ES&T interview
EPA’S Vaun Newill is the federal ambas. ?s as liaison between the health commanity on the one nana and the federal regulafory agency on the other. Newill tells ES&T’S Stan Miller what the federal agency is doing to protect the health of American citizens and offers a federal rationale on fhe concern .for your health and our enuironmental quality. As a nationalpolicy, the nation’s newest clean air law declared that the protection of the health af American citizens must be assuredregardless of economic costs.
Interfaces What is your prime assignment and area of responsibility in EPA? My position is really twofold. In one I serve as an advisor to the Assistant Administrator for Research and Monitoring, Stanley Greenfield, and in the other I carry the title of Chief of the Health Effects Branch in the EPA Division of Processes and Effects. Undoubtedly, we will be talking more about that division in the rest of the interview because that division has four components-health, ecology, transport processes, and instruments and measurements. Basically, this division has responsibility for gathering the effects information that is used for setting standards and taking other kinds of regulatory actions. I first came to work with the environment in 1965 with the HEW Division of Air Pollution, later NAPCA, earlier air pollution predecessor organizations to EPA. The first 2% years was spent looking at the Tokyo-Yokohama asthma problem. I was actually in EPA at the time that it was formed on December 2, 1970; I moved to my present position in Washington, D.C., toward the end of June 1971. There is no doubt about my present position being a challenging assignment. At times, I find it very invigorating and at other times rather discouraging. We have so many problems to deal with and so few people to actually do the job. If I’m going to keep the health staff in the field operative on the research effort, then I cannot have them in Washington thinking about many of the things that need to be done here. From that standnoint. the oresent assignment is a fairly lonely With kww m a n y u ~ r r e n rorgmr%annnsdo you interact in this assignment? There is interaction with many other agencies, but it takes place less frequently than I would really like primarily because of staff limitations. We have close liaison with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The problems that EPA deals with overlap many that are being studied in the National Institutes of Health, particularly the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and the Heart and Lung Institute; our problems also overlap with those in the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health as well as the Food and Drug Administration.
When I say overlap I really mean that we have a common interest in certain environmental problems. We are dealing with the same agents, io one instance, in an occupational setting and in another as a public exposure situation. The agent exerts its effects by human exposure through eating foods, breathing the air, and drinking the water. Early last fall, the President’s Science Advisor, Edward David, and the CEQ Chairman, Russell Train, established an ad hoc committee on environmental health res€.arch under the chairmanship of David Rall, the director 01 the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (Durnarn, ~u.L.). (Rall hails from the National Cancer Institute of National Institutes of Health.) The committee’s report will be available by the end of this summer. It details the total federal funding for environmental health research in the last fiscal year and indicates where in the federal establishment the work is being performed. Previously, all coordination had been on an informal basis, but the committee has come up with a mechanism for liaison that will he more formalized On April 16, I returned from Geneva, Suiitzerland, whei‘e I was serving as a temporary advisor to an f:xpert committe’e on air pollution criteria and guides of the w o n1 01 nr le a n h Organization (WHO). For the first time, WHO has reached a consensus on four of the five major air pollutants considered. The f o u r 4 0 , SOI, oxidants, and particulate matter-are probably the most ubiquitous air pollutants so that the WHO committee has now taken a stand on what are the most important air pollutants. More important is the fact that the consensus went further to establish a set of long-term goals. The levels specified for the four pollutants are close to our national air quality standards. There was, however, no consensus on NO,. We feel quite strongly that WHO should be involved in the business of developing criteria and guides because: of the many member nations of the UN. Consensus there nleans that we are beginning to get some unanimity around the world regarding the kind of air pollution control actions that are necessary. r,.nh T m . r m l f n ~ Ann-1.i t ; n ~ m l x m A E O A h-o II AlthL,,.. great deal of interaction with other national and international groups that are writing criteria documents or setting standards. NATO and their Committee on the Challenges to Modern Society project, for example, has been very successful in pulling together a series of reports and documents that are useful for air pollution regulatory action. Their documents benefit from ha ial added from the foreign .
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literature that was not available t o us a t the time that our criteria documents were written, primarily because of the time frame in which the U S . was trying to accomplish the task. We are also active with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This group is not involved in research directly, but they are very much interested in social and economic analyses and policy analyses of the material contained in criteria documents so that they can make certain kinds of recommendations to member governments.
Triangle Park, N.C., Perrine, Fla., Chamblee, Ga., and Rockville, Md. The remainder of the health effects research is located in Cincinnati, Ohio, where we have a toxicology group that also works on fuel and fuel additives which is headed by Jerry Stara and a water supply program headed by Gordon Roebeck. It appears that the principal research attention is on air pollutants. Are the other four categories adequately represented? Adequately represented is a difficult term. Never will we have as much information as we would like to have for regulatory actions. Also, much of the effects work done in one area is useful in another. For example, cadmium-a pollutant much on our minds these days-is found in the air, water, and food. Its toxic properties probably are not different depending on the route of entry into the body. Thcs, if we study cadmium toxicity as part of the air pollution program, we have the information for water and for food. In fact, the sum of exposures coming from all three must be considered for standard setting. Of course, I have not answered your question. I do believe that more resources should be available to expand the health research programs for the other areas.
Funding and manpower What is the funding level for the health effects program? The fiscal year 1973 budget request is $24 million, up from last year’s funding estimate of $19 million. Essentially, it’s all research money. The two largest programs are air and pesticides. The air program received half ($12 million) and the pesticides program $6 million, of which about $4 million goes for the Pesticides Community Studies program. Then, of course, there is the $4 million for the National Center for Toxicological Research, the Pine Bluff operation. Water supply research will be funded a t a $0.5-0.75 million level. When adding up the health effects budget, only the health portion of the water supply program was included. Last year, the water supply program was under the Office of Water Programs but it was recently transferred to Office of Research and Monitoring. There hasn’t been any special health effects program in solid wastes primarily because if you incinerate the solid wastes, it is included in the air program and if you take the ash or other solid waste and put it in a landfill operation, then there is the possibility of leaching into groundwaters or surface waters and it is included in a water program. Thus, most of the solid waste problems are covered under the air and water programs, and a separate program is not needed. The noise program is just coming into existence; it will be a relatively small eflort next year and will require new legislation before anything in the way of major program comes into existence.
Standards What are the present plans of the agency for including other pollutants in the national air quality standards (naqs), other than the original half dozen? There is a total of 38 air pollutants that we are considering for air pollution control actions. Many of these are found a t very low concentrations in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, we are going through them systematically trying t o find out what the problems are. We are trying to get enough information to decide whether or not the concentrations to which the public is being exposed constitute a health hazard. We are running out of pollutants where naqs may be the way to bring about control. Certainly, where you have a n ubiquitous air pollutant, this is the preferred control action. But when you are talking about a pollutant like lead or other toxic metals in general, you must realize that air is only one way that the person comes in contact with the substance. With lead, for example, the bulk of the human exposure comes through the food and much less from drinking water and air. You cannot set a standard for air, for example, and ignore how much of this exposure comes from the other sources. There are more ways to take regulatory actions than to set standards (naqs). A number of different options for regulatory actions were set out in the Clean Air Amendments of 1970. In addition to naqs, you have performance standards for industries, which basically are emission standards, as well as the designation of hazardous air pollutants.
How many EPA people are working in the health effects area? There are about 300-350 people working in the field. The bulk of the EPA effort is headquartered in the National Environmental Research Center at Research Triangle Park, N.C. Last year, about 85% of the work was done a t RTP. We don’t know exactly what the distribution will be for the next year; it might be somewhat different. At the present time, my personal feeling is that we have about as many positions as we are going to get and this makes redistribution difficult. But let me tell you something about the organization of the air health research program which has the bulk of the people. This program is divided into three disciplinesepidemiology, clinical research, and toxicology. Our largest number of medical doctors exist in the epidemiology program, which is primarily the Community Health and Environmental Surveillance Study, the CHESS program. The clinical research program is located in a laboratory on the University of North Carolina campus; they d o clinical research with patients, human exposure t o pollutants, and measure very fine physiological parameters so that they needed to be located very close to a medical school. The EPA toxicological work-animal and cellular biology studies-is performed in several places such as Research
What is the best health effects advice on lead and other specific pollutants? Actually, there is a n international symposium to discuss the impact of lead on man’s health and environment later this year in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. EPA is definitely cooperating. We are supplying part of the leadership to help in program selection and that sort of thing. Much of the most recent materials relative to lead will be brought together a t that symposium. We’ll factor that new information into the action we take. At this point in time, I doubt very much that the information that comes in will alter the actions that we plan to take regarding lead (removal of lead from gasoline)
590 Environmental Science & Technology
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Body burdens
“I , +el very strongly that we should not wait t o set standards until we have all of the research information in hand. ” EPA’s Newill
but those are the kinds of words that I may have to eat after the symposium. It may be desirable from the regulatory viewpoint to include polycyclic hydrocarbons in naqs, but no decision has been reached on this as yet. The National Academy of Sciences is putting together background documents on polynuclear hydrocarbons. They are trying to summarize what is known about these materials, Their documents will be helpful in the decision-making process. But this is a very complex area, and we have not yet decided whether to go the naqs route or some other route. With regard to fluorine, there are very few places where there is too much fluoride in our water supplies. In fact, a little fluoride in our water supplies is beneficial and should be an ultimate goal. Nevertheless, major excess fluoride problems do exist around specific industrial point sources. Control in this case can best be handled by the performance standards route rather than going the naqs route. Phosphate rock processing operations and the aluminum industry contribute some of these localized problems and probably are best handled this way. EPA is still considering the odor problem, but the control problem with odors is the difficulty of measuring them. At present, this activity is more in the research area than regulatory area. I don’t mean to imply that odors are not important to people, but certainly they have received a somewhat lower priority than some of the other pollutants. Lead, asbestos, and mercury have been proposed as hazardous air pollutants. Soon, a decision will be made whether cadmium is to be so declared. We are also looking at the heavy metals as a group including arsenic, manganese, vanadium, nickel, and so on to decide the next set of pollutants the agency will choose for control action. You must remember that as the nation moves ahead with its general particulate control program included in the state implementation plans, we will be lowering the total suspended particulate matter and probably lowering markedly the exposure to these metallic substances as an indirect consequence of the general program. The reason we like to assess our regulatory program as such is to find out, for example, if the 5-6 of the particulate matter left behind contains a higher proportion of the toxic metals and to learn what exposure the population is receiving from them.
What is the current attempt to monitor the pesticide levels in humans and correlate this level with their general health? There is no doubt that the community studies program has been a highly effective program in terms of giving the kinds of services that states need and helping them in their training programs. In that respect, it has been worth the money that has been invested in it. However, I don’t think that the program has been as productive as it should have been in terms of producing useful research information. In addition to the pesticide monitoring activities, in the CHESS program we are looking at trace metals in hair samples. This work is under way now. We would like very much to develop a tissue bank that is not only for pesticide residues (as the one that has operated in the past) but a much expanded one for all toxic substances. The tissue bank item was an issue at the UN Conference. Whether such a bank is set up internationally or nationally is uncertain now, but its establishment would give us the potentiality of flashing back. For example, if a new mercury problem arises, we could flash back in time and see in these tissues the health consequences of such exposures. As mentioned before, we need to assess the regulatory program as it goes into effect in the community to make sure that our regulatory actions accomplish what they set out to do. One way, of course, is to use a monitoring program. In this way you can see that as the level of the pollutants is actually falling you have a smaller proportion of the total population exposed to levels that are above standards. We are actually doing this and more with CHESS. We are working in communities and seeing whether the sensitive health indicators on which we have a fair amount of base line information do change as we drop these average levels of pollution.
Looking ahead Is the term “environmental medicine” in vogue today? I think environmental medicine is a good term, but the term is not the same as other kinds of medicine. It is not a one-to-one relationship between the physician and patient. With environmental medicine you are dealing with the group and community exposures. The effects represent small differences between those exposed compared to those not exposed. It is true that environmental medicine is one aspect of preventive medicine. I suspect that the medical school department where this type of medicine will be taught will be the community medicine department. What is the thrust of the health effects research at the new toxicological center at Pine Bluff, Ark.? The National Center for Toxicological Research was brought into existence by President Nixon. It was specified in his environmental message of 1971. The program there will be run by the FDA and EPA, and the funding inputs will be about equal. Morris Cranmer, the director, actually came from the EPA pesticides toxicology research group. The facility is under policy direction of a Board of Directors consisting of representatives from the two agencies who will make the policy decisions on the work that will be performed there. Their activity will be to perform much of the protocol development for low-exposure toxicological work that needs to be done but is not under way at the present time. There are somewhere between 100-120 people in the operation today, but that is a beginning skeleton force. Exactly how large they intend to become and their strategy of operation is still to be determined. Volume 6, Number 7, July 1972
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