Children are Lab Rats for the Pesticide Industry

Children don't celebrate Earth Day with costumes as they do Halloween. If they did, I can envisage the perfect ensemble: a dark suit, a white shirt with a starched collar, and a modest tie.

The image comes from a photograph taken around 1905. It depicts a group of formally dressed young men dining at a table spread with a white tablecloth, listening respectfully to an older man in their midst. He was Harvey Wiley, who later became the first commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Wiley had recruited the young men to serve as subjects in one of the first experiments in human toxicology.

Processed foods in that era were treated with chemicals of uncertain safety, and Wiley, who had been chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture, believed they needed to be tested. These young men being served their tainted meals became known as Wiley's "Poison Squad."

Our safety standards are different now. New food additives undergo extensive testing in animals. So do pesticides. But large gaps remain. They lie between what information we draw from the animal studies and what happens to people, especially children, in their actual environment. This disparity helped convince the Congress in 1996 to pass the Food Quality Protection Act. The act set new standards for how we determine the amounts of pesticides allowed in foods.

The new law was a response to a 1993 report by the National Academy of Sciences pointing out the special vulnerabilities of children to pesticide exposure. Instead of looking at residue levels one pesticide at a time, they were now to be grouped in clusters of those with similar chemical properties or with common actions on the brain or other systems of the body. Instead of standards based on food alone, or drinking water alone, they were to be based on all sources of exposure. Because of all the new data implicating environmental chemicals as disruptors of natural hormones, pesticides were to be examined for such properties as well. And, in its most controversial section, the act mandated tightened exposure standards for children so that they were buffered by a protection factor 10 times greater than that for adults.

This extra buffer is intensely debated. But the young and still-developing brain is extremely vulnerable to chemical perturbation. Consider fetal alcohol syndrome, a product of maternal drinking during pregnancy, which is marked by peculiar facial features, mental retardation and behavioral problems. The mother, meanwhile, may experience nothing worse that a hangover.

The incredibly complex orchestration of brain development and the protection it needs may even be jeopardized by something as seemingly trivial as the height at which children play. The young child's world is at floor level, where it stirs up dust that may contain pesticide residues. Children from farm families and agricultural communities are subject to greater pesticide exposures than most urban dwellers because of inadvertent deposition in the home through air currents, foot traffic, and contaminated clothing. Even in cities, as in the upper west side of Manhattan, pesticide use can be heavy in attempts to eliminate vermin. Children at floor level also explore the world with hand-to-mouth sampling. Residues in food are only one element in this barrage.

Although Congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act unanimously, some in Congress, including many who originally voted for the measure, now are trying to weaken its implementation. Their special target is the provision that demands a higher standard of safety for children. What they can't change is children's unique vulnerabilities. Children will continue to consume, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about three times more food per pound of body weight than the average American. They also breathe more air for their size and eat far more fruits and vegetables -- with pesticide residues -- than adults.

We have been setting exposure standards as though children live in a world as ordered as the laboratories in which we test our animals. Without the shield of the Food Quality Protection Act they will return to living in a world where they might as well be costumed as a 21st century poison squad.

-- Bernard Weiss is a professor of environmental medicine and pediatrics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry

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