News Coverage
Risk to Children Was Driving Force Behind New Pesticide Law
Published February 1, 2000
The law that sought to change the world of pesticides 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. The academy asked its National Research Council to carry out the work.
It took five years, but 14 experts appointed by the council, 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 the chemicals. 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 panel 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. A 1997 study found that exposure to organophosphates when a child's brain is going through a growth spurt can affect its development.
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. 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.
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.
That proposal would set a much tougher standard than the existing 1958 law, which banned any pesticide that could cause cancer even if there was no evidence anyone would be exposed to harmful levels but balanced all other risks against the economic benefits to farmers and growers.
Prospects for the Clinton administration bill dimmed when Republicans captured control of the House and the Senate in 1994. The new Congress tied up the EPA's budget with riders to limit the agency's enforcement of pesticide laws, not give the agency more power.
The Republicans' environmental policies backfired, however. By the summer of 1996, polls showed voters turning against Congress' environmental agenda. GOP leaders, desperate for a quick environmental victory, grabbed the food quality protection bill and ran with it. Never mind that the bill proposed the biggest change in pesticide policy in half a century, or that it came from the Clinton administration.
The speed of the bill's passage stunned even a powerful co-sponsor, Rep. Charles Stenholm of Texas, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee.
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."
Overnight, virtually everything the agency knew about policing pesticides had changed: First, farmers could no longer argue, as they could in the past, that the economic harm of banning a pesticide outweighed the health benefits. Under the new law, if a pesticide proved too risky especially to kids it had to go, regardless of the cost to farmers.
Second, the agency was now required to add an extra layer of protection for children in its calculations. The new layer assumed that children could safely withstand only one-tenth the pesticide exposure that adults could.
EPA calculates a safe pesticide dose for humans as one-hundredth of the amount that begins to cause a reaction in lab animals. The new rule for children meant that dose had to be cut in 10 again reducing the allowable amount to just one-thousandth of the amount a rat can stand.