Childproof/EPA Eases Up on Rat Poison
EDITORIAL / Star Tribune (Minneapolis) 22nov04
This time, nobody at the Environmental Protection Agency is coming forward to trumpet another milestone in regulatory reform. But it's easy to see why the agency prefers a "no comment" stance regarding its reversal of past practice on rat poison — the sort of government misstep that might leave anyone speechless.
In 1998, EPA began to require child-proofing of rat poisons that were manufactured in candy-like pastel pellets. Manufacturers were made to give the pellets a bitter taste and a bright dye — the former to discourage small children from eating more than a few of the pellets they might find in their apartment houses, parks or schools, the latter to alert grown-ups when poison had been consumed.
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In
2001, the Bush led EPA struck a deal with chemical companies to remove two
important rat poison regulations designed to protect the safety of
children. Specifically, the safety measures had required rat poisons
contain an ingredient that makes the candy-like pellets taste bitter to
kids and a dye to make it more obvious to adults when a child has ingested
the poison. As a result of no longer requiring those safety additives, the
nation is now seeing a record number of children poisoned by the toxic
pellets. This year more than 50,000 children were poisoned by
rodenticides, which is three times as many as were affected prior to the
removal of safety regulations. According to a recent article in the Los
Angeles Times, the EPA met five times behind closed doors with
representatives of the chemical industry, which ultimately resulted in the
removal of the safety regulations. Read more and sign petition... |
Some poison-makers — but not all — argued that these additives made their products less effective in killing rats, and that this concern should outweigh the risks of harm to "nontarget species," which included domestic pets as well as little kids. And in 2001, after giving the companies unusual access to its deliberations, EPA decided to abandon the child-proofing rules.
So far this year, poison-control centers have reported about 50,000 cases of children under 6 requiring medical treatment for accidental ingestion of rat poisons, whose effects can include internal bleeding, anemia and coma. That's three times as many as in the first full year of the childproofing requirements.
Of course, not all of those cases were terribly serious. Only several hundred of the children required hospitalization. And for this, perhaps, everyone should give thanks — but especially the inner-city poor, whose kids are most likely to mistake rat poison for a treat.
West Harlem Environmental Action, an activist group especially attuned to this sad reality, says that 57 percent of children hospitalized because of rat poison in New York state are black, and 26 percent are Latino — a frequency far out of proportion to their shares of the population (16 and 12 percent, respectively).
So the West Harlem group is suing to force the EPA to abandon this regulatory change. So is the National Resources Defense Council, a watchdog on the overall question of children's exposure to environmental toxins — like airborne mercury emissions from power plants, which are also getting more benevolent EPA treatment in the Bush administration.
The EPA has declined to discuss the issues raised in the lawsuit. Earlier in the year, though, agency officials pointed out that rats pose a health hazard to children too, and they touted the benefits of better warning labels and applicator instructions.
At the time of the mercury rollbacks, we thought they might take the cake for a cynical, business-driven recasting of sensible national policy. It seems we lacked imagination. To bow to business pressure and take the child-proofing out of rat poison seems the stuff of parody, something you might read in the Onion. But this is no joke.
source: http://www.startribune.com/stories/561/5095833.html 2dec04
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