To date, it remains the largest case of pesticide food poisoning documented in North America.
Richard Jackson, who was a top official in California’s health department at the time of the watermelon poisonings, testified at a U.S. Senate hearing back in 1991 that aldicarb posed a health risk to children and that regulations offered an inadequate margin of safety.
“It is good the revocation is happening; it is a shame it took 20 years,” said Jackson, now chair of environmental health sciences at UCLA.
Dr. Lynn Goldman, an environmental health professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, also welcomed the agreement, noting that aldicarb has been under special review at the EPA for more than 25 years.
“It is good to see that EPA and Bayer have now reached an agreement to phase out the remaining uses,” Goldman said Tuesday.
Goldman was an epidemiologist with California’s health department when the outbreak occurred.
“As a state health official, I wanted to see stronger action on aldicarb,” she said, adding that she and Jackson “recommended that aldicarb be banned in California, because of its potency and what seemed to be a large temptation for misuse. We obviously did not prevail.”
Aldicarb was the first of the so-called “dirty dozen” pesticides that an environmental group, Pesticide Action Network North America, targeted in 1985 for worldwide ban. At the time, it was found in bananas and in well water on Long Island, NY.
Scholl-Buckwald said that the EPA relies mostly on voluntary agreements, instead of bans, to avoid lawsuits from manufacturers.
“The system is designed to leave things like this on the market as long as possible. It’s innocent until proven guilty. It’s really unconscionable that it takes literally decades to do this,” he said.
Goldman in 1993 was named EPA assistant administrator overseeing pesticide programs, but she said Tuesday that even then, her efforts to restrict aldicarb were hamstrung by insufficient scientific evidence at the time and a weak pesticide law. She said she faced “the need to exercise due process in making sure that the company producing the chemical had a fair hearing.”Years later, in 2007, the EPA concluded that there were “potential human health risks” from drinking-water contamination, as well as risks to birds and other wildlife. But the agency approved its continued use with added precautions, such as increased setbacks between fields and water wells and reduced amounts applied to crops.
Then, this month, the EPA revised its analysis using new toxicity data and determined that current uses meant babies and young children were at risk of being exposed to levels in water and food that exceeded the agency’s level of concern.
Aldicarb residues are found in grapefruit, oranges, orange juice, potatoes, frozen French fries and sweet potatoes. It already has been banned in bananas because of the potential for high exposure in children.
In the new analysis, children’s exposure from drinking water was estimated based on aldicarb use at cotton and peanut farms in Georgia.
“Potatoes, citrus and water are the greatest contributors to the aldicarb exposure,” the EPA document says.
Bayer researchers recently reported that water contamination has been minimal. They analyzed 1,673 drinking-water wells that were within 300 meters of fields treated with aldicarb, which has the trade name Temik, and found that none violated the EPA’s health advisory limit.
“For nearly 40 years, Temik has provided farmers with unsurpassed control of destructive pests, without compromising human health or environmental safety,” Bill Buckner, president and CEO of Bayer CropScience, said in a statement Tuesday.
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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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