05
Mar
Pesticide Chlorpyrifos Linked to Brain Damage, Advocates Call for Ban
(Beyond Pesticides, March 5, 2018) Even if you don’t live in California, chances are that you eat 
food that is grown there. Unless all that food is organic, some of it was probably sprayed with chlorpyrifos, exposing not only you, but also the farmworkers responsible for its cultivation and harvest. Farmworker families –especially children—who usually live close to the treated fields, suffer higher impacts than those living further away.
Tell Governor Brown to ban chlorpyrifos now, for the sake of the children.
Five months after the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) issued its weak and inadequate draft risk assessment for the brain-harming pesticide chlorpyrifos, the state’s Scientific Review Panel (SRP) ordered DPR back to the drawing board to produce a much stronger draft that properly considers the risk of harm to the developing brain.
In view of EPA’s retraction of its proposal to revoke food residue tolerances of the highly neurotoxic insecticide chlorpyrifos, despite its own assessment that the chemical is too toxic to children, it is especially important that California take action to ban the chemical. California, the home of the largest agriculture industry in the country, used over one million pounds of chlorpyrifos on over a million acres in 2012. EPA’s assessment is also supported by the classification of chlorpyrifos as a developmental toxicant by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), which oversees the “Prop 65” list.
EPA’s assessment, which incorporates recommendations from a 2016 federal Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP), finds that children exposed to high levels of chlorpyrifos have mental development delays, attention problems, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder problems, and pervasive developmental disorders. The SAP agreed with EPA that there is an association between chlorpyrifos prenatal exposure and neurodevelopmental outcomes in children. In 2016, EPA concluded that there is “sufficient evidence” that there are neurodevelopmental effects at low levels, and that current approaches for evaluating chlorpyrifos’s neurological impact are “not sufficiently health protective.”
As stated by U.S. Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) in introducing S. 1624 to ban chlorpyrifos, “The science linking chlorpyrifos to brain damage and neurodevelopmental disorders in children is undeniable. The EPA’s own scientists have established that chlorpyrifos on food and in groundwater is a threat to public health and should be banned.”
Epidemiological data also points to subpopulations that are disproportionately affected by chlorpyrifos exposures. Low-income African-American and Latino families, including farmworker families, continue to suffer the most, and this disproportionate impact creates an environmental justice problem that the state cannot continue to ignore.
Tell Governor Brown to ban chlorpyrifos now, for the sake of the children.
Letter to Gov. Brown:
I am writing to ask you to take action to ban the highly neurotoxic insecticide chlorpyrifos because of its devastating effect on children’s brain function. I urge this action in view of the order by the state’s Scientific Review Panel telling DPR to produce a much stronger draft risk assessment for chlorpyrifos that properly considers the risk of harm to the developing brain, as well as EPA’s retraction, without new science, of its proposal to revoke food residue tolerances. California, the home of the largest agriculture industry in the country, used over one million pounds of chlorpyrifos on over a million acres in 2012.
EPA’s assessment agrees with the classification of chlorpyrifos as a developmental toxicant by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), which oversees the “Prop 65” list. In 2016, EPA concluded that there is “sufficient evidence” that there are neurodevelopmental effects at low levels, and that current approaches for evaluating chlorpyrifos’s neurological impact are “not sufficiently health protective.”
Epidemiological data also points to subpopulations that are disproportionately affected by chlorpyrifos exposures. Low-income African-American and Latino families, including farmworker families, continue to suffer the most, and this disproportionate impact creates an environmental justice problem that the state cannot continue to ignore.
Please eliminate exposure to us and our children by banning this dangerous pesticide.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
