Yesterday's news provided another example. Perchlorate levels that damage
thyroid will be permitted (2). Allowing thyroids to be "mildly" damaged
ensures an ongoing need for sales of and profits from patented
pharmaceutical remedies chronically needed.

Teresa

Source LA times
LINKS at website to more info on Percholate.

March 11, 2004   

CALIFORNIA
State Plans to Regulate Perchlorate

In a rebuff to the Pentagon, California weighs limits on the pollutant.
Some call the pending guidelines lax.

By Miguel Bustillo, Times Staff Writer
 

Despite opposition from the Pentagon, the Schwarzenegger administration is
planning to issue safety guidelines Friday for ammonium perchlorate, a
toxic ingredient of rocket fuel, munitions and fireworks that has tainted
drinking water supplies in 29 states.

The pending guidelines would make California the first state in the nation
to regulate perchlorate. The federal government has yet to act.

Environmentalists, however, have criticized California's pending standards
as being too lenient. 

Studies of laboratory rats have shown that even tiny doses of perchlorate
can affect the thyroid's production of hormones that are critical to early
childhood development, which suggests that the pollutant could be
particularly threatening to pregnant women and young children. However, the
level at which perchlorate poses a danger to human beings remains unclear. 

The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which
conducts research into potentially harmful pollutants, has called for a
health goal of 6 parts per billion for perchlorate, according to several
officials in the California Environmental Protection Agency. 

That figure — equivalent to roughly six drops of water in a typical home
swimming pool — would become the basis for a final regulation by the
California Department of Health Services limiting how much of the chemical
can remain in drinking water supplies.

Military contractors and the Pentagon, whose Cold War-era activities are
responsible for most of the perchlorate pollution, have heavily lobbied the
Schwarzenegger administration to delay setting a standard. Cleaning it up
could cost them billions. 

Environmental groups are also unhappy, contending that the governor who
touted his green credentials during last year's recall campaign appears to
have watered down the health goal at the last minute.

"It sure looks like bending in the direction of industry, and that is not
what we were promised," said Bill Magavern, a Sacramento lobbyist for the
Sierra Club.

Perchlorate, which has been used to power missiles and the booster rockets
that help propel the space shuttle, has become the focus of a nationwide
controversy. It is unregulated, though California has been recommending
that water agencies shut down wells that contain perchlorate at 40 ppb or
higher.

The entire lower Colorado River, which supplies water to more than 15
million people in the Southwest, including Southern California, is tinged
with perchlorate that is leaking out of a former rocket fuel factory in
Nevada.

Dozens of water wells in California have also become contaminated, mostly
near San Jose, Sacramento, the San Gabriel Valley and the Inland Empire.

Perchlorate has also been discovered in lettuce and milk, suggesting that
it is in crops and livestock that receive contaminated water. Most of the
nation's winter vegetables are grown in California and Arizona with
Colorado River water.

As a result, California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment
announced this month that it will consider whether vegetables and other
supermarket products containing perchlorate must carry warning labels under
Proposition 65, a voter-approved state law that requires public notice of
pollutants that are believed to cause cancer or developmental problems in
children.

"Can you imagine putting a label on these products? I think that works
against public health," said Hank Giclas, vice president of the Western
Growers Assn., which represents the farmers who grow, pack and ship nearly
half of the nation's fresh fruit, nuts and vegetables. "These are foods
that every health expert says we should be eating more of, and we are
worried that people could get frightened away from eating them."

Until the 1960s, perchlorate was used by doctors to treat Graves' disease,
a disorder that caused an overproduction of thyroid hormones, so its effect
on the thyroid gland is well known. However, whether perchlorate causes
health problems in the relatively low levels found in tainted water
supplies remains the subject of intense debate.

Government scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at one
point stated that perchlorate could be harmful in drinking water levels as
low as 1 ppb. 

That alarmed military contractors and the U.S. Defense Department, which
contends that harmful effects have only been proved at 200 ppb. They
persuaded the White House to postpone a pending federal perchlorate
regulation until the National Academy of Sciences could conduct an
independent review of the federal agency's research.

The defense industry was hoping for a similar delay in California, where
officials had announced that they were considering a health goal of 2 to 6
ppb for perchlorate. To plead its case, the industry hired James Strock,
former head of the California EPA under Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, and an
advisor to the Schwarzenegger administration during its transition to power
after the recall. 

"It's not a matter of which administration we have. I think any
administration should want to take a look at what the National Academy of
Sciences, a highly respected and neutral organization, has to say about
this," Strock said. "It just makes eminent sense."

Two other influential groups affected by the perchlorate problem — farmers
and water suppliers — joined the lobbying campaign in favor of a delay,
arguing that the state, like the federal government, should wait until an
impartial analysis is performed.

But Schwarzenegger administration officials rejected their pleas, arguing
that the state could always reconsider later if the National Academy's
review showed that government scientists were wrong about the dangers of
perchlorate. 

"Even though this should not be our problem, it has become our problem,"
said Krista Clark, a lobbyist with the Assn. of California Water Agencies,
which is concerned that local waterworks will have to pay much of the bill
for a perchlorate cleanup.

"If the [National Academy of Sciences] report confirms 6 ppb is reasonable,
good, we are on our way to a good regulation. But if the report points to
flaws in the science, we're going to have a problem."

Despite the state's decision to stand firm, environmental groups have
expressed disappointment with the governor's plan. 

Though 6 ppb was still within the range state scientists targeted from the
outset, the Cal/EPA under former Gov. Gray Davis had been moving forward
with plans to set the goal at 4 ppb, said some water quality watchdogs
familiar with the process. 

Schwarzenegger officials, they argued, have given ground — and the
seemingly minuscule difference could possibly save polluters billions while
exposing more state residents to small but potentially harmful doses of
perchlorate.

"There are a lot of drinking water sources in California between that 2 ppb
and 6 ppb, so where it gets set in that range is extremely important.
That's going to have a major effect on what is triggered to be cleaned up,"
said Renee Sharp, a senior analyst with the activist organization
Environmental Working Group. 

Sharp noted that the Colorado River is 5 to 8 ppb perchlorate at the point
where its water is diverted to Southern California. 

As evidence that perchlorate may have harmful effects even in small doses,
Sharp cited a study that found newborn children in Yuma, an area dependent
on Colorado River water, had levels of a thyroid-stimulating hormone
different from babies born 300 miles away in Flagstaff, which gets its
water elsewhere. The study by the Arizona Department of Health Services did
not prove that perchlorate caused the difference.

California officials are trying to persuade agribusiness interests and
others to support the planned regulation, and form a coalition to lobby
Congress to help finance a nationwide cleanup.