I need to do something to stop stewing over the supreme court, so I'm just going to tell the story of how the endocrine disrupting pesticide #atrazine went from being on its last leg in the U.S. to being rubberstamped for the foreseeable future
No one is going to tell this story because there are a thousand other scandals happening right now and because it's super wonky.
Unlike a lot of the big environmental rollbacks that will hopefully be reversed after the election, this will likely fall under the radar
In 2016, under the Obama admin., EPA put out a devastating eco risk assessment of atrazine basically saying that its use has to be scaled back dramatically or there will be serious environmental consequences
In 50 years, this was the most hard-lined position EPA had taken
To be sure, the pesticide office would never ban atrazine - they are too captured by industry - but things looked different for the first time. And young children and vulnerable animals had hope
Then came the human health risk assessment in 2018. New admin., very different analysis.
EPA uses what are called "safety factors" to account for the inherent uncertainty in converting safety thresholds from mouse studies to what they would be for humans
These safety factors essentially lower the dose of atrazine that the EPA considers safe. The bigger the safety factor, the lower the safe dose. Super simple
For developmental toxins like atrazine, EPA typically applies a 1000-fold safety factor to take into account differences between mice and humans, chemical sensitivity differences between individuals, and the fact that young children are more vulnerable to effects than adults
In 2018, EPA decided to reduce the 1000-fold safety factor to 30-fold. It completely erased the 10-fold protection factor for small children and they used a model developed by Syngenta (the maker of atrazine) to justify reducing the interspecies safety factor by 3-fold
So instead of reducing the toxic dose in lab rats by 1000-fold to ensure the most vulnerable among us were protected - as it did in 2006 - it's now reduced only 30-fold
This was the first time in 50 years that protections had ever been erased for atrazine
This served an obvious purpose. A 1000-fold safety factor would have ensured that use of atrazine on grass and turf could no longer be approved. Agricultural applications would likewise have to be reduced considerably
But the new 30-fold SF lets things slide right through
And that great eco risk assessment done in 2016? Completely ignored and relegated to nothing more than an anomaly.
Despite recommending that allowable levels of atrazine in water be reduced 3-fold, the current approval allows it to increase by 50%
EPA didn't make a big, sweeping move. It was death by 1000-cuts in complex risk assessments that no one reads
These types of environmental rollbacks are a dime a dozen and in some ways are the most dangerous
They happen under the radar with no public scrutiny
Let's change that
Atrazine was one of the few pesticides that EPA had actually applied a mandated 10x safety factor for children after the Food Quality Protection Act was passed
The House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy just released an investigation into seresto that found the flea collar should be taken off the market
A lot of new info in the report that had not been reported on previously
Here’s the report. It takes you through the approval of the collar in 2012 to the present. It provides examples of EPA failing to stand up to an industry that feels so entitled, that even the mention of commonsense restrictions was met with derision
As someone who is not opposed to genetic engineering but often at odds with how it is currently used in agriculture, I think we need more nuanced looks at GMOs in the media.
In academia I genetically engineered non-pathogenic bacterial cells and human cells to better understand the genetic basis of chronic diseases like cancer. I understand how genetic engineering works and the promises it can hold, particularly in the biomedical field
It’s easy to find some small company that genuinely wants to better people’s nutrition through genetic engineering and use that as a poster child
But it's a disservice to not adequately explain “what is” instead of “what could be” in some fairytale world that does not exist
We’re in the middle of a public health crisis and the pesticide industry and USDA are working to weaken international guidance aimed at making sure lifesaving medicines still work in the future
How and why is the pesticide industry doing this? 👇
For starters, medically important antibiotics are used as pesticides to kill bacteria on crops. Fungicides, similar to antifungals used in humans, are also widely used as pesticides
The more you use them, the more likely it is that fungi or bacteria will become resistant
Increasingly, there is worry that the overuse of these medicines as pesticides can lead to antibiotic and antifungal resistance in human pathogens and cause these medicines to not work when our lives depend on it
There's a small bright spot in EPA’s atrazine re-approval
Thanks to a legal settlement by conservation groups, atrazine will be prohibited in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the North Mariana Islands
This is an incredible conservation win as these places are biodiversity hotspots. Use of atrazine will also be prohibited along roadsides, in forests and on X-mas trees in the continental U.S.
The harm from atrazine’s re-approval is immeasurable, but these areas will be spared
This is being billed by the EPA and industry as “voluntary” measures they are taking, but there is nothing voluntary about this.
They had to do this as the absolute minimum step of beginning to come into compliance with the Endangered Species Act.
The ecological risk assessment for #chlorpyrifos was released today. The career scientists at EPA found that invertebrates could be exposed to more than 8,600-fold more than the level known to harm them