The inadequacies of pre-market chemical risk assessment's toxicity studies-the implications

Industry provides essentially all the data for most (pre-market) chemical risk assessments (RA); academics study a chemical once it is marketed. For two randomly-chosen high production chemicals, despite new European Union mandates to evaluate all data, just 13% of the herbicide bentazon and 15% of the flame-retardant hexabromocyclododecane's published toxicity studies were found in their pre-market RA, and a systematic review on bentazon concludes it has greater hazards than indicated in its RA. More important, for both, academia's toxicity studies were designated as lower quality than industries were, despite showing hazards at lower doses. The accuracy of industry's test methods is analyzed and found to be replicable but insensitive, thus inaccurate. The synthetic pharmaceutical industry originated them, and by 1983 the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development mandated their test guidelines (TG) methods be accepted for any new study for pre-market RA. For existing studies, industry's "Klimisch" criterion is universally used to evaluate quality, but it only states that TG studies produce the best data. However, no TG can answer the realistic exposure effect hypotheses of academics; therefore, crucially in pre-market RA, tens of thousands of published experimental findings (increasingly at low dose) are ignored to determine the safe dose. Few appreciate this, so scientific debate on the most accurate elements of toxicity tests is urgently indicated. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.