Dear Chairs Pingree and Merkley and Ranking Members Joyce and Murkowski:
"The undersigned public health, medical and environmental health organizations urge you to provide $100 million for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in the FY 2023 Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill.
ATSDR establishes and maintains effective relationships with people in communities that are impacted by environmental hazards throughout the nation. ATSDR assists these communities by investigating and addressing their environmental hazards. ATSDR’s environmental health expertise, regional locations and ability to respond 24/7 enables the agency to respond to and address environmental health threats from chemical spills and other emergencies at a moment’s notice. In the past several years, ATSDR responded to more than 1,400 community, state, and federal requests, addressing the potential health risk of over five hundred thousand people around the country. The agency also educated over 29,000 health professionals on ways to diagnose and treat conditions related to hazardous exposures. ATSDR is conducting groundbreaking work to address emerging contaminants, such as a multi-site health study that will look at the relationship between exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and human health and developmental effects. This study builds upon ATSDR’s exposure assessments at ten sites that are identifying factors that affect PFAS exposure in communities. The exposure assessments have included over 2,300 participants, assessed over 1,300 households and reached over 150,000 people through social media."
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