Having helped to organise this week's SETAC-Europe Special Science Symposium on Endocrine Disrupter Testing and Evaluation, it became obvious to me that regulatory authorities have not yet thought in depth about how the special properties of EDCs could be taken into account in environmental risk assessments. Although the European Union appears to have turned its back on risk assessment for this group of substances, in my view a retrograde step, other authorities (e.g. the US and Japan) have indicated that they consider risk assessment of EDCs to be feasible. For that reason, I think a major and urgent task of this new SETAC Advisory Group will be to develop new risk assessment methods for EDCs which explicitly deal with such phenomena as low dose effects, non-monotonic dose-responses, and delayed appearance of adverse effects. I would like to hear people's comments on this issue.

Peter Matthiessen