| THE ECIS NEWS | March 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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| NEW NAME | |
| As we've mentioned in prior issues of this newsletter, we have changed the name of the system from CIS to ECIS — Environmental Chemistry Information System. We were reluctant to abandon the moniker by which we've been known for more than 30 years, but we had outgrown it: It reflected the analytical chemistry focus the system had when it was first created in the 1970s. However, we are nowadays a utility for retrieval of basic environmental chemistry information — chemical and physical property data, human and environmental toxicity data, workplace handling and exposure information, etc. — and we wanted to be known by a name that reflected that focus. We're still getting used to it ourselves. | |
| UPDATES | |
|
Quite a number of ECIS databases were updated in March
— CCRIS, CERCLIS, HSDB, MALLIN, MEDLINE, OBSERVATIONS, RISKLINE,
RTECS (R), SANSS, TERRETOX, TSCAINV, and TSCATS. These
updates are discussed in alphabetical order in the following paragraphs.
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| CCRIS (Superfund Sites): | |
| The number of sites/records in the CERCLIS database increased from 46,361 to 46,804. The number of records that include list of PRPs (Potentially Responsible Parties) is now 3,178. HOWEVER: Users should note that EPA is once again attempting to pretend that NFRAP sites — "no further remedial action planned" — don't exist. This is a stunt they first attempted back during the Carol Browner era at EPA, and they're doing it again. This time, they have reduced the frequency of updates to NFRAP records and reduced the volume of information distributed for NFRAP records. The latter point is the real problem: One of the items dropped from NFRAP records is alias names, and this can impair your ability to retrieve records that are indeed pertinent to whatever you are researching. EPA of course brushed off our complaint about this situation, claiming that there is no demand for better NFRAP information. This is nonsense. If this kind of gamesmanship upsets you, complain to EPA yourself; we'd be interested in seeing copies of any correspondence generated by our users. | |
| HSDB: | |
|
Hazardous Substances Data Bank, the broad-scope HAZMAT database from the National Library of Medicine, has increased to more than 5,000 records, each one providing an extensive summary of data relating to one chemical substance or class of chemical substances. |
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| MALLIN: | |
The MALLIN database now contains 1,565 material safety data sheets (MSDSs) from Mallinckrodt Baker, Inc. |
|
| MEDLINE: | |
|
This medical sciences database from the National Library
of Medicine now contains more than 1,535,000 records.
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|
| OBSERVATIONS: | |
This database makes its initial appearance in this update. It is a combination of the former ISHOW and ENVIROFATE databases, which both dealt with basic physical/chemical properties relating to the environmental fate of chemicals. Combining these databases will eliminate some useless duplication, and it will make it easier to add data to the new database in future. OBSERVATIONS has approximately 32,800 records in its initial incarnation, up some 200 from what previously appeared in ISHOW and ENVIROFATE. (The number of new records is actually larger than 200, since the total record count was depressed slightly when we eliminated some records that were duplicative.) We also took the opportunity of working over these databases to clean them up a bit, eliminating some textual garbles that had crept into them. More duplicative records will doubtless be got rid of as we go forward, and there are probably still some garbles to get rid of as we come upon them. Note that the database name is set up so that you will retrieve records from OBSERVATIONS if you are accustomed to putting either ISHOW or ENVIROFATE in the Database Name search box. (We intend to fold DATALOG into this new offering as well, but we haven't yet finished our work on it, so it remains an independent entity for now.) |
|
| RISKLINE: | |
| This database from the Swedish National Chemicals Inspectorate contains bibliographic citations to sources of information on workplace exposure and human/animal toxicology and carcinogenicity. It expanded in the course of this update from around 6,900 records to more than 7,400 records. The number of direct on-screen links to source documents was also increased. | |
| RTECS ®: | |
|
This standard toxicology database now includes more than 164,500 records, each one dealing with one chemical substance. |
|
| SANSS: | |
| The update of the SANSS database — the central chemical-oriented database in ECIS — increased the number of records from roughly 681,000 to more than 696,000. A small number of additional chemical names and formulas were included in the update, but its main focus was additional references to other sources of information. Eleven "collections" — sets of references to other sources of information, both inside and outside ECIS — were added, updated, or revised in the course of this update. Three new sets of references to print sources of information were added, two were expanded, and one was revised. Four new sets of references to Internet sources of information were also added, as was one set of references under the "Other Sources" category. | |
| TERRETOX: | |
| The TERRETOX database now contains records derived from some 4,100 separate sources for nearly 3,000 unique chemical substances and nearly 1,900 species. The database previously contained records relating to toxicity tests on terrestrial animals, but it now contains records pertaining to plant species as well (derived from the former PHYTOTOX database). | |
| TSCAINV: | |
| The TSCAINV database of chemicals listed on the public portion of EPA's TSCA Inventory — the list of chemicals approved for use in industry and commerce in the US — now includes the 65,641 records drawn from the "second issue, 2006" of the database. | |
| TSCATS: | |
| The TSCATS database
— "TSCA test submissions," the index to unpublished health and
safety studies submitted to EPA — increased by 383 records, to 65,163
total records. As with our last "update" of this database, we
have cobbled together some "new" TSCATS records available
from EPA with the records from the last formal release of the database
back in 2003. Some of these "new" records date back to the
1990s, and they may actually duplicate records that were already in the
database. (We have no systematic way of identifying duplications, but
"new" records will always differ from earlier duplicates in one
important regard: the "new" records always include online
click-through copies of the referenced documents, whereas the older
records generally don't include links to on-screen full texts.) In any
event, the "new" records don't date from later than 3 October
2005, the last date when EPA entered data into the database. As far as we
are now aware, EPA is not currently updating the TSCATS database,
and has no plans to do so. This is a truly unfortunate situation. (As with
CERCLIS — above — we would be interested in seeing copies of
any correspondence complaining about this situation.) For our part, we can
only tell our users that the version of TSCATS available on ECIS is now,
and will continue to be, the most complete and up-to-date version
available.
We remind users that we added an Add/Alter Date field to TSCATS during our last update. Pre-update records have been given the phony Add/Alter Date of "19850601"; the records newly added in this update have been given the phony Add/Alter Date of "20060601." To restrict any search you do in TSCATS to NEWLY ADDED RECORDS ONLY (last two updates), enter ">2005" in the Add/Alter Date search box. |
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| "MOST POLLUTED" CITIES IN CERCLIS | |
| In an idle moment recently, we looked at the updated CERCLIS database described above with regard to Superfund sites in particular ZIP codes. We were looking for the "most polluted" ZIP codes — those ZIP codes having the largest number of Superfund sites attributed to them. It's not a scientific procedure, but we thought the results might be interesting, and they appear below. This is JUST an assessment of "true" CERCLIS sites — those that require remediation or further investigation. Some 4,269 ZIP codes represented among the set of "true" CERCLIS sites had only a single Superfund site attributed to them, 1,217 had two sites, 465 had three sites, 288 had four sites, 147 had five sites, and 211 ZIPs had six or more Superfund sites attributed to them. Of these latter, the worst of the worst were these: | |
| Number of
Superfund sites: 16 ZIP: 02854 - City: North Kingstown, RI ― Number of Superfund sites: 16 ZIP: 06497 - City: Stratford, CT ― Number of Superfund sites: 16 ZIP: 90280 - City: South Gate, CA ― Number of Superfund sites: 17 ZIP: 36201 - City: Anniston, AL ― Number of Superfund sites: 17 ZIP: 64131 - City: Kansas City, MO ― Number of Superfund sites: 21 ZIP: 06032 - City: Farmington, CT ― Number of Superfund sites: 22 ZIP: 19526 - City: Hamburg, PA ― Number of Superfund sites: 22 ZIP: 33309 - City: Fort Lauderdale, FL ― Number of Superfund sites: 23 ZIP: 33619 - City: Tampa, FL ― Number of Superfund sites: 25 ZIP: 90011 - City: Los Angeles, CA ― Number of Superfund sites: 28 ZIP: 98421 - City: Tacoma, WA ― Number of Superfund sites: 37 ZIP: 90001 - City: Los Angeles, CA ― |
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October 2006 Newsletter |
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