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Monday, 01/16/2017 1:19:43 PM

Monday, January 16, 2017 1:19:43 PM

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Poison Fruit
Dow Chemical Wants Farmers to Keep Using a Pesticide Linked to Autism and ADHD




By Sharon Lerner
January 14 2017, 8:06 a.m

On Mondays, Magda
and Amilcar Galindo take their daughter Eva to self-defense class. Eva is 12 but her trusting smile and arching pigtails make her look younger. Diagnosed with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, Eva doesn’t learn or behave like the typical 12-year-old. She struggles to make change, and she needs help with reading and social situations. Eva’s classmates are sometimes unkind to her, and Magda worries for her daughter’s feelings and her safety. So once a week, after they drive her from her middle school in Modesto, California, to her tutor in nearby Riverbank, the Galindos rush off to the gym where they cheer Eva on as she wrestles with a heavy bag and punches the air with her skinny arms.

The Galindos wish they could have protected their daughter from whatever originally caused her troubles, which began in infancy, when she screamed incessantly. As she got older, Eva was slow to talk and make friends. Nine years ago, when her pediatrician diagnosed her with autism, he told the Galindos that nobody really knew why children developed such problems. And in some ways, that is still true; both the causes of these neurodevelopmental conditions and their increase among American children remain mysterious.

But a study the family participated in when Eva was 3 has pointed to one possible culprit: chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide that was sprayed near their home when Magda was pregnant. At the time, the family was living in Salida, a small town in central California surrounded by fields of almonds, corn, and peaches. The Galindos could see the planted fields just down the street from their stucco house. And Magda could smell them from the patio where she spent much of her pregnancy. Sometimes the distinct essence of cow manure filled the air. At other times she sniffed the must of fertilizer. And there was a third odor, too — “the smell of the chemical,” said Galindo. “You can tell, it’s different from mulch and manure. When they sprayed, the smell was different.”

In 2014, the first and most comprehensive look at the environmental causes of autism and developmental delay, known as the CHARGE study, found that the nearby application of agricultural pesticides greatly increases the risk of autism. Women who lived less than a mile from fields where chlorpyrifos was sprayed during their second trimesters of pregnancy, as Magda did, had their chances of giving birth to an autistic child more than triple. And it was just one of dozens of recent studies that have linked even small amounts of fetal chlorpyrifos exposure to neurodevelopmental problems, including ADHD, intelligence deficits, and learning difficulties.

On November 10, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a groundbreaking report laying out the serious dangers of chlorpyrifos. The “Chlorpyrifos Revised Human Health Risk Assessment,” as it was called, laid out the evidence that the pesticide can cause intelligence deficits and attention, memory, and motor problems in children. According to the report, 1- and 2-year-old children risk exposures from food alone that are 14,000 percent above the level the agency now thinks is safe.

Dow, the giant chemical company that patented chlorpyrifos and still makes most of the products containing it, has consistently disputed the mounting scientific evidence that its blockbuster chemical harms children. But the government report made it clear that the EPA now accepts the independent science showing that the pesticide used to grow so much of our food is unsafe. The “pre-publication copy” of the report stated that “residues of chlorpyrifos on most individual food crops exceed the ‘reasonable certainty of no harm’ safety standard under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act,” which means, in simple terms, that any given sample of food may contain harmful levels of chlorpyrifos. In addition, estimated drinking water and non-drinking water exposures to the chemical also exceed safety standards. The next step was to finalize a chlorpyrifos ban.

Public health advocates have been calling on the EPA to ban the pesticide for years. Four months before the report came out, a group of 47 scientists and doctors with expertise in children’s brain development, including the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, issued a grave warning that toxic chemicals in the environment were increasing children’s risks of developing behavioral, cognitive, and social disorders and contributing to the rise in cases of autism and ADHD. The TENDR statement, as it was called, included a list of the worst neurotoxins and amounted to a desperate plea for immediate action. Organophosphate pesticides, the class of chemical to which chlorpyrifos belongs, was at the top of the list.

Yet when the EPA’s report was published indicating that the agency was finally taking action on chlorpyrifos, there was little rejoicing among the scientists and environmental advocates, because two days earlier, Donald Trump had won the presidential election.

Although the new risk assessment was the missing puzzle piece necessary to get chlorpyrifos out of the food chain and water supply, the law requires a 60-day comment period before such a decision can be finalized. Trump will be inaugurated three days after the comment period ends on January 17. The final deadline to incorporate the comments on the report is March 31, 2017, giving the new administration almost two months to derail the long-awaited regulation.

Chlorpyrifos is the “Coca-Cola of growers,” as one former staffer of California’s Office of Pesticides described it to me. “Everyone uses it out here.” Across the country, some 44,000 American farms collectively use between 6 million and 10 million pounds of chlorpyrifos each year on everything from corn, soybeans, asparagus, and peaches to strawberries, broccoli, cauliflower, onions, walnuts, and cranberries. Used on more than half of all apples and broccoli sold in the U.S., chlorpyrifos makes its way into the vast majority of American kitchens. The chemical has also been found in 15 percent of water samples taken around the country between 1991 and 2012 by the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water Quality Assessment Program.

Several farmers I spoke with at a Dow-sponsored citrus growers convention in Exeter, California, explained that they used Lorsban, one of Dow’s chlorpyrifos-containing products, because it is one of the most reliable and affordable products available to kill ants. The growers were also clearly hoping the pesticide, which kills some 400 different species, would help combat the Asian citrus psyllid, a sap-sucking bug that has been killing fruit trees around the country.

It’s a testament to both the deference the government has shown large companies and the lack of foresight about the consequences of spraying our food with toxic chemicals that the pesticide could become such a widely used tool. After all, there has never been much doubt that organophosphates harm people. German chemist Gerhard Schrader first documented the effects of the chemicals on the human nervous system while trying to develop pesticides to protect food for the Nazi war effort. As Schrader noted in 1936 after he and a colleague were severely sickened by a mere drop of organophosphate that landed on a lab bench near them, people who were exposed choked, shook, vomited, and sweated. Because exposure sometimes led to seizures, comas, and death, the discovery spawned the use of organophosphates as weapons and Schrader spent much of the war producing one of these first nerve agents, Tabun, at a secret Nazi lab.

More than two decades later, the environmental writer Rachel Carson described the effects of organophosphate pesticides, or organic phosphorus insecticides, as she called them, in terms eerily similar to Schrader’s in her 1962 bestseller, “Silent Spring”: “Their target is the nervous system, whether the victim is an insect or a warm-blooded animal. … The movements of the whole body become uncoordinated: tremors, muscular spasms, convulsions, and death quickly result.”

Even back then, the organophosphate pesticides that were supposed to focus their lethal power on cockroaches, ticks, ants, and termites were clearly triggering some of the same reactions in humans.

Chlorpyrifos — and for that matter the nerve agents Sarin and Tabun — work by blocking cholinesterase, an enzyme that breaks down the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. When cholinesterase doesn’t function correctly, the nervous system can go into overdrive, as nerves fire repeatedly without being shut off. Thus, between being sprayed with organophosphates and dying, cockroaches become hyperactive, hyperexcitable, and convulse. And, as Carson delicately described back in 1962, “honeybees become wildly agitated and bellicose.”

Though it was introduced to the market in 1965, the use of chlorpyrifos in farming only began to take off in the 1980s after another group of chemicals was phased out because of the health problems they caused. Carson, who died of cancer at age 56, just 18 months after the publication of “Silent Spring,” would no doubt have been dismayed to know that the banning of DDT, for which she is often credited, gave rise to the widespread use of organophosphates, such as chlorpyrifos. Back in 1962, she already saw the folly of swapping one neurotoxic chemical for another and noted that DDT was itself a replacement for the pesticide lead arsenate, which was abandoned because it too had caused health problems.

As the use of the pesticide rose, so did concerns about it. In 1988, Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into whether pesticides in children’s diets might be dangerous. The resulting report described a range of harms that pesticides can cause and noted that organophosphates have “subtle and long-lasting neurobehavioral impairments” in animals. When he was presenting the report to Congress in 1993, epidemiologist Philip Landrigan, who led the committee, warned that children were particularly vulnerable and called on Congress to apply more stringent pesticide standards.

The shorter-term dangers of the chemical were already apparent by 1996, when the annual number of chlorpyrifos poisonings, which can cause twitching, tremors, slurred speech, and even paralysis and death, reported to Poison Control Centers in the U.S. reached 7,000. It was also becoming clear that children were particularly sensitive to the pesticide, which was available in many household products used to kill cockroaches, termites, fleas, and other bugs.

Vicki Herb learned that soon after she brought her infant son, Joshua, to her West Virginia home from the hospital. Joshua Herb had been born healthy in 1990. But days later an exterminator came for a regularly scheduled visit and, not noticing Joshua asleep in his crib, sprayed chlorpyrifos on a nearby windowsill while the baby was napping. Within days, Joshua became partially paralyzed. Though the doctors who first saw him were dismissive of the idea, Vicki Herb believed her son had been poisoned by pesticides and in 1992 hired attorney Stuart Calwell to sue Dow. Since then the evidence of its dangers — particularly to children — have been mounting.

The Herbs’ case, along with several others that Calwell brought against Dow, did more than reveal how powerfully chlorpyrifos could affect children. It also brought to light how hard the company would work to protect its lucrative pesticide. It soon became clear that Dow’s strategy was to protect the public image of chlorpyrifos, heavily promoting the most positive view of its chemical and attacking research to the contrary.

During the discovery process of the Herb case, Calwell asked Dow’s lawyers to provide reports of adverse incidents tied to the chemical, which companies are required by law to file with the Environmental Protection Agency. Dow’s attorneys told him to get the reports directly from the EPA, according to Calwell. But a judge backed Calwell’s request, and Dow was forced to hand over 220 reports of adverse incidents, including poisonings, that it hadn’t filed with the agency. Calwell, who went on to litigate several cases of people exposed to chlorpyrifos, still remembers the day the Dow attorneys showed up in court holding the brown envelope full of the reports.

While Dow was keeping some of the disturbing information about its chemical from the public, its own research was showing chlorpyrifos to be much safer. While they were reassuring, the company’s studies were also “scientifically worthless,” according to neuroscientist and Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky. Calwell hired Sapolsky, an expert in the degeneration of nerve cells and a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, to review Dow’s own studies on the pesticide. After reading them, Sapolsky wrote to me in an email, he was “simply stunned at how bad the work was, how utterly awful every aspect of them was, from the scholarship to how the studies were conducted to how data were analyzed, to how everything was then interpreted.”

Eventually, Sapolsky enlisted a dozen postdoctoral neuroscientists at Stanford to systematically review as much of the company’s research on the pesticide as he could find. According to an unpublished report they produced in 2008-2009, all the Dow studies on chlorpyrifos they reviewed had some errors and 89 percent had errors that broke the basic rules of science. And these weren’t randomly distributed mistakes, according to Sapolsky. “Every one of the errors in the papers worked in Dow’s favor.” Thus tailored, the company’s studies “were all sterling testimonies to [the] utter safety of the stuff,” according to the neuroscientist.

Dow heavily promoted this rosy vision of chlorpyrifos. Even as it was spinning the science, collecting reports of poisoning incidents, and fending off legal responsibility for them, Dow — or Dowelanco, as it was called at the time — was also boasting about the safety of its pesticide. “The 20-plus years of chlorpyrifos use involving millions of applications confirm that there is not a single documented incident of significant adverse health effect resulting from proper use of Dursban insecticides,” announced one 1991 brochure under a picture of a woman with a small child on her lap. “Does Dursban have any long-term effects?” the brochure asked before supplying the answer: “No.”

Such assertions were, even back then, patently untrue, as the New York attorney general argued in a 1993 suit charging the company with false advertising. Citing the dangers of pesticides and the particular risks they posed to children, the settlement of the case required Dowelanco to immediately stop using such language to promote its chlorpyrifos-containing products, Dursban and Lorsban.

But Dow stuck to its claims of safety, even when they put the company at odds with the truth — and the law. Almost immediately after striking an agreement over the first suit from the New York attorney general, Dow went on to violate it with more falsely reassuring claims about chlorpyrifos, according to another suit from the AG’s office. Dow paid $2 million to settle that suit in 2003. For the AG’s office, this was a record fine. For Dow, it was perhaps a small price to pay for a decade’s worth of reassuring messaging.

The legal challenges cost the company only modestly. Dow settled several of the poisoning cases and reportedly paid Joshua Herb’s family $10 million, which helped cover Joshua’s round-the-clock care. And Calwell’s discovery that Dow had withheld critical information about its chemical led to the EPA fining the company $876,000 in 1995. But the company never admitted any wrongdoing, even in the case of Joshua Herb, who died as a teenager.


A view of the farms across the street from the neighborhood Eva Galindo grew up in, photographed on Dec. 29, 2016, in Salida, Calif. Photo: Shaun Lucas for The Intercept

Continued below:

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/14/dow-chemical-wants-farmers-to-keep-using-a-pesticide-linked-to-autism-and-adhd/







Dan

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