Poison Spring Read Free Page B

conducted by the Medical University of South Carolina. In Charleston, both people and mosquitoes were being fogged with malathion nine months out of every year, so it was almost inevitable that people would react to the toxin, suffering from symptoms including nasal and lung congestion, skin diseases, migraine headaches, gastroenteritis and gastrointestinal bleeding, and cardiovascular disorders. 11
    Malathion was hardly a new worry. In 1976, the U.S. Army Environmental Hygiene Agency had reported that one could disrupt a rat’s behavior with low dosages of malathion while leaving its blood and brain cholinesterase pretty much intact. This meant, the army agency said, “that it may be misleading to assume that behavior is normal following malathion exposure simply because blood ChE activity is within normal ranges.” 12
    In Saku, a Japanese community of about thirty thousand people raising apples, peaches, grapes, and rice, farmers used helicopters to spray parathion, malathion, EPN, and sumithion (all nerve toxins) on their crops. The result? People got sick. In 1971, Satoshi Ishikawa and three other professors from the School of Medicine of the University of Tokyo published a study of the effects of these poisons on children from four to sixteen years old. They found that after lengthy exposure to the nerve poisons, 98 percent of the children suffered a reduction in their vision and 95 percent had a narrowing of peripheral visual fields. Three-quarters had neurological and brain abnormalities; many had atrophied optic nerve and liver dysfunction. 13
    A pair of pathologists named Harvey L. Bank and Diane Melendez had been testing the effects of malathion on Charleston’s people, and despite the EPA’s decision to cancel their study, they sent their results to the agency anyway. Their conclusions were clear: malathion hypersensitivity was a widespread disease among the people of Charleston, and people’s immunological and allergic reactions took place at minute amounts of exposure to pesticides—far lower than the amounts EPA managers and risk assessors had certified as “safe.” 14
    I don’t know whether the EPA managers were looking only at the alarming implications of the South Carolina study when they cut it short by pulling their support and funding, or if they had done their homework and knew that malathion was not the harmless stuff they claimed it to be. But I guess that by the time they decided to do away with the South Carolina study, they knew the USDA was going to spray malathion in the orange groves of Northern California to “eradicate” the Mediterranean fruit fly. Suppressing unpleasant facts about malathion cleared the way for the USDA to indiscriminately endanger hundreds of thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay Area. 15
     
    In 1976, the EPA was under pressure from Congress to plug the regulatory holes it had inherited from the USDA. This translated into fifty thousand pesticide products with dubious safety records. The EPA also had to deal with more than four thousand compound “tolerances”; that is, it had to evaluate the maximum amount of pesticides to be allowed in food. This also happened to be the time when news of the massive IBT fraud (which I will discuss in the next chapter) had begun to challenge all past assumptions of scientific integrity in the regulation of pesticides.
    This was all too much for Senator Edward Kennedy, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure. He launched an investigation that concluded that “pesticides regulation in the United States is fundamentally deficient.”
    The EPA has “largely failed in its responsibility to assure the safe use of pesticides,” Kennedy wrote in the report. “EPA has failed the consumer and the farmer, as well as the pesticide industry. I find it incredible that a regulatory agency charged with safeguarding the public health and the environment would be so sluggish to recognize