News Coverage
Rat-Poison Makers Stall Safety Rules
EPA Had Drafted Regulations To Protect Children, Animals
Published April 14, 2004
Over the past six years, the pesticide industry has fought off or stalled two regulatory initiatives designed to protect children and wildlife from becoming unintended victims of rat poisons, and public health and environmental groups charge that the industry had unusual access to block federal action.
Proposed child safety regulations were abandoned after more than five years of study, and an assessment of the impact of rat poisons on wildlife has been bogged down for about three years. Along the way, the Environmental Protection Agency gave the industry a rare opportunity to revise regulatory language for 15 months after it was in near-final form.
In the interim, the critics say, the toll has grown. Poison-control centers reported last year that more than 15,000 children younger than 6 accidentally ingested rat poison, up from fewer than 11,000 a decade ago. Wildlife organizations, meanwhile, charge that dozens of endangered animals die every year after ingesting rat poison spread to protect crops.
Officials from industry groups and the EPA, which first proposed new child safety regulations in 1998, reject the accusation of undue influence, saying they reached a consensus that the child safety proposals would do more harm than good by making the rat poisons less effective against a creature responsible for spreading serious disease. Instead, the agency decided to require stronger labeling and precautionary statements.
Industry spokesmen also say they pointed out mistaken scientific assumptions that underpinned EPA's ecological assessment.
"If you hire a pest-control operator who's certified, licensed, trained and skilled in the use of rodent-control products, they pose virtually no risk to children or non-target species, or we wouldn't use them," said Bob Rosenberg, government affairs director for the National Pest Management Association. "The benefits of using rat-control products are enormous."
But EPA documents obtained by an environmental group indicate that the agency consulted heavily with the industry before seeking comment from opponents and that manufacturers got officials to tone down their assessment of the risks associated with rat poison.
The process has raised questions at the EPA. At one point during the preparation of an ecological risk assessment issued by the agency in 2002 to lay the groundwork for deciding how to proceed, one unidentified official wrote, "Concerned that for a year the broad stakeholder community has been shut out -- some are asking why."
Aaron Colangelo, a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who obtained the EPA's internal documents for the environmental advocacy group under a Freedom of Information Act request, said the documents highlight how the agency mishandled its effort to protect humans and animals.
"EPA's acquiescence to the demands of the rat poison industry is a disturbing example of the Bush administration EPA allowing industry literally to rewrite the rules," Colangelo said.
Jim Jones, director of the EPA's office of pesticide programs, disagreed. "We've got a very public process that allows everyone to participate in both the science and the agency's regulatory decision making," he said in an interview.
The fight over pesticides began in August 1998, when the EPA, under President Bill Clinton, published a document approving the use of rat poisons as long as the industry undertook certain precautions. The document concluded that rat poisons "pose a significant risk of accidental exposure to humans, particularly children, household pets, and non-target animals" but should remain on the market because they helped contain diseases rats and mice carry.
The agency, however, called for two new safeguards: adding an agent to make the poison taste more bitter and a dye that would make it more obvious if a child had ingested the poison.
In 2001 the agency reversed course, issuing a statement that it "came to a mutual agreement with the rodenticide [makers] to rescind the bittering agent and indicator dye requirements." According to one of the outside experts consulted by the EPA, Rose Ann G. Soloway, the associate director of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, the federal advisory panel she served on concluded that the proposed requirements were impractical, because they would make the poison less attractive to rats and damage household property.
Supporters of the two measures, however, point out that one company, Greensboro, N.C.-based Syngenta Crop Protection Inc., adds the bittering agent Bitrex to its Talon-G poison and says it has "the highest acceptance rate of any available rodenticide among both rats and mice."
"Some companies believe adding a bittering agents to their products may affect efficacy, but we have not found that to be the case," said John Hott, senior regulatory product manager at Syngenta. The bitter additive is used in rat poisons American companies sell in Australia because of that country's rules.
Even as the EPA was abandoning the idea of changing how rat poison is formulated, it was moving forward with an examination of the effects of the poison on wildlife. It conducted an ecological risk assessment to lay the groundwork for federal policies on rat poison. Because rat poison is a blood thinner, other animals occasionally bleed to death when they consume the poison directly or eat an animal that has been killed by it.
By September 2001, the agency was finalizing a document outlining the environmental risks inherent in nine rat poisons. It had just one stage of the procedure left: sending a copy of the report to the industry for an "error only" review that was supposed to take 30 days, giving manufacturers a chance to weigh in before the public did. (The agency is now collecting comments before issuing a final rule.)
Over the next 15 months, according to documents obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the agency did more than make technical corrections. At the behest of the industry, the EPA made broad changes to play down the dangers posed by rat poison, including rewriting a section describing the fatal poisoning of seven deer.
While refusing to meet with consumer and environmental groups, the agency held five closed-door meetings with members of the Rodenticide Registrants Task Force, whose members include Syngenta Crop Protection, Bell Laboratories Inc. and LiphaTech Inc.
EPA deleted language the industry objected to: At one point a staffer wrote in an e-mail that there would be "no references to mitigation and no words/phrases etc. that could evoke emotion on the part of" the industry task force. The document initially said that seven deer in New York state "have been poisoned by anticoagulants. . . . The incidents depict how toxic rodenticide baits can be even to large animals"; at the industry's suggestion this was amended to "Seven deer in New York state tested positive for anticoagulants," with the second phrase dropped altogether.
Jones, at the EPA, said the industry made a compelling case that the number of accidental poisonings was small considering the large amounts of the poisons in use.
"They had raised some very legitimate scientific issues that convinced us we had to go back and do more work on our risk assessment," Jones said.
Lynn L. Bergeson, a lawyer for the industry task force, said, "Some of the information EPA was relying on was outdated, incorrect, or the agency was simply mistaken."
Although the EPA continues to work on its risks and benefits assessment, health and wildlife advocates are angry that after five years of work, nothing has changed.
Michael Shannon, a toxicologist at the Massachusetts and Rhode Island Regional Center for Poison Control and Prevention, said he regularly treats children who ingest rat poison.
"It's just a disaster waiting to happen," Shannon said. "There's nothing to keep a child from getting their hands on it."
And Gerald W. Winegrad, vice president of policy at the American Bird Conservancy, noted that more than 250 animals have died after ingesting rat poison. They include endangered San Joaquin Valley kit foxes of California, golden eagles, great horned owls, mountain lions and bobcats.
"It's a travesty," he said.