By the age of 1, the average child has been exposed to more risk of cancer from pesticides than the Environmental Protection Agency says she should get over her entire life, calculates Richard Wiles of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group in a study released last week.
Legal residues-amounts of pesticides allowed to remain in food-are calculated with adults in mind. If a child consumed as much pesticides as the EPA permits, the risk of cancer could be hundreds of times what EPA deems acceptable.
All this and more will make headlines this week with the release of a report from the National Academy of Sciences on “Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children.” Three years late and more closely held than missile codes, the $1.1 million report by a 14-member panel is expected to conclude that children are more vulnerable to carcinogenic and neurotoxic pesticides than adults are, and to slam the EPA for failing to protect children. Earlier this year panel member Dr. Richard Jackson of the California health department told PBS’s “Frontline” that permitted residues are “100 to 500 times” what is safe for children. Though less than I percent of produce tested has more pesticides on it or in it than is legal, “That’s like setting the speed limit at 7,000 mph and congratulating yourself that no one has broken it,” Jackson said.
_B_Strange eaters:_b_One reason children are particularly sensitive is that the same amount of a pesticide has a greater effect on a small body than a large one. Also, children are strange eaters: dining on nothing but cherries one day, they may consume 10 times more of a food than EPA assumed when it set residue limits. Kids are also more sensitive because chemicals may initiate cancer more readily in the rapidly dividing cells of children than in the quiescent cells of adults. And neurotoxins can penetrate a child’s relatively porous blood-brain barrier, wreaking more damage on a nervous system still getting wired up than on one already formed.
The NAS is expected to call on the government to ratchet down allowable pesticide residues. “We’re going to endorse the scientific recommendations from the Academy,” promises Jeff Nedelman of the Grocery Manufacturers of America. And in a pre-emptive strike meant to stave off another Alartype scare, the Clinton administration said Friday that while it “stand[s] behind the safety of our food supply,” it will “intensify [the] effort to reduce the use of higher-risk pesticides” by promoting alternatives to chemical-intensive farming. Although the agriculture and chemical industries argue that limiting pesticide use threatens the food supply, in fact “alternative agriculture” is making headway. Sweden has cut pesticide use 50 percent over the last few years with virtually no decrease in the harvest. Campbell Soup Co. uses no pesticides at all on tomatoes grown in Mexico; they reap as much fruit as ever. In 1989 the NAS concluded that farmers could slash their use of pesticides (for which they spent $6.1 billion in 1991) with little effect on yield or costs.
The administration vowed last week to formulate legislation based on the NAS and Environmental Working Group reports. “The administration for the first time has made a commitment to a real reduction in the use of pesticides,” EPA Administrator Carol Browner told NEWSWEEK. Prohibiting the use of only 10 pesticides (out of the 70 carcinogens) from 15 foods could cut cancer risk 80 percent, according to an earlier NAS model. By protecting children from pesticides in just the years before kindergarten, we would slash their total lifetime risk of cancer from these chemicals.
