Word: epas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...safe before they are put on the market, and make the Environmental Protection Agency responsible for screening that proof for "unreasonable risk" to human health and the environment. The chemical industry, claiming that such a measure would duplicate existing laws, favors a weaker bill requiring manufacturers to notify the EPA only about products containing compounds that the agency has listed as dangerous; the EPA then would test the products for safety. What will probably pass Congress is a compromise measure: only potentially hazardous chemicals would have to be tested by industry, with the EPA having final review power. Manufacturers...
Hearing Loss. On the opposing side of the OSHA hearings, the EPA has worked out statistics to show that the risk of hearing loss is twice as high at 90 decibels as at 85. Both the EPA and the unions argue that noise can also cause cardiovascular problems, partial loss of vision and mental disturbance...
...Agriculture Department had sprayed Mirex from airplanes two or three times annually on infested areas. But in 1972 tests showed that when Mirex was washed into estuaries and bays, it killed shellfish. Experiments at the National Cancer Institute also indicated that it might cause cancer in humans. So the EPA cut the permissible number of aerial sprayings to only one a year and in 1973 began investigations-which are still continuing -to determine just how dangerous Mirex really might...
...facts are more complicated. Every colony of fire ants can produce dozens of winged queens, each of which can fly miles to set up a new nest. Though an application of Mirex might kill 95% of the ants in an area, says EPA Entomologist Sam Fluker, "to get rid of that last 5% might take an additional 100 treatments." In fact, the battle against the ants has yielded so little and cost so much-$148 million in federal and state funds to date-that Harvard University Zoologist Edward O. Wilson calls it "the Viet Nam of entomology...
...deficiencies, Mirex so far is the only practical weapon that has had any effect on the fire ant. Some EPA officials suspect that Butz canceled the program to dramatize what he considers unnecessarily tough EPA restrictions on many different pesticides. At week's end officials of both federal bureaucracies were trying to work out a compromise. They are convinced that they can at least slow the march of the fire ants, which could eventually infest an area extending as far north as southern New Jersey and all the way west to Washington state...