are significant and “underappreciated” sources of EDCs, he adds. Estrogen-based bioassays are well established in endocrine disrupter studies, but androgenic tests have seen only limited use for EDCs. Owens explains that mammalian breast cancer cells are the basis of this androgenic assay, developed by coauthor Vickie Wilson, a toxicologist at EPA’s National Health and Environmental Effects Research
Laboratory, also in North Carolina. Dihydrotestosterone, the natural hormone that can trigger significant balding in males, acts as the standard in the assay, in the same way that estradiol acts in an estrogenic bioassay. Luciferase is the gene reporter. The researchers also simplified assay samples by fractionating them with liquid chromatography. According to Gullett, the bioassays can only screen samples for basic activity. The researchers are now using other analytical techniques to characterize the individual compounds responsible for the androgenic activity and have not ruled out synergistic effects. Donald Mackay, director of the Canadian Environmental Monitoring Center at Trent University, says it is “not surprising to find [EDCs] in combustion products because combustion is a very complex process that gives rise to a vast number
of oxygenated chemical species, and some of them are quite likely to be EDCs.” However, some researchers with expertise in air emissions and endocrine disrupters say that without further results, they remain skeptical that air is a serious source of EDCs. Timothy Zacharewski, an associate professor at Michigan State University who has used bioassays to examine estrogenic activity in particulate matter, says, “I’m sure there might be EDCs in particulate matter being released, but the concentration that one would inhale would never achieve a high enough level to elicit an endocrine response that may be adverse.” He says that does not mean that particulates are not a health concern, but linking them to endocrine activity is tough without in vivo test results. —RACHEL PETKEWICH
Voluntary strategies recommended to reduce dioxin exposure ventions to reduce dioxin exposure, but the lack of adequate data on the actual levels of dioxins in the food supply and the uncertainty regarding risks posed by low levels of dioxins were obstacles to adopting PHOTODISC
The private sector should work with a U.S. federal interagency group to pursue voluntary ways to minimize dietary exposure to dioxins, recommends a report released in early July by the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine (IOM). In sharp contrast to the situation in the European Union, where limits on dioxins in food and animal feed went into effect last year (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2002, 36, 95A), the report does not recommend regulatory limits on dioxins in the U.S. food supply. Although dioxin contamination in the environment over the past three decades has declined about 76%, data from several studies indicate that 95% of human exposure to dioxins comes from food, says Robert Lawrence, chair of the IOM committee and professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. As a result, last year U.S. regulatory agencies asked the National Academies to study the implications of dioxin in the food supply (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2002, 36, 93A–94A). The IOM committee identified several potential government inter-
Got low-fat milk? Girls and young women should consume less animal fat to reduce their exposure to dioxins before they reach childbearing age, recommends a new report.
many of them, says committee member Michael Taylor of the independent think tank, Resources for the Future. “We concluded that the available data are insufficient to support use of traditional food safety regulatory tools, such as legally binding limits on dioxins in various foods at this time,” he says.
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In its report, the committee recommends that an interagency government group, made up of representatives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. EPA, give high priority to developing strategies in two areas: reducing dioxins in animal feed and reducing exposure to dioxins in girls and young women before they reach childbearing age. Because data on dioxins in animal feed are lacking, “the first step in this initiative should be establishment of a nationwide data collection effort and a single repository for data on dioxin levels in animal forage and feed,” Taylor says. It would also be useful to have data on the geographical distributions of dioxins to determine how they are getting into animal feed, adds committee member Julie Caswell of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. During the data collection period, the government and industry should collaborate “to define voluntary guidelines for good practices that will reduce dioxin exposure throughout animal production systems,” Taylor says. Fetuses and breast-fed infants are particularly susceptible to exposure to dioxins during development, but because the compounds
