Travis Kline, MEM, BCES (Maine), Robert Ettinger (California), and Andrea Wojtyniak (Ontario) coauthored the paper, “Range of the perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) safe dose for human health: An international collaboration,” in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. Their work was named ‘Best Paper of the Year’ by the Society of Toxicology’s (SOT) Regulatory and Safety Evaluation Specialty Section (RSESS). The RSESS will announce the award at the upcoming SOT meeting on Tuesday, March 12, 2024, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Travis is a Senior Principal Toxicologist with more than 25 years of experience focused on human health risk assessment and applied toxicology. His recent focus has been on risk-driven advocacy and allocation support at large, multi-Potentially Responsible Party (PRP) Superfund sites in Oregon Washington, New York, and New Jersey.

Robert is a Senior Principal Environmental Scientist with more than 20 years of professional experience focused on soil vapor extraction system design, vapor emission estimation, and subsurface contaminant vapor migration to indoor air. Early in his career, he coauthored the Johnson and Ettinger (1991) algorithm for evaluating subsurface contaminant vapor intrusion to indoor air.

Andrea is a Senior Risk Assessor and Qualified Person for Risk Assessment with more than 10 years of experience with risk assessment and mitigation. She has experience in Certificate of Property Use compliance oversight and reporting, development of soil management plans in support of soil reuse, development of site-specific excess soil quality standards using the Beneficial Reuse Assessment Tool, and regulatory peer review.

Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology publishes peer-reviewed articles that involve the generation, evaluation, and interpretation of experimental animal and human data of direct importance and relevance for regulatory authorities with respect to toxicological and pharmacological regulations in society.

About the Paper

Many government agencies and expert groups have estimated a dose-rate of perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) that would protect human health. Most of these evaluations are based on the same studies, whether of humans, laboratory animals, or both. All studies note various uncertainties in our existing knowledge. Nonetheless, the values of these estimated safe doses vary widely, with some being more than 100,000-fold different. This sort of discrepancy invites scrutiny and explanation. Otherwise, what is the lay public to make of this disparity?

The Steering Committee of the Alliance for Risk Assessment (2022) called for scientists interested in attempting to understand and narrow these disparities, and, from these, selected an advisory committee of nine scientists from four countries. A subsequent invitation to scientists internationally led to the formation of three technical teams, for a total of 24 scientists from 8 countries. The teams reviewed relevant information and independently developed ranges for estimated PFOA safe doses. All three teams determined that the available epidemiologic information could not form a reliable basis for a PFOA safe dose-assessment in the absence of mechanistic data that are relevant for humans at serum concentrations seen in the general population. Based instead on dose-response data from five studies of PFOA-exposed laboratory animals, we estimated that PFOA dose-rates 10 to 70 ng/kg-day are protective of human health.

More Information

Learn more about the paper: “Range of the perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) safe dose for human health: An international collaboration”
Learn more about: Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology
For more information on PFOA, contact Travis at TKline@Geosyntec.com, Robert at REttinger@Geosyntec.com, or Andrea at Andrea.Wojtyniak@Geosyntec.com.
Learn more about Travis: Travis Kline
Learn more about Robert: Robert Ettinger
Learn more about Andrea: Andrea Wojtyniak | LinkedIn