Word: epa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Tobacco companies have heavier artillery when it comes to challenging the EPA's 1993 report that labeled environmental tobacco smoke, or ETS, a carcinogen. They charge that the report -- a review of 30 epidemiological, animal and laboratory studies conducted during the past two decades -- is fundamentally flawed. The Congressional Research Service and some independent scientists have also criticized the report...
...EPA found that fumes rising from the tips of lighted cigarettes (as opposed to the smoke that users exhale) is the most hazardous, with high concentrations of 17 carcinogens. The agency also concluded that environmental smoke produces serious respiratory illness in young children...
Critics note, however, that the EPA didn't consider a threshold level for smoking damage. Scientists know cells have the ability to repair damage to their DNA. Can cells fix tobacco-induced changes, and at what level of pollution does the repair mechanism become overwhelmed? The agency regarded all smoke exposure as dangerous and the effects as cumulative. EPA scientists admit that the danger of getting a whiff of tobacco at the baseball stadium is generally not the same as driving in an enclosed car with a chain smoker. "I'd expect the ballpark risk to be minimal," concedes...
...irrefutable medical evidence on secondhand smoke," says Mark Green, New York City public advocate and a longtime supporter of antismoking measures, "has been the booster rocket launching the antismoking movement into orbit." Notes an EPA official: "We had no real sense of how big this report was going to be. But it has become the major catalyst for the reforms we're seeing all over the country...
Test results from the EPA and Clean harbors, an environmental consulting firm hired to supervise a clean-up, will not be fully available until March...