Health Experts Urge Tighter Pesticide Curbs

Federal procedures for regulating the level of pesticide residue allowed in the food supply should be tightened to reduce the exposure of infants and children to dangerous amounts of toxic chemicals, three environmental researchers told a Senate committee Wednesday.

Methods used by the Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration to determine “acceptable” levels of pesticide contamination fail to take into account several key factors such as the size of children and eating habits, the experts testified.

The three officials appeared before the Senate Labor and Human Relations Committee in support of a bill that would lower allowable pesticide residue levels and simplify procedures for removing unsafe products from the market.

Because children tend to eat fewer kinds of food, the produce they consume constitutes a larger percentage of their body weight, said Richard J. Jackson, chairman of the Sacramento-based American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Environmental Health.

“If a 17-pound baby eats one banana contaminated with (the pesticide) aldicarb sulfide, he is getting 30 times the legal limit” for chemical contamination, Jackson told the panel.

Moreover, children are typically exposed to high concentrations of potentially harmful chemicals during the first five years of life, when their bodies are developing and are sensitive to toxins, he added.

Jackson, who also heads the California Department of Health Services’ risk assessment office, argued that if federal guidelines are tightened to allow only as much pesticide residue as is now considered safe for children, all consumers would benefit.

But EPA and FDA officials appearing before the committee said that they oppose requiring government agencies to set stricter standards for pesticide residues in food, insisting that present guidelines are adequate. Also, tightening all of the approximately 8,000 “acceptable” pesticide residue guidelines would overburden the agencies, which already are hard-pressed to enforce current rules, the officials said.

Administrators of the agencies would prefer to wait to adjust regulatory procedures until after a National Academy of Sciences report on pesticide contamination in food has been issued, perhaps early this winter, said Linda J. Fisher, assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Pesticides and Toxic Substances.

The committee’s chairman, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), told the federal officials that their agencies had “lost all credibility” with the public and that he considers their response to discoveries during recent years about the effect of pesticides to be insufficient.

Kennedy said he is confident that Congress will pass the pending pesticide measure.