It has been 25 years since the U.S. Congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, an amendment to the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, which mandated that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) test all pesticide chemicals used in food for endocrine disruption. Soon after the law passed, EPA established the Endocrine Disruptor Screening and Testing Advisory Committee (EDSTAC) to provide recommendations to the agency on how its Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP) should work. Among them, the committee recommended that EDSP screening should 1) evaluate both human and ecological effects; 2) test for disruption of the estrogen, androgen, and thyroid systems; 3) evaluate pesticide and non-pesticide chemicals; and 4) implement a tiered approach. EPA adopted the recommendations and the EDSP was created in 1998. To date, the EPA has yet to fully implement the law; in other words, it has failed to test all pesticide chemicals for endocrine disruption. Of the small number th
from my colleagues in kansas city some schools are going mask optional this week is certainly very he, very concerning to me. i think we need to continue with these layers of protection. testing being one important part. part of it seems to be symptomatic of the fact we just don t have an effective testing strategy. we re rationing the tests because we don t have enough of them. we certainly don t have them distributed in a comprehensive and uniform way. i want to talk to you about this data on hospitalizations because we re trying to focus more on that number. unless on these explosive case counts, but focus on the hospitalizations, it seems to be hard to parse out when people are going and getting hospitalized because of covid, because they ve been diagnosed with covid, and when they go to the hospital for something else, but then while they re there it turns out they have covid. can you help us parse this out? what are you seeing in the e.r.? it is important, we have these elabo
more likely to change outcomes. but changing outcomes, does this targeted testing strategy have merit in your view? it depends what our priorities are. i don t think they have to be mutually exclusive. i get nervous when we re pitting one thing against another. the strategies can be different. making sure that the elderly, perhaps more vulnerable person, has early access to things like monoclonals or other treatments to prevent them from going to the hospital if they become sick. certainly is very, very valuable. but keeping kids in school and adults in the school buildings all safe is also critically important. the goal there is keeping the germ out of school, because we do have adults and we do have vulnerable children in school. so there s layers of protection that we need to folk us on testing is one of them, but it s not the be all end all. as the week of now 300,000 pediatric cases in the united states blowing by the previous record of 250,000 cases, hearing
when there is a nationwide federal distribution really up in the air. and new research now showing that it is questioning the reliability of detecting the omicron by the widely used rapid test. how do you square that, sir. you know, we know that testing is a part of overall strategy that should be used to keep our schools open. vaccination efforts are also big part of that strategy. we have seen them work. as schools come in, they should be thinking about a testing strategy to make sure students are having symptoms, they should be tested in school. keeping in school is critical for them, our families, our parents. it s important that that is put in place, but they are not done in isolation. mitigation strategy that we know work are also part of the strategy. what about the school s