Children Face Exposure to Pesticides

[nosmokes]

the evidence just keeps mounting that is no safe way of using these petro-chemical pesticides. we're destroying the soil and poisoning our air and water with this shit. sooner or later we're gonna hafta make the move to bio-intensive organic agriculture. we can either do it by choice or we can wait until we're forced into it and it's gonna be a helluva lot harder then. at least thre's a bit of topsoil in most places now.
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original-commondreams


Published on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 by the Associated Press

Children Face Exposure to Pesticides
By Garance Burke

STRATHMORE, Calif. - On Grandparents Day, Domitila Lemus accompanied her 8-year-old granddaughter to school. As the girls lined up behind Sunnyside Union Elementary, a foul mist drifted onto the playground from the adjacent orange groves, witnesses say. Lemus started coughing, and two children collapsed in spasms, vomiting on the blacktop.

She and the little girls have since recovered without apparent lasting effects. But an Associated Press investigation has found that over the past decade, hundreds, possibly thousands, of schoolchildren in California and other agricultural states have been exposed to farm chemicals linked to sickness, brain damage and birth defects. The family of at least one California teenager suspects pesticides caused her death.

here are no federal laws specifically against spraying near schools, and advocates say California and the seven other states that have laws or policies creating buffer zones around schools to protect them from pesticides don’t do enough to enforce them.

“The regulations are inadequate. In the vast majority of cases, people who didn’t follow the laws received at best a $400 fine,” said Margaret Reeves, a scientist with the Pesticide Action Network, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco.

The pesticide industry says it is committed to safety, and regulators say they are doing their best to enforce the laws.

“Everyone wants to protect children,” said California Department of Pesticide Regulation spokesman Glenn Brank. He said his agency is doing what it can to enforce the law with a shortage of agricultural inspectors.

In the Strathmore incident last November, grandparents said the spraying was being done less than 150 feet from the children. Tulare County authorities fined an unlicensed pest removal company $1,100 for spraying a restricted weed killer that morning. But no action was taken over what witnesses said happened to the children.
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complete article here

[hedgehog]

1. A few years back, a government agency (FDA? EPA?) was

planning a long term study to tease out the effects of pesticides on children. Families would have been enrolled and divided according to whether the family routinely used pesticides in the home or not. Rates of ADHD, poor grades, asthma, etc. for the two groups would have been measured and compared. The children would have been closely monitored and any child whose blood level of pesticides exceeded current exposure limits would have been dropped from the study and given medical care. Unfortunately, the study was killed before it ever got started, supposedly out of concern for the children.