Thread by @Nathan_Donley

Reading @EPA's press release on #atrazine today you might be fooled to think that the agency is actually increasing safeguards for one of the most harmful pesticides still in use

The complete opposite is true

biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-r…

This is the first time I am aware of that protections will actually be erased for atrazine.

Want to know more about this convoluted process that actually allows EPA to say that it is increasing protections for atrazine?

Come find out

While EPA is putting in place some very modest safeguards that have not been in place before, like nozzle requirements, a small reduction in use on turf and requirements for safety gear to be used, these weak measures only seem sufficient because other safeguards were gutted

Earlier in the risk assessment phase the EPA discarded safety precautions mandated under the Food Quality Protection Act that protect young children from pesticide exposures.

In doing so, the agency ignored multiple independent epidemiological studies finding that developing embryos and young children are at a high risk of harm from this pesticide.

The EPA also reduced the protection factor it uses to convert toxicity in rat and mouse studies to levels considered safe for humans. The more permissive benchmark proposed by the Trump EPA relies solely on a model developed by the primary manufacturer of atrazine, Syngenta.

By doing these things earlier, the EPA was able to make it seem like there was only a small amount of harm occurring to people - which allowed the agency to propose these pathetic mitigation measures and pretend that everything was ok

On the ecological side, the EPA makes scant mention that it is increasing the “concentration equivalent level of concern,” or CELOC, a regulatory threshold meant to protect aquatic ecosystems from pesticide pollution.

The current CELOC is a 60-day average concentration of 10 parts per billion of atrazine. The proposed action would raise that level to 15 parts per billion, nearly five times higher than the 3.4 parts per billion the EPA identified as safe in 2016.

Water concentrations that exceed the CELOC in any given year are subject to mitigation measures by the pesticide companies that are meant to bring the watershed back into compliance.

The EPA does not even mention this in its press release

Also, the EPA is proposing to scrap the atrazine monitoring program that was put in place in 2004 to monitor atrazine concentrations in drinking water.

I guess EPA feels that "If you don't like what you see, stop looking"

Our friends @ewg have used these data to find that atrazine spikes in water are negatively affecting the drinking water for millions of Americans across the country

ewg.org/release/hormon…

So, don't be fooled. This decision was straight up from Big Corn and the pesticide companies. @EPA just fell in line