Comment on ‘Asymmetric evaluations of scientific evidence indicating harm compared to evidence indicating an absence of harm in regulatory appraisals’ (van Zwanenberg et al., Environmental Sciences Europe 2025; 37: 138)

Van Zwanenberg et al.’s review rightly and unusually focuses on the culture of regulators in chemical risk assessment, driving the latter’s bias for industry’s toxicity findings, and against those of academia. But they underestimate and misunderstand the development of this culture, so they (really, all chemicals policy stakeholders do) miss the obvious solution: to finally utilize existing mandates in pre-market RA that require the evaluation of all available data (AAD). Multitudes of low-dose toxicity findings from academe, that are fundamentally sensitive to detect toxicity, make the long-delayed debate, on the accuracy of these two competing toxicity test methods, urgent.