On December 14, 2001, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a press release establishing an "interim" human testing policy for pesticides that suspended EPA's long-established policy of using human testing data to establish pesticide tolerances or to determine other human health-protective limits on chemical exposures. The policy was restricted to the results of studies using human subjects sponsored by private companies (so-called third-party studies).

In September 1991, 25 people died at the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, when they were trapped in a factory fire. Witnesses to the fire said the employees could not escape because the building doors were locked, apparently to prevent pilferage. The North Carolina assistant labor commissioner subsequently stated that the locked doors constituted "serious violations" of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act). The plant, however, had never been inspected for health or safety violations in its 11 years of operation.

New rules are emerging to change the way the government makes decisions about cleanup of hazardous waste sites under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA or Superfund). These changes have altered Superfund decisionmaking fundamentally and irrevocably, requiring the government to reach for new levels of accountability, rationality, and consistency. Central to the government's ability to meet this challenge is the way in which it makes and explains decisions about acceptable risks and required levels of cleanup.

Editors' Summary: Since 1910, the federal government has played a role in regulating pesticides. At first, the motive was to fight fraud, but as pesticides became more sophisticated and as environmental concerns grew, the government's regulatory efforts became more comprehensive. Now, near the dawn of bioengineered pesticides, with society confronting and reevaluating environmental risks, and with agencies facing fiscal challenges, pesticide regulation continues to evolve. It is a field of concern to the pesticide industry, of course, but in U.S.

Editors' Summary: In 1996, the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) made major changes in the law governing pesticide residues in food, including elimination of the zero-risk standard for carcinogenic food additives. The FQPA instead imposed a new safety standard—a reasonable certainty that no harm will result from aggregate exposure to the pesticide—for establishment of "tolerances" setting maximum allowable amounts of pesticide residue.