A science-tacular post

I've been doing quite a bit of work on weekends and other times finishing up papers and reports from my postdoc at UCSF, especially the first month I was here. I'm pretty pleased with the results so far and I thought I'd share an update for my science and non-science nerd/friends alike:
First, I was working on a large report for the state of California's Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (EPA-OEHHA). It is on the subject of nanomaterials and nanotechnology in consumer products and if there might be health concerns they should be aware of. It was supposed to be all finished when I ended my postdoc in early June, but of course there were delays. One significant delay was the chemical industry and their lobbyists getting very scared after reading our draft report.
A bit of background about how this fits into the policy process:
My position was strictly academic as a postdoc through the University of California. The State's OEHHA office main job is to assess if there might be health risks posed by certain compounds (they're the group who decides and recommends the chemicals for Prop 65 list, or the reason for all the signs in California that say "this building/product/location is known by the state of California to contain carcinogenic compounds"). They have no regulatory power, per se, they mostly just make recommendations to other enforcement and regulatory bodies within Cal-EPA. They approached us (UCSF) with the question of nanomaterials and how they might fit into health policy, and we contracted with them to write a recommendations report. In theory, they can take our recommendations and put them in the trash--we are just an outside 'expert' entity giving our professional opinion.
So, the industry lobbyists got wind of what we were proposing and were quite concerned, which I always take as a compliment. They slowed the final publication process up a bit by requesting comment periods, conference calls, etc. This is all AFTER we had a NON-REQUIRED public meeting for them to give comment in the first place, which is rare for an academic report.
Since I moved to Bangladesh I had a conference call at 2am local time with what I thought was going to be one or two industry people and our colleagues at Cal-EPA to answer some questions. No fewer than 13 different industry groups, lobbyists and 'independent consultants' were on the call on at least 3 continents!
In the meantime we've cleaned up our language and clarified a few areas of the report, drawing from the useful comments we received at the public meeting and then sent it to a professional editor. Her edits were very thorough and she really did a much better job than I would ever have done in proofreading, however it was a painful process for me to go through and basically edit the entire 86-page document again. It's a much better document for it, though and we're close to being finished and I'm pretty happy with the final product. We'll see what happens when the 'final' version hits the streets...I'll keep you updated!

Second project I've been working on from the postdoc dealt with the topic of estrogenic compounds in drinking water and what contribution oral contraceptives might have to contaminating waterways. This began as a summer intern's project and I was the advisor to her. It's since turned into a review article for Environmental Science and Technology journal and was just accepted last week after one round of editing. It will be in their special issue about Environmental Policy in January. I'm already getting media calls about it, and I hope it's received well. It's an important issue and very timely with chemical policy reform happening and the public's awareness of chemicals in our everyday lives increasing.
The main result of the paper is that the amount of oral contraceptive estrogen that women excrete is very small in relation to all the other estrogenic compounds in our waterways coming from a variety of sources. One seemingly large source is agriculture runoff, especially from CAFOs operations. Also, pregnant women excrete many times more estrogen than women who are taking the pill.
So it's been great to see these projects slowly finish up and add things to my CV! There are also be 2-3 papers from "the thyroid project" that should be coming out in the next year, but I think this post was long and science-y enough, so maybe I'll write about that project when those papers get accepted :-)