EPA exaggerates danger of Ethylene oxide

See Forget AI: The Administrative State Is a Bad by Holman Jenkins. Excerpts:

"Ethylene oxide is a naturally occurring chemical produced by plant growth and decay, industrial and natural combustion, and the human body. Its industrial uses include sterilization of half of U.S. medical supplies, 200 billion items a year. Landing on suburban Chicago’s Sterigenics and other plants out of the blue were hundreds of lawsuits because the EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, based on no new information, decided ethylene oxide was 60 times more dangerous than previously thought.

The EPA’s own Science Advisory Board criticized the finding (and was bypassed by EPA rule makers). Texas regulators conducted a review and found the result to be implausible. Evidence that ethylene oxide is even carcinogenic is based on government studies of occupational exposure between 1938 and 1986 that found a lower-than-normal cancer incidence except for a few rare cancers of questionable statistical significance. Casting more doubt is a recent published study underlining just how wildly uncertain were EPA’s estimates of worker exposure during the decades in question.

Understand: 93% of ethylene oxide exposure comes from natural processes; less than 1% of industrial exposure is caused by the sterilization industry, or less than 0.07% of total exposure. The new EPA IRIS “safe” limit is 1,500 times lower than the concentration in suburban air; it’s 1/40th the level created inside the human body by normal metabolic processes.

None of which matters to EPA’s implicit allies in the trial bar, who are eager to lay blame for every cancer within miles of a sterilization plant. A chemophobe cult inside the EPA, chemical by chemical, is deciding industries must be undetectable to their instruments or disappear from the earth. If you inhale 150 parts per trillion of ethylene oxide and half of one part per trillion is from the medical-implement sterilization industry, that industry should cease to exist. But try finding any of this in the ample press coverage that treats the EPA’s risk calculation as simply beyond question."