Even the unborn are threatened: 

Experts say embryos and children are suffering the worst effects of pesticides.

Donna Jacobs / Saskatchewan Eco Network
Taken from "The Ottawa Citizen", 19jun00

They talked parts per million. They talked diseases. They talked business. They talked politics. But amid hundreds of hours of testimony, perhaps the most arresting statement uttered in the House environment committee during its year-long investigation of pesticide regulation in Canada, was simple: "If the weakest species were adequately protected, then we'd all be adequately protected.''

Angela Rickman, deputy director of the Sierra Club of Canada, told MPs that Canada needs to set the amount of pesticide residues in food, water and air, by "taking the weakest of us into consideration.''

And the weakest of us, said U.S. environmental scientist Theo Colborn, "is not the child, but the embryo.'' The controversial and celebrated researcher used the child-in-waiting - the tiny fetus - for the cover illustration of the Canadian edition of her worldwide bestseller "Our Stolen Future."

Ms. Colborn - a grandmother who is now senior fellow with the World Wildlife Fund in its Washington, D.C., office - described Canadian biologists as world leaders in documenting chemical havoc in wildlife for the last three decades.

She said that Canadian research convinced her that, in a matter of days or weeks - or hours - a tiny dose of the wrong chemical at the wrong time can have dire effects on the human or animal fetus.

"I appear before you as an advocate for the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS),'' she told the MPs. Those Environment Canada biologists first led her to study endocrine disruption.

In the 1970s, biologist Mike Gilbertson found dead and horribly deformed Great Lakes herring gull chicks with ``club feet, missing eyes, twisted bills and adult feathers instead of down.'' And he documented the decline of many other species.

Biologist Glen Fox and his colleagues found gull nests with eggs from two females - no male in sight. The male embryo birds and chicks had abnormal sex organs and the females had abnormal reproductive systems. Nesting behaviour by two females prompted scientists to call them "gay gulls.''

The biologists' work led to the finding that dioxin, PCBs, DDT, DDE - and many other pesticides, plastics and industrial chemicals - are feminizing agents that work either by acting as estrogens or by blocking testosterone.

In the '90s, Ms. Colborn's papers and books caused a scientific stampede worldwide to study "gender benders'' and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Governments changed their laws and testing procedures. These chemicals are especially insidious, she found, because they masquerade as natural hormones, which outrace real hormones to attach to receptors on target glands. Many hormones are identical across species - for example, humans and turtles have the same sex hormones - and so endocrine disruption cuts across the animal world. Hormone impostors can produce pandemonium in master glands such as the thyroid, which directs metabolism and brain development. Damaged thyroid function can cause mental retardation, learning problems and hyperactivity in children.

The lesson, Ms. Colborn told MPs, is to study animals more, partly because it helps research into human disease. She urged MPs to direct more research money into the effect of pesticides on the thyroid and adrenal glands. The "most elegant'' research on thyroids, she said, is already coming from Canadian scientists, but still no one understands how pollutants damage the thyroid. Biologists have discovered that every salmon over the age of two in the Great Lakes has enlarged thyroid.

Environment Canada and university biologists continue to implicate endocrine-disrupting chemicals in wildlife declines, deformities and die-offs. Snapping turtles, mudpuppies, (aquatic salamanders) frogs and toads are disappearing or born severely handicapped.  By the pound, Ms. Colborn said, 60 per cent of pesticides sold are "known endocrine disruptors or reproductive toxicants.'' And the other 40 per cent of pesticides? "They've just never been tested.''

If the 60 per cent statistic sounds high, she said, it will be found to be higher still after an international scientific blitz finishes assessments on 70,000 chemicals. Its top priority will be the 15,000 heavily used and widely dispersed into the environment.

She noted there is no safe dose for endocrine-disrupting chemicals because they act at extremely, sometimes immeasurably, low levels. "It's not the dose, it's the timing of the dose,'' she said. "That's critical. Up through puberty, these kids are really vulnerable. They truly are. I'm thoroughly convinced.''

The following research was presented to the environment committee in testimony or is from related sources. 

Pesticide residue found in food

The U.S. National Resources Defence Council estimated that 55 per cent of cancer risk during a person's lifetime comes from "exposure to carcinogenic pesticides in food before the age of six.''

Food sampling for pesticide residues focus mostly on diets typical of an adult man, rather than acknowledging that children eat differently from their parents. Julia Langer, director of wildlife toxicology for World Wildlife Fund Canada, said that although residue violations are rising, the majority are below current legal limits. Violations may increase dramatically if these limits are made 10 times stricter, as witnesses proposed, to protect unborn and young children.

Organochlorines, including DDT, are found in breast milk, eggs, meat, poultry, dairy products, fruit, fish from the Great Lakes and inland waters, and root and leafy vegetables.

Dr. Kelly Martin is a director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and sits on the Pest Management Advisory Committee, which advises Health Minster Allan Rock. She said: "There are small residue levels on fruits and vegetables, in water, in your carpet and on your sofa. Each of those alone may be safe. In a peach in Canada, there are 40 residues of the same organophosphate family. One of them is safe, are 40 of them (in combination) safe?

"We don't test for that in Canada, nor do they in the States, but clearly that's what we're interested in. A kid is not eating one piece of fruit a day. They're drinking fruit juice that has maybe 10 or 15 peaches or apples in it, and they're drinking those five or six times a day. Also, they're crawling on lawns, and they're drinking water with residues in it. "We've known for a long time that this needs to be changed,'' said the former Ottawa hospital emergency department physician who currently works at Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital. "It's completely inadequate. In the States, they've come closer to it, but in Canada, we haven't moved.''

Human Effects of Pesticides

After its own review of research, the Ontario College of Family Physicians has advised people to buy organic food, to use alternatives to pesticides in homes and gardens and to form community groups that can prevent local spraying by businesses and municipalities. The college cites the following studies to support its advice. The newsletter is on the college's Web site, www.cfpc.ca/ocfp/commun/pest.html

There is a connection between use of yard pesticide treatments and a rise in soft tissue sarcomas (tumours), between insecticide extermination and brain tumours, and between use of pest strips and household and garden pesticides, and leukemia.

Farmers exposed to herbicides, through spraying and skin absorption, for more than 20 days a year have a six-fold increase of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, cancer of the lymph nodes.

Agriculture Canada researchers in southern Alberta found high amounts of 2,4-D, a common weed killer ingredient and a suspected carcinogen, in rainwater. Organophosphates and carbamates such as diazinon, Dursban, Basudin and Sevin block nerve transmission and affect the nervous system. Signs of pesticide poisoning from nerve toxins include behavioural changes to unco-ordinated movements, seizures and coma.

A U.S. National Cancer Institute study indicated that children have a six times greater chance of getting leukemia if pesticides are used in their homes or gardens. Children exposed as fetuses to pesticides, another study found, had a three-fold increase in leukemia.

Other research compared children aged four and five whose parents used pesticides at home or on the farm with children living in a pristine area. The pesticide-exposed children scored lower in standardized tests, behaved more aggressively and tended to play alone and less imaginatively.

Children born to mothers who ate two or three meals a month of Great Lakes fish lost an average 6.2 IQ points - with individual scores ranging up to a 12-point deficit. A new study shows that the higher the mother's PCBs level, the greater the child's learning disabilities.

Although the current Pest Control Products Act doesn't require Health Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency to collect national statistics on pesticide poisoning - or require companies to report them - the Quebec Poison Control Centre says that the province had 1,650 known cases in 1997 alone.

Well Water Contaminated

Canada has no national database on pesticide readings in well water. Infants and children drink between four and seven times as much as adults, based on their relative body weights. Health Canada's PMRA, said some experts, needs well-publicized guidelines on allowable levels of pesticides in drinking water.

Residues of 30 pesticides and breakdown products were found in a study of U.S. states and Canadian provinces. The U.S. reviews data from well water annually. It recently found pesticides in 16,000 out of 68,000 wells in 45 states. The only survey available in Canada, MPs were told, was the Ontario Well Water survey in 1998. It found elevated levels of atrazine, an endocrine-disrupting herbicide also suspected of causing cancer, heavily used in corn fields. One well sample was 40 times the Canadian guideline.

In its report, Making the Right Choice for the Protection of Health and the Environment, released May 14, the Commons environment committee said: "What constitutes an unacceptable risk should be based on child health criteria.''

The all-party group of 22 MPs who worked on the report asked Health Minister Allan Rock to entrench the precautionary principle in the body of the new Pest Control Products Act. It is now being rewritten for an autumn tabling in the House.

To provide extra protection for humans, wildlife and the environment, the MPs want the principle imbedded both in the preamble and the administrative part of the new law - rather than in regulations, which are influenced by political decisions.

The precautionary principle says: "Appropriate preventive measures are to be taken where there is reason to believe that a pesticide is likely to cause harm, even when there is no conclusive evidence to prove a causal relationship between the pesticide and its effects.'' The pesticide industry position resembles current regulation in Canada: a pesticide must be irrefutably linked to disease or harm before Health Canada can refuse to register, or to renew its registration, to allow its sale here.

Mr. Rock told MPs that he's prepared to put the precautionary principle in the law, although perhaps only in the preamble. He also said he would regulate pesticides to protect a human fetus, rather than base risk assessments on a healthy man, appearing to go a long way towards meeting the demands of the committee.

The minister has declined repeated requests from the Citizen to be interviewed on pesticide issues. 

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source: http://www.worldwidehealthcenter.net/article35.htm 20jan01