Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Archives

Fouling our nest. Archive in MCS.

Thanks, Misty.

So the chemical companies are still doing it!

This reminds me of an experience I had as a 13 year old child in about 1950:

I was born and raised on a big dairy farm. This was a few years after DDT
became available to farmers and Rachel Carson had not yet written her book.
The chemical company that made DDT called a county wide meeting of farmers
to demonstrate the total safety of their product "once and for all".

We all gathered at the foot of the wide entry stairs to the front entry of
the Grange Hall (where all big farmer meetings were held). It was a fine
summer evening so the meeting of such a large # of farmers as attended did
not have to crowd into the hall. When we were all gathered the chemical
company rep was introduced, standing on the steps, and he said that this
clear glass mug in his hand was filled with pure DDT. He had a few farmers
come up and smell it since, having used so much of the pure stuff, they
could recognize that that was what it really was. The rest of us could see
that the oily liquid had the color and consistency of pure DDT.

He had an assistant standing by who, the rep explained, was going to drink
the entire mug. And, by God, that is exactly what he did! He chugged it down
and handed the empty mug back to the rep. We waited for the guy to drop
dead. However, after about 5 minutes of pregnant pause and nothing
happened, the rep suggested that the alarmists were exactly that. We all
knew that it only took a couple of cups of the pure stuff, to a 50-100
gallon sprayer, for effective fly killing. This guy had just drunk a full
mug of the PURE STUFF and did not drop dead!

I often wondered, later, how much they had paid that guy to do that and
whether he was a disposable lackey who was replaced with another disposable
lackey for each demonstration. My dad's and my response to the demo was
that we were not nearly so careful where we sprayed DDT after that--and we
had not been very careful before. I can remember spraying the cows, their
feed, the barn, the milking parlor, milk storage area and environs while
becoming soaked to the skin myself. This was done as often as it was needed
to keep the cows and the barn fly free--at least once a week. It was
considered a mark of cleanliness to have a fly-free barn, since before DDT
no one had ever been able to do so.

We poor, chemically unsophisticated farmers had no idea that DDT was a
"cumulative poison" for humans that took 20-50 years to have it's deadly
effect. We would not have even known what a "cumulative poison" was. Of
course the chemical company rep knew!

And now this? I guess they figure: Why tinker with a an effective approach?

Walt Stoll, MD

----- Original Message -----
From:
To:
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 11:20 PM
Subject: [searching-alternatives] Pesticide Makers Attempt to Show EPA Their
Products Are Harmless

I thought this was interesting...
Misty
http://www.searching-alternatives.com

Pesticide Makers Attempt to Show EPA Their Products Are Harmless

Pesticide makers are hoping to persuade the EPA that if healthy
adults suffer no adverse effects after consuming a bit of pesticide,
then restrictions should be relaxed.

by Sharon Begley
The Wall Street Journal

The World Health Organization lists aldicarb, a pesticide, as
"extremely hazardous." It calls the pesticide dichiorvos "highly
hazard-ous"; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies it
as a "possible human carcinogen." Yet, if you are healthy and up
for an adven-ture, pesticide makers will pay you $500, $800, even
$1,500 to imbibe in or the other, either once or daily
for 18 days with your morning OJ.

The controversy over the scientific value and ethics of testing
pesticides on people is approaching, full boil, spurred by intense
pressure from the pesticide industry to loosen federal pol-icies and
by a law suit that manufacturers filed against the EPA to make it
accept data from such experiments. At last count, 14 studies of 11
pesticides have been sub-mitted since 1996.

The push for human testing was triggered by the 1996 Food
Quality Pro-tection Act. In exchange for allowing traces of car-
cinogenic pesticides to re-main on food (previously illegal), the
act requires the EPA to use an additional "safety factor" in setting
allowed residue levels, to protect children and fetuses. Pesticide
makers have that safety factor in their cross hairs, hoping to
persuade the EPA that if healthy adults suffer no adverse
effects after consuming a bit of pesticide, then restrictions should
be relaxed.

THE RECENT EXPERIMENTS dosing people with pesticides havenā?Tt
exactly covered themselves in glory, ethically speaking. In one
testing dichlorvos, in Scotland, many of the volunteers were cash-
strapped college students. The possibility of financial coercion
always is an ethical no-no. And in several places, the consent form
referred to dichlorvos as a "drug" and said it was used as a
medicine, misleading volunteers, as The Wall Street Journal
reported in 1998.

But leave aside ethics concerns for a mo-ment and focus on the
science, for unless an experiment on humans yields valuable data it
is by definition unethical. The argument in, favor is simple: "There
is no substitute for the knowledge gained from human volunteer
studies," as Monty Eberhart of Bayer CropScience, a major pesticide
maker, puts it.

True ,but only in the abstract. The current round of studies have
used small numbers (10 to 50, typically) of healthy adults, raising
doubts about the studies statistical power. "If you see an effect,
you can be reasonably confident in that finding even if you used
only 10 or 15 people," says toxicologist Michael Gallo of the
Environmen-tal and Occupational Health Sciences Institute in
Piscataway, N.J. "But to be confident that you have no
effect is much more difficult. You may just happen to have studied
10 people who are not sensitive to the compound. To prove a negative
you need many more people," probably hundreds.

The existing studies border on junk science for another reason: You
can't volunteer for them unless you're a healthy adult. Given this
"voluntarism bias," as epidemiologist Lynn Gold-man of Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, calls it, there are real doubts that a level
found to produce no adverse effects in such a group also is safe for
children, the ill and the elderly.

When you run a toxicology study, you don't ask, "So, what does this
chemical do, anyway?" You define an endpoint, such as, "How does
this chemical affect acetyl cholinesterase activity?" "This is the
basic fallacy of relying on these studies," says Dr. Goldman, a
former EPA pesticide official. The critical effects are things like
developmental neurotoxicity in children and fetuses, and those might
reflect chemical pathways unrelated to whatever is causing toxicity
in adults. Organophosphate pesticides have been found to alter gene
expression in the brains of fetal rats, for instance, yet are tested
for how they inhibit enzyme activity in adult red blood cells.

BUT LET'S SAY the endpoints are chosen properly, and the tests have
enough subjects to offer statistical power. Let's say, too, that the
studies adhere to ethical standards. Are they OK now? You still
have an inherent ethical problem. When people volunteer to
test the safety of drugs, "those Phase 1 trials are for things in-
tended to make people better," says bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn of the
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. "If the purpose is to allow
industry to get higher levels of pesticides into the environment,
then it's very questionable."

When an EPA Science Advisory Panel studied the acceptability of
experimenting with pesticides on people, it concluded in 2000 that
if the study is conducted with rigorous ethical controls, if there
is no other way to fill data gaps and if the goal is to protect
public health, then the EPA should consider it. "We felt that only
under the most extraordinary circumstances should human testing be
done," says toxicolo-gist Ronald Kendall of Texas Tech University in
Lubbock, who chaired the panel.

Interestingly, very few experiments would likely meet those
guidelines. As Prof. Gall, who is viewed as sympathetic to industry,
asks, "For existing pesticides, where we have a great deal of human
data from epidemiology and biomonitoring of farmworkers exposed to
pesti-cides, why do we need these studies?"

Hoping for scientific and political cover, the EPA has asked a panel
of the National Academy of Sciences to answer that. Its report is
expected late this year.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Does it concern anyone else that on top of everything else, the
study only lasts for 18 days? Can that really be representative of
a lifetime of ingesting pesticides?

Misty.
http://www.searching-alternatives.com

Comments?

Walt