Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 11:48:36 -0500
From: Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Lyndon Hawkins <hawkins@empm.cdpr.ca.gov>
State of California,
Department of Pesticide Regulation
Integrated Pest
Management
Dear Lyndon, I thought you might like to read Part IV of the Guthion POISON "saga" entitled: Apple farmers favor Guthion. The pesticide is cheap and works fast, but it’s also a nerve agent.
Juan Angulo, 65, is among the apple pickers near Pasco,
Wash., who believe Guthion has caused their headaches and irritated eyes.
By Brent Walth and Alex Pulaski - NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE.
For 42 years, Guthion has been apple growers’ weapon of choice against their worst enemy: the codling moth. A mottled gray-brown and the size of a nickel, the codling moth is to apples what locusts are to wheat. Unchecked, the moths’ offspring can eat their way through 95 percent of an orchard — a frightening prospect to a grower whose yearly profit could vanish if more than 10 percent of his fruit is lost.
BEFORE GUTHION, growers would spread arsenic among their trees; after World War II, many used DDT, heralded as a modern miracle for the agriculture industry. But the codling moth started to grow resistant to DDT by the 1950s.
The chemical industry was already developing what appeared to be safer alternatives, fast-acting chemicals that, unlike DDT, quickly faded. One possibility lay in the chemical family known as organophosphates. In 1953, Bayer, famous for its aspirin, introduced a refined organophosphate pesticide called azinphos methyl. Bayer called the product (POISON) Guthion. Though its patent has expired, Bayer still controls about 90 percent of the azinphos methyl market in the United States.
BEST RESULTS - Growers use (the "registered" POISON) Guthion widely on such crops as blueberry bogs in Maine, sugarcane in the South and almond trees in California. By far, however, Guthion is used most often in Northwest orchards, U.S. Department of Agriculture records show.
Azinphos methyl is sprayed in 91 percent of Washington state’s apple orchards. Guthion remains popular because it is cheap and kills codling moths for days longer than alternative (POISON) sprays. (Lyndon, there are safer unregistered alternatives.)
"It works better than anything else," says apple grower Don Brandenburg. "You can’t argue with results."
Those results, however, have exacted a price.
EPA records show that between the mid-1960s and 1982, investigators linked azinphos methyl to at least 37 fish kills. In 1991, wildlife officials blamed it for as many as 250,000 to 1 million dead fish when Louisiana sugarcane growers used heavy amounts of the insecticide during a rainy year.
Many of the lessons about organophosphates’ effects on people have been drawn from agricultural workers, the canaries in the coal mine who inadvertently test the effects of overexposure.
AFFECTS NERVES - As nerve agents, organophosphates enter the body through the skin, inhalation or on foods that we eat. A person exposed to low levels of Guthion or other organophosphates may feel dizziness, nausea and headaches. At higher doses, vision can blur and limbs can weaken.
In extreme cases, organophosphates can kill by disrupting the nervous system so much that the lungs forget how to work. (Remember the Nazi gas chambers Lyndon?)
Scientists used to believe that the ill effects of organophosphates faded when the pesticide left the body. But studies in 1990 and 1992 found that between 10 percent and 20 percent of workers exposed to organophosphates still showed neurological problems years later.
Washington orchard workers Juan Angulo and Martin Ponce consider themselves living proof. On May 26, 1995, a bitter scent hung in the air as Angulo and Ponce joined 35 others thinning apples at an orchard near Prescott, Wash., a few miles from their homes in Pasco. After half an hour, Angulo’s head drummed. His hands, and then his arms, torso and legs, felt as if tiny insects chewed his skin.
"My skin was itching, eyes were watering, my head hurt," Angulo said.
Ponce felt it, too. "The smell was very strong," he said. "I threw up. I couldn’t eat."
Doctors diagnosed Angulo and two other workers with a reaction to ("registered") pesticides (POISONS).
Angulo and Ponce still work in the orchards. The headaches and burning eyes that struck that day revisit them, especially during the summer thinning season and autumn harvests.
Brent Walth and Alex Pulaski are staff writers with The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.
© 2000 Newhouse News Service
Well Lyndon, I guess it all depends on who determines what the word "CHEAP" means!
Respectfully, Stephen L. Tvedten
Comment from Dr. Robert Simon: The end called efficacy (killing moths) does not justify the means called toxicity(poisoning people and the environment).