Scientific Principles to Protect Public Health
Chronic disease, including cancer, diabetes, and neurological disease, is on the rise, in part driven by exposures to health-harming chemicals from fossil fuels and plastics. PRHE, in partnership with scientists, public health experts and health and environmental organizations, urges the Trump administration to adopt scientific principles that will improve and protect health.
2025 Recommendations
Executive Summary
2024 recommendations to safeguard science integrity, stop corporate interferance in regulatory decision-making, use best available science, and protect health for all.
Scientific Integrity
To ensure people are not made sick from toxic chemicals, scientific integrity must be upheld at all levels of decision-making within EPA, including accounting for and eliminating financial conflicts of interest, and preventing political influence.
Health Protective Chemical Policy Reform
EPA urgently needs to update its scientific methods to more accurately identify hazards and risks of chemicals and pollutants to ensure people are not made sick from toxic chemicals.
Data for Decisions
To ensure people are not made sick from toxic chemicals EPA must invest in systems to support collecting, organizing, and making more accessible environmental and health data and evidence.
Environmental Justice
To ensure people are not made sick from exposure to toxic chemicals in air, water, and soil, EPA must accelerate efforts to eliminate health harms in communities that are more highly impacted.
Systematic Review
To ensure all evidence is properly considered to identify how toxic chemicals impact health, EPA should immediately implement a single, Agency-wide science-based, validated, and transparent systematic review method.
2021 Recommendations to Strengthen EPA
and its Mission to Protect Public Health
To help EPA put science and public health front and center, PRHE collaborated with top scientists and chemical policy experts from around the country to develop evidence-based recommendations to improve hazard and risk assessment, and prevent harms from chemicals and pollutants.
Below are a set of recommendations to strengthen EPA and its mission to protect public health in six critical areas.
How to Strengthen EPA and Its Mission to Protect Public Health
EPA Chemical Policy Recommendations
Chemical Policy
Using the Best Available Science to Assess Hazards and Risks of Industrial Chemicals Will Ensure Better Public Health Decisions
Systematic Review
To ensure EPA is making decisions based on the best available science, EPA must implement a science-based, validated systematic review method.
Conflicts of Interest
To reduce biased findings, financial conflicts of interest from industry funding in environmental health research as well as industry ties on EPA advisory committees should be eliminated to the extent possible.
Environmental Justice
We must adopt environmental justice principles in chemical policymaking and implement environmental statutes as Congress intended to fundamentally transform chemical policy to address health disparities from harmful chemicals.
Data Infrastructure
EPA must invest in systems to support collecting, organizing and making accessible environmental and health data that allow the Agency and the public to understand, monitor and act on environmental factors that influence health.
Research Funding
EPA must invest in research and workforce training to ensure it has the right and best science for decision-making and that its workforce keeps pace with current scientific advances.
