| THE ECIS NEWS | August 2007 |
| This issue of The ECIS News is coming to you from the old CIS E-mail address — cissupport@nisc.com. Comments, questions, concerns, etc., should be directed to that address. (The new ECIS E-mail address — ecissupport@nisc.com — should be functional soon. Both addresses will continue to work.) | |
[Format problems? If the format of this newsletter goes doesn't suit your E-mail reader, try taking a look at the HTML version of the newsletter in The ECIS News archive. You can reach it through http://www.nisc.com/cis/.] |
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| UPDATES | |
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The following ECIS databases were updated in August -- FINDS, MALLIN, OBSERVATIONS, SANSS, RTECS®, and
TRI. These updates are discussed in alphabetical order in the following paragraphs.
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| FINDS: | |
| The FINDS database of sites and facilities regulated under a wide variety of EPA and many state programs now covers 2,033,676 sites/facilities. | |
| MALLIN: | |
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The MALLIN database now contains 1,549 material safety data sheets (MSDSs) from Mallinckrodt Baker, Inc. |
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| RTECS ®: | |
This standard toxicology database now includes more than 165,600 records, each one dealing with one chemical substance. The number of records increased by about 1,100 in the course of this update. (NOTE: We have had a detailed statistical analysis of the contents of RTECS® posted on one of our web pages for several years now. It's seven pages long, and it dates from March, 2004. We plan on replacing this soon with an updated analysis based on the current contents of RTECS®. Check out http://www.nisc.com/cis/ details/rtecs.htm in a week or two if you're interested.) |
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| SANSS: | |
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The update of the SANSS database -- the central chemical-oriented database in ECIS -- primarily involved "collections" -- references to other sources of information, both inside and outside ECIS. Several of these were added, updated, or revised in the course of this update. Two noteworthy additions in this category are links to the OECD's Screening Information DataSet (SIDS) and the EPA's High Production Volume Information System (HPVIS). The program spawning this last collection has been in the news of late, for a variety of reasons, not all of them complimentary. In particular, see C&E News, January 8, 2007, pages 40-42, and July 30, 2007, page 44. The latter story concerns a report from Environmental Defense (formerly Environmental Defense Fund) that is critical of the HPV program. The report is available at environmentaldefense.org/hpvreportcard. For a contrary response from the American Chemistry Council, visit the ACC's website at http://www.americanchemistry.com/, and search this phrase (INCLUDING the quotes): "ACCOMPLISHMENTS ON SCREENING PROGRAM". This will fetch up a press release from ACC disagreeing with the gist of the ED report.
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| OBSERVATIONS: | |
We introduced this database during our last update. Then, it combined the former
ISHOW and ENVIROFATE databases, which both dealt with basic physical/chemical properties relating to the environmental fate of chemicals. In the current update, the former
DATALOG database was also folded into OBSERVATIONS. That database also dealt with basic properties, although it included only bibliographic references, not actual data. Consequently, we have structured
OBSERVATIONS so that a search in it will retrieve former ISHOW and/or
ENVIROFATE records first -- the records that include actual data. The less useful, bibliographic-reference-only records from
DATALOG will always appear further down in the results set. Some of these former bibliographic-reference-only records have already been converted to data-inclusive records in the course of this update, and more will be converted in future -- which was one of the points of creating OBSERVATIONS. We also eliminated some records that were duplicative, and more purging of duplicative records will occur in upcoming updates as well. In addition, we worked over
DATALOG to eliminate some textual garbles that had crept into it; there are probably still some garbles we didn't spot, and we will try to fix those as we come upon them. |
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| TRI (Toxics Release Inventory): | |
| The 2005 data (the latest set available) were added to this database. The database now includes more than 1,615,000 records from the beginning of the TRI program in 1987 through 2005. Note that this database permits searching either by chemical (CAS RN is preferred) or by site data (e.g., ZIP code, company/facility name) or a combination of the two. You can also limit retrievals to a given year (1987 through 2005) or set of years; there are a number of ways of doing this, but the simplest is probably by using the Publication Year fields. (NOTE: In conjunction with this update, we prepared a bibliography of publications related to TRI over the years. It includes references to articles in trade and academic journals, as well as publications from EPA. There are direct links from many of the entries to the actual documents referenced. If you're interested in the history of the TRI program, you can reach the bibliography through our TRI "details" page at http://www.nisc.com/ cis/details/tri.htm -- just look for the link that leads to the "partial bibliography.") | |
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March 2007 Newsletter |
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