Pressure derails law to shield kids. Congress directs an environmental agency to cut chemicals (POISONS)  in food; instead, power trumps science to save an insecticide (POISON)
 
 

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Subject:   A Civics lesson Continued--(The rest of the story)-----
 Date:       Tue, 07 Dec 1999 18:41:34 -0500
From:     Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization:     Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To:     Lyndon Hawkins <hawkins@empm.cdpr.ca.gov>

Lyndon, The Oregonian just published an article entitled:  Pressure derails law to shield kids. Congress directs an environmental agency to cut chemicals (POISONS)  in food; instead, power trumps science to save an insecticide (POISON).  Sunday, December 5, 1999.  By Brent Walth and Alex Pulaski of The Oregonian staff.

Don Brandenburg's future hangs from the trees.

On a perfect 74-degree afternoon on May 12, 1998, he does what he has always done to protect them.

He drops dissolvable plastic packages into a tank of churning water, climbs aboard his 1976 John Deere tractor and pulls the tank through the rows.

Behind him blows a poison wind.

A giant fan whines like a small jet engine, firing the tank's contents into the trees. His young apples, hard and green and no bigger than grapes, tremble with his passing.

The wind carries azinphos methyl, the most commonly used insecticide in Northwest apple orchards. On this spring day, Brandenburg thought it might be among the last times the pesticide -- better known as Guthion -- shrouded his orchard.

At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 3,000 miles away, Guthion was facing its first-ever review under the Food Quality Protection Act, a new law aimed at protecting children from dangerous pesticide residues. A year later, the EPA announced "major reductions" in  Guthion's use. Environmentalists, editorials and some members of Congress hailed the move as a breakthrough.

But Guthion lives on.

Despite the restrictions announced Aug. 2 this year, most growers, including Brandenburg, can use Guthion much as they had before.

A six-month review by The Oregonian shows that the new EPA rules were largely written to satisfy apple growers and Guthion's manufacturer, Bayer Corp., both of whom  argue that the EPA is exaggerating Guthion's risk to children.

Three years ago, when President Clinton signed the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 into law, he said, "If a pesticide poses a danger to our children, it won't be in our food, period."

It wasn't that simple.

Instead the law, itself born out of an election-year need in Congress, fell afoul of the politics of pesticides.

An inside look at three years of behind-the-scenes wrangling shows how politics -- not science -- drives pesticide "regulation" in the United States.

As a result, the EPA's ability to enforce the landmark pesticide law has been hobbled for years to come.

The law told the agency to stop looking at pesticides one at a time and instead measure children's total exposure to  the pesticides on their food, lawns and pets, and in their homes and drinking water.

The story of Guthion shows why that's not being done.

In the end, canny lobbyists and bureaucratic dawdling, a leaked memo and presidential politics, pesticide-eating Scottish students and an odds-making computer program  named for a European gambling resort all combined to save a doomed pesticide.

Protecting the family farm

Don Brandenburg doesn't remember hearing about Congress' unanimous vote to pass the Food Quality Protection Act back in July 1996. He does remember wondering that summer how he would keep his apple orchard out of bankruptcy.

The year before had been his worst ever, when the orchard that his family had run since 1947 lost $36,000.  His only comfort, if it could be called that, lay in knowing he was not alone.

Brandenburg's orchard sits in the Wenatchee Valley, heart of Washington's bountiful apple industry. Hot days, cool nights and plentiful water have nurtured apples into the state's top crop -- helped along by a cornucopia of  chemicals, including Guthion.

The familiar logo of the Red Delicious apple symbolizes Washington's nearly $1 billion a year in sales of all varieties -- more than half of national totals. The Washington apple business sustains 3,800 growers, many of them small operators such as Brandenburg, whose father brought his family from Oklahoma to pick apples near Wenatchee.

China has recently begun flooding world markets with cheap fruit and juice. To make matters worse, consumers are spurning the once-prized Red Delicious. Through generations of hybrids, the apple was engineered to a fantasy deep red color and half-hourglass shape. But farmers inadvertently bred the taste out by grafting redder strains.

"I don't know what happened," said Ray Schmitten, a  grower and packer in Cashmere, Wash. "Maybe it was just God's way of telling us to lighten up, because we ended up with this industrial-strength, super-red apple  with the taste of a potato."

Brandenburg's bank, which will no longer lend him money without a government guarantee, says a break-even price on apples is $87.50 for a 900- to 950-pound bin. Last year, he was paid between $3.08 and $44.68 a bin for his apples -- as little as one-third of a penny a pound. "You keep hoping it gets back to the old times," Brandenburg said, "but it doesn't look very promising."  (Organic apples sell for a higher price.)

Some growers have chosen to let their fruit fall to the ground and rot. Some tear out their old apple trees and  replace them with pears, cherries and new apple strains.   The signs of the times along Wenatchee roadsides read:  Apple wood (sprayed with pesticides) for sale.

Other growers have bulldozed their trees, stacked them and struck a match, watching the Red Delicious dissipate in a plume of smoke.

Favorite pesticide under attack

Amid this upheaval, apple growers in 1998 caught  rumblings of a new threat: Their favorite pesticide was under attack. U.S. Department of Agriculture records show that apple growers use azinphos methyl, the basic chemical in Guthion, more than any other bug killer.  Growers in Washington spray 55 percent of the insecticide that's used in the Untied States.

The thought of a full-scale pesticide war worried many.   They had seen first-hand what such a battle could do. In 1989, a "60 Minutes" report charged that Alar, a chemical  used to keep apples on the tree longer so their red color  would deepen, might cause cancer. Apple growers claimed the concern about Alar's health risks bordered on  the hysterical. Still, the EPA banned Alar in 1991, but not before the public furor sent apple sales into a plunge.

No one could afford that again.

"If they keep taking away all these chemicals, there isn't going to be an American farmer left," said Dick Smithson, a grower in Peshastin, Wash.

For 42 years, Guthion has been growers' weapon of choice against their worst enemy: the codling moth.  (Funny, I would have thought their worst enemy was the prices they have to pay for their poisons, etc. and/or receive for their apples.)

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.  (What about the people who are letting their fruit rot?)

The rhythm of the moth's life adjusts itself to temperature and target. The female moth lays a single egg on or near the apple; the larvae hatch in a week or so and burrow  into the fruit -- safely away from sprays -- within a few hours.

They make their way to the fruit's center, feed on the seeds for a month or so and exit the apple to spin their cocoon and begin the cycle again. 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. Not long after that, biologist Rachel Carson forever changed Americans' view of pesticides with her1962 book, "Silent Spring." Carson argued persuasively that DDT and other long-lasting chemicals were passed up the food chain to humans.

The chemical industry was already developing what appeared to be safer alternatives, fast-acting chemicals that, unlike DDT, quickly faded.

They turned to a legacy of Nazi Germany. In 1932, German researchers found that certain phosphorus compounds proved swift and deadly to lab rats. Four years later, a researcher at IG Farben, a giant German conglomerate, formulated the first organophosphate insecticide.

Organophosphates disrupt the nervous system and, in high enough doses, kill by overwhelming organs. One such chemical, sarin, is considered one of the most lethal nerve gases; it was the weapon used by the Aum Shinrikyo cult on Tokyo subway riders in 1995, killing a dozen people and injuring more than 5,000. The Hitler regime used the technology to develop nerve gas, and the Nazis used another of the Farben-produced compounds, Zyklon-B, in concentration camp gas chambers.

After World War II, the Allies dissolved IG Farben and spun off the company's subsidiaries, including BASF, Hoechst and Bayer Corp. Bayer, famous for its aspirin, continued to develop Farben's chemical products. In 1953, Bayer refined the organophosphate formulations to create a nerve agent called azinphos methyl. Bayer patented the formula and called the product Guthion.

Bayer's patent on Guthion has expired, and several companies make generic versions of the insecticide. With Guthion, Bayer still controls about 90 percent of the azinphos methyl market in the United States and at least 80 percent worldwide.

Today, growers use 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's apple orchards. Guthion remains popular because it is cheap and kills codling moths for days longer than alternative sprays.

"It works better than anything else," Brandenburg said. "You can't argue with results."

A Question of Safety

Those results, however, have exacted a price.

Pesticides such as Guthion won government approval years ago because they had proved effective against bugs.  No one asked whether they were safe for humans and wildlife.

Guthion is a Class I pesticide, ranking it among the fastest killers. EPA records show that between the mid-1960s and 1982, investigators linked Guthion to at least 37 fish kills. In 1991, wildlife officials linked azinphos methyl to as many as 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.

As nerve agents, organophosphates enter the body through the skin, inhalation or on foods that we eat.

At low levels, organophosphates inhibit an enzyme called cholinesterase, which regulates the way nerves function.  When cholinesterase levels drop, the nervous system begins to fire erratically. 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.

Scientists used to believe that the ill effects of organophosphates faded when the pesticide left the body.  But in 1988, research began to point to longer-lasting effects. 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 pesticides. Although the workers said their supervisor acknowledged that Guthion had been sprayed the night before, written records indicated otherwise. State investigators concluded that the farm owner had not violated pesticide laws.

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.

Angulo figures that's the price of being exposed to pesticides through decades of field work.

"I know that anything that's not good for you," he said, "is taking a little bit of your life."

Benchmark study on children

The law that would change the world of pesticides was not written to protect workers, however. Instead, it resulted from a benchmark 1993 study on how pesticides might affect children.

In 1988, Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences, a nonpartisan group that advises the federal government, to sift through the growing worldwide body of research on pesticides' effects on kids.

Five years later the xx-member panel, citing 169 studies dating back to the 1960s, reached its conclusion: The EPA, the nation's pesticides cop, was doing a poor job of  protecting kids from pesticides.

In the world of pesticides, the conclusion was as sweeping as the surgeon general's 1965 declaration that cigarettes were harmful to people's health.

Like the surgeon general, however, the Academy of  Sciences had to draw on science that was suggestive,  rather than conclusive. Did the report show sick children in emergency rooms because they ate an apple dosed with a pesticide? No. Were there volumes of medical literature documenting brain damage from kids' ingesting bug killers in their juice? No. Were children with learning disabilities suddenly showing up in schools? No again.

In fact, the Academy of Sciences report acknowledged flat out that there was no concrete evidence children's diets were unhealthy -- only that the U.S. government had left wide open a door through which a serious risk to kids could saunter through.

The scientists cited precedent.

For decades, scientists had believed that people reacted the same way to toxic chemicals, regardless of their age. But as scientists began noticing learning disabilities in children, they suspected the old assumptions might be wrong.

Then, in the 1970s, one major study after another proved children were in fact far more sensitive to lead than adults.  Within a few years, scientists found they had dramatically underestimated the way lead hurts the developing brains of children.

This watershed research caused scientists to question what they knew about the way kids react to other toxic chemicals, including pesticides.

The academy's members looked at research dating back to 1963 that showed baby lab rats' brains were more susceptible than were adults' to organophosphates, the pesticide class that includes Guthion. The panel also looked at a 1976 accidental poisoning with methyl parathion, another organophosphate, of 79 people in Jamaica. Seventeen people died; children were the hardest hit.

In addition, researchers feared an ill-timed pesticide exposure could cause lasting damage to developing bodies. One 1997 study found that exposure to organophosphates when a child's brain is going through a growth spurt can affect its development.

Citing the history of research into lead, the report concluded that the EPA should play it safe when it comes to pesticides -- very safe.

The academy exhorted EPA not to wait for further evidence. The existing research was indicative enough, the panel said, that in the absence of evidence to the contrary the EPA should always assume children are at greater risk than adults from pesticides.

Specifically citing threats to children's neurological development from trace amounts of organophosphates, the panel called on the EPA to immediately raise standards to protect kids

The Clinton Administration took the academy report, "Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children," and  wrote a bill that would carry out many of its suggestions. But for the bill to pass, the old law would have to go.

Health Problems Ignored

For years, the federal government's ability to control pesticides for health reasons was limited to the Delaney clause, a 1958 law requiring that a pesticide be banned if it could cause cancer -- even if there was no evidence anyone would be exposed to harmful levels.

But the law ignored other health problems such as nerve and brain damage. Moreover, the weight of the law always favored farmers and growers. A pesticide could remain immune from government restrictions if growers could prove that the chemical's economic benefits outweighed its health risks.

Congress recognized the inadequacy of the Delaney clause but could never agree on a way to fix it. That changed after 1993, when the National Academy of Sciences report found that the EPA had no way of making sure children were not at risk of harm to the nervous systems in their developing bodies.

In response, in 1994, the Clinton administration offered up the Food Quality Protection Act. Under the sweeping bill, the EPA would have to cut the levels of pesticides considered safe for children and look at the total impact of pesticides on their diets.

The bill won cautious support from pesticide companies and farming groups.

Hopes on Capitol Hill dimmed for the bill, however, when Republicans won a landslide victory in 1994 and took control of the House and the Senate. The new Congress, run by House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, tied up the EPA's budget with riders to limit the agency's enforcement of pesticide laws, not give the agency more power.

After a year of running Congress, however, Republican leaders found that their efforts to change environmental laws had backfired. In early 1996, the federal government shut down, in part because Clinton refused to sign budget bills that he believed would weaken environmental laws. By the summer of 1996, polls showed voters turning against Congress' environmental agenda. GOP leaders desperately wanted a quick environmental victory, especially with the Republican National Convention -- and the nomination of Dole as the party's presidential candidate -- approaching in a matter of weeks.

They found one with pesticides.

Despite the GOP control of Congress, several EPA officials and Republican aides had been quietly working out the details on the Food Quality Protection Act, work that kept hope alive for the measure.

"A million people told us we would never get something like this through," said EPA Assistant Administrator Lynn Goldman, who helped lead the administration's effort to pass the bill. "I always thought, 'If you think this is the right thing to do, just keep plugging away. You never know when the stars are going to line up.' "

The stars aligned when GOP leaders grabbed the pesticide bill and ran with it. Never mind that the bill proposed the biggest change in pesticide policy in half a century, or that the bill came from the Clinton administration.

The speed of the bill's passage stunned even its original supporters, including Rep. Charles Stenholm of Texas, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee.

With the promise of good headlines and the chance to champion children's health, "both sides saw political implications in this bill," Stenholm said, adding that the timing came "for purposes dealing with the political problems Republicans were having in 1996. No question about that."

The bill zipped through the House unanimously.

Nor did anyone dissent when the Senate gaveled the bill  through. There wasn't time. Watching on C-SPAN, EPA officials clocked the debate in the Senate -- often called  the most deliberative body in the world -- at 26 seconds.

"Most people didn't know what was in it," Stenholm said.   "Not even me."

You can reach Brent Walth at 503-294-5072 or by e-mail at brentwalth@aol.com. You can reach Alex Pulaski at 503-294-5957 or by e-mail at alexpulaski@news.oregonian.com.

Well Lyndon, This obviously is no longer the "The Government of the People, By the People and For the People."  You can change the word "People to POISON".  Sad Lyndon, Sad!  The really sad thing is I grow better apples using my safe alternatives than these people do with POISON.  When will unregistered, safe and far more effective alternatives be "legal" to use in California rather than your "registered" POISONS?

Respectfully,  Stephen L. Tvedten