Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Pesticide Use For Mosquitoes in Neighborhoods Is Not Safe

Why Do We Allow It To Continue?

"There will still be many late lessons and ignored early warnings."
- Tim O'Riordan, Associate Director, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, University of East Anglia, England ¹

Anvil is a commonly used pesticide. This chemical is being fog sprayed weekly/biweekly in at least 8 towns in here in Berkshire County in the summer months under the Mosquito Control Project. Spraying is either requested by homeowners or initiated as a result of surveillance that identifies areas of high mosquito density.²

The practice is allowed because the available science is interpreted to mean Anvil is safe when used to spray in these ways.

Those entities who actually conduct the spraying are simply relying on what is accepted as "expert opinion".

This practice poses potential hazards to residents. The use of Anvil is based on fundamentally flawed thinking on what is safe and what is dangerous. I will confine my remarks in this brief article to comments on Anvil. My principle points also apply to most herbicide and pesticide use, including the chemicals used on lawns by thousands of homeowners county-wide.

Point #1: I maintain there are reasonable grounds for concern³ that repeated toxic exposure over years in vulnerable individuals may be a contributing cause to chronic illness and premature death.

Point #2: Current health care practices in the U.S. are based on a quasi-scientific dogma that insists harm must be proven before a substance can be considered dangerous. The precautionary principle proposes we should have to prove no harm before a potentially harmful substance or practice is allowed.

Many of you, having read thus far, may decide that these two points are good common sense and sufficient reason to stop the spraying. I agree.

Unfortunately, precaution and common sense remain pieces of grit in the oil of conventional governance and the quasi-scientific dogma it assembles to support its policies. The financial ties between corporate interests and the scientific community further drive arguments fashioned to support these hazardous practices.

Adverse Long Term Effects in Humans

Many scientists are rightfully concerned about the risk of harm in individuals who may have repeated exposures to chemical toxins over time. Cumulative exposure over a lifetime to chemical toxins, starting in the womb, and the risk of synergistic adverse effects on human health certainly constitute reasonable grounds for concern about the unregulated use of these chemicals.

Mainstream medicine is reluctant to face the fact that disease may result from repeated gene-environment interactions over many years. Predicting adverse reactions across a wide population is costly and time consuming. Individuals within the population may be vulnerable, due to a combination of genetic predisposition and prior toxic exposures. Identifying vulnerable individuals is difficult, if not impossible.

Safety Unproven

The major active component of Anvil Sumithrin a so-called Pyrethroid, which may be associated with liver damage, breast cell proliferation, lowered sperm counts, cognitive problems and hormone disruption ("endocrine disruption"). ⁴ It may also harm of kill other wildlife, including bee, butterflies and grasshoppers. Health problems in humans can take years to surface so it can be very difficult to establish a connection, especially when Anvil exposure may be only one of many insults to the body over time. Chemical companies, like cigarette makers, are aware of this lag time and complexity and naturally exploit it to avoid liability.

Mainstream medicine has trouble getting its arms around the issue of repeated toxin exposures in vulnerable individuals over time. The maladaptive acute care model that still drives the chronic disease care is preoccupied with finding single causes, then treating them with drugs and surgery. The very methodologies employed to support this approach are ill-suited to the multi-factorial, long latency realities of chronic disease that may results from repeated toxin exposures over many years. As a result, hard questions about the safety of potentially hazardous substances don't get asked, because they are difficult to answer without great cost and delay.

Fundamental Flaws in the Prevailing Science

As matters stands at present, when scientists look at a pesticide like Anvil, they attempt to disprove the null hypothesis. This stacks the deck in favor of avoiding false positive results. In common parlance, scientists are afraid of incorrectly showing harm when there is none. They are less concerned about incorrectly showing no harm. This bias favors the ill-advised and premature use of potentially harmful chemicals while favoring the bottom lines of chemical manufacturers eager to put product out into the market.

The available scientific evidence consists of animal studies that examine the effects of solitary exposure to pyrethins and human studies are limited to a small number of chemical workers.⁵ These do not come close to approximating the realities of cumulative toxic load from multiple toxic agents acting synergistically over time in the bodies of potentially vulnerable individuals.

Everything Connects

Compartmentalized, reductionist science with its linear, mechanistic propositions is an inadequate base for making wise policy decisions on the potential impact of complex processes. It needs to be enhanced with the dynamic, emergent properties of systems science. This is not yet being done. In the meantime, caution and informed decision making should prevail.

Let's Stop Rolling The Dice

There are many unanswered questions about the use of Anvil in our communities. What are the true benefits of Anvil? How many mosquitoes does it really kill? Have meaningful measurable outcomes, such as how many people are spared from disease, what disease, and how severe. How many lives does it save, if any? Who are the vulnerable individuals who might be harmed years later? Do we really have adequate proof of no harm? Who benefits the most from spraying? Corporations? Town governments? Are we gambling with the future of our children?

1. The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century
Late Lessons from Early Warnings Harremoes, Gee et al
European Environment Agency 2002 From forward.

2. Based on phone conversation 6/24/09 with Berkshire Mosquito Control

3. European Commission on the Precautionary Principle
Copenhagen 2002

4. www.pesticidefreezone.org
5. www.pesticideinfo.org

Recommended Reading:

Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment by Sandra Steingraber

Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival?--A Scientific Detective Story by Theo Colborn

The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century: Late Lessons from Early Warnings--Harremoes, Gee, MacGarvin, Stirling, Keys, Wynne, Vaz Editors

The Secret History of the War On Cancer by Devra Davis

Alan Inglis MD
American Country Doctor

Tags: chronic illness, corporate interests, herbicide, pesticide