On September 20, 2013 the peer-reviewed high impact scientific journal Nature published a news article commenting on the current debate amongst researchers around the European Commission’s proposed endocrine disruptor chemicals (EDC) policy which leaked earlier this year. The report triggered a group of toxicologists to write a letter to the European Commission’s (EC) Chief Scientific Advisor Anne Glover, calling the proposed EDC policy “based on complete ignorance of all well-established and taught principles of pharmacology and toxicology” (Dietrich et al. 2013, reported by the FPF). To Nature journalist Daniel Cressey, Daniel Dietrich conceded that he and his co-authors fear that the EC may adopt a regulatory system which would assume human relevance of animal data, irrespective of the existence of data showing non-relevance. Dietrich and colleagues strongly oppose the idea that companies may have to prove that their chemical is not an EDC, if a no-threshold assumption were accepted by regulators. On September 18, 2013 leading endocrinologists and scientific journal editors-in-chief published a rebuttal reported on by the FPF, which called the original letter “a profound disservice” to public health (Gore et al. 2013). The recent response by Gore and colleagues was preceeded by an earlier piece of 41 scientists who argued that Dietrich’s editorial “confuses and conflates several aspects of the current debate” (Bergman et al. 2013, reported by the FPF).
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Daniel Cressey (September 20, 2013). “Journal editors trade blows over toxicology.” Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2013.13787
FPF article “EDC journal editors call upon scientists to cooperate in EDC research and policy”
FPF article “Opinion: New EDC policy in Europe is scientifically justified”
FPF article “Opinion: Scientists call European Commission’s proposed EDC regulation over-precautionary”
