Getting Practical About Pesticides

By Christine Gorman

No one could blame the save-the-earth brigade for feeling a bit confused last week. There was Carol Browner, eco-hero Al Gore's personally approved choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, coming to the defense of 35 pesticides that potentially cause cancer. Arguing that they actually pose little threat to human health since they are consumed in extremely minute amounts, she seemed poised to ask Congress to relax one of America's oldest and most stringent food-safety laws so that farmers could keep applying the chemicals to crops.

Or maybe not. After environmental activists raised a ruckus, Browner released a Clintonesque statement: "Right now the law says we cannot have these chemicals concentrated in processed food. We have to accept what the law is. But at the same time, we have gotten to a point where we have to say we know a lot more about these chemicals than we did 35 years ago when the law was passed." Welcome to the EPA two-step.

Browner is not the first government bureaucrat to dance around the issue of pesticides. But the former Florida secretary of environmental regulation was expected to be a stalwart anti-Quayle when it came to ecological correctness. Instead, rather sensibly, she plans to gather everyone from activists to farmers to chemical manufacturers around the negotiating table. "We have to get out of an adversarial posture and into a dialogue," she says.

At the heart of the controversy lies the so-called Delaney Clause, approved by Congress when Eisenhower was President and named for its chief sponsor, Representative James Delaney of New York. This landmark law prohibits even the tiniest trace of potentially cancer-causing additives in juices, jellies, flour, baked goods and thousands of other processed foods. Most pesticide laws -- for example, the ones that cover fresh foods -- strike a balance between risk and benefit, allowing for tiny amounts of man-made chemicals if they help farmers protect crops. Not Delaney. Any amount of a potential carcinogen in processed food is grounds for banning the chemical product.

Since the law went into effect, however, researchers have developed exquisitely sensitive techniques for sniffing out compounds. Today these tests can detect one part per quintillion -- roughly the same as a tablespoon of liquid in all the Great Lakes combined. At that level of analysis, laboratory studies would probably reveal that virtually all food contains dioxin, for example, because small amounts of the toxic substance are released by volcanoes and picked up through the soil. Yet there is no flexibility in the Delaney Clause to compensate for such a phenomenal increase in scientific capability.

Furthermore, researchers now know cancer is not a one-shot process. Over the eons, the human body has evolved numerous defense mechanisms that detoxify small quantities of environmental carcinogens. So several fail-safe systems have to malfunction for a malignancy to develop. For that reason, chronic smoking, hereditary defects and a high-fat diet present the greatest dangers to health. People who want to stop eating their fruits and vegetables will have to find a better excuse than fear of pesticides.

Scientists have also learned that some chemicals cause cancer in rats but not in humans. So making direct comparisons between laboratory animals and people can yield highly misleading conclusions. "Delaney was appropriate legislation at the time," says Les Crawford, executive vice president for scientific affairs at the National Food Processors Association. "We just didn't know much about carcinogenesis. Now everyone argues that Delaney should be changed. The question is, What kind of change?"

EPA officials thought they had their answer six years ago when a panel of experts from the National Academy of Sciences recommended a more realistic rule of thumb. If researchers determined that the level of pesticide did not cause more than one extra case of cancer in 1 million people over a 70-year life-span, then the amount was considered a "negligible risk" and therefore safe to consume. However, a group of environmental and consumer advocacy organizations, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, sued EPA to prevent it from adopting the new standard. "At a time when cancer strikes 1 in 3 Americans and is killing 1 in 4, we shouldn't be lowering our guard against this disease," says Albert Meyerhoff, an attorney with the NRDC.

Last July a federal appeals court in San Francisco decided in favor of the plaintiffs and ruled that the EPA was not free to use its own discretion in interpreting the Delaney Clause. Now the Supreme Court must consider whether or not to hear the case. But no matter how the legal question is resolved, the larger issue remains. "There are scientific anachronisms that get created anytime you have a 30-plus-year-old environmental regulation," Browner says. "It's time to revisit Delaney with the knowledge we have now." In a period when many people see all sorts of foods as health hazards, a more realistic assessment of pesticide risks could go a long way toward easing public paranoia.

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CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: EPA, National Agricultural Chemicals Association, World Resouces for the Future}]CAPTION: TINY TRACES

With reporting by Dick Thompson/Washington