the us Environmental Protection Agency (epa) vastly underestimates the cancer risk from exposure to volatile organic compounds (vocs), which are used for manufacturing many household and industrial products. Researchers from the us-based Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that residents of Baltimore face three-fold greater cancer risk than what epa claims.

The researchers are the first to compare actual voc exposure levels with the results of epa's Assessment System for Population Exposure Nationwide (aspen) model, which mainly relies on ambient voc levels. During their study,