EPA Research Partner Support Story: Screening and prioritizing chemicals to protect public health
Partner: Minnesota Department of Health (MDH)
Challenge: Identify and communicate the potential for hazardous chemicals
Resources: Software and computational tools to screen and prioritize chemicals to protect public health.
Project Period: 2019 – Present
The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) measures and evaluates the potential health risks of chemical exposures in the environment and in Minnesotans, especially children and pregnant people. EPA ORD and MDH are collaborating on two projects to develop computational tools to advance this work.
“The software developed by EPA to assist our Toxics Free Kids program will be an integral part of our prioritization review process and will provide greater transparency and timeliness as we continue to provide Minnesotans with information about exposure to potentially hazardous chemicals. This software can do in minutes what would have taken us weeks to do manually and MDH is grateful for this partnership.” – MDH Research Scientist David Bell
Project One: Protecting Minnesota’s Children The first project focuses on developing software which can be used by MN to prioritize chemicals which may pose more of a risk to children, as required by the MN Toxic Free Kids Act. MN’s Toxic Free Kids (TFK) program identifies and communicates the potential for hazardous chemical exposures from consumer products to harm human health, particularly to vulnerable or susceptible populations.
To support the program, ORD developed a hazard and exposure comparison software to facilitate rapid and reproducible evaluations of chemicals for their potential risks to children and people who could become pregnant.
The Chemical Prioritization software for the TFK program compares the relative hazards of multiple chemicals simultaneously via color coded scoring. In addition, it provides the underlying scoring based on MN’s criteria which were used to assign the final scores and provides hyperlinks to more data for chemicals of interest to MDH.
The downloadable software is being used by the MDH TFK program to review and revise the Chemicals of High Concern list every three years and prioritize chemicals for consideration for their Priority Chemical List. The MDH uses these lists to communicate the potential hazard of these chemicals to the public through various communication mechanisms including reports that summarize these lists on their website and through community outreach. It is anticipated other states with similar legislation pertaining to children’s health and chemical exposure may be interested in using this application.
Project Two: Screening Water for Chemicals of Concern The second project focuses on developing an automated chemical exposure workflow for the MN Contaminants of Emerging Concern (CEC) program. MN’s CEC program identifies chemicals in water that have no current regulatory standard yet may potentially pose a risk. Nominated chemicals undergo a screening-level evaluation and ranking based on exposure and toxicity potential. The CEC program currently evaluates exposure potential one chemical at a time using a standardized set of sources and procedures. ORD worked with MDH to develop an automated workflow that would enable rapid evaluation of thousands of chemicals using MDH’s criteria.
MDH has evaluated the results of the CEC initiative automated workflow using a case study of 1,800 chemicals, including 82 chemicals already evaluated by MDH using its existing manual process. MDH found reasonably good agreement between the manual and automated workflows. This indicates that the automated workflow will be a useful tool to accelerate exposure screening evaluations and expand the number of chemicals assessed, freeing resources to complete the more complex aspects of exposure assessment. In addition, this allows for more efficient re-screening of previously evaluated chemicals to incorporate updated or newly available information. The automated workflow developed by EPA ORD greatly reduces the time and resources needed to identify higher priority water contaminants by eliminating much time-consuming data collection work.