Dr. Patrick Allard, ISG Assistant Professor, is featured in a UCLA Newsroom piece titled “A chemistry test for public safety.”
An estimated 80,000 chemical substances currently find their way into our environment through industrial and agricultural waste, as well as through food additives, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. But even as companies continue to produce new chemical compounds at a rapid clip, toxicologists and state and federal regulators agree that conventional approaches to testing chemical safety have significant limitations.
“When we say chemicals in the environment are safe, that’s only within the context of what has been studied,” said Patrick Allard, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “But what has been studied is only the tip of the iceberg — there is still a great deal of uncertainty.”