In August, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced an agreement with global chemical manufacturer Bayer CropScience to end the use of the pesticide aldicarb in the United States.
The EPA’s press release notes that the pesticide “no longer meets rigorous U.S. food safety standards”, and may pose unnecessary dietary risks, especially to infants and children if treated food is not washed properly prior to consumption.
The first crops to be aldicarb-free will be citrus and potatoes. Bayer will also adopt risk mitigation strategies to prevent aldicarb from entering groundwater. Finally, Bayer will voluntarily stop making aldicarb by December 31, 2014, and end sales of the product by December 31, 2016, with all remaining uses terminated by August of 2018.
The ‘remaining uses’ clause raised my eyebrows, as it probably will yours. If they stop making it, what other uses are there? Simple. The chemical might be stored in Bayer’s factory, or in farmer’s sheds, and still be used (on cotton, peanuts, dry beans, soybeans, sugar beets and sweet potatoes) from 2015 to 2018.
The EPA also says that it will restrict the levels of aldicarb residues currently allowed in foods. This says nothing about cotton, which never reaches grocer’s shelves but nonetheless gets significant doses of aldicarb – certainly enough to leach into ground and well water.
So how did this ban come about, other than the fact that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is the first in several decades to take her job seriously? Suffice to say it’s been a long time coming, beginning in 1979, when aldicarb reached detectible levels in 4,000 of 8,404 wells tested in Long Island, New York.
The finding was a surprise, since all previous laboratory and field studies had concluded that the pesticide could not, and therefore would not, reach groundwater aquifers. Aldicarb is not considered carcinogenic, mutagenic (causing mutations), or teratogenic (altering the growth and development of the fetus).
While federal and local EPA officials said, “whoops”, testing showed that 52 percent of the wells had between 8 and 30 parts-per-billion (ppb) of aldicarb, while another 32 percent had between 31 and 75 ppb, and a final 16 percent had more than 75 ppb. This, even though state guidelines set the upper limit at 7 ppb.
According to one source, aldicarb is a “highly toxic” carbamate ester that causes cholinesterase inhibition. In other words, it causes synapses in the brain to “misfire”. This erratic brain activity occurs all the way up the food chain, from bugs to humans, and takes place whether the exposure is through inhalation, ingestion, or through the skin, eyes and mucous membranes.
The result is rapid and uncontrollable twitching of the extremities, paralyzed lung function, convulsions, and in some cases even death. Symptoms of milder exposure include nausea, vomiting, blurred vision, dyspnea, perspiration, headache, and temporary paralysis of the arms and legs which lasted up to 12 hours. There are supposedly no residual effects.
Sold under the trade name Temik, the chemical was responsible for the worst case of mass chemical poisoning in the U.S. On July 4, 1985, 2,000 people became ill from eating California watermelons. The first to sicken were in Oakland. Next came Oregon. The toxic watermelons even reached out to Canada. In all, 17 people were hospitalized, six died, and two fetuses were stillborn.
Also in 1985, 135 people from the Union Carbide aldicarb plant in Institute, West Virginia were hospitalized. This was one year after a chemical used in aldicarb manufacture (methyl isocyanate) was released from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killing 4,000 and injuring another 200,000.
In 1989, 318 sheep died from aldicarb soil treatments, 288 almost immediately and the other 30 within three weeks. Of 1,300 sheep in adjacent field, lambs born the next season had an unusually high frequency of limb and digestive problems. The six men tending the sheep continued to seek medical care for various symptoms for the next three years, in spite of the fact that Bayer insists aldicarb has no lingering health effects.
One wonders why it took a quarter century to ban the pesticide. According to Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Managing Director Steve Scholl-Buckwald, the product should never have been permitted in the first place, since by the mid-1980s there was more than adequate proof that it was extremely toxic. Aldicarb was, in fact, one of the first of the so-called “dirty dozen” pesticides that PAN targeted for removal.
I can understand giving manufacturers adequate time to phase out product lines, and pesticide users time to find a viable alternative. And I’m more than happy to see aldicarb on its way out. Buy why does it take eight more years to make it happen? Ms. Jackson, I though you were tougher than that.
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