Incorporation of endocrine disruption into chemical hazard scoring for pollution prevention and current list of endocrine disrupting chemicals

Research continues to support the theory of endocrine disruption. Endocrine disruption is defined as the ability of a chemical contaminating the workp lace or the environment to interfere with homeostasis, development, reprodu ction, and/or behavior in a living organism or it's offspring. Certain clas ses of environmentally persistent chemicals such as polychlorinated bipheny ls (PCBs), dioxins, furans, and some pesticides can adversely effect the en docrine systems of aquatic life and terrestrial wildlife. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTN), developed a method for hazard scoring chemical s for the aquatic ecosystem. The Indiana Clean Manufacturing Technology and Safe Materials Institute at Purdue University (CMTI) later expanded the sc oring system to include terms for worker hazard as well as terms for contam ination of soil and air quality, and for stratospheric ozone depletion. We call the CMTI chemical hazard score the Purdue score. At West Virginia Univ ersity, two improvements of the Purdue chemical hazard score are developed, a normalizing of the term for soil contamination, and addition of hazard s core terms for ecosystem endocrine disruption. The results of incorporating endocrine disruption terms into the hazard scoring equations resulted in i ncreased hazard rankings, often substantially increased, for 26 endocrine d isrupting chemicals (EDCs) among 200 Superfund chemicals. Because data sugg esting human endocrine disruption from such chemicals is still controversia l, no endocrine disruptor term has been added to the human toxicity portion s of the chemical hazard scoring system at this time. The third product of this work is assembly of a Current consolidated list of (1) established or probable, mostly synthetic, industrial chemical and medication EDCs and (2) suspect (less certain) synthetic and natural (phytoestrogen) possible endo crine disrupting chemicals, with the goal of contributing to future develop ment of quantitative structure activity relationship software for predictin g whether an untested chemical is likely to be ill endocrine disruptor. We conclude that enough endocrine disrupting, chemicals' are now identified to make an attempt at developing Structure activity estimates of disrupting p otential worthwhile. Further. we conclude that within a group of 200 chemic als of concern to the US EPA, the addition of endocrine disrupting terms to the Purdue score substantially increases its representativeness in reflect ing ecological exposure hazard. We have developed this enhanced Purdue scor e risk management tool to be of assistance to industry.