Negotiated Rule Making II

On January 12, 2010, ISDA held the second Negotiated Rule Making meeting on pathogen drift from dairies utilizing pressurized irrigation systems.

Here’s what happened (you can also listen to our recording of the meeting by clicking the “play” button on the media player above):

• Participants heard presentations from Johns Hopkins University researchers Dr. Meghan Davis and D’Ann Williams about the public health impacts of industrial dairy waste– including Livestock Associated MRSA, respirable and enteric pathogens, endotoxin, dust and allergens.  They presented via Skype from Barbados (it was a good thing we brought along a tech guy we know or it wouldn’t have happened as ISDA’s IT guy had no clue about how to bypass ISDA’s firewall to set up and record a Skype presentation). Dr. Davis spoke about the threat of antibiotic resistance and livestock-associated MRSA, and Ms. Williams spoke about field research she had done in the Yakima Valley in Washington state (another industrial dairy epicenter) showing asthma-inducing bacterial endotoxin at high levels in people’s homes as far away as three miles from a facility.
• Participants also heard from DEQ personnel Dr. Jeff Fromm, Rick Hardy, and Mike Cook about the drift modeling and risk assessment methods DEQ uses to regulate industrial and municipal waste. This presentation took up the majority of the meeting as the DEQ representatives wanted to make sure they presented on the science and different scenarios as well as showed what this modeling would look like as applied to dairy waste. The dairy association strongly objected to applying this same modeling to dairy waste without first having an “independent expert” analyze it.
• The meeting ended in a stalemate, with the dairy association now claiming that it was everyone else who had come to the table in bad faith; that we were supposed to be at the table to negotiate, but that there were no clear “negotiations” going on.

Despite all of the data presented at the meeting, the conclusion was troubling. ISDA has informed participants that we can expect to hear from them at some unidentified point in the future about the plan for moving forward.