Pesticide Is Poison; Who Needs a Study?

In 1989, the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council was accused of manipulating CBS’s “60 Minutes” into hyping the dangers of Alar, a chemical sprayed on apples to regulate growth and enhance color. The immediate result of that broadcast: Supermarkets stripped produce aisles of McIntoshes and Winesaps; traditional student bribes vanished from teachers’ desks and orchard owners got bruised, suffering losses in the millions.

Uniroyal Chemical was forced to take the product off the market even though, growers argued, it posed no health risk. Since then, the Alar scare has become a media metaphor for Chicken Little environmentalism and / or government regulation run amok.

Do we have another “Silent Spring” playing out in Ventura County, where agriculture is a billion-dollar-a-year industry? Community and Children’s Advocates Against Pesticide Poisoning, an action group of Ventura County concerned parents, teachers and residents, fears that aerially sprayed pesticides and schoolkids make for a deadly combination.

I spoke with three teachers who are not only sick and tired, but are sick and tired of the powers that be pretending that pesticides are not a problem. They are primarily fighting for the children and asked me to put a human face on arguably anecdotal data. They contend that nearly half of their students are dependent on asthma inhalers. Many of their students suffer respiratory distress after mild exertion. Kids complain about flu-like symptoms, which pesticide poisoning convincingly mimics.

A National Cancer Institute review of studies turned up nine that showed a statistically significant increase in brain cancer correlated with pesticide exposure. Researchers have also found correlations between pesticides and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, soft-tissue sarcoma and Hodgkin’s disease.

Marsha Cummings fears for her two daughters, who attend the same high school as Beth Graham, the 15-year-old who succumbed to leukemia Oct. 25. Rio Mesa High School is listed by the Washington-based Safe Schools Coalition, as the third most at-risk school for pesticide exposure in the state.

Are these teachers overreacting, as critics contend? “When you think about environmental hazards, kids are just different from adults,” Richard Jackson, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, told the Atlanta Journal. Children eat, drink and breathe three times as much as an adult in proportion to their weight, Jackson said. Further, they tend to be more aggressively and intimately involved in their environment.

Raspy-voiced John Cort (who has never smoked) said that during the 28 years he taught physical education, he has undergone 11 throat operations for precancerous polyps. He added that another teacher at Rio Del Valle Junior High lost his larynx and that many of his colleagues are plagued by sore throats and respiratory ailments.

Janet Lapins considered herself in great shape before being exposed to pesticide drift while teaching special education at Rio Mesa. She became so debilitated that she “couldn’t walk 50 feet” and is convinced that her recent struggle with cancer is the result of exposure to the carcinogenic fungicide captan. When she turned to her district superintendent for support, she says she got nothing. She now teaches elsewhere.

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Just last month, middle school teacher Patrick Justus, who suffers from sleep disorders and respiratory problems, grabbed his vice principal and hunted down a helicopter pilot fogging a nearby field. The flier had followed the letter of the law, finishing up a good five minutes before the first bell rang. Justus asked him if he thought the schoolyard was safe for his own wife and baby. The helicopter jockey, who did have a wife and baby, couldn’t come up with an answer.

Have state regulations been consistently enforced in Ventura County? A state Department of Pesticide Regulation report criticized Agriculture Commissioner Earl McPhail’s office. County Supervisors have increased funding for new positions, including a deputy commissioner who will concentrate on pesticide enforcement full time.

What is not regulated are the pesticide cocktails that, in combination, yield unascertained outcomes. In fact, the whole process by which chemicals are regulated is topsy-turvy. Unlike medications, pesticides are judged safe until the Environmental Protection Agency proves them otherwise. Meanwhile, children are getting sick. Some are dying.

The Oxnard City Council recently gave thumbs up to annexing a 14-acre parcel for a badly needed new elementary school, to be called Juan Lagunas Soria School. The only hang-up is that this campus would be girded on three sides by cropland. Although real estate near rural areas is generally cheaper, is the savings worth exposing school children to pesticides?

And last week the Environmental Defense Center sued the school district to obtain a draft study that allegedly shows students attending Soria School would be exposed to high levels of pesticides including methyl bromide, findings not included in the project’s environmental impact report.

With respect to Alar, a panicked public confused imminent danger with long-term cumulative threat. As a result, most of us never learned that the EPA officially banned Alar as a carcinogen and vindicated its opponents.

Why wait for some study to prove what we already know--isn’t pesticide poison?