EPA Grapples With New Methods To Harmonize Pesticide, Water Risk Tests

摘要

EPA's water and pesticides offices are grappling with how to use new toxicity test methods in their effort to harmonize competing methods to assess pesticide risks to aquatic species, an effort that would likely ease the agency's ability to set water quality limits for the chemicals that are usually stricter than pesticide safety standards. The agency released three draft white papers Nov. 17 that explore various possibilities for using newer, predictive methods of evaluating chemicals' toxicity with the goal of eventually integrating them into a suite of tools both offices can use to calculate risks of pesticides to entire aquatic ecosystems, regardless of how robust or limited the available data is for a particular chemical.