Steve Tvedten of Get Set, Inc.'s email to Lyndon Hawkins of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation citing a recent report by Dr. Warren Porter of the University of Wisconsin regarding "registered" pesticides and agression.

Questions have been asked of the California Department of Pesticide Control since Fontana Unified School District declined to consider a pesticide free IPM program because of the Department of Agriculture's opinion about only utilizing registered pesticides to eliminate pests.  The California Department of Pesticide Regulation has remained silent and not responded to these issues:

Lyndon - I thought you might like a copy of a California interview with Dr. Warren Porter of the University of Wisconsin regarding "registered" pesticides and agression.  Lyndon, it is time to protect the people of California and not the poison producers!  Please read this and think------

What's In the Mix?
by Keith Hamm
Santa Barbara Independent, April 15, 1999, pg. 21 and following pages

In this community, Earthday has never been a one-day reason to catch a clue about the downside of living in a world wrapped up in its own undoing.  Santa Barbarans have never needed an excuse, a token day of redemption, to lend a hand in trying to turn things around, or at least to clean things up. The battle rages every day. This weekend's Earthday celebration pays homage to our efforts, past and present, and prepares us for future fights.

At the most basic level, environmentalism is not a movement or an agenda or a political campaign. It's deeper: a gut-level sense that it is fundamentally wrong to gratuitously damage the miraculous, self-sustaining web of water, land, and life to which we belong. And one of the most basic elements of environmentalism focuses on one of our most basic requirements:  a safe supply of food.

In the following Q & A, Dr. Warren Porter--a University of Wisconsin-based zoologist on a sabbatical fellowship with UCSB's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis--discusses with us his groundbreaking research on how agricultural chemicals can affect us humans. His work,bolstered by other equally outstanding studies, reveals that common exposure to a common mix of pest- and weed-killing chemicals applied to food crops can harm the bodies and minds of infants and children. Beyond contributing  to scientific literature, Porter feels a need to get this information to the general public. Is he an environmentalist, as well? An activist? Perhaps just a concerned parent.

[Q & A]

Q:  Tell me a little bit about your work.

A:  We are able to show that there were neurological, immune, and endocrine effects [after] exposure to mixtures [of herbicides, pesticides, and nitrates] and in one case just an herbicide all by itself. After we got done with this, and also knowing that the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems all talk to each other--they're interconnected--we hypothesized that if you hit one corner of that triangle, you will probably drag down the other two because of all the communication that goes on between them. We decided that  we'd look at a mix [of chemicals] that was the most common in the United States at levels found in ground water: nitrate, atrazine (an herbicide) and aldocarb, sometimes used as an insecticide.

The idea was to deal with exposure in as natural a way as possible. We decided on drinking water because the stuff was in groundwater in levels that we were going to test. These were levels you could measure in Wisconsin and in the rest of the States. We did a whole series of experiments staring in about 1990 and just kept on doing them. We changed the duration of the experiments, and we repeated the experiments over and over to make sure that what we were getting would be robust. We got several
surprises from those experiments.
 

Q:  As much as you can, please explain things on a layman's level.

A:  Earlier work had shown that thyroid hormone typically changed when exposure to these pesticides occurred. Thyroid hormone not only affects and controls your metabolic rate, that is, how fast you burn food, it also controls your irritability level. For example, Type A personalities are more assertive, more aggressive, more hyper. These people tend to have higher levels of thyroid hormone. Type B personalities--people that are really laid back, really take things very easily--have lower levels of thyroid hormone.  We expected that changes in thyroid [would] change irritability levels.  This was a concern because there was information that kids are getting more hyper and [that their] learning abilities are going down.

When we looked at single chemicals, which is the standard toxicology testing protocol, almost never did we see any effects. As soon as we started looking at mixtures, especially of nitrate plus something else, we began to see affects that we wouldn't see just with nitrate, or just with the herbicides, or just with the insecticide.

Q:  So, scientists had looked at the ingredients, but not the cocktail?

A:  That's exactly right. Current toxicology testing, as done by the Environmental Protection Agency, is appropriate for the laboratory, but when you start considering the real world where real exposures occur, there are just so many shortcomings it's not a very realistic test.

And the cocktail is much more than even just the active ingredients. The so-called inert ingredients are in fact equally biologically active. For example, imagine you're a chemist and your job is to get this [chemical] into the plant as fast as you can. There are only two primary routes that will get you the fastest entry and they're both through the leaf.
One is  through the waxy surface. So what you do is add organic soaps to make these active ingredients much more soluble, easier for them to get through the waxy surface. Unfortunately, our skin is also a waxy surface, which you'll see if you dump any water on your skin: it beads up. So if you've got organic soaps in there and this stuff lands on your skin, even in minute amounts, you may very well get much more rapid penetration through your skin.

Consider the other route, through the breathing pores of the leaf, which have a watery film inside directly analogous to the watery film that lines the respiratory surfaces in our lungs. [Some chemicals have an ingredient] designed to weaken the surface tension of a watery film, [which] would normally act as a barrier. So when you breath it in, entry is much more  rapid.

These two routes of entry are much more significant than if you ingest something into your gut, because, in effect, these two routes sidestep your body's natural defense mechanisms. You see, in an evolutionary sense we're designed to deal with something [toxic] that we might eat.

[To defend the body], the liver will try to mount enzymes [that] break down fat-soluble compounds coming in. It's a normal system of filtering that might be able to defend against incoming chemicals. But if they come in through the skin or the respiratory system, they don't [come up against] those same kinds of defenses. They bypass the line of defenses and get into the body, and have the potential for effecting bodily functions without having first faced the challenges of a defensive system.   The ability to produce [these defenses] is dependent on a whole lot of things. For example, if you're taking certain kinds of medication, it can suppress your ability to even [put up defenses].

Imagine [that] you're standing in a boxing ring and a boxer jumps in with you, and he walks toward you smiling with his hand outstretched. And you reach out to shake his hand and he smacks you in the stomach as hard as he can. And when you bring your arms up to defend yourself, he backs away. Finally you get tired of holding your defenses up and you drop them and he rushes in and smacks you again. That's the physical equivalent to a "pulse  dose," which is normally what we tend to get exposed to.

The defenses we have take a while to induce, just like it takes a while to bring your arms up. It takes anywhere from a half a day to five days to induce those [defenses] to appropriate levels. If you're in a particular stage of your hormone cycle or you're taking some antibiotics, it can compromise your ability to defend yourself even if you did have enough time to induce your defenses. If you've got pulse doses coming in under your defenses or coming in faster than you can bring your defenses up then you've got a situation where you're totally vulnerable.
 If you've got a pregnant mom, for example, in day 20 when the fetus's neural tube is closing and she gets an exposure, she hasn't had enough time to induce her defenses. Her thyroid level goes up or goes down, the hormone crosses the placenta and can permanently alter the developmental pattern of the fetus's brain. And then the pulse dose is gone, you have no detection, mom doesn't even know she's pregnant, and you may have an offspring that is  neurologically compromised and wonder, "How did this happen?"

Q:  How did you get into do this kind of research?

A:  It was a natural  evolution, really. I was studying how climate affects animals' ability to grow and reproduce, and then I started wondering about how disease also modifies that. It was just really the collaborations I developed at the University of Wisconsin. The friend I was working on the diseases with had an immunologist friend who noticed that the structure of one of the plant-growth regulators used in agriculture was almost identical to the structure of an immunosuppressant used after an operation to keep people from rejecting a new kidney or heart. We began to wonder whether this class of chemicals was imunosuppressive. They all turned out to be.

We [also] began to wonder what the weaknesses are in toxicology testing.  One of the things scientists are finding on a global scale is that . . . it's beginning to look as if all these pesticides are biologically hot. And there's good reason to believe that they would be, if you think about how they're designed.
 

Q:  How's that?

A:  To get a [chemical] into a cell you've got to have part of the [chemical] that's fat soluble so it can pass through the cell membrane. And part of it has to have a strong electrical charge because you need to attract the chemical to the part of the cell where you want to do the damage. The trouble is, the ways cells communicate, both within themselves and between each other, is by means of highly charged molecules, ions really. These things are being pumped across the membranes and moved around in cells. So when you take a chemical that you've designed that has a strong electrical charge and you put it in the middle of this tremendous stream of communication--I mean, a high school chemistry student could tell you there are going to be effects. There's just no way these things are not going to be biologically active. It's very important for people to understand that.  This is a very real concern.

Manufacturers are trying to make their chemicals more volatile, [to make them] evaporate more quickly to keep them out of ground water. But that means the atmosphere is carrying a lot more of this stuff. There's a tremendous amount of atmospheric transport. And when you add the [ingredients that facilitate absorption into the skin] or you breathe them in, you're talking exposures without having to eat anything.
 

Q:  The chemicals you've studied don't rank high in use in California.  Would it be irresponsible to make sweeping statements about agricultural chemicals in general? How do we know if we as a community are sucking down a poisonous cocktail?

A:  One of the things you could do is you look at the data from Vincent Garry showing that there were in fact birth defect rates that were higher in the [children of field workers who applied pesticides] and in the general populace in Minnesota where there was high pesticide use. We also know about Elizabeth Guillette's paper showing serious compromises in the brain functions of preschool children in the Yaqui Valley in [Northwestern] Mexico. I'm sure they're using different chemicals down there. We also knew from other studies that people who were frequently exposed to herbicides have about a five times higher risk of Parkinson's disease.

If California looked carefully at it's federal child count data, which has to be collected each year and reported to the U.S. Department of Education, I bet that if you looked at the incidence of learning disabilities in kids, the incidence of emotional disability and orthopedic malformations in [them] over the last 10-15 years, you'd see big increases.
 

Q:  We've known about this stuff since Silent Spring. Why do you think that studies like this haven't been done before?

A:  Everybody should be asking that question. We have on the books right now federal legislation  mandating that all new registered pesticides be tested for neurological, endrocrine, and immune effects. Those laws have been on the books for almost three years and have never been enforced. The American public should ask, "Why have they not been enforced?" Of the 77,000 pesticides out there that are registered for use, none of them have been tested for neurological, endocrine, and immune effects.

You can also look in the [scientific] literature. I bet you could give me the names of  chemicals that are widely used here in California, and I could find data in the open scientific literature that deals with whether or not there might be health effects.

Another thing that people need to understand is that the federal funding for biological research is so low these days. For the last decade, the probability of being funded for a grant proposal has been less than one in ten. These are the Ph.D. people in this country who are trained to do this stuff, and we're only funding one out of ten proposals. That means your  ability to find out about this stuff is really constrained.

Something else the American public doesn't realize is that the amount of money being allocated for alternative agriculture is less than one percent of the agricultural research budget. Most of the money goes to supporting chemical-related agriculture. I think those proportions ought to be reversed. And I think the American public ought to demand it.
 

Q:  Are pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer used more or less these days than fifty years ago and have the toxicities changed?

A:  The usage has continued to climb. There's an enormous amount of these [chemicals being used] right now. There was a recent study that examined the urine of people across the country, [asking] if people are being exposed.   On average, anywhere from five to seven compounds were being excreted. There's a great deal of exposure to the general populace.

And yes, the toxicities have definitely changed. [Some toxicities are now measured] in the parts-per-trillion range. I would point out that fetuses are sensitive to chemicals in the parts per quadrillion range.

Q:  I would assume that most people in this country are eating conventionally grown food. If that's the case, wouldn't the problems be more apparent? Why are there not more hyperaggressive dim-witted people with poor immune systems?

A:  If we really looked carefully at what's been happening in this country, you might find exactly that happening.

Q:  What's the trade-off between the health benefits we can get from what we eat and the potential adverse impacts we may suffer from that same food?

A:  That's a question that everyone must answer for themselves. There are quite a few things that people can do to protect themselves. They can buy organically grown produce. They can buy a good water filter for their water supply. These two actions can probably reduce exposure very significantly.

A recent study looking at the amount of chemical contamination in fruits and vegetables found that organically produced foods were very, very much lower than the commercially produced stuff.

It's also very important that we look at this from a broader perspective in the context of the fact that there are industrial chemicals out there, plasiticizers, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins. Nobody has looked yet at the possible interactions between pcbs, dioxins, and pesticides, for example. We have only looked at three chemicals that you might likely be  exposed to. If you throw in PCBs, it might make things more of a concern, especially from the developmental point of view.

I think we are most vulnerable [during early] development because that's when the fetus is most sensitive. And the fetus doesn't have the defense mechanisms that adults have. Even children who are not sexually mature are compromised in their ability to defend themselves against incoming chemicals. The vulnerabilities are greatest in the fetal and early-childhood  development, and this is where we are not protecting our children. We protect our laboratory rats and mice much better than we protect our children.

Q:  You seem more than just a collector, synthesizer, and analyzer of scientific data. Do you have an activist side as well? Do you feel an obligation as a scientist to share your information with the public?

A:  I feel an obligation to be as responsible as I can with the information that I share with the public. All I'm trying to do is provide the public with key pieces of information based on what's out there in the scientific literature. There are many, many scientists involved in this kind of thing today, in fact, the paper that I published was just one of 23 papers that  came out in a single journal [The Journal Of Toxicology and Industrial Health, mid-March].

The solution to the problem is a shift in market shares. Most people don't realize that a downward shift of only half of one percent of market shares will cause a corporation to have tremors. In fact, what we see already are [food-providing] corporations moving to much more organically based, benign kinds of pest controls. A corporation has two things that it must always consider: firstly, the bottom line; and secondly, it must always try to reduce risk. It needs to be concerned about opportunities to lower that risk so that financial resources are maximized. This means that there is tremendous opportunity for industries that move most quickly to create new products that are more benign and much less toxic. They are going to clearly have the market advantage and they will gain market share very rapidly.

Q:  Many farmers are very worried about the emergence of genetically engineered foods. Can you describe the good and bad of genetically grown food?

A:  Genetic engineering has the promise of giving us better tasting [produce], the promise of providing us with plants that are resistant to a variety of different diseases so that we don't have to be spraying [pesticides and herbicides]. This is a tremendous thing.

One of the concerns about genetic engineering [revolves around] a crop like soy beans that you're going to grind up for baby food and it's been genetically engineered to be resistent to [the herbicide] Roundup, [which would be sprayed to kill surrounding weeds.] We have no tests for that compound [Roundup] in the arena of endocrine, neurological, and immunal effects. There's serious reason to question whether or not this should become the basis of our processed food industry.

Another concern is that if you have a plant that is open-pollinated, the genes that are in that pollen might blow off and interact with other species, other flowers. If [the genes] get in to them, you could be spreading genetically engineered plants into all kinds of other plants that  aren't designed to have them. So there are some serious issues about letting the genes loose.

There's another concern with genetically engineered bacteria that is used to kill caterpillars. If you've got that gene genetically engineered into corn, for example, the pollen that is released from the corn could introduce it into all kinds of other plants. And so you could very rapidly get the entire population of [nearby] insects immune to one of the best defenses we have  in modern agriculture today.

In an ecological context this kind of thing has to be examined very carefully, and as far as I can see it's not being studied carefully at all yet.

Q:  Lastly, whether we're talking about conventionally grown, organically grown, or genetically engineered food, what are the best guarantees that the consumer is going to purchase safe food?

A:  There are no guarantees that anything is going to be perfectly safe, because as far as we can tell pretty much everything out there these days is being contaminated at least at very low levels by a variety of chemicals that are out there in the atmosphere. You can reduce your risk significantly by purchasing organically produced fruits and vegetables, meats, eggs, and butter. Simply buy products that you know are produced in ways that don't depend on the heavy use of chemicals. [In doing so] you are empowering the people who produce these things to be ever more competitive and to also bring the prices down for you. Just simply changing what you buy can be extremely powerful in terms of protecting your long-term interests and the interests of your children and your grandchildren.

Lyndon, When Will It Be Legal (In Your Opinion) To wash Your Can In California?