from the Environmental Working Group (ewg.org)…

When consumers realize the magnitude of the health threat posed by pesticides, they naturally wonder: Doesn’t the government regulate these toxic chemicals? The answer is that, unfortunately for human and environmental health, government action has been far too slow. It is important to remember that the government said that highly toxic pesticides like DDT, chlordane, dursban and others were safe right up to the day the EPA banned them. And considering that we are talking about toxic chemicals whose effects on children’s health may be irreversible, no delay is justifiable.

The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 was designed to require protection of infants and children from pesticides. This law produced several notable achievements and fundamentally improved the health standards in pesticide law by requiring explicit protection of infants and children. But a lot remains to be done, especially in protecting human health from pesticide mixtures and chemicals that have endocrine disrupting properties. Not surprisingly, pesticide makers and agribusiness groups have been fighting strict application of the statute, particularly provisions that require an extra 10-fold level of protection for infants and children.

Ignorance Does Not Equal Safety
Even in the face of a growing body of evidence, pesticide manufacturers continue to defend their products, claiming that the amounts of pesticides on produce are not sufficient to elicit safety concerns. Yet, such statements are often made in the absence of actual data, since most safety tests done for regulatory agencies are not designed to discover whether low dose exposures to mixtures of pesticides and other toxic chemicals are safe, particularly during critical periods of development. In general, the government demands, and companies conduct, high dose studies designed to find gross, obvious toxic effects. In the absence of the appropriate tests at lower doses, pesticide and chemical manufacturers claim safety since the full effects of exposure to these mixtures of chemicals have not been conclusively demonstrated (or even studied).

The majority of the U.S. population has detectable concentrations of multiple pesticide residues in their bodies, as detected in biomonitoring studies by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The ubiquitous pesticide exposures are further compounded by exposure to hundreds of industrial chemicals that contaminate human bodies and are even found in the developing fetus. The full health effects of exposure to these mixtures of chemicals are not yet known; true public health protection would require a consideration of cumulative risks of exposure to multiple toxic chemicals at a time.

Enjoy this Article? Get More in our Weekly Newsletter

Sign up to receive Weekly Health Tips + Special Product Offers - FREE!
PLUS, Get a Coupon for $5 OFF at our Online Store just for signing up!

Want to see some of our past newsletters before signing up? Click here.