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It’s About Time: EPA to Probe Atrazine Again
If Iowa hadn't exercised good judgment and supported Barack Obama in the caucuses nearly two years ago, I wouldn't have awakened in my Des Moines hotel last week and felt as grateful as I did.
For on the front page of the Des Moines Register last Thursday was the announcement that should have been made years ago. The Obama administration's Environmental Protection Agency is taking a U-turn and plans a yearlong investigation into the safety of the second most commonly used herbicide in the nation: atrazine.
While atrazine is sprayed on golf courses, roadsides and yards, its widest use is as a weed killer in agriculture, especially for cornfields. This is undoubtedly why the EPA has found elevated levels of atrazine in drinking water in corn-growing states like Iowa - and Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.
While Wisconsin is a corn-growing state, the state did not show such levels of atrazine in the drinking water. This is largely because almost two decades ago, Wisconsin lawmakers and regulators committed to regulate atrazine to protect groundwater. The state's maximum allowable application rates are half of the maximum federal rate, and the state imposes "atrazine prohibition areas" if the pesticide is found above certain levels in groundwater samples. The regulations were controversial at the time and remain so with some farmers, who have been forced to find alternative weed control methods.
For years, atrazine was understood to be a carcinogen, but more recent studies associate even very low levels of the herbicide with birth defects, low birth weight, and lower sperm counts in humans. It also has been found to cause hermaphroditism, or changes in sexual organs, among male amphibians. Syngenta, which manufactures the pesticide in the United States, conducted research intended to show that such amphibian sex changes were not linked to atrazine, and tried to suppress results when its own research validated these concerns.
It took some pressure to get even the Obama administration to move on this issue. In August, the Natural Resources Defense Council published results of its Freedom of Information Act request findings. Between 2003 and 2008, the EPA tested drinking water in 150 places in the nation; although it found at least 10 occasions where the annual average levels of atrazine exceeded the allowable level of 3 parts per billion, it failed to notify citizens of the hazard. In several communities, atrazine levels spiked during the spring planting period to many times the level currently considered safe - the drinking water standard.
Because the drinking water standard of 3 parts per billion was originally based on cancer and other research, the standard does not protect against potential hormone effects found with very low levels of the herbicide (as low as 0.1 parts per billion in some cases). The call for a review of current research is justified.
No doubt it is scary for farmers to contemplate more restrictions on this ubiquitous herbicide, but it should be even scarier to contemplate the federal agency NOT investigating the issue. After all, farmers and their families drink the water. Aside from the effects on wildlife, ecosystems and other people's health, farmers need reliable research to guide their applications to protect the health of their own families and rural communities.
So it's not good news that atrazine may be far more hazardous than most farmers have thought for years. But it is very good news that the Obama administration's Environmental Protection Agency has committed itself to letting facts, rather than political influence, inform what those hazards are and are not - for farmers and the rest of the nation.
5 Comments so far
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"For years, atrazine was understood to be a carcinogen, but more recent studies associate even very low levels of the herbicide with birth defects, low birth weight, and lower sperm counts in humans. It also has been found to cause hermaphroditism, or changes in sexual organs, among male amphibians."
I'm about halfway through a first reading of "Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals; An Endocrine Society Scientific Statement," (© 2009) some 50 pages of tough reading in which atrazine is discussed. This is really scary stuff.
In rural southeast Indiana where I live, I am surrounded by corn and beans and the harvest is fully underway. Everything looks normal until you observe more closely and realize that when you were a kid walking along a stream or lake frogs were inevitable but now they are almost completely GONE. This is true even in "groundwater protection" areas. Earlier this year I attempted to find crawdads under rocks and in several streams where I knew them to exist decades ago and used to catch them. I did not find a single one this year. I often hunt for mushrooms in state parks and I used to encounter salamanders and snakes and toads quite often. No longer! This year I've seen a single black snake.
I know some purists will object that this is anecdotal evidence, but that's how science starts, by observation, and that's why there is an annual bird count, for example.
Meanwhile, the author is correct in observing that farmers should be as concerned about this as everyone else. As the Endocrine Society's statement reports:
"The most compelling data for a link between prostate cancer and environmental factors outside of diet in humans comes from the ESTABLISHED OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD OF FARMING and increased prostate cancer rates (234-236)." (my emphasis)
I'm not saying it's the atrazine, since farmers in this country are living in a chemical soup of pesticides and herbicides, but more research into it should be opposed by nobody! The way things are going now it may soon be that the only way to see a frog is to google it! From a climate-controlled half-million-dollar condo in a gated community surrounded by electronic sensors...
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OleManRiver, I share your concerns.
The city where I lived in Illinois consistently dumped chemicals, one of which was Atrazine, into the pond our townhome backed up to.
Despite the board's complaints about not liking the way the algae "looked", I persuaded the city to use alternative methods such as aerators to keep the water moving.
Reading up on these carcinogenic, endocrine-disrupting chemicals and sharing that knowledge helps to make people aware so they can protect themselves, and nature, and hopefully, get involved in stopping the proliferation.
Thanks for sharing this information.
We're in a chemical, biological and radiological soup. Wonder why one of every 150 kids is autistic?
This stands to get worse quickly:
1. As population grows, gross chemical use increases though practice stays the same.
2. There's no sign of chem industries receding
3. Those of us who are old enough to show signs of decades of chem use grew up with far less chem saturation than young people have had at similar ages
4. Neither industry nor government much cares. Huffpost raised the alarm on Atrapine by itself. The EPA knew and ignored it.
Consequently --
Those in a position to do so might look at distilling water. Some friends are working on porcelain stills with the idea of distributing plans for local production, but they're early in the process.
It seems that something that has been of use for so many generations would have a pre-existing methodology, but I find none.
Any suggestions?
Bardamu writes:
"3. Those of us who are old enough to show signs of decades of chem use grew up with far less chem saturation than young people have had at similar ages"
Correct. This is a huge reason for the so-called "health care crisis" and probably one reason why some reports are out now suggesting that life-span has peaked, that our children will live shorter lives than we will (unless they kill us for our betrayal!). The Endocrine Society Report has a long discussion of chemical inputs and childhood as well as adult-onset obesity and early-onset diabetes, a massively costly (and profitable) disease. (Just one example...)
Bardamu writes:
"It seems that something that has been of use for so many generations would have a pre-existing methodology, but I find none.
Any suggestions?"
I must assume, in the context, that you mean atrazine. A few weeks ago I parked off the road in a blocked off driveway leading up to an abandoned two-story brick farm homestead and walked to a nearby stream to see if I could see any fish. As I was studying the creek an older man came out of a driveway on a golf cart and pulled up beside me and asked why I was there. I told him I was studying the stream to see if there were any fish, frogs, etc. because I was worried about atrazine. He said he's been using atrazine since the 1950s with favorable results. (If there is a local farmer who doesn't use it, nobody is advertising it.) I could see no fish. I later learned that this fellow is and has been for years high up in the local county government food chain.
My point here is that with regard to your question, atrazine was "grandfathered in" starting back in the 70s when the environmental movement really got started. Compared with other environmental toxins (DDT, PCBs, etc.) atrazine may be, by itself, relatively harmless and thus an old standby. I suspect that recent concerns go to (1) its ubiquity and (2) that it is now interacting with other more recently introduced pesticides/herbicides in a far more toxic form. These combinations are extremely complex and hard to research. Meanwhile, what I do know is that the dropoff in the local wild fish (not the stocked lakes), amphibian and reptile populations has been precipitous in the past decade.
Rachel Carson saw this happening a half century ago at a larger level and wrote "The Sea Around Us" and the blockbuster that really created the environmental movement, "Silent Spring." Today I'm finding literal Species Extinction at the local level. It is very alarming, in no small part because it is now understood pretty solidly that amphibian loss is the proverbial "canary in the coal mine." (Meanwhile, irony of ironies, because of protection laws and the banning of DDT, the eagles which were of such great concern to Carson are actually returning here. I saw none for many years while now I see them regularly, hovering on utility wires or atop poles, watching for rodents.)
I suspect that atrazine by itself is relatively benign, but something else has entered its environment with highly toxic results. It's called synergy. 1 + 1 = 3, or 4, or 5, depending on the chemical mix.
A final observation: the article reports atrazine as the second most common farm chemical but fails to report the first. My guess is that it is Monsanto's RoundUp, which is, unlike atrazine, dependent on (Monsanto) genetically-modified crops for its success, another huge can of worms. But don't bother using them for bait. You won't catch any fish, because they're mostly gone! And if you go into just about any corn field in these here parts hoping to dig up some worms, forget it!. This is monoculture. We don't want no f**kin species diversity here...
The EPA was created by Nixon as a clever scheme of what Herbert Marcuse coined as "repressive tolerance" while today even that carrot to the environmental movement is being debilitated as government (the Commonweal) is being drowned in the proverbial bathtub.
We are in very deep doo-doo.
Hope this helps.
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