Malathion Can Drift, Study Says : Medfly: A 1981 state study contradicts officials who contend that the malathion hits its mark and doesn’t drift outside the target area.

A 1981 state Medfly study found that malathion-laden helicopters often miss their mark and spray pesticide over untargeted areas, leaving up to a quarter of the mixture outside the intended spray boundaries.

The finding, which monitoring officials said they expect to see repeated in current tests in Southern California, contradicts repeated assurances from state and local officials that they have seen no malathion drift in their aerial attack on the Mediterranean fruit fly.

But even as officials sought to explain the apparent discrepancy, they met with escalated attacks from malathion critics over the attempts to protect local agriculture from the Medfly by spraying 383 square miles of Southern California with pesticide.

The Los Angeles City Council, following the lead of three Orange County cities, voted unanimously Tuesday to go to court to try to halt the program.

Meanwhile, the Huntington Beach City Council criticized acting state Agriculture Director Henry Voss for “demonstrating insensitivity to the concerns of urban Californians” and unanimously passed a resolution urging the state Senate Rules Committee not to approve him today for full-time appointment to that post.

The state Food and Agriculture Department study of spray patterns during Northern California’s Medfly infestation in 1980-82 concluded that initial efforts there to exclude hospitals, nursing homes and other potentially sensitive areas were “only minimally successful.”

Some of these untargeted areas in and out of the spray boundaries were hit with direct spray and soaked with concentrations of malathion near or equal to targeted areas, the study found. Smaller, undetectable levels of the mixture--as much as 24% of the total sprayed--”could easily extend miles beyond” the targeted spray zones, the study concluded.

State researchers who studied the spray monitorings within 250 miles of Santa Clara County concluded that malathion and its potentially more harmful oxidation product--malaoxin--were detected in “low concentrations in both water and air,” amounts that state officials say pose no risk.

The report added, “Excessive levels of malathion and malaozon were found only in water from rain runoff.” The levels were high enough in one instance, a state official added Tuesday, to kill several hundred fish in a shallow body of water in Santa Clara County.

Faced with a growing core of critics over the Southern California sprayings, state agriculture officials have agreed to monitor local water and air samples.

The tests were started last week. But since the spraying methods have not changed substantially since 1981, monitoring officials say they are confident about the results.

“We’re not going to find anything different,” said Ronald Oshima, branch chief of the environmental monitoring and pest-management division in the state agriculture department.

“The problem of drift is one we’re simply going to have to live with,” Oshima said. “There’s no way to control that . . . other than just to stop the spraying.”

Some other state agriculture officials with the Medfly Project said that they were unaware of the 1981 findings. They said they had taken precautions to avoid spraying on windy nights and, in the absence of such conditions, were under the impression that there was no drift.

Some residents who have called Medfly hot lines around the Southland to complain that they saw helicopters overhead--even though they were outside the spray zone--were told not to worry because the helicopters were not spraying.

Officials have also said that such tourist attractions as the Los Alamitos Race Course and Disneyland--sitting just north of a 36-square-mile spray zone around Garden Grove--would not be affected.

But the study of the earlier spraying said that “aircraft either could not shut off in time or occasionally did not identify some flagged areas” that were not supposed to be sprayed.

State officials asserted that the point is moot because they believe low dosages of malathion now used pose no health threat.

“If the product is safe, some drift outside is not really a concern,” said Isi Siddiqui, the assistant director of the state agriculture department.

Others viewed the study’s findings differently.

“I consider that extremely significant,” said Arthur DeLaLoza, the Huntington Beach assistant city attorney who has worked on the city’s legal attempts to halt the sprayings. “It raises a whole host of questions about whether the state is even following its own action plan.”

DeLaLoza said that residents have a right to expect notification of sprayings, and that residents outside spray boundaries may have been misled into thinking they would not be affected.

He and other malathion critics said the discrepancy between the state’s assurances and the findings of its own study appears particularly significant in light of other recent disclosures.

It was revealed last week that state officials have been cautioning local doctors about eye irritation, nausea and other possible effects from malathion exposure, although they had told the public that the spray mixture poses “no health hazards.”