Bush and Whitman had better be sure about arsenic

In deciding to scrap new standards for arsenic in drinking water, President George Bush and Christie Todd Whitman, the director of the Environmental Protection Agency, had better be prepared to drink lots of water from affected communities if they are to persuade voters that their action is even slightly credible. For Whitman to deny solid scientific evidence of the poison's carcinogenic properties to keep special interests happy shows a surprising disregard for public health.
To read the press release put out by Whitman's agency, Americans should believe that the tougher standards for arsenic were thrown together at the last minute by that tree-hugging pawn of environmentalists Bill Clinton.
& quot;This decision will not lessen any existing protections for drinking water," Whitman said. "The standards would remain the same, whether the rule went through or not, until it was time to enforce it under the compliance schedule five to nine years from now, & quot; said Whitman. & quot;But, in the interim, EPA will examine what may have been a rushed decision. & quot;
The only rushed decision we can see has been this administration's.
Republican program: Missing from Whitman's statement was the fact that a Republican Congress mandated the setting of a new arsenic standard in the Safe Drinking Water Act amendments of 1996 and that the proposed standard reducing arsenic levels to 5 parts per billion -- the standard of the World Health Organization -- was published in the Federal Register on June 22, 2000 with the EPA taking public comments until August 24, 2000.
In response to more than 6,500 pages of comments from 1,100 commenters, the final proposed standard was set at 10 ppb -- a level at which one in 1,000 Americans could die from arsenic-induced disease.
Why did the EPA double its own proposed arsenic level? Because Congress had given the agency the flexibility to offset benefits against costs and the EPA decided to set the drinking water standard for arsenic higher because it believed that the costs would not justify the benefits at that level. How much more risk are the American people willing to take with their health?
Continuing danger: And that five-to nine-year schedule for compliance that Whitman spoke of. That was to give water systems time to make necessary changes. Wait another few years, and folks will just have that much more time to drink the deleterious water.
Two years ago, scientists of the Arsenic Health Effects Research Program at the University of California, Berkeley, concluded "that although much more research on arsenic is needed, the need for such research should not be used as an excuse to delay implementation of an inorganic arsenic drinking water standard considerably lower than the current 50 parts per billion."
Their conclusion makes even more sense today.