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Children Face Exposure to Pesticides
STRATHMORE, Calif. - On Grandparents Day, Domitila Lemus accompanied her 8-year-old granddaughter to school. As the girls lined up behind Sunnyside Union Elementary, a foul mist drifted onto the playground from the adjacent orange groves, witnesses say. Lemus started coughing, and two children collapsed in spasms, vomiting on the blacktop.
She and the little girls have since recovered without apparent lasting effects. But an Associated Press investigation has found that over the past decade, hundreds, possibly thousands, of schoolchildren in California and other agricultural states have been exposed to farm chemicals linked to sickness, brain damage and birth defects. The family of at least one California teenager suspects pesticides caused her death.
There are no federal laws specifically against spraying near schools, and advocates say California and the seven other states that have laws or policies creating buffer zones around schools to protect them from pesticides don't do enough to enforce them.
"The regulations are inadequate. In the vast majority of cases, people who didn't follow the laws received at best a $400 fine," said Margaret Reeves, a scientist with the Pesticide Action Network, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco.
The pesticide industry says it is committed to safety, and regulators say they are doing their best to enforce the laws.
"Everyone wants to protect children," said California Department of Pesticide Regulation spokesman Glenn Brank. He said his agency is doing what it can to enforce the law with a shortage of agricultural inspectors.
In the Strathmore incident last November, grandparents said the spraying was being done less than 150 feet from the children. Tulare County authorities fined an unlicensed pest removal company $1,100 for spraying a restricted weed killer that morning. But no action was taken over what witnesses said happened to the children.
Because no one reported the incident as a case of pesticide drift, county agricultural inspectors never swabbed the jungle gym or took grass samples, making it impossible to establish whether pesticide had, in fact, drifted onto the playground.
The Environmental Protection Agency does not keep comprehensive national figures on students and teachers sickened by drifting pesticide.
In California, the No. 1 farm state and the one with the best records, there were 590 pesticide-related illnesses at schools from 1996 to 2005, according to figures given to the AP by the state. More than a third of those were due to pesticide drift, the figures show. Activists say that those numbers are low and that many cases are never even reported.
In California's long, flat interior, spraying season lasts seven months, from March through September. When citrus trees blossom and grapevines climb trellises, Lemus prays to the Virgin Mary that her granddaughter won't come home with her eyes watering and head pounding, unable to breathe.
Tulare County, where she lives, is one of the nation's most fertile farm regions, with more than half the schools within a quarter-mile of agricultural fields, according to the nonprofit Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment.
As suburbs push close to farmland, the rate of pesticide poisoning among children nationwide has risen in recent years, according to a 2005 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study found that 40 percent of all children sickened by pesticides at school were victims of drift - pesticide carried on the breeze.
Research on pregnant women exposed to common pesticides has suggested higher rates of premature birth, and poor neurological development and smaller head circumferences among their babies.
The effects on children of small, repeated exposures over a long period of time are unclear, said University of California, Berkeley epidemiologist Brenda Eskenazi.
But acute pesticide poisoning can cause nausea, blurred vision, an abnormally fast heart rate, paralysis and death.
Chrissy Garavito, a 15-year-old high school sophomore, died in Fontana in 1997 of a heart rhythm disturbance her mother believes was triggered by exposure to chemicals sprayed at the school. Authorities never confirmed that pesticides contributed to her death.
In 2001, pesticide poisoning nearly killed Elena Dominguez, then a sixth-grader in Wenatchee, Wash.
One day, after playing Frisbee during gym class across the street from an apple orchard, she passed out at her desk.
"She was in a stupor," said her mother, Cindy Dominguez. "She couldn't talk, her eyes were rolling back in her head."
Emergency room doctors dismissed Elena's abnormally fast heart rate as a symptom of dehydration, gave her intravenous fluids and sent her home. Three weeks later, it happened again.
"I was at a track meet and all of a sudden I felt really, really tired," said Elena, now 18. "I made it to the finish line and just fell over."
Investigators found her clothes were soaked in the pesticide Endosulfan I; it had been picked up from residue on the grass and absorbed into her bloodstream through her skin. Officials later found five other pesticides on school grounds and fined the apple grower for forging his applicator's license.
The Dominguez family sued the orchard owner and the Wenatchee school district, which established rules requiring students to stay inside after a spraying, among other things. State officials believe it is the only district in Washington with such limitations.
But keeping students inside may not be enough. Two years ago, 600 students and staff members were evacuated from an Edinburg, Texas, elementary school after pesticides drifted from a cotton field into the school's air conditioning system. Thirty-nine people developed nausea and headaches.
EPA officials say they have no real idea how often pesticides waft onto school grounds. The EPA must register pesticides before they are sold, but federal law does not restrict where they can be sprayed.
"We implement the laws that Congress gives us," said Ruth Allen, an EPA epidemiologist.
Once the EPA approves a product, federal law requires manufacturers to report any "unreasonable adverse effects on the environment of the pesticide" that their products cause. Activists say industry is essentially allowed to police itself.
CropLife America, a national organization representing suppliers of farm pesticides, said their use near schools is well-regulated.
"We're really committed to public safety," said spokeswoman Donna Uchida. "Any kind of use of a pesticide has a labeling requirement that is imposed to protect human health and the environment."
California has some of the strictest pesticide laws in the nation. Under state law, growers and pest control companies can be fined if pesticide drifts from a field and sickens people.
A 2002 state law allows county authorities to establish a no-spray buffer zone of a quarter-mile around schools. But Tulare County has not done so. State officials said they did not know how many counties have set up such buffer zones.
Lemus and environmentalists are pushing for pesticide-free zones throughout California.
"Why don't they tell us they'll spray beforehand so we can bring our children inside?" Lemus said.
© 2007 The Associated Press.
12 Comments so far
Show AllCalifornia should become an organic-only state.
http://www.dreamingearth.net
Our state of the art scientific equipment is very primitive compared with where it will be in another 25 years. Same can be said of most of our politicians (Dennis Kucinich is one of a few excerptions). The chemicals in our food, water, & air are to blame for much of the cancers that take so many lifes. The waste from nuclear plants causes much harm too.
Eventually we'll see the importance of consuming organic & minimally processed food. Eventually we'll see that space brothers from civilizations thousands of years ahead of ours have been cleaning up nuclear toxins here spilled from our nuclear power plants for several years. If it wasn't for their work, the earth would presently be uninhabitable.
Pesticides don't kill pests, they just make pesticide resistant pests. Antibiotics just make antibiotic resistant disease. Large scale agriculture just makes dust bowls, deserts and more mouths to feed.
Basically, to every solution there is a problem: life springs eternal.
Wherever we solve lifes problems, life expands to fill the gap.
Consider the lillies of the field. (Matthew 6:25-34)
the bottom line here is that this is simply another piece of evidence that is no safe way to use synthetic petro-chemical pesticides and additives on our food and soil and especially in our homes. no matter how much money the industry lobby spends to tell us otherwise.
This is just another example of how the US values most children. Wow, can you just imagine if this spraying were around schools in the upper income brackets....
This is almost as bad as the chem trails, they hit our valley today and it was down right weird. I keep my son in on days like this.... look up people.
I live in the San Joaquin Valley where Tulare County is located. I reside in a rural area, and God only knows how many pesticides I have breathed in, drank, etc. I attended a small grammar school with vineyards across the street, and at one point the school had to provide bottled water to drink. DBCP was found in the school's well. Spraying near rural Valley schools happens all the time, and has gone on as long as pesticides have been sprayed on Valley crops. It is absolutely appalling and disgusting.
I am not in favor of an organic only California. I am in favor of an organic United States. The spread of pesticides in the environment is well known, travelling through aquafers and the food chain. It all comes back to us and NO ONE is safe. Pesticides are not only linked to cancers, but there is some evidence that they impact neurological disorders, such as depression, anxiety and ADHD. The chemicals are made to act on the nervous systems of insects. How do we suppose ourselves not to be vulnerable to these same chemicals? How do we suppose they will not--if at a slower rate given the difference in mass--cause human beings serious harm? Of course, that is the simple connection. The one that gets the most attention. When we see a chemical does direct harm to us, it is a concern. But what is the sense of poisoning the insect world? Doesn't anyone feel a sense of panic when honey bees vanish in great numbers as they did in the Northeast this spring? At what point do we cause a catastrophic failure to the very intricate system of life on this planet and then notice that we are a (dependent) part of that system, not a superior observer?
The San Joaquin Valley is also at or near the top in ozone, nitrous oxide, and particulate pollution. The Sustainability Institute described in a report how US farmers are obligated to try every new synthetic input produced by the petro-chemical complex. The commodities mafia enforces this rule by lowering commodity prices to reflect expected cost savings from the latest petro-chemical input.
US small farmers are forced out of the game, and federal dumping of commodity surplus into global markets drives foreign small farmers off their land too.
This particular manifestation of systemic corruption in US markets is a "Vertical restraint" addressed in Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act but unenforced. A Vertical restraint is an interaction across levels of the production and distribution process, e.g. a back-scratching deal between the petro-chemical complex and the commodities mafia.
The Supreme Court has over the past 30 years set precedent using "Rule of Reason" to narrow the applicability of the antitrust laws, to encourage creative collusion for those who heed the call of crime.
The answer is individuals demanding clean food directly from their local small farmer and neighborhood gardener.
How long are we going to take this. I used to be a pacifist but now I think the only solution is to fight. What have we got to lose at this point. We know the answer is local small farmers and grow your own but what is the point if they are spraying next door. That's if you can get your hands on land. We should all have the right to own a home and be able to grow our own food. Is that to much too ask? Is this progress?
The inequity between rich and poor is too great. How much do they want? How long do we wait? Why do we wait? Do we really believe they care for us? The only power we have right now is as a consumer. But if we all ran out and bought organic tomorrow it would not feed us all.
How long do we wait and do nothing.
The pesticide and petrochemical companies (many agricultural chemicals have petroleum components) , their trade organizations,industries from related chemical pollution (plastics, cosmetics among others) have not only fought safety measures, they've fought the whole field of environmental medicine. BTW, ExxonMobil has funded global warming naysayers, too.
For example, in the European Community, 1000 chemicals have been banned- here 9 (nine).
Is it any wonder we don't have universal health care? Chemical companies' externality, their poisoning of people and the environment, would be exposed to the light of day. The American health care non-system is as bad as it is because of the profits from the causers and treaters of man-made diseases.
Take it form someone who has Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. Children are more sensitive to these environmetal pollutants and poisons. And older people show signs of becoming more sensitive to environmental problems because their bodies have accumulated environmental poisons.
You will all be interested to know that Canada is facing pressure to deregulate pesticide use.
The reason is that U.S. customers prefer their fruit with fewer pesticides, which represents an unfair trade advantage to Canada. Obviously, we can't have that.
The solution, it seems, is not to regulate pesticide use in the U.S. to give consumers the safer product it is claimed they want, but to force non-U.S. sources to deregulate if they want access to the American market. That way, U.S. consumers will not have the choice of buying lower-pesticide fruit.
I assume that lower pesticide use has costs that exceed the savings to be had by using less pesticide, or there would be no need to regulate as farms would use the least they could to save money. If so, then the lower-pesticide fruit should cost more, and in an actual 'free market', people would be free to pay the extra cost for the healthier fruit.
Apart from a desire to see an increase in environmental toxins for its own sake, it is difficult to see what the actual rationale might be.