Working For Jobs

by Tom Laskawy.

If you want to understand all that is wrong
with our government’s environmental safety priorities, you need only look at
the sad story of the weed killer atrazine. Despite the fact that study after
study has demonstrated its dangers, it remains one of the most commonly used
herbicides in the U.S.—to the tune of 76 million pounds a year.

Atrazine is highly volatile—which means not
only can it leach into groundwater through the fields, but it can become
airborne and drift into waterways. Much of the Midwest’s water supply contains
detectable levels of the stuff. I know a Midwesterner who will proudly declare—tongue firmly in cheek—“we Iowans
drink atrazine for breakfast!”

Laughing aside,
Atrazine is an endocrine disruptor that also appears to cause cancer.
The European Union, concerned about its toxicity, banned the chemical in 2004.
But here in the U.S. you’ll continue to find reports like this one in Brownfield, an industry trade magazine, that
declares that atrazine “is still a viable option for producers to manage weed
problems.”

Atrazine is
manufactured by one of the most powerful agribiz companies in the world,
Syngenta, which profits mightily from herbicide sales. In fact, as the Huffington Investigative Fund discovered, the EPA relied heavily on
Syngenta-funded research to establish the safety of the herbicide. So it should come as no surprise that atrazine
remains on the market and is embraced by large-scale corn growers across the
country (estimates are that it’s applied to 75 percent of corn fields in the U.S.).

Of course, Sygenta
maintains there is no risk to humans or wildlife from atrazine—the company
even put out a video touting its benefits.
Yet a pair of studies have just been released that even the EPA can’t ignore.

The first, appearing in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, is a review by a team of 22 international
scientists examining a broad range of studies conducted in the laboratory and
in the field that examines atrazine’s status as an endocrine disruptor in mammals,
fish, and amphibians. Their analysis confirmed that atrazine is dangerous at
levels the EPA considers “safe.” Dangerous how? Like this (via ScienceDaily):

… Atrazine
exposure can change the expression of genes involved in hormone signaling,
interfere with metamorphosis, inhibit key enzymes that control estrogen and
androgen production, skew the sex ratio of wild and laboratory animals (toward
female) and otherwise disrupt the normal reproductive development and
functioning of males and females.

Oh, and it also
suppresses immune function.

Perhaps animal
studies don’t faze you. (I mean, who cares about hermaphroditic fish or frogs
that switch sexes?) Well, maybe this study, published in Environmental
Research, will. Researchers from Colorado State University
and the Vermont Department of Health looked at women in farm towns in Illinois
and Vermont. And they found that simply drinking a couple glasses a day of tap
water with detectable but low levels of atrazine was enough to disrupt a
woman’s menstrual cycle and her hormone levels. According to the article in Environmental Health News:

The
women from Illinois farm towns were nearly five times more likely to report
irregular periods than the Vermont women, and more than six times as likely to
go more than six weeks between periods. In addition, the Illinois women had significantly
lower levels of estrogen during an important part of the menstrual cycle.

Tap
water in the Illinois communities had double the concentration of atrazine in
the Vermont communities’ water. Nevertheless, the water in both states was far
below the federal drinking water standard currently enforced by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency.

And the more
glasses of water the women drank, the more screwed up their hormones became.

All the usual
caveats that accompany a single scientific study should apply. But as the first
study I mentioned demonstrated, there is more than ample evidence that atrazine
poses a serious health hazard. And this latest research suggests the danger of
exposure at levels Americans—especially in the Midwest—ingest on a daily
basis.

Now, the EPA is in
the midst of a review of atrazine’s safety—and the reality of the chemical’s
toxicity is leaking out. As Mother Jones noted, an independent panel convened by the
agency to examine the herbicide’s cancer risk provided “a list of cancers for
which there is ‘suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential’: ovarian cancer,
non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, hairy-cell leukemia, and thyroid cancer”—with the
evidence for a connection to thyroid cancer singled out as “strong.”

Despite that
evidence, however, the panel’s final statement was the milquetoast
recommendation that the EPA in essence alter its atrazine warning from
“unlikely to be carcinogenic to humans” to “inadequate information to
assess carcinogenic potential.” Um. Really? That’s progress? Because other
than that linguistic alteration, the EPA plans no action any time soon (a fact
that demonstrates the massive pressure they must be under from the chemical
industry).

Damn Syngenta’s profits. There’s simply no excuse for the continued use of this chemical. Yes,
it might make operations simpler for mega-corn farmers, but at what cost? After all, Europe may have plenty of problems,
but failed corn harvests due to a seven-year-old atrazine ban isn’t one of them.

So, can someone
explain to me why the needs of a single company and the convenience of a group
of industrial farmers outweigh the health of millions—yes, millions—of
Americans? Anyone?

Related Links:

Chicken chases its kale: Chik-fil-A attacks artist over leafy-green slogan

Talking vertical farms: An interview with Dickson Despommier

Crop insurance: This year’s Farm Bill frontier

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