This excellent resource describes the various Federal agency programs, guidelines, laws, and requirements regarding potential exposure to carcinogens in the environment-ambient air, water, and soil-workplace environment-food and drugs and other consumer products. It covers 16 different programs, activities, and Federal agencies. The reader is provided insight into the background and rationale behind current Federal Policy and regulations relating to public health and potential carcinogenic hazards. Necessary differentiation among Hazard Identification, risk characterization, risk assessment, and risk management are clearly described. This guide should prove valuable to scientists, engineers, and managers-companies, governments, universities, and consultants.

Take a random walk through your life and you’ll find it is awash in industrial, often toxic, chemicals. Sip water from a plastic bottle and ingest bisphenol A. Prepare dinner in a non-stick frying pan or wear a layer of Gore-Tex only to be exposed to perfluorinated compounds. Hang curtains, clip your baby into a car seat, watch television—all are manufactured with brominated flame-retardants. Cosmetic ingredients, industrial chemicals, pesticides, and other compounds enter our bodies and remain briefly or permanently. Far too many suspected toxic hazards are unleashed every day that affect the development and function of our brain, immune system, reproductive organs, or hormones. But no public health law requires product testing of most chemical compounds before they enter the market. If products are deemed dangerous, toxicants must be forcibly reduced or removed—but only after harm has been done. In this scientifically rigorous legal analysis, Carl Cranor argues that just as pharmaceuticals and pesticides cannot be sold without pre-market testing, other chemical products should be subject to the same safety measures. Cranor shows, in terrifying detail, what risks we run, and that it is entirely possible to design a less dangerous commercial world.