That's understandable, and I grant you it's necessary to do that. The difficulty, particularly in the example you mentioned, developmental neurotoxicity, where there are impacts on the developing brain, is that we know so little, and we need to know a great deal more. The numbers of children with learning or behavioural problems in this country are very high; we're talking about 25% of children with one or more learning or behavioural problems. You cannot make a relationship between those statistics on neurological development in children and the existence of chemicals in their environment and the fact that some of them are suspected in developmental neurotoxicity. You can't; there's not enough evidence to make that link.
But if you put those two things side by side and you see that children are exposed to suspected neurotoxins and you see those kinds of numbers in the child population, to me, that's a red flag. It says, look more closely here. And when you have an approach, a regulatory evaluation approach, that says we follow the science, the difficulty is that if there isn't the science already there and you therefore don't require it, you could be missing something extremely important.
So that's why my organization and organizations in the Canadian Partnership for Children's Health and Environment have made the recommendation that the core testing requirements be expanded to not just look at genotoxicity and carcinogenic cancers, but also to expand the battery of required core testing to include developmental neurotoxicity, so we can get at the problem. This is a way of prioritizing where you look, to go for the areas where large numbers of children are potentially affected.