News
GOVERNMENT
Delaney Clause finally overturned Nearly 40 years after the Delaney Clause was enacted, President Clinton has signed into law legislation that includes provisions that overturn the Delaney Clause's controversial zero-tolerance for cancer-causing food additives—most notably pesticides—in processed foods. The new law, the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, brings regulations on processed foods in line with existing risk-based pesticide standards for raw foods (Anal. Chem. 1995, 67,375 A-78 A)) Thii shange has seen linked to analytical chemistry and could affect future developments in food analysis. The 1958 Delaney Clause prohibited the sale of processed foods with any additive, regardless of its concentration, that causes cancer in animals or human. However, the regulation became increasingly unworkable as analytical chemists over the past four decades have succeeded in dramatically lowering detection levels for pesticides and pesticide residues, said Stanford Miller of the University of Texas Health Science Center (San Antonio) and a former director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. "We are at a detection level where we don't understand the biology." "We were really out of control," said Thomas Cairns, who left his position last year as a senior researcher at FDA's Mass Spectrometry Center in Los Angeles to join Psychemedics Corporation (Culver City, CA). "It almost became an Olympic sport to see who can get down to one attogram.. The new regulations will follow rules that specify acceptable concentrations of pesticides in raw foods based on the standard of a one-in-a-million lifetime risk of cancer. FDA analytical chemists say that the law will have no immediate effect on their work, because foods still must be analyzed. However, Miller and Cairns predict some long-term changes in the analytical chemistry of foods. "Analytical chemistry [of foods] hasn't lagged behind, but it hasn't moved ahead as quickly as it did at one time " argued Miller. "This will raise the question again." He expects that the new law will lead to new methods of looking tt food additives other than pesticides and the development ofrapidautomated techniques "We need really quality accurate precise analytical tools that allow,rapid determination of broader groups of compounds" 598 A
Cairns also predicts positive changes from the new law. "[The new law] stimulates a wider view. Now, we wiil lry to go to parts-per-trillion but with better precision and accuracy. It brings stability to the field of analytical measurement." Cairns, like Miller, predicts more cost-effective approaches to food analysis will be needed. "You no longer need a Rolls Royce when a Volkswagen will do."
Drinking-water bill eases monitoring Despite overwhelming bipartisan support, the reauthorization of the Safe Drinking Water Act was one of the last bills finalized by Congress and sent to President Clinton for his signature before the preelection recess in August. The new bill revises a number of provisions in the 1986 law, including several sections dealing with the analysis of contaminants in drinking water. The new law • repeals a requirement in the 1986 law that EPA add 25 new contaminants to its regulatory list every three years, in addition to 83 contaminants set forth in the 1986 law. EPA has not complied with this additional contaminant provision; if it had, the agency would now be requiring testing for 158 contaminants. • establishes criteria that will allow states to temporarily or permanently ease monitoring requirements for contaminants unlikely to befoundbecause of hydrogeology or other factors or consistently present at levels below the agency's regulated maximum contaminant level. • introduces risk assessment into the regulatory process. This provision could put more emphasis on controlling microbials, rather than chemicals, in drinking water. • provides EPA with the authority to ask public utilities everyfiveyears to determine up to 30 unregulated contaminants; results of these analyses will go into a national database along with data on regulated contaminants. Small systems will get financial help from EPA to pay for the testing. • requires EPA to "review new analytical methods to screen for regulated
Analytical Chemistry News & Features, October 1, 1996
The new law also requires the Department of Agriculture to begin collecting data on food consumption by infants and children to complement the traditional "market basket" studies. This provision reflects growing concern that current risk models do not adequately account for the pesticides in foods eaten by children and infants, whose diets vary significantly from adults.
contaminants and approve such methods as more accurate or cost-effective than established methods for use in compliance monitoring." EPA experts Analytical Chemistry talked to still uncertain as to what this means for EPA's current drinkingwater methods • delays regulations on radon, sulfate ion, and arsenic and authorizes $2.5 million for further health and cost studies. (Arsenic is currently regulated, but the others are not.) Further reduction on naturally occurring arsenic and strict rules on radon and sulfate ion—also naturally occuring— would involve significant expenditures for what some argue are small gains in public health. • requires EPA to review monitoring requirements for at least 12 currently regulated contaminants and modify the requirements as deemed appropriate within two years, after consultation with public health experts and state officials. Some scientists have argued that new toxicology data show that some contaminants such as chloroform are regulated at unduly low levels; however the review could also lead to tougher controls. • directs the government to regulate bottled water. • formally establishes an "estrogenic substances screening program" to lookforcompounds commonly known as endocrine disrupters.
