EPA Research Partner Support Story: Tapping data from the latest innovations in toxicology to advance chemical risk assessments
Partner: Minnesota Department of Health (MDH)
Challenge: Identify and communicate the potential for hazardous chemical that could be harmful to human health
Resource: Software and workflow development to prioritize chemicals for MN’s Toxic Free Kids Program and screen for drinking water contaminants of concern
Project Period: 2018 – Present
The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) measures and evaluates the potential health risks of chemical exposures in the environment and in Minnesotans, especially pregnant people, and children. ORD and MDH are collaborating on two projects to develop computational tools. One 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 that could be harmful to human health, particularly to vulnerable or susceptible populations. 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 the MDH to develop an automated workflow that would enable rapid evaluation of thousands of chemicals using MDH’s criteria.
“Minnesota has benefited greatly from this collaboration. It’s provided us access to top-notch scientists at EPA, and their expertise in chemical screening and evaluation has been really helpful to our work.” – MDH Environmental Health Division Director Tom Hogan
For the TFK 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. For the CEC Initiative, an automated workflow was developed that integrates relevant exposure data, including new approach methodologies (NAMs) exposure modeling and biomonitoring data.
“Because of this collaboration we have new tools in our hands to help us perform exposure screening faster and more in depth than before. Ultimately we hope the collaboration will also bring us new tools for hazard screening and identifying chemicals of emerging concern that are relevant to Minnesota.” – MDH Research Scientist Supervisor Sarah Fossen Johnson
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. This 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.
“The software developed by EPA to assist our TFK 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
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 rescreening of previously evaluated chemicals to incorporate updated or newly available information. The automated workflow developed by ORD greatly reduces the time and resources needed to identify higher priority water contaminants by eliminating much time-consuming data collection work.