http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/03/AR2006120300992.html
Evidence Such as Eggs In Male Fish Spurs Push
By David
A. Fahrenthold
Monday, December 4, 2006; B01
Growing evidence
that chemicals in the environment can interfere with animals' hormone systems
-- including the discovery that male
A decade
ago, the very idea that pollutants could interfere with a body's chemical
messages was near the fringes of science. But now, it is an urgent topic for
lawmakers and researchers around the world, and especially in the
In recent
years, researchers have linked some common chemicals to troubling changes in
laboratory rodents and wild animals, including reproductive defects,
immune-system alterations and obesity.
For now,
no connections to human ailments have been proved. But some studies have
provided hints that people might be affected by crossed hormones, and activists
wonder if this kind of pollution could contribute to diabetes, birth defects
and infertility.
"There's
a lot of concern that a lot of chemicals to which we are exposed routinely, and
without our knowledge, are interfering with the way hormones work," said
R. Thomas Zoeller, a professor of biology at the
The
Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments is planning to host a public
forum about hormone-disrupting pollution this spring. U.S. Reps. James P. Moran
Jr. (D-Va.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) have said they plan to press the
Environmental Protection Agency about its failure to develop a program to test
chemicals for hormonelike effects, as ordered by Congress in 1996.
The idea
that natural hormone messages can be tampered with is not new; for decades,
women using birth-control pills have been counting on a man-made chemical to do
just that.
But the
current concern is much wider: Some fear that modern chemistry might have
unwittingly created other compounds with hormonelike effects and that they
might have spread widely around the globe.
In the
past few years, scientists working with animals have found potential problems
with several pollutants, among them rocket-fuel components, pesticides and
additives to soap. Among the most heavily researched:
?
Phthalates, a family of additives used to make vinyl plastic flexible and
prevent perfume from evaporating, have been linked to lower sperm counts and
other sexual problems in male rats, as well as to heightened allergic reactions
in the animals. Chemical industry officials have said that these tests used
unrealistically high doses and that the results are not likely to translate to
humans.
?
Bisphenol A, used as a building block for hard plastic goods like bottles and
as a resin to line food cans, has been connected in some experiments to
abnormal sexual development in male lab rodents, as well as a predilection for
obesity. Officials from the chemical and pesticide industries have vigorously
criticized these results, saying that other studies have shown the chemical to
be harmless.
? Treated
sewage, which carries human estrogen and birth-control pill components excreted
in waste, has been linked to "feminized" male fish in waters around
the world. In the St. Lawrence River in
The study
of endocrine disruptors began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with
scientists struggling to add up such oddities as male birds with female organs
in the Great Lakes and sexual defects in
They
eventually found that some chemicals were turning on hormone switches in the
body's endocrine system that trigger biological processes. Others blocked the
switches so natural hormones couldn't get through.
That
revelation meant that a pollutant could be harmful even if it wasn't poisonous
and didn't cause cancer. Even small doses could cause major damage, if they
came at a key time when hormones were guiding pregnancy or early development.
"We
have to ask different questions," said John Peterson Myers, an activist
and former scientist based in
Today,
despite the wealth of studies in animals, the implications for human health are
unclear. One of the most dramatic studies examined the sons of mothers whose
bodies contained phthalates. It found no major birth defects but did show that
the higher the phthalate level, the greater chance that the boys' bodies would
show subtle signs of being "undermasculinized," according to
researcher Shanna Swan, director of the Center for Reproductive Epidemiology at
the University of Rochester.
Still,
that falls well short of a smoking gun: Humans are not laboratory rats, so
scientists say it is exceedingly hard to craft a study that shows a particular
chemical caused a particular problem, and not genetics, diet or some other
factor.
"They're
nowhere near cause-and-effect," L. Earl Gray Jr., a senior research
biologist at the EPA, said of human studies. "We're showing correlations
and associations" between pollutants and human health effects, he said,
but no indisputable sign that one causes the other.
Officials
from the chemical and pesticide industries have vigorously defended their
products, saying they see no reason for concern about products in the
environment interfering with human hormones.
Some
scientists have also pointed out that human diets have always included some
estrogen-like compounds: They occur naturally in wine and soy-based products,
for example.
Stephen
H. Safe, a professor of veterinary physiology and pharmacology at
Still,
concerns that human health might be in danger have led to recent bans on
certain phthalates in young children's toys imposed by the European Union and
the City of
Activists
in the
Some
activists fear that damage is already being done. They caution avoiding plastic
baby bottles, which could contain bisphenol A, and reducing consumption of
animal fat, where some environmental pollutants can concentrate.
"I
feel terrible because we haven't moved on this faster," said Colborn, the
activist who has served as an unofficial leader among endocrine-disruptor
researchers. "This is a transgenerational problem that is undermining the
integrity of humans."
But Paul
Foster, an official who evaluates risks to human reproduction at the National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said it was hard to give useful
advice at this point because the chemicals being investigated are so
ubiquitous.
"There's
very little that they can do," said Foster, whose agency is part of the
National Institutes of Health. "That's why you can't be too alarmist about
it, because you can't stop people living."
H.JOSEF HEBERT
Associated Press
Tue, Nov. 21, 2006
WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday
that pesticides can be applied over and near bodies of water without
a permit under the federal Clean Water Act. The decision brought
immediate criticism from an environmental watchdog group and from a
senator involved in environmental issues. They said it would make it
easier to pollute the nation's lakes and streams.
But the EPA said the two specific circumstances in which clean water
permits no longer will be needed will add to public health by
allowing for better eradication of pests.
"This clean water rule strengthens and streamlines efforts of public
health officials and communities to control pests and invasive
species while maintaining important environmental safeguards," said
Benjamin Grumbles, the EPA's assistant administrator for water-
related issues.
Under the rule, pesticides can be applied directly into water or
sprayed nearby or onto foliage over water without a pollution permit
if the application is needed to control aquatic weeds, mosquitoes or
other pests.
Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., the ranking member of the Senate
Environment and Public Works Committee, said the permitting exemption
will lead to more toxic pollution getting into lakes and streams. He
said a billion pounds of pesticides are used annual in the United
States "and much of it ends up in our waterways."
"We must strengthen, not weaken, our policies and laws that prevent
pesticides from polluting rivers, streams, lakes and our underground
water supplies," Jeffords said in a statement.
Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides, a private
public health and environmental advocacy group, called the ruling a
weakening of federal protection because the Clean Water Act set
limits on the maximum contamination levels that would be allowed to
protect waterways.
"More protection is need from pesticides, not less," said
Feldman.
http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/news/politics/16070426.htm
---_
On the Net
Environmental Protection Agency:
http://www.epa.gov/
Beyond Pesticides:
http://www.beyondpesticides.org
(Beyond Pesticides, November 13, 2006) Bed bugs have made a comeback of epic proportions in the United States and around the world lately, and in cities around the country are reported to be major nuisances. Reports of growing resistance to pesticides and evidence of toxicity of conventional bed bug products has led to the production of new least toxic bed bug products.
For example, the company K4 Products, L.L.C., has released a new least-toxic product called EcoBugFree for Bed Bugs claiming to kill bed bugs on contact. EcoBugFree for Bed Bugs qualifies as an EPA exempt minimum risk pesticide, and therefore is considered a low-risk product.
Bedbugs are tiny reddish-brown insects, about 1/5 inch, which live in the cracks and crevices in bed frames and adjacent walls or in mattress seams. They usually become active at night, while their host is sleeping, in order to feed. Human reactions to bedbug bites can be anywhere from swelling and pain to nothing at all. Bed bugs can easily be transported from one host to another by riding on clothing to buses and trains, movie theaters and other public places where another person could pick them up. They can also be introduced to a home on a used mattress, or can travel between apartments and hotel rooms.
While bedbugs were not much of a problem in the last several decades, they have recently been making a comeback. The Washington Post reports that in the past five years, bedbugs have been reported in 27 states. Last spring a Chicago woman sued a New York hotel for $20 million after suffering more than 500 bed bug bites (see Daily News 5-10-06). Both New York and San Francisco have recently passed city legislation to help control the spread of the bugs. In San Francisco, the legislation centers on landlord and tenant rights while in New York, it involves controlling the sale and transport of used mattresses.
EcoBugFree for Bed Bugs is currently being used by hotels and shelters to manage their bed bug issues and is being stocked at hardware stores and pharmacies for sale to the general public. According to the manufacturers, EcoBugFree for Bed Bugs is a safe product that can be used on and around the bed as well as in the presence of children and pets.
As with any pest problem, before resorting to pest control, consider alternative practices first. The first step is to inspect to see if you really have a bug problem. Some signs of a bedbug infestation include a pungent odor, and blood or fecal spots on your pillow casings and sheets. Search out eggs and adult bedbugs in the cracks and spaces in your bed frame and along the baseboard if you think you might have a bedbug problem.
The next step is to investigate the possible cause of the infestation. The bugs could be coming from a nearby bird¿s nest or bat nesting area. By getting rid of the source, you will help rid the infestation in your home. Be sure to caulk and paint the openings and cracks in your bed frame and surrounding area to close up any hiding places.
There are also more direct strategies to take care of a bedbug problem. If you need to take action right away, a good short-term emergency technique involves setting up a barrier so that the bugs cannot get on your bed. Place the legs of your bed in containers filled with soapy water, and make sure that no part of the bed is touching the wall.
You must thoroughly clean sheets and blankets. Try using an enzyme cleaner or borax for this. Steam clean all the furniture in your home. Infested mattresses and beds should be replaced.
Temperature manipulation provides another control method. Bedbugs can only survive in the range of 48° F and 97° F. By artificially raising the temperature in the infected area to 97° and 99° for several days, a large number of bedbugs will be killed. Lowering the temperature to 32° to 48° will take 30-60 days to kill off all the eggs. If you opt for temperature manipulation, use it in conjunction with the other techniques discussed above so that you can get rid of the entire infestation.
In addition to K4 Products¿ EcoBugFree for Bed Bugs, insecticidal soaps and silica aerogels provide least-toxic controls that you can employ if all else fails.
(Beyond Pesticides, November 2, 2006) In a new study in the journal Aquatic Toxicology, Canadian researchers find that at environmentally-relevant levels, the anti-bacterial agent triclosan interferes with the thyroid hormone in frogs, affecting the timing of metamorphosis in tadpoles. This study is the first demonstration of low-level impacts of triclosan on thyroid hormone function. The study raises further questions about human and environmental health risks from triclosan.
The study, entitled ¿The Bactericidal Agent Triclosan Modulates Thyroid Hormone-Associated Gene Expression and Disrupts Postembryonic Anuran Development,¿ shows that exposure to as little as 0.15 micrograms/L triclosan causes an earlier metamorphosis from tadpole to frog than normal, with effects on the tadpole brain and tail.
Results of the study indicate that low levels of triclosan can potentially affect the human thyroid gland. The thyroid plays a role in development, body temperature and metabolism.
"Frogs serve as a very sensitive sentinel species for chemicals that can actually disrupt thyroid hormone action," said University of Victoria molecular biologist Caren Helbing, Ph.D., one of the authors of study. ¿Triclosan at levels measured in our waterways can actually affect how thyroid hormones works in frogs."
The chemical triclosan, marketed widely to protect children from germs, is found in hundreds of products, including antibacterial soaps, deodorants, toothpastes, cosmetics, fabrics and plastics. Research shows that triclosan is no more effective than washing with regular soap and water, and the ubiquitous nature of the chemical is leading to antibacterial resistance problems.
"For most things, regular soap is just fine. In terms of children's products, they shouldn't have triclosan in them at all,¿ Dr. Helbing said in an interview with the Victoria Sun.
"When you ask a qualified microbiologist, they'll tell you that it's being overdone and there's probably a greater chance of creating bacterial resistance than preventing problems," said Joe Schwarcz, Ph.D., director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society. "Washing with soap and water is enough, except in a hospital environment ... You don't want to use a jackhammer to kill an ant when stepping on it will do.
"The reason why the triclosan story is interesting is it's so pervasive - it's in so many products. Even (though) the risk (of ill effects) is small, the exposure is too large," says Dr. Schwarcz.
In fact, triclosan is used so commonly that is has made its way into the human body ¿ it has been found in the umbilical cord blood of infants and in the breast milk of mothers.
In March, the Canadian Paediatric Society called for parents to stop buying antibacterial products, and instead use traditional soap and water to wash toys, hands or household items. This past August, an Illinois County asked EPA to cut the widespread use of antibacterial agents. The American Medical Association and Association for Professionals in Infection Control have said there's no evidence that antibacterial soaps prevent infections in homes. Additionally, on October 20, 2005, at a meeting of the Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee, which advises FDA, the committee voted 11-1 that antibacterial soaps and washes were no more effective than regular soap and water in fighting infections ¿ both work equally as well. Shortly after, Beyond Pesticides, along with 14 other public health and environmental advocacy groups, petitioned FDA to ban triclosan for all non-medical uses. As of yet, the agency has failed to respond to the petition.
The widespread use of triclosan has led to contamination of the nation¿s waterways. A 2006 study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health finds that after people flush antibacterial products down the drain, about 75 percent of triclocarban and triclosan compounds survive treatment at sewage plants. Most of that ends up in waterways and sludge spread on agricultural fields, and may end up on produce.
TAKE ACTION: When used in hospitals and other health care settings, or for persons with weakened immune systems, triclosan and its analog, triclocarban, represent important health care and sanitary tools. Outside of these settings, the use of these antibacterial ingredients is unnecessary, and the constant exposure to them becomes a health and environmental hazard. The best solution to preventing infections is good old, regular soap and water. Make sure you read all labels when buying soaps and other toiletry products, including cosmetics, to ensure that triclosan and triclocarban are not included. Also be on the lookout for Microban and Irgasan, which are other names for triclosan.
Three times more likely to fall ill
Study examines agricultural link
Oct. 12, 2006. 01:00 AM
JOSEPH HALL
HEALTH REPORTER
Women who have worked on farms are almost three times more likely to develop breast cancer than those who have never worked in agriculture, a new study of cancer patients in the Windsor area suggests.
The paper, to be published today in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, says women with farming experience are 2.8 times more likely to develop the disease than non-farmers and that the agricultural link may linger long after a woman has gone on to other occupations.
Study author James Brophy, an occupational and environmental health scientist, theorizes that exposure to pesticides, or other common farm contaminants, may explain the increased risk.
The study was conducted over 2 1/2 years and looked into the lives of 564 women diagnosed with breast cancer at the Windsor Regional Cancer Centre, said Brophy, who is also executive director of the Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers in Sarnia. Of those 564 patients from Essex and Kent counties, 154 had worked on farms. Those patients were compared to an equal number of women in the same area who did not have any form of cancer.
After weeding out traditional breast cancer risk factors ¿ such as genetics, smoking, age, number of children and hormone replacement therapies ¿ the farming link was apparent, said Brophy.
"We also found that if she went on to work in health care or in auto (manufacturing) her breast cancer risk continued, and in the case of the auto industry, it actually slightly increased."
Brophy said there have been a couple of previous studies that have also shown a link between agriculture and breast cancer. But "there is a significant gap in our understanding of work-related exposures and breast-cancer risk." he wrote in the paper's introduction.
"I'm not saying we have the smoking gun on breast cancer. We don't," said Brophy, who conducted the study with Dr. Margaret Keith. "What I think we do have is a study that shows the importance of looking at occupation as a potential risk factor and that something is going on ... within the rural population."
Heather Logan, head of cancer control policy with the Canadian Cancer Society, said much more must be done to study occupational links to the disease, and Brophy's paper could point the way.
"The whole way they've approached this study is really quite remarkable," Logan said. "And it raised really important questions, not just about women's work history, but our ability to understand the previous work history in both men and women and the potential risk of developing cancer as a result."
Ann Chambers, a professor of oncology at the University of Western Ontario's Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, said it was a "good study" that should prompt further research. But Chambers, who specializes in breast cancer, said it was important to understand the association found in the study between cancer and farming does not necessarily mean there's a causal relationship between the two.
"The real danger that the public has in this sort of thing is that you see an association and then they think, `Aha, working on a farm causes cancer,'" she said. "And the study statistically can't say that. It says there is an association which warrants further study to understand what the cause is."
Brophy agreed further research must be conducted to see if the association holds true outside of the Windsor area and he is currently expanding his sample size to 1,000 women.
He said the study groups all forms of agriculture together and cannot determine if one type of farming is more dangerous than another.
Brophy said a host of environmental contaminants, like diesel fumes, antibiotics and growth hormones are common in agricultural settings and could also be contributing to the higher cancer rates.
(Beyond Pesticides, September 22, 2006) Low-level exposure to dieldrin, a banned but persistent pesticide lingering in the environment, appears to accelerate changes in the brain that can potentially lead to the onset of Parkinson's disease symptoms years or even decades before they might naturally develop. This finding, by researchers at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, was presented at the 232nd national meeting of the American Chemical Society. The concept of an accelerated disease process is a new twist in the investigation of the long-suspected link between the use of pesticides and Parkinson's disease, according to the researchers.
"Our current study clearly shows that pesticides such as dieldrin appear to accelerate or exacerbate the already underlying disease," said Gary Miller, Ph.D., an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at Emory University. "Pesticides aren't necessarily the causative agents, but they do promote Parkinson's. So it appears the more you are exposed to pesticides, the greater your risk of developing the disease earlier in life."
In their pilot study, Dr. Miller and his co-researchers -- Emory graduate student Jaime Hatcher and Georgia Tech Professor Kurt Pennell, Ph.D. -- found that levels of dieldrin, an organochlorine pesticide developed in the 1940s as an alternative to DDT, were three times higher in the brains of 14 people who had Parkinson's disease than in the brains of 12 people who didn't.
Based on this finding, the researchers estimated the lifetime exposure levels of these people and extrapolated these levels to mice. They then exposed laboratory mice to low, but "environmentally relevant" dosages of dieldrin - about 1 to 3 milligrams per kilogram. After one month, although none of the mice showed symptoms of Parkinson's disease, the researchers did detect increased levels of oxidative stress in the brain and significantly reduced uptake of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that plays a key role in the development of Parkinson's.
This latest work adds more evidence establishing a link between pesticides and Parkinson's. Earlier this year, a Harvard School of Public Health study of more than 140,000 adults found that those exposed to long-term, low levels of pesticides had a 70 percent higher incidence of Parkinson's disease. Another recent study, by the same Emory/Georgia Tech team, found that fetal rodents exposed to dieldrin had brain alterations that made them more susceptible to Parkinson's-inducing toxic chemicals.
"All of the evidence that has been accumulating suggests that exposure to pesticides increases the risk of Parkinson's disease," Dr. Miller said. "We believe that a person who is destined to get Parkinson's because of genetics or other factors at age 80 might develop symptoms when they're 65 or 70 if they have been exposed to pesticides."
Dieldrin, which was most commonly used to control agricultural pests and termites, was banned for most uses by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1974 after it was found to be harmful to fish and other wildlife. It was totally banned in 1987. Although no longer used, dieldrin can persist in the environment for decades and move up through the food chain, particularly in dairy products and meats, to humans, noted Dr. Pennell.
Over the next few decades, however, dieldrin and other banned pesticides should dissipate in the environment and become less of a factor in the development of Parkinson's disease, according to Dr. Miller. "Today, people are being exposed to much lower levels of pesticides than people were 30 or 40 years ago," Miller said. "I would predict that over the course of the next several decades that we will see a decrease in the incidence of Parkinson's disease." Environmentalists are concerned, however, that because newer pesticides are not adequately studied for long-term effects, that the problem may continue.
At least 500,000 Americans have Parkinson's disease and about 50,000 new cases are diagnosed each year, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. The disease occurs when certain nerve cells die or become impaired and can no longer produce dopamine.
(Beyond Pesticides, September 8, 2006) According to the Associated Press
(AP), some species of male fish are acquiring female sexual characteristics at unusually high frequencies in the Potomac River and its tributaries, prompting concerns about pollutants that might be causing the problem. Environmentalists have long pointed to pesticides and other endocrine disrupting chemicals as having the potential for wreaking such hormonal chaos. The article reports that in some Potomac tributaries, including the Shenandoah River in Virginia, nearly all of the male smallmouth bass caught in a survey last year by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) were so-called intersex fish, producing immature eggs in their testes. In the Potomac itself, 7 of 13 largemouth bass exhibited female characteristics, including 3 that were producing eggs.
Intersex fish were discovered in the Potomac rivershed in 2003 and have also been found in other parts of the country. But the frequency found by the surveys is much higher than what had been found elsewhere, said Vicki Blazer, a USGS fish pathologist. Female fish caught in the survey did not develop any unusual sex traits, though fish of both sexes exhibited lesions and other problems related to pollution, said Ms. Blazer, who coordinated the survey. Gerald LeBlanc, an environmental toxicologist at North Carolina State University, told the AP that the high percentages of intersex fish found in the Potomac survey were surprising. It is not uncommon for such fish to be found in other parts of the country, Mr. LeBlanc said, but at lesser frequencies. Most scientists believe that changes are caused by a combination of endocrine disrupting pollutants and synthetic estrogens, such as pesticides and birth control pills. Endocrine disruptors are a diverse group of several thousands of chemicals that are used in everything from pesticides and flame retardants to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Endocrine disruptors may be mistaken for hormones by the body and thus their presence may alter the function of hormones, either blocking their normal action or interfering with how they are made in the body. Since hormones regulate things like growth and body development, there is great potential for damage. In particular, some endocrine disruptors are mistaken for the female hormone estrogen. These estrogen mimics interfere with the reproductive system, causing infertility, malformed sexual organs, and cancer of sensitive organs.
Disturbingly, there are many commonly used pesticides that are known or suspected endocrine disruptors, such as _atrazine_ (http://www.beyondpesticides.org/pesticides/factsheets/Atrazine.pdf) , _2,4-D_ (http://www.beyondpesticides.org/pesticides/factsheets/D.pdf) , _lindane_ (http://www.beyondpesticides.org/pesticides/factsheets/Lindane.pdf) , and _permethrin_ (http://www.beyondpesticides.org/pesticides/factsheets/permethrin.pdf) . A _recent study_ (http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2005/7728/abstract.html) found that the commonly used lawn pesticide formulation Round-up, with the active ingredient _glyphosate_ (http://www.beyondpesticides.org/pesticides/factsheets/Glyphosate.pdf) , causes damaging endocrine effects in fetuses. EPA does not currently evaluate or consider the endocrine disrupting properties of pesticides during registration or reregistration.
The environmental effects of these chemicals has been well-established: pseudo-hermaphrodite polar bears with penis-like stumps, panthers with atrophied testicles, _hermaphroditic deformities in frogs_ (http://www.beyondpesticides.org/infoservices/pesticidesandyou/Summer%2004/Wreaking%20Havoc%20with%20Life.pdf) , and male trout with eggs growing in their testes have all been documented as the probable result of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment. Many scientists believe that wildlife provides early warnings of effects produced by endocrine disruptors, which may as yet be unobserved in humans.
Environmental Science & Technology
Science News –
September 6, 2006
The first national study to examine pesticide exposure in daycare centers finds some mixed results.
Millions of children get exposed to pesticides while attending daycare, concludes the first nationwide study of insecticide residues in U.S. daycare centers. The study, published today on ES&T’s Research ASAP website (DOI: 10.1021/es061021h), found low levels of organophosphate and pyrethroid pesticides. Although the health impacts are unclear, the results raise questions about the risks children face from these chemicals.
“We found at least one pesticide in every daycare center,” says lead author Nicolle Tulve, a research scientist with the U.S. EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory. Tulve says that the concentrations were quite low. She did not comment on whether these concentrations might be harmful but notes that no health advisories or national standards currently exist for such exposures.
For the study, researchers selected 168 daycare centers across the U.S. At each site, a technician wiped samples from indoor surfaces, such as floors and tables, and collected soil from outdoor play areas. The manager of each facility was also questioned about cleaning and pest-management practices. Researchers tested for 39 pesticides, and 63% of the centers reported applying up to 10 different insectides. Organophosphate and pyrethroid pesticides cropped up most often, and three of the four centers with the most pesticides detected were in the South, where warm weather brings out the bugs.
This study provides a teaching opportunity in terms of training childcare workers to manage pests in the safest way possible, says Lynn Goldman, who is a professor of applied health at Johns Hopkins University and a former EPA official in charge of the agency’s pesticide program. “These chemicals should be avoided around children, and if needed, bait traps, which do not leave residues on the floors and surfaces, are preferable, as long as they are kept out of the reach of children,” she says.
Goldman says that she was disappointed that the agency did not use the results to characterize how much exposure to pesticides children face. “These data are interesting but [could] be far more meaningful,” she says.
Paul Lioy, the deputy director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at Rutgers University, agrees. He says that aggregating the total exposures could help to identify individuals with sensitivity to these chemicals.
In the past decade, more and more states have started regulating pesticides in daycare facilities. In 2000, Massachusetts passed a law requiring all schools to submit integrated pest-management plans to limit children’s contact with pesticides. And New York legislators recently introduced a bill to prohibit pesticide applications in daycare centers during business hours. Meanwhile, California is considering a bill to require daycare owners to notify parents when they are treating for pests.
However, Lioy also notes that pesticides are not all bad. These chemicals kill roaches, which can cause allergies in some children. Prudence, he says, dictates wise use of insecticides and complete pest-management plans. —PAUL D. THACKER
(Beyond Pesticides, September 6, 2006) According to researchers at Emory University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), residential pesticide use represents the most important risk factor for children's exposure to pyrethroid insecticides. The study, A Longitudinal Approach to Assessing Urban and Suburban Children's Exposure to Pyrethroid Pesticides, is published in the September 2006 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives (Vol. 114, No. 9).
The results are part of a larger study examining the impacts of dietary and residential exposure of children to organophosphate (OP) and synthetic pyrethroid pesticides. With the phaseout of most residential uses of the common OP insecticides, chlorpyrifos and diazinon, home use of pyrethroids has increased. Pesticide products containing synthetic pyrethroids are often described by pest control operators and community mosquito management bureaus as ¿safe as chrysanthemum flowers.¿ While pyrethroids are a synthetic version of an extract from the chyrsanthemum plant, they were chemically engineered to be more toxic, take longer to breakdown, and are often formulated with synergists, increasing potency and compromising the human body¿s ability to detoxify the pesticide. Pyrethroids may affect neurological development, disrupt hormones, induce cancer, and suppress the immune system.
The authors conducted a longitudinal study to assess the exposure of 23 elementary school¿age children to pyrethroid pesticides, using urinary pyrethroid metabolites as exposure biomarkers. The 15-consecutive-day sampling period was divided into three phases. During phase 1 (days 1¿3) and phase 3 (days 9¿15), children consumed their normal conventional diets. During phase 2 (days 4¿8), organic food items, including fresh fruits and vegetables, juices, processed fruit or vegetables (e.g., salsa), and wheat- or corn-based items (e.g., pasta, cereal, popcorn, or chips), were substituted for the children's conventional diet. These food items are routinely reported to contain pesticide residues by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). During the 15 days, urine samples were analyzed for five common pyrethroid metabolites. The researchers also surveyed the children's parents for residential pesticide use. Comparing metabolites between dietary phases, the researchers saw no apparent trend. However, seven children in families that reported using pyrethroid pesticides had significantly higher metabolite levels than the other children.
Furthermore, children's ages appear to be significantly associated with pyrethroid exposure, which is likely attributed to the use of pyrethroids around the premises or in the facilities where older children engaged in outdoor activities. The researchers conclude that an organic diet alone is unlikely to dramatically decrease a child's exposure to pyrethroids the way it does exposure to OP pesticides. Limiting residential use of pyrethroids and preventing children's contact with treated areas are essential in reducing children's exposure to these harmful pesticides.
The September issue of
Environmental Health Perspectives is available online.
You
can see it here: http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2006/114-9/toc.html
Because pyrethroid pesticides are often used in conventional agriculture, people are routinely exposed to trace amounts in foods. Similar exposure to organophosphorus (OP) pesticides has been described previously in results from the Children's Pesticide Exposure Study, an investigation of pesticide exposures among 23 Seattle children aged 3¿11. Unlike OP pesticides, however, pyrethroids are also approved for residential use. The latest findings from this study show that residential use of pyrethroids appears to be a more significant source of exposure to this class of pesticides than diet [http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2006/9043/abstract.html.
With the phaseout of residential use of the commonly used OP pesticides chlorpyrifos and diazinon, home use of pyrethroids has increased. Depending on the compound and the dose, pyrethroids may affect neurological development, disrupt hormones, induce cancer, and suppress the immune system. However, little is known about the extent and effects of human exposure.
Using samples collected during the summer of 2003, researchers at Emory University and the CDC determined urinary pyrethroid metabolite levels during 15 consecutive days for each child. During days 1¿3 and 9¿15, the children consumed foods prepared from conventionally grown crops. On days 4¿8, organic items were substituted for plant-based foods such as fruits, vegetables, pasta, and cereal.
During the entire 15-day sampling period, the dominant metabolite seen was PBA, a nonspecific metabolite of permethrin, cypermethrin, and deltamethrin. PBA was detected in 82% of samples and had the highest median concentration, 0.45 µg/L. trans-DCCA and cis-DCCA, metabolites of permethrin, cypermethrin, and cyfluthrin, were also common, detected in 71% and 35% of all samples, respectively. Concentrations of cis-DCCA were too low to quantify; the median trans-DCCA concentration was 0.38 µg/L. The metabolites FPBA, derived from cyfluthrin, and DBCA, derived from deltamethrin, were each detected in only 2% of samples.
Comparing metabolites between dietary phases, the researchers saw no apparent trend. However, seven children in families that reported using pyrethroid pesticides had significantly higher levels of PBA and trans-DCCA than the other children and accounted for most of the FPBA-containing samples and all of the DBCA-containing samples. Interestingly, the older children experienced higher exposure than the younger ones. Typically younger children have higher exposure due to behaviors such as mouthing items and playing on floors, but the older children in this study spent time at sports facilities where pyrethroids may have been used.
The researchers conclude that an organic diet alone is unlikely to dramatically decrease a child's exposure to pyrethroids the way it does exposure to OP pesticides. Limiting residential use of pyrethroids and preventing children's contact with treated areas are very likely the best measures for decreasing their exposure to these pesticides.
(Beyond Pesticides, August 31,
2006) A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a
pesticide rule issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2004,
saying that the regulation does not violate the Clean Air Act even though it may
conflict with an international environmental treaty signed by the U.S. that
phases out the use of the methyl bromide, an ozone-depleting and cancer-causing
agricultural fumigant. The ruling came after the Natural Resources Defense
Council (NRDC) sued EPA in 2005, arguing that the agency permitted chemical
companies to boost supplies of methyl bromide instead of phasing out the
contentious pesticide as outlined in the Montreal Protocol (See Daily
News Story 1/4/05).
"EPA is pleased with the court's decision. EPA
and the Bush Administration remain committed to finishing the job of restoring
and protecting the ozone layer, protecting public health and meeting critical
needs of American farmers as they make the transition to methyl bromide
alternatives," an agency spokesperson said.
In the ruling, the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that the NRDC had the legal right to have
its case considered, but maintained that EPA didn't break the December 2004 law,
which allowed for a 2 million pound increase in the use of methyl bromide in
2005 alone (See Daily
News Story 12/17/04).
The NRDC in its lawsuit had argued that EPA's
move violated both the Clean Air Act and the Montreal Protocol, an international
environmental treaty on ozone. But the court, in a unanimous decision, said that
an international treaty could not be considered a federal "law" and as such, was
not enforceable in federal court.
The Montreal Protocol, signed by
President Ronald Reagan in 1987 and supported by subsequent U.S. presidents from
both political parties, is intended to protect the ozone layer, which shields us
from harmful cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation that increases risks of skin
cancer, cataracts and immune disease. In addition to being a potent
ozone-depleter, methyl bromide also causes prostate cancer in agricultural
workers and others who are directly exposed, according to the National Cancer
Institute.
TAKE ACTION: Write President Bush in the White House and insist that the U.S. comply with the Montreal Protocol and begin implementing alternatives to methyl bromide.
(Beyond Pesticides, August 30, 2006) Kerry Ryan, a symbol in the fight against Agent Orange, died Monday at 35 of kidney failure. Her father, Michael Ryan, a Vietnam War veteran, attributes her battle with 22 major birth defects to his exposure to the chemical while serving in the war. Mr. Ryan said, ¿She belongs on the wall in Washington, D.C. She is a casualty of Vietnam the same as any man on there.¿
Kerry¿s story first became public when the Ryans were named in a 1979 class-action lawsuit against Dow Chemical, one of the manufacturers of Agent Orange. The suit was ultimately settled for $180 million, but did not directly benefit the Ryans. Her family also wrote a book in 1982, called Kelly: Agent Orange and an American Family.
Kelly¿s death comes less than a week after the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Vietnam veterans who patrolled offshore can now claim disability benefits due to exposure to Agent Orange. The ruling stated that the current regulations over such benefits were unclear, particularly in the distinction between land-based and sea-based veterans. As Judge William A. Moorman wrote, ¿Veterans serving on vessels in close proximity to land would have the same risk of exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange as veterans serving on adjacent land, or an even greater risk than that borne by those veterans who may have visited and set foot on the land of the Republic of Vietnam only.¿ While the Veterans Affairs Department said that it was unsure how many veterans would be affected by the ruling or what the cost might be, it is expected to expand coverage to thousands more who served in Vietnam.
Agent Orange is infamous for its effects on millions of soldiers and civilians during the Vietnam War. Hundreds of thousands of children have been affected by their parents¿ exposure to the chemical, and like Kerry, showed a wide range of symptoms. It has been linked to Lukemia, diabetes, and peripheral neuropathy. While application of Agent Orange may be less prevalent, its sister-chemicals, such as 2, 4-D, are still commonly used.
(Beyond Pesticides, August 21, 2006) During the peaking of West Nile Virus season and an increase in community decisions to spray for mosquito control, a new study shows that spraying does not reduce the transmission of West Nile Virus.
Recognizing the widespread use of truck-mounted spraying to control adult mosquitos, yet the lack of research on the true effectiveness of this method in reducing the transmission of West Nile Virus (WNv) disease, a group of scientists and practicioners conducted an efficacy investigation of truck-mounted spraying in reducing mosquito populations. The study, ¿Efficacy of Resmethrin Aerosols Applied from the Road for Suppressing Culex Vectors of West Nile Virus,¿ is funded in part by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, and led by the Harvard School of Public Health (Michael R. Reddy, et. al.) appears in the June 2006 issue of Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, Volume 6, Number 2.
Three suburban landscapes in eastern Massachusetts with an array of lot sizes, street, and vegetation patterns provided the study site. Following U.S. EPA guidelines for flow rates and droplet size, and heeding important mosquito control considerations for wind speed and temperature, a typical spray application of the pyrethroid pesticide, resmethrin, commenced just after dusk and continued for two hours.
Mosquito populations were measured looking at egg-laying rates in treated and non-treated areas in six different trials during the months of July and August. Minimum and maximum rates of resmethrin were applied. Generally, about as many eggs were deposited before the pesticide application as after in both the treated and untreated areas, meaning the treatments did not decrease the reproductive activity of the adult mosquitos. In only one of the trials did the egg rafts decrease somewhat after spraying, and in another trial the populations of eggs actually rose after treatment in both the treated and untreated sites.
The authors conclude ¿we find that ULV applications of resmethrin had little or no impact on the Culex vectors of WNV, even at maximum permitted rates of application, [and] such insecticidal aerosols, delivered from the road, may not effectively reduce the force of transmission of WNV.¿
In further discussion the authors state, ¿Although numerous field trials have demonstrated that insecticidal aerosols are lethal to caged mosquitoes (Mount 1998), few have monitored their impact on mosquitoes in nature. A previous study (in Memphis, Tennessee by one of the authors, Paul Reiter,) demonstrated an 80% reduction of Culex species on the night after a treatment, but concluded that a single application was probably inadequate for meaningful reduction of human risk of arboviral infection (Reiter et al. 1990).¿ The authors consider the nature of the Memphis neighborhood with its larger plots (five times larger than New England), extensive lawns and lack of shrubbery, the major factor in the efficacy numbers found in this study.
In 1998, ¿A critical review of ultralow volume aerolsols of insecticides applied with vehicle-mounted generators for adult mosquito control.¿ appeared in the Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association (Mount, G.A.), and concluded that the average upwind and downwind mosquito kill from truck-mounted spraying to be between 21% -45%.
(Beyond Pesticides, August 18, 2006) Research conducted at the University of Kansas (KU) showed findings that the popular herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) could lose its effectiveness on weeds over time. The research team, which included Ernst Schönbrunn, associate professor of medicinal chemistry, and Todd Funke, doctoral student at KU, analyzed the protein that makes certain crops resistant to the herbicide Roundup, chemically named glyphosate. The study was recently published in the peer-review journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team¿s findings suggest that the farming industry might need to develop a new weed killer or develop better management practices that are environmentally friendly.
Successful alternative least-toxic weed strategies are available,.with preventiong being the key to managing weeds. Cultural practices have been proven to be the single most effective method of weed management. In states such as Wyoming, noxious weeds are being successfully controlled with Cashmere goats. (See PAY Vol. 21, No 4 2001.)
During the 1990s Monsanto found a bacteria that could resist Roundup in a production factory where the herbicide was highly concentrated. Crops were given a DNA sequence from the resistant bacteria and were then able to make a protein that allowed them to resist Roundup. The crops were dubbed Roundup-Ready. Weeds do not possess the same protein and thus are killed by the herbicide.
According to Mr. Funke, ¿Roundup-Ready crops have been on the market for years, but no one knew exactly what allowed this protein to work.¿ Dr. Schönbrunn said results of their research indicates that weeds could soon become resistant to Roundup, as did the bacteria in the production factory, because the chemical change needed for plants to resist the herbicide is so minor. Dr. Schönbrunn continued, ¿The scary thing is that glyphosate, or Roundup, is commercially very successful because it is toxic to plants but doesn¿t harm animals or the environment and that all other known herbicides are more poisonous to animals and cause more environmental damage.¿ Exposure to glyphosate can cause asthma-like symptoms and breathing difficulty. Undisclosed, or proprietary, ingredients (called ¿inert ingredients¿) in Roundup, a common formulation of glyphosate, have been linked to pneumonia and damage to the mucous membrane tissue and the upper respiratory tract.
Symptoms following exposure to glyphosate formulations include: swollen eyes, face and joints; facial numbness; burning and/or itching skin; blisters; rapid heart rate; elevated blood pressure; chest pains, congestion; coughing; headache; and nausea. In developmental toxicity studies using pregnant rats and rabbits, glyphosate caused treatment-related effects in high dose groups, including diarrhea, decreased body weight gain, nasal discharge and death. A 2002 peer-reviewed study finds children born to parents exposed to glyphosate (Roundup®) show a higher incidence of attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity. EPA material safety data sheets for the common herbicides glyphosate (Roundup), 2,4-D, mecoprop, and dicamba, (often combined as Trimec®) list them as respiratory irritants that can cause irritation to skin and mucous membranes, chest burning, coughing, nausea and vomiting.
According to Mr. Funke, there is a bright side to the team¿s findings that could lead to the development of drugs that fight microbial infections, such as pneumonia or malaria. Mr. Funke continued, ¿All bacteria, plants, fungi and many parasites use this protein, but humans don¿t. So there¿s a lot of interest in designing chemicals to stop this protein from functioning." The researchers plan to search for chemicals that target this protein in order to develop new antibiotics and herbicides.
(Beyond Pesticides, August 11, 2006)
The preliminary results of an ongoing study, led by the University of North Dakota's Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC), add to the growing body of evidence linking pesticides to neurological changes associated with Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), epilepsy, and Alzheimer's. Funded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the results of the study's first year showed that the areas of the brain in laboratory-tested rats affected by pesticide exposure are the same areas linked to these disorders.
These findings are consistent with a Harvard School of Public Health study in June 2006 that found a 70% increase in risk for Parkinson's among individuals exposed to pesticides over those not exposed. This study comes a year after a UK study of 3,000 individuals, which concluded that the higher one's exposure to pesticides, the greater one's risk for contracting Parkinson's. And while the pesticide industry trade group CropLife America calls such studies "unsubstantial," it acknowledges 31 separate studies finding a connection between pesticide exposure and Parkinson's.
The longer-term goal of the EERC's study will be to determine how airborne pesticides affect humans, in order to design strategies to reduce the risk for affected populations. North Dakota provides an ideal stage to test this. As EERC Director Gerald Groenewold said, "North Dakota is the perfect laboratory to perform this testing as the state's main industry is agriculture. Airborne pesticides are more prevalent in our state relative to other classes of pollutants, which makes their effects easier to detect." This aids a branch of the study designed to show that the most efficient means of human exposure to pesticides is not through food or water, but tiny airborne particles of pollen. As he told Minnesota Public Radio, "Frankly, if there is a link between pesticides and these diseases, I think the very fine pollen is the transport mechanism, and is in some cases you might say the smoking gun."
Although this is the first year in a proposed four-year study
(the EERC is currently seeking additional funding to continue the study),
researcher Dr. Patrick Carr emphasized the finding of "physical changes" in the
rats' brains which, with further research, could eventually be correlated to the
affects on a person working with pesticides. "What this research says is that we
have started to open some doors and shine some light in a very objective
fashion, a very comprehensive fashion, on this group of questions," Groenewold
said. "And it says, more than ever, that this research is extremely important
not only here in the Red River Valley, but basically
globally."
(Beyond Pesticides, August 9, 2006) A new study, An Effective Counter Measure Against Poisoning by Organophosphorus Insecticides and Nerve Agents from the University of Maryland School of Medicine showed findings when treatment with galantamine, a drug used to treat mild to moderate cases of Alzheimer's is combined with atrophine it can protect people from the toxic effects of nerve agents and some insecticides. In the study researchers gave guinea pigs a treatment of galantamine, combined with atrophine, which protected them from lethal doses of the nerve agents sarin and somain and one of the most extremely acute toxic insecticides parathion, which is notorious for the number and severity of human poisonings that it causes each year.
Study results find that galantamine, a drug originally extracted from snowdrop flowers currently approved to treat Alzheimer's disease, could be used as an antidotal therapy to counteract the lethal effects of even the most deadly organophosphorus compounds. According to the findings that will be published later this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study provides the basis for the further development of a safe and effective treatment to protect people exposed to organophosphorus compounds, that include nerve agents that have been used in chemical warfare and terrorist attacks, as well as pesticides used in and around households and on farms worldwide has been provided in the findings that has been published this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
According to the lead author of the study, Dr. Edison X. Albuquerque, "the only medication currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration to prevent the catastrophic effects of nerve agent poisoning does not protect the brain," Dr. Albuquerque continued, "This medication, pyridostigmine, doesn't effectively cross the blood-brain barrier."
Most animals that are treated with pyridostigmine and exposed to toxic doses of nerve agents survive when they receive a combination of other medications, including atropine, oximes and benzodiazepines. However, even with this drug cocktail, animals surviving the initial nerve agent exposure can develop neurological effects.
The reason Dr. Albuquerque and his colleagues studied the effects of galantamine in an animal model was to counteract the neurological devastation caused by nerve agents and organophosphorus pesticides. According to Dr. Albuquerque, "We wanted to test a drug with neuroprotective properties that is widely available and safe and could be as effective taken before as it would be taken after an exposure." Dr. Albuquerque continued, "galantamine fit that description."
According to the study, those animals treated with galantamine and later exposed to lethal doses of soman or sarin survived and showed no signs of the most common symptoms of exposure to nerve agents, such as convulsions, respiratory distress and loss of coordinated movement. Comparatively, those animals treated with the standard therapy of atropine and benzodiazepines all died after being exposed. The researchers repeated the experiments with paraoxon, the active metabolite of the insecticide parathion and again, all of the animals survived with no signs of toxicity.
Due to the difficulty in predicting when a person might be exposed to toxic levels of nerve agents or insecticides, the researchers also studied whether treatment with galantamine following exposure could counteract their toxicity effectively. According to Dr. Albuquerque, "All the animals treated with the antidotal therapy consisting of galantamine and atropine within five minutes after an exposure to lethal doses of soman and paraoxon survived with no side effects."
Dr Albuqurque said, "The basic finding of their study is that galantamine effectively penetrates the blood-brain barrier and protects the brain from the toxic effects of organophosphorus compounds, as long as it is administered before or soon after an exposure. " The researchers feel that this simple and safe antidotal therapy could be added to the arsenal of medications carried by all military members and first responders, who could easily administer it to themselves should they suspect that they've been exposed to a nerve agent. The researchers also feel that their findings show that this therapy could be used worldwide to save the lives of people who come in contact with toxic levels of organophosphorus insecticides.
Other researchers such as David H. Moore, D.V.M., Ph.D., director of Strategic Research Program Development at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense say that, "These important findings of Dr. Albuquerque and his colleagues will pave the way for further improvements in the current medical countermeasures against intoxication by organophosphorus nerve agents and insecticides
(Beyond Pesticides, August 7, 2006) August 3, 2006 marked the congressionally mandated deadline for the Environmental Protecion Agency's (EPA's) safety review of thousands of widely used pesticide products, from home lawn weed killers to insecticides used in food production. The Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) of 1996 required EPA to review and reregister food use pesticides, and reassess the amount of residues that are allowed on food, the tolerances, specifically with children's unique vulnerability in mind. The review includes 231 organophosphate and carbamate pesticides, known to damage the developing nervous system of fetuses, infants, and children.
On the tenth anniversary of FQPA enactment, EPA completed over 99% or 9,637 of the 9,721 tolerance reassessment decisions resulting in recommendations for the revocation of 3,200 tolerances, the modification of 1,200 tolerances, and the confirmed safety of 5,237 tolerances. The reregistration process has resuled in cancellation of nearly 4,400 individual pesticide end-use product registrations out of a current universe of 17,592.
Simultaneously, EPA announced immediate cancellation of most uses of the highly toxic chemical carbofuran, after a review that has lasted more than two decades. Thanks to public pressure and overwhelming scientific data showing harm, the agency announced yesterday its conclusion that there are considerable risks associated with carbofuran in food and drinking water, risks to pesticide applicators and risks to birds that are exposed in treated fields. The pesticide, which is sold under the name "Furadan" by FMC Corporation, is one of the most toxic pesticides to birds left on the market. It is responsible for the deaths of millions of birds and wildlife since its introduction in 1967. See more on carbofuran decision.
So, is our food supply safer and our children fully protected? A look at the neurobehavioral associations of organophosphates exposures with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD, a growing neurobehavioral disorder among children, suggests not. Trends available during the last 10 years show a major increase in ADHD among children. A 1999 Report of the U.S. Surgeon General on Mental Health Report states between 1.398 million (3%) and 2.330 million (5%) of school-age children had AD/HD. In 2003, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates 4.4 million youth ages 4-17 have been diagnosed with ADHD and 7.8% of school-aged children were reported to have an ADHD diagnosis by their parent.
Scientific studies link exposure to certain common organophosphate pesticides, such as carbaryl – a pesticide found on the shelves of retail stores as well as in agriculture - to adverse cognitive and behavioral effects in mice and other subjects. Research by Dr. Warren Porter, a researcher at University of Wisconsin, has shown that even low levels of pesticide exposure can cause endocrine disruption, which can lead to learning disabilities. Another study published in the March 2003 issue of Nature Genetics demonstrates a clear genetic link between exposure to organophosphate pesticides and neurological disorders such as ADHD and gulf war syndrome. A 2002 peer-reviewed study found children born to parents exposed to glyphosate (Roundup) show a higher incidence of attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity (ADD and ADHD). In 1995/96, glyphosate ranked as the second most used active ingredient in non-agricultural settings, with five to seven million pounds used in the home and garden and nine to twelve million pounds used in commercial settings.
On August 4, the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Office of Inspector General (IG) issued an evaluation report of the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP), entitled Measuring the Impact of the Food Quality Protection Act: Challenges and Opportunities, in time for EPA's deadline. The report found that EPA has "made progress" in implementing the requirements of the FQPA, but that OPP has primarily measured its success and the impact of FQPA by adherence to its registration schedule rather than by reductions in risk to children's health. It went on to say that the "measures used by OPP generally indicate actions taken, instead of environmental or human health outcomes achieved." Whether this is because OPP is less focused and interested in keeping track of human health outcomes is unclear, as is the degree to which it has been engaged in achieving such outcomes.
On August 2, the New York Times reported on recent actions of Unions representing 9000 of EPA's own staff scientists, "We are concerned that the agency has not, consistent with its principles of scientific integrity and sound science, adequately summarized or drawn conclusions" about the chemcials. The EPA scientists, also charge that EPA's Administrator is willfully ignoring evidence that "pesticides damage the developing nervous systems of fetuses, infants and children," and are calling on EPA to cancel the registrations of 20 pesticides in the organophosphate and carbamate chemical family. See May 24, 2006 letter by EPA scientists.
"EPA's pesticide program allows corporate chemical company interests to trump science, putting the public and environment in harm's way," said Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides, a national public interest group.
Beyond Pesticides and other environmental and public health organizations identify a series of deficiencies in EPA's review of pesticides, calling into question the safety of commonly used products.
EPA plans to complete reregistration eligibility decisions for the remaining 47 non-food use pesticide reregistration cases by October 3, 2008, as required by the 2004 amendments to FIFRA contained in the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act (PRIA).
(Beyond Pesticides, August 4, 2006)
The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Office of Inspector General (IG) has issued an evaluation report of the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP), entitled Measuring the Impact of the Food Quality Protection Act: Challenges and Opportunities, in time for EPA's August 3, 2006 final tolerance approval deadline for 231 food use pesticides. The study, which comes on the heels of a May 24, 2006 letter by EPA scientists alleging the agency is too heavily influenced by politics and uses bad science in its policy making decisions, can be viewed as a response to those claims, though it does not directly address them, and an attempt to validate OPP's regulatory evaluation methods.
The study was initiated to determine OPP's ability to measure its performance in meeting the mandates of the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA); to determine the strengths and weaknesses of OPP's current measuring system; to determine how OPP can "use existing data to measure"; and what impact FQPA had on mitigating dietary pesticide exposure risk on children's health.
Beyond Pesticides criticizes the report conclusions for assuming that the risk assessments used by EPA are flawless, at the same time that the agency does not fully consider the availability of least toxic approaches to pest management. The report identifies the dilemma faced by OPP, a program with a self-described mission to serve as a "gateway" for harmful pesticides to enter the market, while being ill-equipped to track pesticide poisoning and contamination incidents that may occur as a result of pesticide use.
Buried in the IG's report is a finding that OPP, in order to measure its performance on regulatory outcomes, can rely on "existing data" that do not include poisoning incident reports. In fact, none of the data cited in the report track acute pesticide incident reports. Pesticide incident report data cannot be used because EPA discontinued its pesticide incident monitoring system (PIMS) in 1981, leaving no federal system in place to track pesticide poisoning incidents. Adding to the question of the reliability of data used for regulatory and policy making decisions that do not assess incident reports, is the fact that risk assessment, which does not account for biological variations in the human population with respect to determining harmful levels of exposure, is heavily relied upon and is seen as a fool proof and bullet proof evaluation method. The report fails to recognize the deficiencies in risk assessment that have been found and documented in numerous studies and reports. The report apparently accepts risk assessment as a hundred percent credible without addressing underlying problems of uncertainty, data gaps, and political influence that are associated with it. EPA's commitment to its overall goals of protecting human health and the environment from pesticide risk is called into question by the failure to recognize these deficiencies.
Risk assessment calculations under the federal pesticide registration and tolerance laws evaluate harm based on false realities about daily toxic exposure and individual sensitivities. Risk management decisions under these laws assume the benefits of toxic pesticide products to society or to various sectors of users, then make a determination that the risks are "reasonable." Even under FQPA, which has been touted for its health-based standard, there is an inherent assumption that if a pesticide meets a highly questionable "acceptable" risk threshold, it has value or benefit. This is the practice even though there are typically less or non-toxic methods or products available. Absent altogether is any analysis of whether the so-called "pest" (insect or plant) has been accurately defined. EPA does not regularly consider non-chemical alternatives (such as organic agricultural methods), nor does it evaluate the need for or the benefit provided to society (do we need to use toxic chemicals to kill clover in our yards?).
The report also indicated that OPP successfully accomplished the reduction of detections on a core set of 19 foods eaten by children relative to detection levels for those foods reported in 1994-1996, as well as an apparent increase in the percentage of acre treatments with "reduced risk" pesticides.
However, such conclusions do not necessarily reflect increased vigilance on OPP's part. For example, the IG found that "risks associated with 16 foods commonly eaten by children declined by almost 50 percent," but does not discuss which pesticides were responsible for the reduction. The reduction could have come as the result of reduced usage of just one pesticide, rather than several, or as a result of changes in practices that are less reliant or not dependent on toxic chemicals. But there is no way to determine this, nor precisely what was responsible for the reduction. As a further example, the report discusses methyl parathion, which has had some of its uses cancelled. These cancelled uses represented a 90% reduction in the dietary risk to children, dramatically reducing the estimated dietary risk and thus making the risk "acceptable for children and all others in the U.S. population." And in a discussion of how EPA regulatory actions decrease dietary pesticide exposure risks, the report indicated that just two pesticides, parathions and chorpyrifos, were responsible for a 98% reduction in dietary pesticide exposure risks.
The report found that EPA has "made progress" in implementing the requirements of the FQPA, but that OPP has primarily measured its success and the impact of FQPA by adherence to its registration schedule rather than by reductions in risk to children's health. It went on to say that the "measures used by OPP generally indicate actions taken, instead of environmental or human health outcomes achieved." Whether this is because OPP is less focused and interested in keeping track of human health outcomes is unclear, as is the degree to which it has been engaged in achieving such outcomes.
What is clear is OPP's commitment to facilitate, and certainly not discourage, pesticide usage and its seeming lack of a desire to consider least toxic alternatives. According to the report, "OPP's mission is not one of zero risk or zero exposure&ellipsis;OPP must balance its dual mission of providing a gateway to the marketplace for pesticide products with the protection of the public from harmful pesticide exposures." The degree to which OPP focuses on the former to the detriment of the latter is the substantive question the report really ought to have considered.
August 2, 2006
New York Times
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 - Unions representing thousands of staff scientists at
the Environmental Protection Agency say the agency is bending to
political pressure and ignoring sound science in allowing a group of
toxic chemicals to be used in agricultural pesticides.
Leaders of several federal employee unions say the chemicals pose serious
risks for fetuses, pregnant women, young children and the elderly through
food and exposure and should not be approved by Thursday, the
Congressional deadline for completing an agency review of thousands of
substances in pesticides.
"We are concerned that the agency has not, consistent with its
principles of scientific integrity and sound science, adequately
summarized or drawn conclusions" about the chemicals, union leaders
told the agency administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, in a newly disclosed
letter sent May 25.
The leaders also wrote that they believed that under priorities of EPA
management, "the concerns of agriculture and the pesticide industry
come before our responsibility to protect the health of our nation's
citizens."
Nine union leaders representing 9,000 agency scientists and other
personnel around the country signed the letter. It was given to The New
York Times on Tuesday by environmental advocacy organizations working on
their behalf in the hope that it would arouse public outcry and increase
pressure on the agency to withdraw the chemicals from use.
The chemicals at issue are organophosphates and carbamates, long a matter
of controversy over their environmental and health risks. They are in
such pesticides as chlorpyrifos, methyl parathion and diazinon.
The advocacy organizations that released the letter, Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility and the Pesticide Action Network, also
provided the agency's response, on June 27, from Susan B. Hazen, acting
assistant administrator. Ms. Hazen assured the scientists that her agency
was applying proper scientific review for the use of all chemicals in
pesticides.
Ms. Hazen did not deny the accusation that industry positions were taken
into account. She welcomed information "from all interested
parties," she said.
In an interview on Tuesday, Jim Jones, director of the EPA's pesticide
office, described the scientists' accusations as inaccurate, saying the
agency examines the effects of various chemicals and adjusts
recommendations for public use according to what the science
dictates.
Risk assessments of the pesticides cited in the unions' letter, Mr. Jones
said, have been "aggressively regulated" through steady reviews
of their use over the last six years.
The complaints from agency employees are the latest to come from within
federal agencies that accuse the Bush administration of allowing politics
or industry pressure to trump science on issues like climate change and
stem cell research.
In this case, they also echo concerns raised by the EPA inspector general
in January in a report that suggested the agency had not done enough to
protect children from exposure to pesticides, which can affect the
development of the brain and the nervous system. That investigation was
prompted, in part, by published reports of a Florida program in which
parents would be paid for letting their children participate in an effort
measuring the effects of pesticides in the home. The program was quickly
shut down.
The inspector general's report fueled a growing desire among union
leaders to take a more active role in shedding light on what they say is
a flawed system.
"More and more, the unions are coming together to confront the
agency's unwillingness to make the appropriate use of science to show
risks to public health and the environment," said William Hirzy, a
senior scientist at the environmental agency and a union
official.
Despite the agency's insistence that pesticide regulations follow
scientific guidelines, several agency scientists said industry determined
how chemicals were regulated.
"It's how the game is played," said an EPA specialist involved
in the pesticide program who spoke on the condition of anonymity because,
he said, critics within the agency often lose choice
assignments.
"You go to a meeting, and word comes down that this is an important
chemical, this is one we've got to save," he said. "It's all
informal, of course. But it suggests that industry interests are
governing the decisions of EPA management. The pesticide program
functions as a governmental cover for what is effectively a private
industry licensing program."
Another senior EPA scientist who also spoke on condition of anonymity
said the agency often ignored independent scientific studies that
contradicted the industry-subsidized study that supported many
regulations on pesticides.
She cited a North Carolina researcher who found that chlorpyrifos might
have a more damaging effect on developing brains than other studies.
"What we heard back from headquarters was, 'No, he's wrong,' "
the scientist said.
"Chemicals like these can be harmful to children in ways we don't
understand yet,'' the scientist said. "If there is disagreement,
doesn't that cry out for further research?"
Mr. Jones said the agency had addressed chlorpyrifos in complying with a
10-year Congressional mandate to review 9,741 pesticide ingredients by
Thursday.
Work has been completed on 9,637 of them, or 99 percent, he said, and
"all are protective of children."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
(Beyond Pesticides, July 25, 2006) A new study finds that trace quantities of agricultural chemicals find their way into rural homes—not only on the fruits and vegetables that consumers buy, but also through dust that enters houses. The study, "Proximity to Crops and Residential Exposure to Agricultural Herbicides in Iowa," which was published in the June 2006 issue of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, shows that home exposure to agricultural herbicides increases as the amount of nearby cropland increases.
The findings are disturbing considering the documented links between pesticides and health effects, including non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. This study was done as an offshoot of a larger non-Hodgkin's lymphoma study financed by the National Cancer Institute, reports Science News Online.
In the new study, Mary H. Ward, PhD, of the National Cancer Institute, and her colleagues collected dust vacuumed from the homes of 112 Iowa lymphoma patients and healthy, randomly selected volunteers of the same age. Using satellite-generated maps of agricultural fields in the state, the team calculated the acreage of croplands near the home of each participant. Both farm and in-town homes were included in the study. Because most of Iowa's cropland had been historically planted with corn and soybeans, Dr. Ward's team probed homes for specific chemicals known to be used on the local fields.
Analyses show that at least one of six primarily agricultural herbicides is present in house dust from 28 percent of sampled homes. These chemicals include acetochlor, alachlor, atrazine, bentazon, fluazifop-p-butyl, and metolachlor. Atrazine and metolachlor are the agents most commonly used to treat corn and soybeans. The next most-popular herbicides used on the crops are trifluralin and dicamba. At least one of these four herbicides show up in 43 percent of homes.
Although atrazine had been applied to nearly 70 percent of corn acreage, it showed up in the house dust of only 8 percent of homes. Where detected, however, its concentration in dust ranged from 60 to 4,700 parts per billion (ppb). Metolachlor was found in about 20 percent of homes; its concentration ranged from 27 to almost 3,200 ppb.
Most shocking is the amount of dust containing 2,4-D, which was found to be present in 95 percent of homes, typically in concentrations exceeding 1,000 ppb. In one house, 2,4-D's values reached an astounding 125,000 ppb. Used on crops, along roadsides, in forests, and on lawns, 2,4-D is the third most widely used herbicide in the United States and Canada. According to Illinois EPA, 2,4-D is a probable endocrine disruptor and a number of studies link 2,4-D to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
The study also finds that farm workers' homes are generally the most contaminated with weed killers. Some herbicide concentrations in their dwellings more than tripled those present in the homes of people who have never worked in agriculture.
Nearly 60 percent of the study's participants live within 550 yards of cropland. The chance of finding agricultural weed killers in house dust increases by six percent for every 10 acres of cropland found within a roughly 800-yard perimeter of the house. The result was that herbicide-laced dust showed up in three-quarters of homes having at least 300 acres of cropland within that 800-yard perimeter.
Of nearly 120 studies that have investigated the risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma associated with pesticide contact, most show an increased risk for the disease—especially for herbicides—according to the Lymphoma Foundation of America. Printed information from the foundation states that the pesticides "more frequently associated with increased lymphoma incidence and/or deaths" are the herbicides 2,4-D and the triazines, which includes atrazine.
Cancer, however, is far from the only health or environmental risk associated with agricultural pesticides. For instance, some herbicides used on corn have been shown to disrupt normal reproductive development in frogs, in studies so far (see Daily News). Some biologists now suspect that such changes may explain declining amphibian populations.
Agricultural pesticides may also affect human fertility. Four years ago, epidemiologist Shanna H. Swan, PhD, of the University of Missouri and her colleagues studied sperm in men from big cities and small towns. In the study, sperm concentrations and quality in men from semi-rural Missouri communities are below those of men from Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New York City (See Daily News). This suggests, Dr. Swan told Science News Online that "environmental exposure to current-use pesticides is associated with poorer semen quality."
In an extension of that study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta will soon measure agricultural pesticides in the urine of men who had participated in the original study, notes Dr. Swan, now at the University of Rochester
July 13, 2006 — By Associated Press
BRUSSELS, Belgium — The European Commission proposed stricter rules Wednesday to regulate the use of pesticides including mandatory record-keeping of their use by farmers and a ban on aerial spraying.
EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said tougher rules were needed to improve protection of the environment and human health.
"It will ensure an even higher level of protection ... while also offering more choice to farmers and boosting competitiveness for the industry in this field," Kyprianou said.
The plan, which needs approval by European Union governments, also seeks to tighten and simplify the rules for authorizing new pesticides that come on to the EU market. It also aims to force pesticide makers to reduce animal testing of their products.
The EU head office said new rules were needed to prevent the overuse of pesticides and spur research into alternative methods. It said continued pesticide use damages water, air and soil and could cause long-term health problems for humans, animals and plants.
"Long-term exposure to pesticides can lead to serious disturbances to the immune system, sexual disorders, cancers, sterility, birth defects, damage to the nervous system and genetic damage," the Commission said in a statement.
The Commission said some 300,000 tons of pesticide substances were sold in Europe in 2003 with no sign of a decrease in use over the past decade.
"Five percent of food and feed samples still contain unwanted residues of pesticides in quantities which exceed the maximum regulatory limits," the Commission said, adding that the contamination of rivers and streams was an acute problem in Europe.
The use of crop-dusters to spray pesticides will be banned "except for strictly defined cases," to ensure residues do not end up in nearby streams or wildlife areas where they could do harm.
The plan also calls for the banning of pesticides in specific sensitive areas near nature reserves or parks.
Source: Associated Press
June 26, 2006
People who have been exposed to pesticides are 70 percent more likely to develop Parkinson's disease than those who haven't, according to a new study. The results suggest that any pesticide exposure, whether occupationally related or not, will increase a person's risk of the disease. This means that using pesticides in the home or garden may have similarly harmful effects as working with the chemicals on a farm or as a pest controller.
The research, published in the July issue of Annals of Neurology, provides the strongest evidence to date of the link between pesticide exposure and Parkinson's. The study included over 143,000 men and women who completed extensive lifestyle questionnaires beginning in 1982, and follow-up surveys through 2001. All subjects were symptom-free at the beginning of the project, when they were asked about their occupation and exposure to potentially hazardous materials. Since then, 413 of them have developed confirmed cases of Parkinson's, with a greater incidence of the disease in those who spent time around pesticides. "Low- dose pesticide exposure was associated with a significant increase in risk for Parkinson's disease," says lead author Alberto Ascherio of the Harvard School for Public Health. "I think this is one reason to be careful about using pesticides in general."
Although the causes of Parkinson's are not well understood, it has long been suspected that environmental factors play a large role. Animal studies have shown that chemical compounds commonly used as pesticides can cause a degeneration of dopamine-producing neurons. In Parkinson's, a shortage of dopamine causes the disease's characteristic motor abnormalities, including muscle tremors and muscle rigidity. Previous small-scale human studies had suggested a link between pesticides and Parkinson's, but this new study is the first to establish a clear correlation in a large patient population.
The researchers also looked for links between Parkinson's and other environmental contaminants, including asbestos, coal dust, exhaust, formaldehyde and radioactive material. They found no correlation between the disease and any of the materials besides pesticides, however. Because of the design of the questionnaires, the study was not able to determine how the frequency, duration, or intensity of pesticide exposure affected the incidence of Parkinson's. The next step, according to Ascherio, is to figure out which class of chemicals is actually causing the disease, so that people can reduce their exposure.
(Beyond Pesticides, June 5, 2006) One month before the Bush administration proposed rules authorizing experiments on humans with pesticides and other chemicals, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staff met with pesticide industry lobbyists to map out its provisions, according to meeting notes posted May 30, 2006 by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The industry requests for exemptions allowing some chemical testing on children and other provisions were incorporated into the human testing rule ultimately adopted in January 2006.
At the August 9, 2005 meeting held inside the President's Office of Management and Budget, representatives of the pesticide trade association, Crop Life America, as well as Bayer Crop Life Science met with OMB and EPA officials. Also attending was a former top EPA official, James Aidala, who now acts a lobbyist at a law firm representing chemical companies.
The meeting notes detail industry concerns about the text of a proposed rule that the Bush administration first unveiled a month later on September 12th. For example, the Crop Life America attendees urged:
* "Re kids—never say never" (emphasis in original);
* "Pesticides have benefits. Rule should say so. Testing, too, has benefits"; and
* "We want a rule quickly—[therefore] narrow [is] better. Don't like being singled out but, speed is most imp."
"These meeting notes make it clear that the pesticide industry's top objective is access to children for experiments. After reading these ghoulish notes one has the urge to take a shower," commented PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, whose organization works with EPA scientists who have been prevented from voicing ethical and scientific concerns about human subject testing. "For an administration which trumpets its concern for the 'value and dignity of life,' it is disconcerting that no ethicists, children advocates or scientists were invited to this meeting to counterbalance the pesticide pushers."
The upcoming August 3rd deadline for EPA final approval for a controversial class of pesticides derived from nerve agents called organophosphates appeared to be a top industry priority. Mr. Aidala, the industry lobbyist, stated, "Won't be able to meet the FQPA [Food Quality Protection Act] deadline. Wouldn't anyway. Just do the rule first, then proceed ASAP."
Mr. Aidala also suggested how the rules could make subtle exceptions for chemicals testing on children:
* "Distinguish testing kids from using data on kids who were tested"; and
* "Some workers may legally be children, albeit old enough for DOL" [Department of Labor coverage].
The human testing rule adopted by EPA earlier this year contains the loopholes advocated at the OMB meeting for exposing children to pesticides, such as testing on workers and exposures unconnected with the approval process for new pesticides or new uses for existing agents. In addition, the rule broadly allows dosing experiments on infants and pregnant women using non-pesticide chemicals.
Beyond Pesticides is opposed to testing pesticides on humans. Although EPA is assuring the highest levels of safeguards available, what continues to be an issue for environmental and public health advocates, is that pesticide "benefits" do not justify the intentional dosing of human subjects even on a voluntary basis. EPA does not evaluate pesticides for their societal benefits in light of alternative approaches, practices and products. EPA does not by practice or rule, under the "unreasonable adverse effects" standard of the federal pesticide registration law (Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act - FIFRA), generally evaluate the actual need for a pesticide to determine whether the pest is adequately defined and, if so, whether there is a less or non-toxic approach to pest prevention or management. Therefore, EPA is not equipped to meet the rule's requirement that human studies are approved "only if risks to subjects . . . are reasonable in relation to anticipated benefits." This is a threshold issue when discussing the ethics of intentionally dosing human subjects with toxic chemicals.
Take Action: Let EPA know the public will not tolerate weak ethical standards, especially in a rule that allows people to be exposed to unnecessary and potentially detrimental health risks and that the proposal fails to comply with the Congressional mandate. Write to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, Johnson.Stephen@epa.gov, and let him know how you feel about this important issue. Also, write to your Senators and Members of Congress. Much of the movement on this issue has been initiated in Congress and may continue as a result of Congress responding to public outrage. To determine your Senators and Member of Congress, visit www.congress.org or contact Beyond Pesticides.
By NOREEN O'DONNELL
JOURNAL NEWS COLUMNIST
Lead-free paint. Lead-free gasoline. Pesticide levels lowered tenfold.
Credit Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, a pediatrician whose work helped to bring about all three.
He has been trying to protect children from environmental threats for more than 30 years ¿ whether by documenting the dangers of lead and pesticides or these days advocating for the National Children's Study, an ambitious $2.7 billion project that had its funding scrapped by the Bush administration.
"First of all, it's the morally right thing to do," said Landrigan, the head of Mount Sinai's Center for Children's Health and the Environment in New York City and a professor at its School of Medicine. "A study that improves children's health would be a good investment for the country."
The study, for which President Bush included no money in his budget for the 2007 fiscal year, would follow 100,000 children across the country from before birth to age 21, tracking all of the factors in the environment that affect their health. The hope is to cut the rates of childhood diseases the way the Framingham (Mass.) Heart Study begun in 1948 reduced the rate of heart disease and strokes. Heart disease remains a killer in this country, but it is down by 50 percent among white men and women, Landrigan says.
So the study ¿ if it survives the threat to its funding ¿ would consider questions like these: "Do household pesticides harm neurodevelopment?" "How does your genetic makeup affect how severe your asthma is?"
It would look at asthma as well as diabetes, birth defects, learning disabilities and cancers, of which the three most prevalent among children are leukemia, brain cancer and testicular cancer. The last is an epidemic in this country, says Landrigan; the cyclist Lance Armstrong is just one face of the disease.
"He's not out there by himself unfortunately," Landrigan, 63, said.
Landrigan, who lives in Mamaroneck village with his wife, Mary, the spokeswoman for the Westchester County Health Department, would direct the test center for the New York region in Queens. He and others were to have begun signing up families in the summer of next year.
The Boston native, who this spring was honored as a children's environmental health champion by the Environmental Protection Agency, has been an advocate from the start of his career. He did his residency in the late 1960s at the Boston Children's Hospital, where doctors were still treating cases of lead poisoning so severe that children died.
"High-dose lead poisoning is a terrible disease," he said.
From there, he signed on as a globe-trotting epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and became among the first to show the insidious damage that lead could do to children, from lower IQs to shortened attention spans. Another pioneer was Dr. Herbert Needleman, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a friend.
Before then, it was thought that lead poisoning was an all-or-nothing phenomenon: It caused coma or convulsions or nothing at all. They showed that children who had elevated lead levels but no obvious symptoms had suffered from the exposure. It was a breakthrough and helped to convince the federal government to ban lead from paint and gasoline.
By the late 1980s, Landrigan was studying the harm done to children by pesticides, something he noticed while on assignment in El Salvador.
"I started thinking along the same lines as I had thought with lead," he said. "If high-dose exposure could cause obvious poisoning, what might be the effects of a lower dose of toxicity?"
As the chairman of a National Academy of Sciences committee, he helped to change the way the country regulates pesticide use. Until then, the government had thought of children as young adults, but as Landrigan says, "As soon as you sat down and thought about that, it just didn't make any sense."
Children are growing and developing. They are more vulnerable, and he argued they needed more protection. You can wash some of the pesticides off fruits and vegetables, but the rest is in the flesh of the fruit. Peaches and strawberries, which he describes as the most notorious, sometimes contain five or six different kinds.
The result was the Food Quality Protection Act, which was passed unanimously by the Senate and House of Representatives in 1996 and sharply reduced the permissible levels of pesticides.
Now Landrigan again is focused on Congress. He and others are trying to persuade the lawmakers to disregard President Bush's priorities and fund the National Children's Study. The Senate has called for adding $7 billion for health and other programs, including medical research, but the House is still debating.
Even if it were not the right thing to do, Landrigan says, it makes sense economically. Diseases caused by exposure to such toxins as lead, pesticides and air pollution cost the country $55 billion each year. If the National Children's Study helps some children not get sick, it could quickly pay for itself.
"The clock is ticking," Landrigan says.
We're polluted from head to toe and though scientists can now measure minute amounts of chemicals in our bodies, no one knows the long-term health effects
Apr. 21, 2006. 06:08 AM
NANCY J. WHITE
LIFE WRITER
Toronto Star
Sarah Winterton is many things: a 45-year-old mother of three teenagers, a Toronto resident, a program director - and a toxic chemical dump.
Blood and urine samples show that her body is home to 16 respiratory and 38 reproductive toxins, 19 chemicals that disrupt hormones and 27 carcinogens. Stored in her body are traces of heavy metals, such as lead, arsenic and uranium, and chemicals used in pesticides, flame retardants and stain repellents. DDE and DDT, DMTP, HCB, PBDE 47 and 99, PCBs and PFOS - this is just a taste of the alphabet soup swishing through her.
She wonders about the air she breathes, the tinned food she buys, the chemically protected mattress she sleeps on. "There are likely thousands more chemicals in me," she says. "It's not a great picture to have of yourself."
But it's as common as a snapshot.
Studies of volunteers in Europe, the U.S. and Canada show the same results. Coursing through our bodies is a complex chemical cocktail, the by-product of a modern life of industrial emissions, treated food and endless consumer products - microwave bags, fast food wrappers, nail polish, computer casings - laced with synthetic substances.
"We are the guinea pigs in the largest uncontrolled science experiment in history," says Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence.
The Toronto-based watchdog group sampled 11 volunteers across Canada - including Winterton, its program director, and Vancouver Island artist Robert Bateman - for 88 harmful chemicals and detected 44 on average in each person. The results of the testing, done at special labs in Quebec and Texas for $1,500 per person, is described in the report Toxic Nation, released last fall.
For years scientists have measured levels of toxic chemicals in wildlife and done specific studies on breast milk, childhood lead exposure or occupational hazards. But now this technique of sampling human tissues and fluids, known as biomonitoring, is being used by environmental groups and governments to get a broader sense of our body burden, or the chemicals carried within us. Next year Health Canada will conduct its first widespread biomonitoring testing on about 5,000 people. The Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. has been doing it since 2001.
Biomonitoring is turning pollution into a much more personal matter and helping to revitalize the political debate internationally. Many man-made chemicals on the market have never been thoroughly tested for human safety. The Canadian Environmental Protection Act is scheduled for review this year, and many advocates want to see the law beefed up, similar to proposed legislation in the European Union.
"Canada is increasingly falling behind," says Smith.
While scientists can now measure increasingly minute amounts of more substances in humans, they're still studying what it all means. A manufactured chemical in a person's blood or urine doesn't imply disease. Or even risk of a disease. Only exposure.
"Just because it's there doesn't mean it's going to hurt you," says Bruce Caswell, senior manager of environmental health and safety with the Canadian Chemical Producers Association.
But it doesn't mean it's not hurting you either. We experience a constant barrage of synthetic stuff, even in the womb. Doses differ as do genetic and physiological vulnerabilities.
"None of this belongs in our bodies. Period," says Riina Bray, a family physician at Women's College Hospital's Environmental Health Clinic.
Researchers suspect these toxic chemicals have links to a number of cancers, including breast, testicular and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, not to mention reproductive disorders and learning disabilities. But little is proven. Scientific consensus moves slowly and environmental health research is tricky. It's about as clear as an oil slick.
"I don't think there is cause for alarm, like with a pandemic flu, but there is cause for concern," says medical epidemiologist Don Wigle, an affiliate scientist at the University of Ottawa's McLaughlin Centre for Population Health Risk Assessment. "We need a precautionary approach to reduce exposures. No one wants to wait for all the answers."
There are no roads where David Masty lives. No industrial smokestacks. No manufacturing emissions. Yet this chief of Whapmagoostui First Nation on the shores of Hudson Bay, one of the Toxic Nation volunteers, had 51 of 88 chemicals in his body, including a high level of mercury.
"It doesn't matter where you are," says Masty, 60. "The pollution is transported through the air and from the products we use in our homes."
There's the scented lotion absorbed into your skin. The coloured polish you spread on your nails. The soft vinyl toy your child enjoys. These may be made with phthalates, chemicals widely used to soften plastics and carry fragrances. In laboratory animals some phthalates cause organ damage, disrupt hormones and cause reproductive harm. Some phthalates have been banned in children's products in Europe, and Canadian manufacturers have agreed to remove some from soft, chewable toys here. The soup you eat from a tin can? Bisphenol A, a hormone disruptor in rodents, can leach from the can. Your non-stick cookware? A perfluorinated chemical that causes cancer in rats. (See story below).
Upholstered furniture, mattresses, carpets, even the plastic casings around the computer and television may contain brominated flame retardants. The good news is that they slow the spread of fire. The bad news is they likely contain polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). In rat studies, they interfered with thyroid function, affected behaviour and caused liver tumours. PBDEs have been found in house dust and human breast milk.
Absorbed by a woman, many chemicals can be passed on to her children through breast milk and through the placenta.
A U.S. study of umbilical cord blood from 10 newborns found pesticides, chemicals used in consumer products, and by-products from gasoline, garbage and the burning of coal. The newborns averaged 200 contaminants, many of them carcinogens, developmental toxins and neurotoxins.
"It's a big red flag," says Jane Houlihan, vice president of research at the Environmental Working Group in Washington, D.C., which spearheaded the study. "Babies aren't supposed to be born pre-polluted."
While most experts agree there's no safe exposure level to carcinogens, it's generally believed that other chemicals have threshold doses. Below that amount, harmful effects are unlikely. But above it, usually in large doses, exposure may be risky.
At least that's the conventional wisdom. Medical epidemiologist Wigle wonders if perhaps our tests are not yet sophisticated enough to pick up subtle effects.
But even with a safe threshold, there's not a simple formula. Some chemicals are quickly excreted, while others persist and accumulate. There's the individual factor. "Everyone has different susceptibilities, driven by their genetics," says Houlihan. And the timing of exposure counts. Humans are more vulnerable in the womb and during early childhood and puberty.
And there's the great unknown variable: the synergy of the soup. Could the sum of all the synthetic chemicals in our bodies be more toxic than the parts? "That's extremely important and largely unresolved," says Wigle.
Researchers eager to know the health effects of this body burden look at illnesses that are on the upswing. The worldwide prevalence of asthma is rising by 50 per cent, on average, every decade. From the early 1970s to 2002, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, the age-standardized incidence of testicular cancer was up 54 per cent, breast cancer 19 per cent, thyroid cancer 221 per cent, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (a cancer of the lymphatic system) 83 per cent.
"We know our genetics haven't changed," says Houlihan. "With rapid changes in health, scientists suspect environmental exposures play a role."
At the University of Ottawa, assistant health sciences professor Karen Phillips is part of a group examining chemicals known as hormone disruptors or endocrine toxins, which interfere with hormone pathways. Human health effects may include fertility problems, reproductive cancers and birth defects, especially abnormal formation of the male urogenitals.
While some of these diseases and disorders have shown up in animal studies, says Phillips, it's been at very high doses, more than the average person would experience. The reproductive physiologist says the incidence of diseases associated with hormone disruptors could be explained in humans by other factors, such as improved screening techniques and rising rates of obesity.
She did, however, point to Denmark, where young men have experienced an increase in testicular cancer, lower sperm counts and birth defects such as cryptorchidism, or undescended testicles, and hypospadias, where the penis opening is located somewhere other than the tip.
"There could be an environmental factor at play," she speculates, but adds that more evidence is needed.
The government will start collecting some next year. As part of the Canadian Health Measures Survey of 5,000 volunteers, biomonitoring tests will be conducted for about 60 chemicals and heavy metals. It's Canada's first large scale national testing for environmental contaminants, says Rene Langlois, chief survey developer. It will provide a baseline look at Canadians' body burden and enable researchers to track trends over time.
But environmentalists want more from Ottawa, and the Canadian Environmental Protection Act is up for review. Smith from Environmental Defence would like to see timelines for the elimination of the most harmful chemicals and more attention paid to the Great Lakes basin, a pollution hotspot.
He and other advocates believe that chemical manufacturers are not held to a high enough safety testing standard. They point to the European Union's REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of CHemicals) proposal, which could be signed early next year. REACH would shift the burden of proof for safety from government to industry and include strong incentives to replace toxic chemicals with safe substitutes.
"It's a paradigm shift in the way chemicals are managed and controlled," says Beverly Thorpe, director of Clean Production Action in Montreal, a non-profit group that promotes "green" chemistry.
Allan Godfrey, manager of the toxic substances management division at Health Canada, does not agree that this country is lagging behind. Canada has temporarily banned four fluorinated polymers that are precursors to the controversial perfluorinated carboxylic acids, or PFCAs, for example.
Since 1987, new substances have undergone a government-led risk assessment before being used. There's about 600 to 800 new substances each year, says Godfrey.
The government is currently categorizing some 23,000 older, unassessed chemicals to single out ones requiring further investigation. The report, due this September, is likely to list about 5,000 substances needing more action.
"Our categorizing (of these chemicals) is world leading," he says. "I don't know another country that's done it."
Some people, impatient with government and science, are taking action themselves. Toxic Nation volunteer Mary Sexton from St. John's was shocked when she saw her results: She had 49 out of 88 chemicals. She tested positive for 31 suspected carcinogens. "It was an awakening for me," says the 43-year-old television producer.
She now avidly reads ingredient labels, drinks only bottled water, keeps her house cleaner, uses biodegradable cleansers and detergents and diligently gets her breast exams and Pap smears. Already a vegetarian, she's bumped up her diet to 70 per cent organic. She's given up her daily six cups of coffee - worried about contaminants - and thrown out her non-stick frying pan.
She has no idea how much any of these changes will help. She does, after all, live in a toxic world.
"If you're a walking, breathing Canadian," says Sexton, "you're polluted."
EU decision to bar atrazine puts focus on herbicide's use here
by Tom Pelton, Baltimore Sun reporter.
As birds sang in blossoming pear trees outside the McGinnis farmhouse in northern Baltimore County, a tanker truck with a 75- foot-wide boom rumbled across the family's fields, spraying chemicals.
The nozzles were shooting phosphorus to fertilize the cornfield. In a few days, workers plan to make a second pass to spray atrazine, a herbicide that kills thistle and other weeds that sprout between rows.
About 75 percent of American corn farmers over the past half- century have made a springtime ritual out of spraying atrazine, using about 70 million pounds every year as a labor-saving alternative to tilling to remove weeds. Farmers such as Wayne McGinnis argue that it is harmless and makes their farms more productive.
But as the European Union prepares to ban the herbicide by 2007, renewed attention is being focused on its safety here. The EU decided to take the chemical off the market as a precaution after it was detected in drinking water. Environmental groups in the U.S. have filed lawsuits claiming that the compound should be banned here because researchers not only have detected it in drinking water, but also have linked atrazine to deformities in frogs and lower sperm counts in men.
To settle one of the lawsuits, the Environmental Protection Agency agreed last month to study whether atrazine is killing loggerhead turtles and other endangered species in the Chesapeake Bay.
"The potential impact of atrazine is very big," said Tyrone Hayes, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who has studied the compound. "We see a chemical castration of amphibians, through a loss of testosterone. This is an indicator that we all need to be very concerned."
Hayes' research concluded that atrazine is sterilizing male frogs and contributing to a decrease in the number of amphibians worldwide. He said other researchers have published studies associating exposure to the herbicide with higher rates of prostate cancer in men.
The EPA believes that atrazine is not likely to cause cancer in humans, and that it is "unlikely there are significant adverse ecological effects" from using the herbicide properly, said Steven Bradbury, director of a division of the EPA's office of pesticide programs.
But the federal agency believes Hayes' study and others are enough to suggest "it's a reasonable hypothesis" that amphibians might be harmed by the herbicide, Bradbury said. The question deserves further study, he said.
The leading manufacturer of the liquid compound denies it hurts humans or wildlife.
"The EPA has determined that it would not pose adverse effects to humans or the environment if it's used according to label," said Sherry Ford, spokeswoman for an American branch of the Swiss firm Syngenta, "which means not going over the amount specified on the label."
To McGinnis and other farmers, calls for a ban on atrazine do not make sense because they have been using it for decades without obvious harm.
McGinnis, 69, said he has been spraying atrazine on his family's 1,200 acres for three decades. He said his family is in its sixth generation of good health on the farm, with his parents living into their 90s.
"We are right in the middle of spraying this stuff. If it was going to hurt anybody, it would hurt us," McGinnis said, as he played with his 3-year-old granddaughter in front of the family's almost 200-year-old, stone-and-wood farmhouse.
His son, Jay McGinnis, 38, said the frogs are so numerous in the pond in front of their home that guests have a hard time sleeping at night because the chirping is so loud.
"The frogs are everywhere," said Jay McGinnis, who gave up a career as a mortgage broker to help keep alive his family's farm near White Hall. "If you come out here, you can hear them singing all night long."
The farming industry, which has employed former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole to lobby for the continued approval of atrazine, has argued that growers would lose at least $1 billion a year if the chemical were banned.
Wayne McGinnis said eliminating atrazine might also hurt the Chesapeake Bay. The chemical kills weeds so efficiently it allows "no till" farming, he said. That means tractors don't need to pull claw-like devices through the fields twice each spring to rip up weeds. That process digs up soil that runs with rainfall into nearby streams and, eventually, the bay.
"Without atrazine, it would mean more time and labor, an increase in fuel use to till the fields, and more sediments running into our streams and reservoirs," Wayne McGinnis said.
Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences, said farmers are right when they say that "no till" agriculture helps keep mud and silt out of the Chesapeake Bay. But Boesch added that "the jury's still out" on whether trace levels of the herbicide harm marine life.
"It's pretty clear that at a high enough dose, atrazine would affect amphibians," said Dr. Lynn Goldman, former assistant administrator for the EPA's office of pesticides and now professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "The question is, at the levels that are actually in the environment, does it actually affect them? There has been a lot of controversy surrounding that question."
Less harmful to wildlife is another common herbicide, called Roundup, manufactured by Monsanto and other companies, said Jonathan Kaplan, sustainable agriculture project director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which sued the EPA to seek a ban on atrazine.
Better yet for the environment is organic farming, Kaplan said. "We need to be looking for nonchemical alternatives in farming," he said. "Organic farming is a good candidate. It does cost more, but not as much as you might think."
Wayne McGinnis said organic farming serves a narrow, wealthy market and is not practical for feeding America and the world. He said chemical-free farming produces less food per acre, demands heavy amounts of manure and requires many more manual laborers willing to do back-breaking labor.
"I don't think the American population is prepared to move back to the farm and grab a hoe," McGinnis said.
McGinnis said he prefers atrazine to Roundup in part because atrazine prevents weed growth for an entire season, while Roundup kills only the weeds present at the time of spraying and often must be applied repeatedly.
Aaron Colangelo, attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it's an important victory that the EPA last month agreed to study the effects of atrazine on endangered species such as loggerhead turtles, Kemp's ridley turtles, green turtles and shortnose sturgeon. "This is an important step toward protecting life in the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere," he said.
As an example of the chemical's effects on nature, he pointed to Hayes' study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in 2002. It found that 16 percent to 20 percent of African clawed frogs exposed to minute levels of atrazine in labs developed dysfunctional gonads. Eggs grew in the testes of males, making them sterile.
The same trace levels - 0.1 part per billion, or the equivalent of a thousandth of a grain of salt in a fish tank - are common in streams in agricultural areas of Maryland and elsewhere, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Farmers in Maryland sprayed 600,000 pounds of the weed killer in 2000, according to state figures. The chemical shows up in rain, the bay and many drinking-water wells, according to federal researchers.
A 2003 study of 50 Missouri men, led by Shanna Swan of the University of Missouri School of Medicine, found that farmers with atrazine and other pesticides in their blood were more likely to have low sperm counts and unhealthy sperm, according to the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
Rena Steinzor, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law who helped file the lawsuit, said the EU decided to ban atrazine by 2007 because it was showing up in trace levels in drinking water. It took the position that caution was wiser than waiting for proof that atrazine is hurting people or animals, she said.
In America, similar levels are in tap water, but the federal government appears to be taking a more industry-friendly approach, she said.
"Here, we don't move until we are absolutely certain that it's causing harm," Steinzor said. "We have to find dead bodies in the street, and that's a shame, because our laws were set up to prevent injury."
Joining the Grass-Roots Movement
By GWENDOLYN BOUNDS and ILAN BRAT
April 15, 2006; Page P1
Tucked in the back of a Lowe's garden center, wedged near grass-seed spreaders and jugs of weed killer, sits a pallet whose contents are quietly upending America's lawn landscape: $24.97 bags of Cockadoodle DOO organic lawn fertilizer made from chicken manure.
With spring hitting full swing, a battle is shaping up over your backyard. Taking aim at consumers who have embraced organic products from vegetables to cotton sheets, some upstarts are pushing the idea that it's not enough for your grass to be green -- it should also be "green."
The approach is at odds with most of the $35 billion lawn- and garden-care industry, which for years has been focusing on ever more effective synthetics. But the organic products are making inroads. Lowe's, Sears and Home Depot now stock several brands of organic fertilizers and weed control in their gardening aisles, and Lowe's, for one, says demand is growing. Even industry behemoth Scotts Miracle-Gro, is hedging its bets: At the same time it is testing genetically engineered grass, it's also pushing organic fertilizer and potting mix.
The organic-lawn movement is in step with a broader backlash against landscaping chemicals. That's giving traditional lawn and garden suppliers fits -- one industry group mounted a "Gloves Are Off" media campaign proclaiming "We're about to start fighting back."
Then there's the matter of looks. Building an organic yard involves things some homeowners -- and perhaps more importantly, their neighbors -- might consider incompatible with a picture-perfect lawn.
With organic methods, some weeds are likely to persist. Leaving unsightly lawn clippings lying around is encouraged to add nutrients to the soil. And organic lawns are trimmed more hippie-style -- roughly, three inches tall -- to strengthen roots and ward off invasion by weeds.
For Nancy T. Cabaniss, a homeowner in Lexington, Va., the organic approach means extra work. "With a synthetic spray, I spray the weeds once and they're gone," says Ms. Cabaniss. "With some organic products, I have to keep doing it over and over and over."
At first, champions of organic lawns admit, taking the organic route may be more work and more pricey: a 3,000-square-foot lawn that costs $200 a year to maintain with synthetics might cost twice as much using organic substitutes. The payoff, advocates say, will be a yard that one day costs less to care for, is safer for the environment and handles stresses such as drought.
"Initially, it may feel harder, but in the long term, it's easier," says Scott Meyer, editor of Organic Gardening magazine. He likens using chemicals to "putting your yard on steroids." Over time, he says, "it weakens the system."
As with food, there's debate about how beneficial the all-natural approach truly is. Some turf experts say plants thrive equally well with synthetic and organic nutrients. Frank Rossi, a professor of turfgrass science at Cornell University, adds that organics give users a false sense of security. For instance, he says, runoff of certain organic fertilizers with high concentrations of phosphorus can harm streams and rivers. "Some people think because it's organic, there's absolutely no harm you can do with it," Mr. Rossi says. "That's a lie."
A recent survey from the National Gardening Association and Organic Gardening magazine found that, while only 5% of U.S. households now use all-organic methods in their yards, some 21% said they would definitely or probably do so in the future. "It says to me that it's going mainstream," says Bruce Butterfield, the NGA's research director.
The issue of lawn chemicals is getting more visibility across the U.S. The little flags or warning signs posted around town by professional lawn services are required in some states; many tell people not to enter a chemically treated area within 24 hours of application. The same recommendation is on some off-the-shelf products.
Nearly two dozen states, including New York and Wisconsin, now require public notification when pesticides are being applied by professionals, according to Beyond Pesticides, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group. At least 13 U.S. towns, including Lawrence, Kan. and Chatham, N.J., have pesticide-free parks, and 33 states and several hundred school districts have laws or policies designed to minimize kids' exposure to pesticides. Just last year, New York City passed legislation requiring the city to phase out acutely toxic pesticides on city-owned or leased property and make commercial landscapers give neighbors notice before spraying certain pesticides.
The health effects of treating lawns with pesticides is hotly debated, but a growing body of research suggests that some commonly used synthetic pesticides may pose health risks, including cancer and kidney or liver damage, particularly to children and pets. One study published in a journal put out by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences found that children exposed to herbicides and pesticides in the first year of life were significantly at higher risk of asthma than never-exposed children. The Environmental Protection Agency Web site says kids are at greater peril from pesticides because their internal organs and immune systems are still developing.
Other studies, including one published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, have suggested that exposing dogs to some herbicide-treated lawns and gardens may increase their chances of developing canine malignant lymphoma or bladder cancer. And environmentalists are concerned about chemical runoff into streams and rivers.
Scotts and other big players in the lawn-care business say that, when applied appropriately, EPA-registered pesticides are perfectly safe and stress that consumers should not overapply products. "You don't take an aspirin if you don't have a headache," says Tom Delaney, government affairs director for Professional Landcare Network, an industry trade association. "And if you do have one, you don't take three or four. You follow the directions."
Professional lawn-care services that have long depended on traditional synthetic products are moving into organics. Attendance at organic-accreditation classes for landscapers run by the Northeast Organic Farming Association has nearly doubled over the last five years. One NOFA member, Griffin Organics in Peekskill N.Y., now treats 40 clients' lawns organically, up from four just three years ago. Although most Griffin customers still buy chemicals, operations manager Tommy Eade is so impressed with organic results that he hopes to one day never touch another bag containing 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (a common herbicide and component of Agent Orange). "Our goal is to be all organic," Mr. Eade says.
Golf courses are getting into the act, too. The founder of Pure Barnyard, which makes Cockadoodle DOO products, says he supplies his organic chicken manure fertilizer to about 20% of New England's courses. Marblehead, Mass., recently converted 15,000 acres of athletic fields to organic care. Even Walt Disney World has reduced its use of traditional pesticides by 70% since the 1990s and is using all-natural composts in some areas of the park.
Traditional makers, meanwhile, continue to develop new kinds of synthetic products. Scotts has a popular four-step program timed to the seasons with bags of "weed and feed" that combine fertilizer with insecticides and herbicides. And the company is angling to market a genetically engineered golf-course turf that's resistant to Roundup, a powerful herbicide for which Scotts owns U.S. residential-marketing rights. A consumer version of the grass is also on the horizon.
That prospect has organic purists digging in their heels. "Many people call pollution with a life of its own," says NOFA coordinator Bill Duesing. He says such varieties endanger the ecosystem by giving transgenic grass a competitive advantage over naturally occurring varieties.
For Pam Delcore, the impetus to go organic was simpler. Shopping at a garden story in Dedham, Mass., last week, Ms. Delcore said she used to pay a pro to douse her lawn with pesticides, but got worried after nearby flowers started dying. She fired the lawn-care company and now she's ready to give organics a shot.
"It was just making me nervous," she says of the chemical solutions.
--Jessie Knadler and Marisa Milanese contributed to this article.
Write to Gwendolyn Bounds at wendy.bounds@wsj.com and Ilan Brat at ilan.brat@wsj.com
Joining the Grass-Roots Movement
By GWENDOLYN BOUNDS
April 15, 2006; Page P5
After three years of staring at a patchy backyard filled with bare spots, dandelions and straggly stuff that might pass for grass, I've finally decided to get serious about my lawn.
I'm trying to keep up with the Joneses, or more precisely, the Johnsons. My neighbor, Josephine Johnson, is a horticulturist from Holland whose yard makes me green with envy. So I asked what products kept her lawn so lush and low on weeds. Must be something pretty potent, I figured.
Wrong. As it turns out, my friend is an organic landscaper. Jos uses no synthetic herbicides or fertilizers on her grass. With two sons, a dog and well water, it was never worth the possible risk, she thought. Since I too have a dog and in a couple of years may well have a kid, that got me thinking that I should consider going organic.
But how hard would it be? My time outdoors is limited, as are my environmental stripes. I don't own a compost bin or hybrid car and, for the record, have never considered donning a pair of Birkenstocks. To help me form a plan I could stick to, I enlisted Jos and two other pros, Scott Meyer, the editor of Organic Gardening magazine, and Bill Duesing, coordinator for the Northeast Organic Farming Association.
Their strategy for my 3,500-square-foot space was pretty simple. First, get some grass growing in those bare spots to help fight the weeds. Second, feed the lawn during the summer and fall with organic fertilizers and other nutrients, and mow. In mid to late summer, throw down an organic herbicide called corn gluten to control weeds. (It's also good to do this in the spring if you're not putting down grass seed.) And in the fall I may add some calcitic limestone to get the pH of the soil up to a less acidic 6.5, or so -- I'd gotten a soil test last year and knew the pH was low.
I got started two weekends ago, raking up winter debris (not fun). Then I bought several bags of top soil with organic compost and humus, and tossed the contents together in a wheelbarrow with a spading fork (more fun). I spread the humus/soil mix on the bare spots and used a rotary spreader to drop organic fertilizer.
Next up, grass seed. I chose a sun/shade variety and distributed that using the same spreader. Then I covered all the bare spots with straw to keep moisture in and hungry birds out, and watered the entire lawn deeply. If I'm lucky, the grass will come up this week. In late spring and early fall, I'll fertilize; that should help thicken and green things up, I'm told. For general timetables, check a Web site like organiclandcare.net, organicgardening.com or extremelygreen.com.
Time permitting, I'll feed the lawn compost "tea" and seaweed blends, and try a Weed Dragon to torch pesky plants around the lawn's edges -- so much cooler than digging them up.
My lawn is a work in progress. If you have tips, write to me at wendy.bounds@wsj.com . Also, check back online this spring and summer, when I'll update readers on how the lawn progresses.
ORGANIC LAWN 101
We asked Scott Meyer, editor of Organic Gardening magazine, and consulted the Northeast Organic Farming Association's "A Citizen's Guide to Organic Land Care" for general guidelines and timetables.
Get Soil Test
This shows what fertilizers and soil amendments, such as limestone, you need. Tests can be done by pros or with do-it-yourself kits available in stores and online at sites such as www.gardensalive.com (Anytime)
Control Weeds
Clean up debris and apply organic corn gluten herbicide, such as Cockadoodle DOO Weed Control or WeedBan (www.purebarnyard.com, (www.extremelygreen.com). Safe for kids and pets, but not when seeding new grass. (Early spring & late summer)
Fertilize
Non-synthetic organic brands can be found in gardening centers and most home improvement chains, including Home Depot and Lowe's. Look for a seal from Organic Materials Review Institute. Follow directions. (Early and late spring, late summer or early fall)
Mow and Water
Keep grass on the high side -- 2.5 to 3 inches -- to fight weeds. Don't cut lawn while it's wet, and leave clippings to feed the soil. Rake out clumps. Lawns need about one inch of water a week. Water early -- 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. is best -- and for concentrated periods. Light sprinkling fosters weak roots.
Feed Turf
Nutrients like compost tea sprays, liquid seaweed and grub deterrents may build soil's biology and fight pests. Some brands can be found at www.gardensalive.com and www.extremelygreen.com. (See directions for best application times)
Seed
When nights are cool, grass grows best. That's the best time to over-seed lawn and fill in any bare spots. (Fall)
Implementing the toughest rules in North America, a new era in pesticide use has begun in Quebec with the banning of many domestic products that have chemicals considered toxic to humans and the environment. Montreal Gazette, Quebec.
IRWIN BLOCK, Montreal Gazette
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
A new era in pesticide use has begun in Quebec with the banning of many domestic products that have chemicals considered toxic to humans and the environment.
The third and final phase of Quebec's Pesticide Management Code, first introduced in March 2003, went into effect yesterday.
With its ban on 20 active ingredients, 210 lawn-care products are now off the market, giving Quebec the toughest standards in North America.
Home gardeners may no longer use such popular herbicides as Green Cross Killex,
C-I-L Tri-Kill and Weedex that contain 2,4-D to rid lawns of dandelions and other weeds. Insecticides such as Sevin that include Carbaryl are also banned.
The move was hailed by concerned physicians and environmentalists.
The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, based in Toronto, said the code makes Quebec a leader in protecting human and animal health.
"This bold action ... sets a standard for excellence that other governments ignore at their peril," said Warren Bell, an association board member.
Although Health Canada last month said 2,4-D is safe to use on lawns and turf "when label directions are followed," the association warned pesticides have been linked to childhood cancer, birth defects and neurological disease.
Michel Gaudet, president of the Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides, said that Quebec law is now in line with 2,4-D prohibitions in effect in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
"Sweden prohibited 2,4-D in 1977 and 12 years later they noted the increase in some of their cancers started to go down," he said.
Such firms as Rona and Reno-Depot, which also owns Botanix, and supplies as many as 400 outlets in Quebec, knew the ban was coming and began reducing inventory last fall, spokesperson Sylvain Cloutier said.
Unused stock was transferred for sale in company stores in Ontario and western provinces, where 2,4-D may be sold.
Don Cerone, merchandiser at its head-office nursery, said the ban means gardeners will have to get back to basics.
"To have a healthy lawn, you need good soil, add lots of grass seed, and use fertilizer to put nutrients in your soil."
The basic principle is "the more dense your grass, the less room there is for weeds," he said.
Environment Canada suggests mowing less often so grass can be six centimetres tall to crowd out weeds and build deeper roots.
As for getting rid of weeds, "the best way is pulling them out," Cerone said.
"Technically, there are no safe products that have yet to be approved" for sale in Quebec, he added.
The research consists of systematic reviewing of recent studies and literature concerning the environment and cancer, and is supported by the Cancer Prevention and Education Society. Professor Vyvyan Howard and John Newby, from the University's Department of Human Anatomy and Cell Biology, also found that genetic variations, which can predispose some people to cancer, may interact with environmental contaminants and produce an enhanced effect.
Professor Howard said: "Organochlorines are persistent organic pollutants (POPs), which disperse over long distances and bioaccumulate in the food chain. For humans the main source of OC exposure is from diet, primarily through meat and dairy products. Children are exposed to dioxin, a by-product of OCs, through food; dioxin and other POPs can also cross the placenta and endanger babies in the womb. Breastfed infants can be exposed to OCs with endocrine disrupting properties that have accumulated in breast milk. Our research looks at involuntary exposure to these chemicals in the air, food and water.
"Environmental contaminants - in particular synthetic pesticides and organochlorines with hormone-disrupting properties - could be a major factor in causing hormone-dependent malignancies such as breast, testicular and prostate cancers. Preventative measures for these types of cancer have focused on educating the public about the danger of tobacco smoke, improving diet and promoting physical activity. We should now, however, be focusing on trying to reduce exposure to problematic chemicals."
The research team has also looked at anecdotal evidence, from practicing physicians in pre-industrial societies, which suggests that cancerous disease was rare amongst particular communities, such as the Canadian Inuits and Brazilian Indians. This suggests that cancer is a disease of industrialisation.
Professor Howard added: "The World Health Organisation estimates that between one and five percent of malignant disease in developed countries is attributed to environmental factors; but our research suggests this figure may have been underestimated."
Jamie Page, Chairman of Cancer Prevention and Education said: "This research is very important and suggests that there are links between chemicals and cancer. It is our opinion that if progress is to be made in the fight against cancer, far more attention and effort must be made to reduce human exposure to harmful chemicals."
Professor Howard's finding will be published in the Taylor & Francis Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine.
(Beyond Pesticides, March 9, 2006) Children in Ecuador whose mothers were exposed to pesticides while pregnant have increased blood pressure and diminished ability to copy geometric figures as compared to a control group, according to an epidemiological study in the March issue of Pediatrics. The results appear to be independent of current exposure to the chemicals. The mothers themselves are reported to be healthy.
A team of researchers led by Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), analyzed data on 72 children aged seven or eight years old in the rural Tabacundo-Cayambe area in Northern Ecuador. The children were examined by a physician and were given a battery of standardized tests for neurobehavioral functions. Thirty-seven of the children had mothers whose self-described occupational histories indicated that the women had been exposed to pesticides during pregnancy, typically by working in greenhouses. Dose-response relationships and the exact timing of the exposures' impact were not established due to the nature of the study design.
In the exposed children, the average systolic blood pressure is higher than in those who were unexposed (104.0 mm Hg versus 99.4 mm Hg). An increase in diastolic pressure is not statistically significant. Hypertension among children and adolescents is defined based on a range of blood pressures in healthy children, and children above the 95th percentile are considered hypertensive. In the Pediatrics study, nine children exceed the approximate 95th percentile of 113 mm Hg. Seven of those children had prenatal pesticide exposure.
Prenatal pesticide exposure is also associated with a decreased ability to copy figures presented to the children as part of a standardized Stanford-Binet test. Adjusted regression analysis indicate that the exposed children experience a developmental delay on this aptitude of four years. The authors note that the confidence interval, or range of value, for this coefficient is relatively wide but is a statistically significant finding in a study of limited size, suggesting that the effect could be substantial.
In the part of Ecuador in which the children live, malnourishment is frequent. The authors used delayed growth, or stunting, to explore the role of nutrients in the study's results. Stunting is viewed as an indicator of malnutrition and is defined according to a height-for-age scale. Stunting was associated with decreased copying ability in both exposed and non-exposed children. The researchers found that stunting has no clear effect on blood pressure. They therefore concluded that prenatal pesticide exposure may add to the already deleterious effects of malnutrition.
Current pesticide exposure was measured by excretion of pesticide metabolites in urine and was associated with increased reaction time, one of the standardized tests given for neurobehavioral function, indicating that current and prenatal exposures result in different outcomes. Effects caused by exposure in utero may last into childhood.
"These results suggest that more attention should be paid to protecting the developing brain and that we should seriously consider adopting and enforcing a greater margin of safety in protecting both fetuses and children from potential toxic exposures," said Grandjean.
For more information contact: Contact: Christina Roache, Harvard School of Public Health, croache@hsph.harvard.edu, (617) 432-6052
"The data shows an urgent need to strengthen policies at all levels of government and curtail pesticide use," said Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides, a national information and advocacy group.
"This report underscores the need to strengthen, not weaken, water quality protections from toxic pesticides that pollute rivers, streams, lakes and our underground water supplies," said Paul Schwartz, National Policy Coordinator of Clean Water Action.
As the USGS report shows, pesticides and their degradates are getting into the drinking water sources for millions of Americans. These contaminants combine with disinfectants, such as chlorine, added by drinking water providers to kill dangerous viruses, bacteria and pathogens, and form disinfectant by-products that are associated with increases in birth defects and miscarriages.
"Drinking water providers," said Mr. Schwartz, "are then faced with a dilemma about how to deal with the twin problem of killing dangerous bacteria while not increasing the chemical health risks for pregnant women and healthy infants."
"The toxic cocktail of pesticides in our drinking water can't be addressed by the chemical by chemical regulatory approach of government," said Jane Nogaki, pesticide program coordinator of NJ Environmental Federation. "Citizens can take action at the local level to reduce or eliminate pesticides in their own back yard, in their local parks and schools. "
For more information on pesticides in water, see Beyond Pesticides' article, Threatened Water: Turning the Tide on Pesticide Contamination from the Winter 2005-2006 edition of Pesticides and You.
| Release | Contact | Phone |
| March 3, 2006 | Robert Gilliom | 916-278-3094 |
| Donna Myers | 703-648-5012 |
Today, the U.S. Geological Survey released a report describing the occurrence of pesticides in streams and ground water during 1992-2001. The report concludes that pesticides are typically present throughout the year in most streams in urban and agricultural areas of the Nation, but are less common in ground water. The report also concludes that pesticides are seldom at concentrations likely to affect humans. However in many streams, particularly those draining urban and agricultural areas, pesticides were found at concentrations that may affect aquatic life or fish-eating wildlife.
Dr. Robert Hirsch, Associate Director for Water, said, "While the use of pesticides has resulted in a wide range of benefits to control weeds, insects, and other pests, including increased food production and reduction of insect-borne disease, their use also raises questions about possible effects on the environment, including water quality." Hirsch also commented that "the USGS assessment provides the most comprehensive national-scale analysis to date of pesticide occurrence in streams and ground water. Findings show where, when, and why specific pesticides occur, and yield science-based implications for assessing and managing pesticides in our water resources."
The USGS findings show strong relations between the occurrence of pesticides and their use, and point out that some of the frequently detected pesticides, including the insecticide diazinon and the herbicides alachlor and cyanazine, are declining.
USGS has worked closely with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the 10- year study. EPA uses the data extensively in their exposure and risk assessments for regulating the use of pesticides. For example, EPA used USGS data in its risk assessments for the reevaluation of diazinon, chlorpyrifos, cyanazine and alachlor. Uses of three of these pesticides (diazinon, chlorpyrifos and cyanazine) have now been significantly limited, and usage of alachlor was voluntarily reduced and largely replaced by a registered alternative.
The USGS report is based on analysis of data collected from 51 major river basins and aquifer systems across the Nation from Florida to the Pacific Northwest and including Hawaii and Alaska, plus a regional study in the High Plains aquifer system.
Although none of the USGS stream sampling sites were located at drinking-water intakes, a screening-level assessment was done by USGS to provide an initial perspective on the relevance of the pesticide concentrations to human health. USGS measurements were compared to EPA drinking-water standards and guidelines. Concentrations of individual pesticides were almost always lower than the standards and guidelines, representing less than 10 percent of the sampled stream sites and about 1 percent of domestic and public-supply wells.
However, pesticides may have substantially greater effects on aquatic ecosystems than on humans based on a screening-level comparison of USGS measurements to water-quality benchmarks for aquatic life and fish-eating wildlife. More than 80 percent of urban streams and more than 50 percent of agricultural streams had concentrations in water of at least one pesticide¿mostly those in use during the study period¿that exceeded a water-quality benchmark for aquatic life. Water-quality benchmarks are estimates of concentrations above which pesticides may have adverse effects on human health, aquatic life, or fish-eating wildlife.
Insecticides, particularly diazinon, chlorpyrifos, and malathion frequently exceeded aquatic-life benchmarks in urban streams. Most urban uses of diazinon and chlorpyrifos, such as on lawns and gardens, have been phased out since 2001 because of use restrictions imposed by the EPA. The USGS data indicate that concentrations of these pesticides may have been declining in some urban streams even before 2001¿benchmark exceedences in urban streams were least frequent late in the study. A case study of diazinon shows declining concentrations in several urban streams in the Northeast during 1998-2004.
In agricultural streams, the pesticides chlorpyrifos, azinphos-methyl, p,p'-DDE, and alachlor were among those most often found at concentrations that may affect aquatic life, with each being most important in areas where its use on crops is or was greatest. According to senior author Robert Gilliom, however, "Pesticide use is constantly changing in response to such factors as regulations and market forces and findings from this decade-long study need to be examined in relation to changes in use during and after the study. For example, levels of the herbicide alachlor declined in streams in the Corn Belt (generally including Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, and Ohio, as well as parts of adjoining states) throughout the study period as its use on corn and soybeans declined, with no levels greater than its aquatic-life benchmark by the end of the study. In contrast, both the use and the levels of atrazine, the most heavily used herbicide in the Corn Belt region, remained relatively high throughout the study period."
In addition, DDT, dieldrin, and chlordane¿organochlorine pesticide compounds that were no longer in use when the study began¿were frequently detected in bed sediment and fish in urban and agricultural areas. Concentrations of these compounds in fish declined following reductions in their use during the 1960s and elimination of all uses in the 1970s and 1980s, and continue to slowly decline. Just as notable as the declines, however, is the finding that these persistent organochlorine pesticides still occur at levels greater than benchmarks for aquatic life and fish- eating wildlife in many urban and agricultural streams across the Nation.
The USGS study also reported that pesticides seldom occurred alone¿but almost always as complex mixtures. Most stream samples and about half of the well samples contained two or more pesticides, and frequently more.
Gilliom explained that "The potential effects of contaminant mixtures on people, aquatic life, and fish-eating wildlife are still poorly understood and most toxicity information, as well as the water-quality benchmarks used in this study, has been developed for individual chemicals. The common occurrence of pesticide mixtures, particularly in streams, means that the total combined toxicity of pesticides in water, sediment, and fish may be greater than that of any single pesticide compound that is present. Studies of the effects of mixtures are still in the early stages, and it may take years for researchers to attain major advances in understanding the actual potential for effects. Our results indicate, however, that studies of mixtures should be a high priority."
The report, "Pesticides in the Nation's Streams and Ground Water, 1992-2001," Circular 1291 is available at http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2005/1291/, or by calling 1-888-ASK-USGS, or by fax 303-202-4693. In-depth information about the pesticide assessment may be found at: http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/ under "What's New."
The USGS serves the Nation by providing reliable scientific information to describe and understand the Earth; minimize loss of life and property from natural disasters; manage water, biological, energy and mineral resources; and enhance and protect our quality of life.
To receive USGS news releases go to www.usgs.gov/public/list_server.html
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(Beyond Pesticides, January 27, 2006) A new report finds significant harmful effects of pesticide mixtures on frogs, even though levels of the individual pesticides were thought not to cause harm and were 10 to 100 times below EPA standards. This finding, published Tuesday by University of California Berkley professor Tyrone Hayes in the online version of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, suggests that current efforts to asses health risks of chemicals in isolation may significantly undermine their danger.
Frogs treated with the mixture of pesticides, all commonly found in agricultural runoff, were, on average, 10 to 12 percent smaller than the untreated control group. Nearly 70% of the treated frogs became infected by a common pathogen that the untreated group fought off. They also developed holes, or plaques, in their thymus. High levels of corticosterone, a hormone similar to one found in humans, were also found. Corticosterone is associated with stress and known to decrease growth and slow development. In a related paper also published by Dr. Hayes on Tuesday, these chemicals, and atrazine in particular, switched testosterone to estrogen, causing the testes of exposed male frogs to produce eggs instead of sperm. Effects were seen in frogs at concentrations of 0.1 parts per billion, a level far below any health threshold.
Dr. Shanna Swan a professor at the University of Rochester, has also found that pesticide concentrations as low as 0.1 ppb may cause problems in humans as well. In particular, she found a link between this concentration and low fertility in men. As a reference, the urine of a farm worker contains 2,400 parts per billion of some of these compounds.
Safety tests performed by the US EPA and FDA study only one compound in isolation. By ignoring the real-world interactions between different chemicals, the safety reports may be significantly underestimating the danger these chemicals cause. Though it may be more difficult to replicate real-world environments in studies, it is important to do so in order to fully understand the implications chemicals may have on human health and the environment.
Amphibians are declining at alarming rates across the globe, and many scientists believe that industrial chemicals and pesticides may be partially to blame. Numerous scientific studies have definitively linked pesticide use with significant developmental, neurological and reproductive effects on amphibians. Recent studies by Dr. Tyrone Hayes at the University of California have strengthened the case for banning atrazine, the most common contaminant of ground, surface, and drinking water. Dr. Hayes demonstrated that atrazine is an endocrine disruptor that chemically castrates and feminizes male amphibians.
Additionally, a study by Penn State University researcher Joseph Kiesecker found that wild tadpoles exposed to low-level agricultural chemicals along with the deformity causing parasite trematode were five times more likely to develop leg deformities than frogs only exposed to the trematode. The presence of the pesticides are thought to weaken the frog's immune system thereby making them more susceptible to infection by the parasites.
http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2006/01/11/eline/links/20060111elin001.html
Reuters
January 12, 2006
By Charnicia E. Huggins
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - While infertility may be caused by a number of factors, new study findings suggest that exposure to nonpersistent, or short-lasting, insecticides may play a role in male infertility.
"Environmental exposure to chlorpyrifos or its metabolite (TCPY) may be associated with reduced levels of circulating testosterone in adult men," lead study author Dr. John D. Meeker, of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, told Reuters Health. "A decline in testosterone throughout a population could potentially lead to adverse reproductive health outcomes," he added.
Until 2000, chlorpyrifos was one of the most common insecticides used in homes. The Environmental Protection Agency restricted its residential use after research revealed it can affect the central nervous system. Just one year earlier, however, up to 19 million pounds of the chlorpyrifos were used in the United States, and recent investigations suggest that individuals are still environmentally exposed to the insecticide, despite EPA restrictions.
The Second National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals found that more than 90 percent of men had detectable levels TCPY in their urine.
In a previous report, Meeker and his colleagues also found that higher levels of 1-naphthol (1N) in men's urine are associated with decreased concentration and motility of sperm and increased DNA damage in sperm cells. 1N is a breakdown product of carbaryl, a lawn and garden insecticide known as Sevin, and the compound naphthalene, which is found in cigarette smoke, diesel fuel and other combustion byproducts.
Meeker and his colleagues from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta explored the association between TCPY and 1N, and reproductive hormone levels in 268 men who were recruited at an infertility clinic between 2000 and 2003.
Men with higher urine levels of TCPY and 1N had lower levels of the sex hormone testosterone, the researchers report in the journal Epidemiology. They also found that as TCPY levels increased, testosterone levels decreased.
Higher TCPY levels were also associated with a decrease in free androgen index, a markerof lower testosterone concentrations, the report indicates.
"Although the decrements in testosterone related to TCPY were relatively small," Meeker acknowledged, "they may be of public health concern because of widespread human exposure among men."
The researchers also found some evidence that higher TCPY and 1N levels are associated with decreased levels of luteinizing hormone and a decreased free androgen index, but more studies are needed to confirm this finding.
If TCPY and 1N are associated with decreased levels of testosterone and luteinizing hormone, the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, rather than the testes, may be involved in the mechanism by which certain pesticides affect sperm quality, Meeker speculates. "But there are several other potential mechanisms as well," he said.
According to Meeker, "This is the first human evidence of an association between chlorpyrifos or its metabolite (TCPY) and testosterone levels, so other studies would be needed to substantiate our findings."
SOURCE: Epidemiology, January 2006.