Crackdown on a Popular Pesticide
EPA weighs strict limits on use of Dursban
It fills shelves at home-improvement and discount stores. Chances are, it's in your garage or beneath your sink. In the past 35 years, chlorpyrifos--better known by the trade name Dursban--has become one of America's favorite bug killers. The active ingredient in 1,000 products, it's applied an estimated 20 million times a year in homes, schools, and offices. Last week, however, came word of an impending Environmental Protection Agency report that confirms what many have suspected for some time: The chemical poses an unacceptable threat to the human brain--especially the developing brain of a child--and should be severely restricted.
The dangers of Dursban, detailed in a U.S. News investigation published Nov. 8, 1999, are echoed in the new risk assessment prepared by the EPA. Sources say the study has found that chlorpyrifos exposures for children may exceed safe levels by as much as 10,000 percent depending on the type of application. As a result of this finding, most home and garden uses could be eliminated, and agricultural uses--on apples, primarily--curtailed. At week's end the EPA and the manufacturer of Dursban, Dow AgroSciences, were negotiating the details.
Numerous complaints. Dow continues to insist that the compound is safe when used according to the label. But the EPA believes otherwise. When the agency invited public comment on chlorpyrifos late last year, it got dozens of responses. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said that it should be banned, and a Massachusetts man reported that his young daughter began having seizures after a neighbor's lawn was treated with it. "The more we've learned about it since it came on the market, the more we realize it's dangerous," says Ken Cook, director of the Washington-based Environmental Working Group. Fearing that manufacturers will be allowed to sell existing stocks of chlorpyrifos, the group has asked the CEOs of Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and Lowe's to voluntarily pull Dursban products from their shelves. None has responded.
Chlorpyrifos belongs to a family of pesticides called organophosphates (OPs). Relatives of nerve gas, they attack the nervous system. Under the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, the EPA must re-evaluate the toxicity of 39 other OPs, among them Diazinon and Malathion. Like Dursban, these products have a cloudy future. Environmentalists say the country need not fear being overrun by vermin.
"The choice isn't Dursban or cockroaches," says Daniel Swartz, executive director of the Children's Environmental Health Network, whose members include the American Academy of Pediatrics. "What people will start hearing from chemical companies is [that] if you have these pests, you'll give your kids allergies. It's not true, you can use something far less toxic and get rid of them."
This story appears in the June 12, 2000 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.