=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #469
—November 23, 1995—
News and resources for environmental justice.
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MANY PESTICIDES, LITTLE KNOWLEDGE
About 85 percent of American homes maintain an average inventory
of 3 to 4 pesticide products, including pest strips, bait boxes,
bug bombs, flea collars, pesticidal pet shampoos, aerosols,
granules, liquids and dusts. [1] Roughly 70 million households
make more than 4 billion pesticide applications per year, an
average of 57 applications per household per year. According to
the National Home and Garden Pesticide Use Survey by U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), almost 39 percent of
households use insecticides because they have a major insect
problem. However, 37 percent of all U.S. households treat for
insects even when there is not a major problem.
A 1994 study of pesticide labels published in the JOURNAL OF THE
AMERICAN OPTOMETRIC ASSOCIATION found that it requires an
11th-grade cognitive reading level to understand a pesticide
label, which means that 40 to 50 percent of the general
population cannot read and understand the directions on a
pesticide product label, even if all members of the public had
the necessary 20/30 visual acuity to read the fine print.
Nationwide in 1993, 140,000 pesticide exposures, 93 percent of
which involved home use, were reported to poison control centers.
About 25 percent of these exposures involved pesticide poisoning
symptoms. Over half of all reported exposures involved children
under age 6.
According to toxicologist William Pease of the University of
California-Berkeley School of Public Health, indoor use of
pesticide products in the home is the main source of exposure for
children. Furthermore, Pease says exposures from household use
exceed (but of course are added to) those from pesticide residues
in food.
There are over 20,000 different household pesticide products
containing over 300 active ingredients and up to 1700 inert
ingredients. Household pesticides may contain more than 99
percent inert ingredients. Active ingredients are the
ingredients that are listed on the product label and are
regulated by law. Inert ingredients are not listed on the label
and are not regulated.
Section 2m of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide
Act (FIFRA) –the nation’s pesticide control law –states, “The
term ‘inert ingredient’ means an ingredient which is not active.”
In actual practice, pesticide manufacturers decide what to call
inert and what to designate as an active ingredient subject to
EPA regulation. This has produced a situation where ingredients
considered active and regulated by the EPA in some pesticide
products are, in other pesticide products, unregulated, inert
ingredients, missing from the label.
In 1991, the Inspector General of the EPA issued a report on
inerts in household pesticides [U.S. EPA Office of the Inspector
General, INERT INGREDIENTS OF PESTICIDES (audit report No.
E1EPF1-05-0117-1100378, September 27, 1991)]. The report
identified 4 categories of inerts:
** 300 inerts are “generally recognized as safe.” This category
includes dextrose, ethanol, fish meal, lard, olive oil, water,
and wintergreen oil.
** 68 inerts are “potentially toxic.” Examples include petroleum
hydrocarbons, toluene, xylene, and methyl bromide.
** 56 inerts are “toxic.” These ingredients yield evidence of
carcinogenicity, adverse reproductive effects, neurotoxicity, or
other chronic effects, or birth defects in laboratory animals or
humans. Examples: aniline, asbestos, benzene, carbon disulfide,
chloroform, formaldehyde, hexachlorophene, lead, cadmium, and
mercury oleate.
** 1300 inerts have “unknown toxicity.” The EPA Office of
Inspector General (the EPA’s internal police force) says, “EPA
knows little or nothing about the adverse effects of most of
these inert ingredients. Some data may exist for the inert
ingredients of unknown toxicity, but EPA has not yet evaluated
the data to determine the effects.” Examples include barium
sulfate; epoxy resin; styrene acrylic copolymer; sodium nitrite;
thymol; lithium chloride; naphthalene; polyethylene terphthalate;
D & C Red #37; malathion; kerosene; coal tar; asphalt; Freon 114;
and sulfuric acid. Gathering information about the health
effects of these inerts presently has low priority at EPA,
receiving less than 1 percent of the Office of Pesticide
Programs’ budget. Furthermore, EPA has no specific procedures or
time frames for ensuring that these inerts are reviewed,
according to the EPA Office of Inspector General. “Until these
reviews are completed, users are unaware of potentially toxic
inert ingredients contained in certain pesticide products. The
use of these pesticide products may be jeopardizing human health
and the environment,” the EPA Office of Inspector General states.
By law, inert ingredients are not listed on pesticide product
labels. Only “active” ingredients are listed on labels.
Furthermore, government officials are forbidden by law from
revealing the inert ingredients in pesticide products. “Inert
ingredients are confidential information. If we were to disclose
that information we could be prosecuted for it and imprisoned,”
says Louise Mehler, a physician and program director of
California EPA’s Worker Pesticide Illness Surveillance Program.
Mehler says some inert ingredients “are sometimes of real
toxicological significance” whereas they “could also be just
water.” Although inert ingredients are secret by law, it is
widely believed that pesticide companies know their competitors’
inert ingredients. “The chemists here say that since the
invention of the mass spectrometer anybody who wants can really
find out,” says Mehler.
U.S. government evaluation of pesticides has focused rather
narrowly on cancer, and that there is evidence that pesticide
exposures can cause other health effects besides cancer.
Specifically, damage to the immune system (including, but not
limited to, allergic reactions) and the central nervous system
are known to result from pesticide exposures. For example, John
Bucher, acting chief of the toxicology branch of the National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, is quoted saying, “We
have spent an enormous amount of time in pesticides with cancer
assessments. [But] we could be missing the boat on the potential
effects on the immune system.” He goes on to note that subtle
effects on the nervous system are almost never studied: “We
almost never see anything on learning, memory, and potential
psychological effects of exposures,” says Bucher. “You can’t ask
a test animal for the kind of information that you can ask
people. So you can’t adequately study some of these things with
animal models,” he said.
The most sensitive creatures are human fetuses and infants,
according to Dr. Sheila Zahm of the National Cancer Institute.
She recommends that pregnant women should avoid exposure to any
pesticides. The rapidly-growing fetus may be particularly
susceptible to mutagenesis [genetic damage], chromosomal
aberrations, and carcinogenesis, Zahm says. She points out that
infants crawling on carpets may be exposed to lawn chemicals
tracked indoors, and that such chemicals may endure much longer
indoors than they would outdoors exposed to rain and sunlight.
William Pease from Berkeley asks whether some pesticides are
worth the hazards: “Because of the difficulties in controlling
how the end-user uses the product, and knowing that at least some
will become ill, as we are currently seeing adverse effects, the
question in our mind, since there are alternative means of
treating many pests, is if we should even recommend some of these
products when we know there are alternatives.”
Federal pesticide authorities have far to go before they have
fully evaluated the health effects of pesticide products
currently on the market, and to which millions of American
families, including children, are exposed routinely and
repeatedly each year.
EPA knows little or nothing about the toxic characteristics of
most of the ‘inerts’ that make up the bulk of most household
pesticides. Furthermore, government officials are prohibited
–under penalty of prison sentence –from revealing to the public
what they DO know about inert ingredients. Meanwhile, this
enforced secrecy about inerts does not prevent a pesticide
producers’ competitors from learning which inerts are being used.
Only the public is prohibited from learning this information.
Pesticides can affect the immune system, the central nervous
system, and other bodily systems as well, such as the endocrine
(hormone) system and the genes. Damage to the genes may be
inherited by the next generation, and then passed on to
subsequent generations. These important non-cancer effects of
pesticides have hardly been studied by government health
authorities.
So little is known about the health effects of pesticides, and
the “inerts” that are integral to them, that full health risk
assessments for pesticides cannot be completed in any meaningful
sense. At present rates of study, it will take centuries or
longer before sufficient information has been gathered.
Therefore, assurances of safety from most pesticide exposures
cannot be based on sound scientific evidence, but more on wishful
thinking, or guesswork.
Although the purpose of labeling is to allow consumers to protect
themselves, this purpose is not served by present labeling
practices because (a) much of the public hasn’t the skills
necessary to read a pesticide product label; and (b) so-called
‘inert’ ingredients, which may not be inert in the normal sense
of that word, and which can make up more than 99 percent of a
pesticide product, are not listed on the label.
Frankly, it appears that the U.S. government’s current pesticide
program was designed primarily to protect something other than
the health and well being of the public.
Many pesticides now in use are simply not needed. For household
pests, the first line of defense should be mechanical control of
flying pests (screens, windows, nest removal, fly paper, and fly
swatters). For crawling insects (such as roaches), baits and
traps work well and can reduce the need for spraying whole areas.
To our way of thinking, William Pease asked the crucial
question: since non-toxic alternatives exist for controlling
many pests, should the government be licensing the use of toxic
chemicals for controlling those pests, knowing that some members
of the public will needlessly — and inevitably — be harmed?
When non-toxic alternatives exist, should toxic alternatives
receive a stamp of approval from the government? It is an
important ethical question.
                
                
                
                
    
–Peter Montague
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[1] All information in this issue is from: Joel Grossman,
“Dangers of Household Pesticides,” ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH
PERSPECTIVES, Vol. 103, No. 6 (June 1995), pgs. 550-554.
Descriptor terms: pesticides; household use statistics;
labeling; poisoning; active ingredients; inert ingredients;
fifra; regulations; regulation; epa inspectpr general; niehs;
neurological damage; neurotoxicity; immune system damage;
immunotoxicity; children; developmental toxicity;