How Children Are Being Hurt By Poisonous Pesticide Clouds and What the Environmental Protection Agency Can Do To Help Them

Pesticide Protections? Partial at Best

Children face a greater risk from pesticides than adults. Their small bodies are more vulnerable to chemicals. And they typically spend more time than adults playing outdoors, crawling on pesticide-treated lawns or carpets, putting their hands into their mouths, or playing with pets treated with flea shampoo. For those reasons, Congress required the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1996 to set regulations by 2006 that protect children from pesticide exposure. Three years after its deadline passed, EPA's job is still only partially complete.

Double Standards, Forgotten Children

The agency has made some progress -- banning the use of some pesticides in the home and in parks. But the agency has failed to set standards protecting children from agricultural pesticide 'drift' -- or the poisonous clouds that form when pesticides are applied to nearby crops.

EPA has acknowledged the risk of pesticide drift, but still chose to go ahead with a double-standard: protecting urban and suburban areas, while leaving the children of farmworkers and other rural kids vulnerable to these poisonous pesticide clouds.

Nerve Gas Pesticide: A Tragic Example

After studying the risks posed to children by the widely used nerve-gas pesticide chlorpyrifos, EPA banned use of the pesticide in the home. But the agency went ahead and approved the pesticide for many dozens of farm uses without even assessing or guarding against the risks posed to the children who live, play or go to school near the fields where these poisons are sprayed.

EPA's decision carries real consequences for these children. Even very small doses of chlorpyrifos, initially developed in World War II by the Nazis, can be toxic to humans. The effects of this nerve gas pesticide have been likened to a chemically-induced flu: chest tightness, blurred vision, headaches, coughing and wheezing, weakness, nausea and vomiting, coma, seizures, and death.[1]  Exposure to this pesticide is also associated with chronic health impacts like asthma, developmental brain impairments during pregnancy, low birth weights, and interference with normal hormone function.[2]

Nowhere to Turn

From pesticide poisoning reports to scientific studies, the available information is unsettling: pesticides are ending up in the air and in people's bodies at unsafe levels. Schoolchildren have been poisoned from nearby sprayings. Surrounded by poisonous pesticide clouds and abandoned by EPA protections, rural children have nowhere to turn.

• In 1996, the California Air Resources Board found chlorpyrifos in 74 percent of air samples taken at elementary schools and other sites near orange fields in Tulare County, California.[3] 
• In 2000, chlorpyrifos applied to a lemon orchard in Ventura, California, drifted into a nearby elementary school.  Dozens of students and staff suffered symptoms of pesticide poisoning, and two children were removed because of poisoning symptoms.[4]
• In 2000, chlorpyrifos was detected in one-third of all ambient air samples at levels that sometimes exceeded what EPA considers safe for young children[5] in California's San Joaquin Valley: an area which is home to both intense agriculture and a rapidly growing population
• In spring 2006, air monitoring in the apple and grape producing regions of Washington detected chlorpyrifos in communities at levels above what EPA considers safe for young children.[6]
• A bio-monitoring study conducted in 2006 in Lindsay, California[7] found metabolized chlorpyrifos in 11 of 12 people participating in the study. Seven in 8 women who participated in the study had levels above what EPA considers safe for pregnant and nursing women.[8]

A Simple Solution

Fortunately, the solution is straightforward: EPA must fully evaluate the risks for all pesticides that have the potential to drift from agricultural sites and must limit pesticide uses that result in children being exposed to unsafe levels of pesticides. It's not just the right thing to do, it's the law. To protect children while it conducts the necessary studies and develops pesticide-specific protective measures, EPA should impose no-spray buffers around homes, schools, parks, and day care centers. At a minimum, these no-spray buffers should be required for two groups of widely used nerve toxins (organophosphates and carbamates) that cause acute poisonings when people are exposed to small amounts through drift. EPA has found that young children are already exposed to these pesticides at levels that are at and possibly exceed unsafe levels, without having considered the additional exposures from drift.

We can't let another growing season go by. Rural children deserve to be protected from poisonous pesticides. EPA needs to act.