Weedkiller Targeted By City Poses Risk

Subject: Weedkiller Targeted By City Poses Risk
Date:     Mon, 27 May 2002 13:03:01 -0400
From:      Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization:     Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)

To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide Regulation

Dear Mr. Helliker, I thought you might like to read an article dated: Sunday, May 26, 2002 from The Ottawa Citizen By Tom Spears entitled: Weedkiller Targeted By City Poses Risk.

The most common weedkiller on Canadian lawns and golf courses for the past 40 years, 2,4-D, is often absorbed into the semen of men who spray the pesticide, and is passed on to their wives during sex.

If the woman is pregnant, the fetus is also exposed to the pesticide, says a Health Canada study of 97 male Ontario farmers.

The department has no idea what effects this may have on the next generation, but it wants to know if the men's exposure could harm their children.

2,4-D is one of the main chemicals under scrutiny in the City of Ottawa's debate on lawn and garden pesticides.

It is an organochlorine that kills broad-leafed plants, but not grass. It's widely sold in Ottawa stores and is used by lawn care companies in brands such as Killex, Trillion and Par-3, often in a mixture with two other weedkillers, dicamba and mecoprop.

In broad-leafed plants such as dandelions, it acts like a growth hormone, causing a burst of uncontrolled growth that ultimately kills the dandelion while not affecting the grass.

The study, published in a research journal called Reproductive Toxicity, is by a team led by Health Canada researcher Tye Arbuckle of the Bureau of Reproductive and Child Health. She also teaches at Queen's University.

Health Canada calls the pesticide amounts "trace levels." About half the men had detectable levels of pesticide, and those who did averaged 20 to 30 parts per million in seminal fluid. Those men who showed pesticide in their semen generally also had it in their urine.

"Given the importance of semen as a potential carrier of chemicals posing reproductive hazards, it is crucial to understand the relationship between pesticide-handling practices, the presence and levels of pesticide residues in semen and the risk of adverse reproductive outcomes," the department adds in a summary of the study.

It says this study is the first to make some initial estimates of exposure and comparisons between pesticide levels in semen and urine. The Ontario farmers were not so bad compared with farmers in Argentina, whose 2,4-D levels were as much as 300 times higher than those of Ontario men. The men in Argentina had significant damage to their sperm cells.

But what about the far lower exposure levels in Canada? So far the effects, if any, are unknown. Most of the sperm damage once caused by 2,4-D-based pesticides was caused by dioxins that crept in as accidental contaminants, said Barbara Hales, a pharmacology professor at McGill University. Her field is how men's exposure to drugs or chemicals can affect their offspring.

But the industry says those early years of contaminated 2,4-D are long gone, and there's no dioxin in today's weedkiller. Still, Ms. Hales added, "it's always a concern," and so far the health evidence is inconclusive.

The fetus could only be exposed in its earliest embryonic stage, before it is protected by an amniotic sac, she said. And the amount of 2,4-D in seminal fluid "is really, really low."

The pesticide industry's 2,4-D task force says the chemical is utterly safe when used properly. It quotes a 1997 study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which concludes 2,4-D is "non-carcinogenic, non-teratogenic (does not cause birth defects) and non-mutagenic."

As well, it has the support of one of the study's co-authors, University of Guelph toxicologist Len Ritter, who wrote: "While we can also all agree that it would have been more comforting had we not detected any residue in semen, we can't conclude that the detected levels constitute any risk because ... the study simply detected that exposure had occurred, at extremely low levels that pushed our analytical capability to its limit and required special methodology to even be able to detect these extremely low levels."

Well Mr. Helliker, I would feel more comfortable if safe and effective alternatives were "legal" rather than "registered" POISONS but, at least the dioxin contamination is no longer in "today's" weed killer. It is a beginning.

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