An Approach to Assessing the Influence of Environmental and Occupational Cancer Hazard Identification on Policy Decision-Making

Cancer hazard identification is critical to informing decisions on preventive actions. However, the influence of cancer hazard assessments on the creation of health-protective regulations is poorly understood. Although prior studies have measured the health and economic benefits of regulatory actions in general, we are not aware of efforts to explicitly study the influence of cancer hazard identification on policy decisions in the United States. In this commentary, we present an approach to examine whether formal identification of a substance as a human carcinogen may prompt a regulatory action to reduce exposure to carcinogens and enhance public health. Further, we discuss the broader implications of cancer hazard identification on policy decision-making, including identifying gaps and providing recommendations. Using the Report on Carcinogens (RoC) as a test case, we systematically searched U.S. federal and state databases for notices of regulations mentioning the RoC from 1995 to 2023. For each regulation, we extracted information on the carcinogen(s) regulated, the regulatory agency, the regulatory purpose, the economic sector exposure sources, and the analyzed public health benefits and costs. We created a publicly available, web-based interactive tool to visualize the data. U.S. regulatory agencies have been using cancer hazard evaluations, such as the RoC, for decades to inform public health policy actions to prevent or mitigate cancer risks. Specifically, nonregulatory cancer hazard assessments have been used to prioritize chemical evaluations, support regulatory-based assessments, and trigger regulatory action. Our approach showed that assessing the influence of cancer hazard identification on science-based public health policies is feasible, informative, and needed, and our study is a first step in this direction. We recommend expanding this approach to other cancer and noncancer hazard assessments to ultimately inform our understanding of the influence of hazard classifications on policymaking. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP12681.