The Tribune (San Luis Obispo, Calif.) July 14, 2005 DON'T WAIT TO ACT ON POLLUTING PESTICIDES By Pam Heatherington It has become a commonplace of journalism, in seeking the grail of "balance," to cover a news story as an argument between an issue's partisans and critics, then shrug, leaving the reader with the impression that the truth must lie somewhere in between. The status quo is probably OK; go on about your business and don't worry too much. So it was with "Pesticides' risk is a big question" in the July 9 Tribune, subtitled "It all depends on who you talk to: the government or organic food proponents." An organics spokesman was quoted as saying that pesticide residues are present in virtually all industrially grown food. He was countered by a food safety expert employed at a university funded by industrial agriculture interests, saying that "you can never prove safety," individual pesticide residues are very low, and "it's the dose that makes the poison ... not the presence or absence of pesticides." The article concluded that pesticide exposure might pose some risk for children or during early pregnancy, but as a rule, residues "are at low levels and meet government criteria." Setting aside the reporter's omission of the people who harvest all the fruits and vegetables from our heavily toxic fields and the documented health problems they suffer because of exposure to pesticide and herbicide residues, there are two problems with this comforting conclusion. First, the risk assessments undertaken by the government are based on measurement of the effects of the dosage of a single chemical, as opposed to the way things work in the real world, where 70,000 synthetic chemicals interact in millions of different combinations, creating chemical byproducts and exposure effects that are unidentified and unknown. Second, many pesticides are persistent organic pollutants. They can persist in the environment for decades without breaking down. That means the real dosage we are getting is cumulative, concentrating over time as the chemicals move up the food chain (space won't allow for inclusion of the downstream impacts like the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, fish kills and fish and amphibian abnormalities). Depending on what you eat, you can (and you do) accumulate a "body burden" of pesticide concentrations more than 10 million times the level of the residue on the corn flakes and berries you had for breakfast. The Center for Disease Control documents a partial list of pesticides found in our bodies. Yes, science can never prove safety. Science can never prove anything. It can only gather data and test hypotheses in experiments, making tentative conclusions that are subject to further challenge and tests. But when confronted with a practice that clearly causes harm, the correct response is not to claim insufficient data and hope for the best, but to apply the precautionary principle: Move to avoid the harm rather than wait until we have conclusive evidence in hand. Phase out classes of chemicals that have been linked to catastrophic disease and neurological disorders, develop alternatives to persistently polluting pesticides and adopt a zero- tolerance policy for their release into the environment. This plan -- far superior to the current plan of endless study and setting exposure levels despite our ignorance of cumulative effects -- is outlined in an article by Dr. Joe Thornton entitled, "Beyond Risk: An Ecological Paradigm to Prevent Global Chemical Pollution." It represents the shift in focus necessary if we are to break away from the uncritically accepted unreality that leads to soothing conclusions about acceptably low levels and meeting government criteria, and make the protection of human and environmental health a priority over an industry's short-term profits. Copyright 2005 San Luis Obispo Tribune