One of the nation's most stringent food safety regulations--the Delaney Clause--is on the verge of repeal as part of legislation quickly making its way through the U.S. Senate.

The provision under attack states that \o7 any \f7 compound that causes cancer in humans or animals must be banned from processed food. Delaney established the so-called zero-risk measure for known carcinogens and has been applied primarily to regulate pesticides residues.

A bill sponsored by Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and passed last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee would repeal the regulation as part of a more wide-ranging effort to introduce cost-benefit analyses to federal regulation of food, medicine and the environment. The full Senate is expected to take up the issue in early June. The House introduced similar anti-Delaney legislation on Tuesday.

Prospects of the bill passing the Republican-controlled Senate are good. Previous attempts to repeal or reform Delaney in Congress met with gridlock, pitting environmentalists against the food industry. Now, with Republicans and an anti-regulatory mood ascendant in Washington, the environmentalists are losing the influence and votes that may preclude a similar stalemate.

"The Delaney issue has been stuck in the mud for a long time . . . There have been moves and countermoves by people that fought a long fight over this provision," said Charles Benbrook, a former director of the Board of Agriculture for the National Academy of Sciences and currently an independent consultant in Washington.

Repeal of the Delaney Clause, however, would be "an extraordinary development" with "significant" implications for farm chemical regulation, Benbrook said.

Food industry representatives applaud the legislation as a necessary reform of "1950s science." Consumer and environmental groups, however, are alarmed by the prospect of repeal, especially because the current legislation does not include a substitute or alternative to Delaney.

"(Dole's bill) guts consumer protections from cancer-causing Richard Wiles, vice president of the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based advocacy organization. "This action is particularly disgraceful in light of rising cancer rates in the general population . . . (This) legislation will allow more cancer-causing pesticides in the food of America's children."

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Wiles' group and others, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), argue that children are more vulnerable than adults to pesticide residues in food.