Regulating toxic chemicals for public and environmental health

About the Authors: Liza Gross * E-mail: lgross@plos.org (LG); birnbaumls@niehs.nih.gov (LSB) Affiliation: Public Library of Science, San Francisco, California, United States of America ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5886-9815 Linda S. Birnbaum * E-mail: lgross@plos.org (LG); birnbaumls@niehs.nih.gov (LSB) Affiliation: National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, United States of AmericaCitation: Gross L, Birnbaum LS (2017) Regulating toxic chemicals for public and environmental health. Ford’s signing statement described a law giving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broad regulatory authority to require toxicity testing and reporting to determine whether the chemicals posed risks. In the decades since Ford promised a robust policy to regulate potentially hazardous chemicals, evidence has emerged that chemicals in widespread use can cause cancer and other chronic diseases, damage reproductive systems, and harm developing brains at low levels of exposure once believed to be harmless. Over the past three decades, Lanphear notes, evidence from some of the most extensively studied toxic chemicals-including lead, asbestos, tobacco, and benzene-shows that some chemicals are most toxic at the lowest levels of exposure.