CONTAMINATED COMESTIBLES: The U.S. EPA has announced plans to phase the use of aldicarb, a toxic insecticide commonly used on food crops.
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A farm chemical with an infamous history – causing the worst known outbreak of pesticide poisoning in North America – is being phased out under an agreement announced Tuesday by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Manufacturer Bayer CropScience agreed to stop producing aldicarb, a highly toxic insecticide used to kill pests on cotton and several food crops, by 2015 in all world markets. Use on citrus and potatoes will be prohibited after next year.
Tuesday’s announcement comes 25 years after a highly publicized outbreak of aldicarb poisoning sickened more than 2,000 people who had eaten California watermelons.
New EPA documents show that babies and children under five can ingest levels of the insecticide through food and water that exceed levels the agency considers safe.
“Aldicarb no longer meets our rigorous food safety standards and may pose unacceptable dietary risks, especially to infants and young children,” the EPA said in announcing the agreement.
For infants, consumption of aldicarb residue – mostly in potatoes, citrus and water – can reach 800 percent higher than the EPA’s level of concern for health effects, while children between the ages of one and five can ingest 300 percent more than the level of concern, according to an Aug. 4 EPA memo.
In a statement, Bayer CropScience said Tuesday that its decision to agree to phase out aldicarb came after EPA’s new report calculated the health risks to children.
The company said it “respects the oversight authority of the EPA and is cooperating with them” even though it “does not fully agree” with the agency's new assessment. Bayer CropScience stressed that the analysis “does not mean that aldicarb poses an actual risk” to consumers.
One of the most acutely hazardous pesticides still used in the United States, aldicarb is a carbamate insecticide that is taken up by roots and carried into the fruit of a plant. High levels of aldicarb can have neurotoxic effects; it inhibits an enzyme that controls the transmission of messages to nerves.
“After thousands of poisonings, it is mind-boggling that aldicarb is still in use,” said Steve Scholl-Buckwald, managing director of the environmental group Pesticide Action Network North America. “The wheels just grind so, so slowly. It never should have been registered in the first place back in 1970 and by the mid-1980s there was sufficient data to suggest it should have been taken off the market.”
On the Fourth of July in 1985, three people who had eaten watermelon in Oakland, Calif., rapidly became ill with symptoms that included vomiting, diarrhea, muscle twitches and abnormally slow heart rates. At the same time, people in Oregon were falling ill, too, and tests of watermelons found extremely high levels of aldicarb, which was illegal to use on all melons.
California ordered an immediate ban on watermelon sales, which meant huge quantities had to be destroyed in fields and at stores at the height of the season. How aldicarb got into watermelons remains unknown, but experts suspected that some melon farmers used low levels of it intentionally and illegally and that some also might have flowed off nearby cotton fields.That summer, a total of 1,350 cases of aldicarb poisoning from watermelon were reported in California, plus another 692 cases in eight other states and Canada, according to a report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Seventeen people were hospitalized. Six deaths and two stillbirths were reported in people who fell ill, but the pesticide was not listed as the cause of death in coroner reports.
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5 Comments
Add Comment25 years after the outbreak the only thing, we, as a society, can offer ourselves and our children is a phasing out period for another 8 years and a declaration that Alicarb “no longer meets our rigorous food safety standards”? Is it my mis-conception that the agencies designated to defend public’s health, should be more alert for consumer’s protection and less inclined to subdue to pharmaceutical or other organized interests? Because if the latter is not the real cause of such a criminal delay in action then what is?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey are voices advocating precaution instead of “poorly understood” data. Others warning of all the possible and visible risks of pesticides. I would cite the one I found the most interesting and the most alarming. The one of the greek writer, Mr Ioannis Tsatsaris, a gnosiologist, whose analysis warns that food pollution leads to all these unknown illnesses that crop up in our times, to the aggression in every level of human interaction, as well as to a surprisingly decline in intellection and reasoning: “Nowadays, based on the pollution mankind has effected on the food chain, the atmosphere, the earth and the water table, they have ended up in an aggressivity against their very selves, which makes them feel dissatisfied and turns them against others, demanding to be treated as they themselves wish, but without themselves behaving towards others as they should. This is due to the disruption of their organic equilibrium. .. It is in essence the destructiveness that inorganic carbon effectuates in our organism. …..the production of his (man’ s) blood function is no longer that which would assist the brain to develop a strong doubt of what is offered, which would subsequently be transformed also into a steady perception of what has to be done to assist his organic functions and production.
When blood is produced, after passing through a special processing centre it then enters the lungs to be oxygenated and cleansed of any inferior quality of elements. From there it goes to the heart, which carries the selected quality of blood to the brain and the remainder to the rest of the organism. The brain needs the suitable haematic quality of nourishment in order to develop those operations promoting perception in man to distinguish the propitious from the pernicious… We thus reach a point where medical science diagnoses diverse illnesses which it cannot cure, however, for it does not know their exact nature nor provenance...” (“On Dissociation”, http://www.tsatsaris.gr/new9_en.html)
Cleo Katsivela, Civil Law Notary LLM Medical Law
Why the delay? If they know of it's health effects why not pull it now instead of two years from now? Money???????????????
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBetter late than never.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi don't know what aldicarb is sold by but i was backrupted in farming in the early 80's for financial reasons and most of my family (generations of family farmers) died of cancer. it is a wonderfull way of life but i don't believe there is much truth in advertising when it comes to the chemicals necessary to produce the yeilds necessary to make a living. i've heard about atrizine showing up in wells not to mention furidan and other insectisides. i've seen dozens of dead starlings at the end rows after using granular furidan. i often wonder if i've doomed myself simply by not being aware of the toxicity of some of these chemicals. thanks; phil
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyou are what you eat. how can you be anything else?
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