“Pesticide use is an unnecessary, life-destroying activity. Risk assessment arranges deck chairs on the Titanic. Let's refuse to get on board.”

--Mary O’Brien, staff scientist for the Environmental Research Foundation

Quick Tips

Pesticides poison more than bugs. In the United States 1.2 billion pounds of these chemicals are used each year (three-fourths in farming). With this dependency on quick, toxic fixes, it’s certainly no surprise we are killing fish, birds and beneficial insects, and poisoning our food, soil, water and air, along with our farm workers, our kids and ourselves.

Schools may be ignorant of toxic hazards. That’s why it’s so important for you to learn what kinds of poisons your child’s school may be harboring – and to try to educate the educators about the dangers of exposing kids to pesticides that can both make them sick and interfere with their ability to learn. That's also why it's so important to have an authoritative source like Chemical-Free Kids to support your position.

Beware of tents and tarps. Tented houses (structures that have been temporarily sealed in plastic enclosures that resemble circus tents) and tarped fields are indicators of structural or soil fumigation with a chemical called methyl bromide – an extremely lethal poison capable of killing any living thing it encounters, including you or a member of your family. The facts that methyl bromide has claimed victims of all ages and is now believed to pose a powerful threat to the earth’s protective ozone layer, however, so far haven’t been sufficient to get it removed from the market – not with influential agribusiness interests supporting legislators who have found ways to keep it in circulation. Which means it’s up to you to make sure your children aren’t exposed to this toxic serial killer.

The EPA permits pesticide residues to remain on food. They’re called “tolerances,” the maximum legal amounts allowed in the food you eat. Your fruit salad, for instance, could have multiple traces of pesticides in it, all quite legal, from a variety of chemicals applied to different fruits. The Food Quality Protection Act was supposed to require that tolerances be set ten times higher to protect kids if there were “data gaps” on how certain chemicals might affect developing brains and nervous systems. But so far, that’s only been done in a fraction of the cases (see our latest newsletter for an update).

The pesticide penalty

In the year 2000, the EPA finally got around to taking a second look at one of the most commonly used insecticides on the market, and didn’t like what it saw. As a result, the agency ordered the chemical, chlorpyrifos (more commonly known by the product names Dursban and Lorsban), phased out for nearly all indoor and outdoor residential uses, and halted its use in schools, parks, and other settings where children might be exposed (as of the end of 2001). It also ordered certain agricultural uses of the chemical reduced.

While certainly welcome news to environmental organizations and parents, the action was also bad news to the public in the sense that it reflected just how misplaced our confidence actually is in the supposed “safety” of federally registered pesticides -- the idea that if the government allows it, it must be okay.

“Through this review, EPA has determined that chlorpyrifos, as currently used, does not provide an adequate margin of protection for children,” notes an EPA Web site on the subject. “This action adds a greater measure of protection for children by reducing/eliminating the most important sources of exposure.” But while attempting to allay public concern about the significance of such exposure, the EPA can’t conceal the fact that chlorpyrifos has been routinely used for years (and can still be used until supplies run out) in many of the places where children are most apt to come into contact with it – including classrooms, school cafeterias and lockers.

What kind of damage might such exposure produce? To quote a Cornell University fact sheet on chlorpyrifos issued in 1999, “there is clear evidence that it is toxic to the nervous system. Hence, unnecessary exposure to this chemical and exposure to children, especially toddlers, should be minimized.”

That’s not surprising, however, when one considers that its one of a class of pesticides -- organophosphates – that are deliberately intended to poison the nervous systems by interfering with an enzyme in the brain called acetylchlolinesterase. According to the Center for Children’s Health and the Environment of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, “…there is substantial evidence from animal studies that chronic, low-level exposure to organophosphates affects neurodevelopment and neurobehavioral functioning in developing animals,” and that it can affect children's developing nervous systems in a similar manner. The results, the center notes, may include “lower cognitive function, behavior disorders, and other subtle neurological deficits.” Research findings also suggest that organophosphates disrupt the autonomic nervous system (which controls the motor functioning of the lungs) and “may be among the preventable causes of childhood asthma.”

Toxic Tolerances

Safe – adj.-- Not dangerous; unlikely to cause or result in harm, injury, or damage.

If you’re like most of us, you probably assume that when the EPA allows a pesticide to be registered and used (for food, lawn care, or control of termites for instance), it’s been officially declared to be “safe.” But at the EPA, that word isn’t even in their vocabulary. According to Antonio Bravo, of the EPA’s Office of Pesticide and Toxicology, “There is no definition for safe. There is a definition for what would be considered adverse (i.e., having an adverse effect on people) but not safe.” The EPA, according to Bravo, “intentionally avoids (that) definition.”
“No pesticide is 100 percent safe.” Bravo pointed out. “Anybody in this agency would back me on that because pesticides…are designed to kill something, so how could they be safe? It runs counter to intuition.”

But while the agency won’t say “safe,” it does set tolerances -- the legal limit of a pesticide allowed as a residue in your food. “What a tolerance is supposed to indicate is a ‘no effect level,’” commented Daniel Swartz, Executive Director of the Children’s Environmental Health Network. “The only way that we could possibly have data that would give us absolute certainty of safety is to run scientific experiments in thousands of kids; the second way is that we don’t use any of these things at all. I certainly don’t opt for the first.”

To set a tolerance (which is in reality an “enforcement tool”) the EPA reviews animal studies designed to look for different types of organ damage to the test animal (such as brain, reproductive or liver damage), then multiplies the no-observable effect level by a factor of 100. But, no matter how sophisticated the studies, they are still dealing with animals. “In the science of toxicology, recognizing anything we recommend with respect to these levels is based on extrapolation from models and animal studies,” says Bravo. “There’s a lot of gray area there.”
To invoke the additional tenfold safety factor that’s supposed to be mandated by the Food Quality Protection Act , you would take the established tolerance for a particular pesticide on a commodity, say, a tomato, and multiply it by ten. Given the distinct lack so far of new neurotoxicity data that the law was designed to elicit, one might assume that such a factor would automatically go into effect for the majority of pesticides that have been reviewed. But that, as it turns out, is far from the case (see our updated newsletter for information on the EPA's 10-year review of pesticide safety in 2006 under the FQPA, and the dissent registered by thousands of its own scientists).

“The EPA has gotten them off the hook about 75 percent of the time without industry having to do a thing, was how Richard Wiles, senior vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group, summed up the situation.

But perhaps that’s a reflection of the kind of pressure that EPA personnel involved in the reappraisal are constantly under. “On any individual pesticide,” noted Swartz, “the audience that is going to be most concerned and pay most attention is always going to be industry. They have the most at stake for any individual decision. The public may be worried about pesticides in general, but we’re not going to spend hours going through the report on a particular pesticide. On the individual decisions that end up having the cumulative effect of setting the regulatory system, EPA faces certainly a lot more scrutiny and pressure from the folks who want to sell this stuff than from those who might be concerned [about its safety].”

“Safe is too abstract a term,” was how Bravo put it, “What we might call safe today may prove to be unsafe tomorrow … Too often people ask us – especially food processors – to declare that, say, avocados treated with this and that are safe. How could they be safe? You’re using a killing agent on them. We could assess whether consumption of that avocado might result in some type of harmful effect to the consumer, but we could never say it’s safe.”