FQPA Science Policies

In response to direction from Vice President Albert Gore, the EPA began to work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Tolerance Reassessment Advisory Committee (TRAC) to address FQPA issues and implementation in an open and transparent process. The TRAC comprises of more than 50 representatives of affected users, producers, consumers, public health, environmental, states, and other interested groups. The TRAC has met several times, most recently April 27, and 28, 1999.

The EPA has been working with TRAC to ensure that its science policies, risk assessments of individual pesticides, and process for decision making are transparent and open to public participation. An important product of these consultations with TRAC is the development of a framework document for addressing key science policy issues. The EPA presented to the TRAC a framework that identified the issues relating to these science policy issues.

The TRAC then identified nine science policy issues it believed were key to the implementation of FQPA and tolerance reassessment. These nine areas are:

1. Applying the FQPA 10-Fold Factor
2. Dietary Exposure Assessment - Whether and How to Use ``Monte Carlo'' Analyses
3. Exposure Assessment - Interpreting "No Residues Detected" Dietary (Food) Exposure Estimates
4. Dietary (Food) Exposure Estimates
5. Dietary (Drinking Water) Exposure Estimates
6. Assessing Residential Exposure
7. Aggregating Exposures from all Non-Occupational Sources
8. How to Conduct a Cumulative Risk Assessment for Organophosphate Insecticides or Other Pesticides With a Common Mechanism of Toxicity
9. Selection of Appropriate Toxicity Endpoints for Risk Assessments of Organophosphates

EPA is using the framework identified for the TRAC and these nine science policy areas to develop and issue FQPA science policy documents for public comment. For a list of all of the papers that have or will be published as part of this process, as well as the schedule that EPA plans to use, please go to   EPA Science Policies Schedule and Status.

EPA has already developed and issued for comment policy papers on several of these science issues. One of the key activities of the IWG is to pull together the broad set of technical expertise of the entire industry to comment on these policies and ensure that sound science is developed and used. Please go to   Published Science Policy Papers/Comments  for access to the papers that EPA has published so far and the comments that the IWG has provided.