The standards used to determine whether pesticide residues on produce are unacceptable are set by the Environmental Protection Agency, based on laboratory tests of the active ingredients in pesticides.
The EPA has said that after it conducts tests for both “short-term (acute) and long-term (chronic) toxicity,” it comes up with a dose at which no adverse effects occur. This dose, it goes on to say, “is divided by an uncertainty or ‘safety’ factor (usually 100) to account for the uncertainty of extrapo–lating from laboratory animals to humans and for individual human differences in sensitivity. The resulting figure, termed the Reference Dose, is the level of exposure that EPA judges an individual could be exposed to on a daily basis for a lifetime with mini–mal probability of experiencing any adverse effect. For cancer risks, EPA evaluates multi-year tests of laboratory animals to estimate levels unlikely to pose more than a negligible risk. Tolerances [allowable levels of pesticides on food] are only approved if the expected exposure is below those health concern levels.”
This formula has come under fire, inasmuch as it does not take into account multiple paths of exposure (such as from household pesticide use or contaminated drinking water), does not consider the endocrine disrupting potential that many of the most toxic pesticides (including organochlorines) are thought to pose, and does not consider the disproportionate effect that pesticide exposure has on infants and growing children.
Even the EPA has acknowledged that “children are at greater risk of pesticide exposure than most adults. Pound for pound of body weight, children not only breathe more, eat more, and have a more rapid metabolism than adults, but they play on the floor and lawn where pesticides are commonly applied.”
To address these concerns, in 1996 Congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), which requires the EPA to conduct new safety reviews of 470 active ingredients used on food crops (more than 9,000 specific tolerances altogether), with a special eye to ensuring that pesticides in foods do not harm infants, children, and highly exposed populations (including people living near farms). At the same time, Congress required the EPA to reduce the amount of acceptable pesticide residues to a tenth of present levels (unless reliable data indicate an even lower limit should be established).
By August 3, 1999, the agency was to have completed review of its limits for organophosphate pesticides (a class that includes heptachlor).
The agency is not close to meeting this schedule. In August, a coalition of environmental, health, consumer, and farm worker groups sued the EPA over its failure to comply with the act.
Meanwhile, estimates of the amount of pesticide exposure children receive in the United States were published in a February 1999 report, “How ‘Bout Them Apples?” published by the Environmental Working Group. The study found that 20 million children ages five and under eat an average of eight pesticides a day (2,900 pesticide exposures per child per year from food alone). Each day, more than 600,000 children ages one through five ingest a dose of neurotoxic organophosphate insecticides deemed unsafe by the government.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 10, Number 6 December 1999
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