October 7, 2015 / como / 0 Comments
Robert James Bidinotto wrote an article this week on the spurious attacks on atrazine and highlighted why consumers and farmers alike benefit from this herbicide. On behalf of the Kansas Corn Growers Association, I applaud Mr. Bidinotto on telling the story and history of the fear-mongering spread by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
Mr. Bidinotto begins by recounting how NRDC essentially got the chemical growth agent alar, commonly used on apples, banned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after employing a campaign with actress Meryl Streep which “claimed that alar might eventually cause thousands of lifetime cancer cases due to apple consumption by preschoolers. It was later revealed by Bidinotto that NRDCs “junk science” used experiments which gave lab mice doses of alar that were “so outrageously high that 80 percent of the animals were poisoned to death.”
NRDC is attempting the same fear-mongering tactics with atrazine now and has successfully convinced the EPA to review the chemical for safety just six years after it was re-registered by the same government agency. Bidinotto points to another one of NRDCs “junk science” reports released last September, Atrazine: Poisoning the Well. The report declares “that the chemical was linked to all sorts of potential health problems and raising the specter of unsafe concentrations in ground water,” writes Bidinotto. This is despite the fact that the EPA already employs a safety margin that limits atrazine concentrations in drinking water to no more than three parts per billion, “more than one thousand times below the threshold of any health concerns.”
Mr. Bidinotto is right on target with what NRDC is attempting to do. We must not allow consumers and the EPA to fall victim this junk science. Atrazine has been safely and effectively used for more than 50 years and banning it would only serve to harm millions of farmers around the country who depend on atrazine. In fact, there are more than 6,000 studies documenting the safety of atrazine from not only the United States but international bodies including the World Health Organization. The NRDC wants you to believe that their study is the only one that matters; but how can the one claiming atrazine is not safe be right when thousands of other studies contradict this claim? I encourage you to get the message out that atrazine is an important part of American agriculture and is needed to help farmers survive.
September 17, 2015 / como / 0 Comments
Elizabeth Whelan, President of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) posted a great entry on ACSHs Health Facts and Fears blog on the growing attempts by activist groups to convince the EPA to ban atrazine due to cancer claims and other health concerns.
Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. It helps farmers fight weeds on corn, sugar cane and other crops, leading to dramatic increases in crop yields. Without it, our food supply would be in jeopardy. Activists want the public to believe that atrazine causes cancer and birth defects, but its simply not true. Whelan writes:
“Atrazines health and safety record is stellar. The Safe Drinking Water Act requires monitoring for a multitude of chemicals, including atrazine. Levels of atrazine in U.S. waters are well within the federal lifetime drinking water standard a level containing a 1,000-fold safety buffer. The Environmental Protection Agency in 2006 completed a 12-year review involving 60,000 different studies and concluded that the current use of atrazine poses “no harm” to the general population infants, children and adults. According to this same regulatory agency (which oversees pesticide use) atrazine is “one of the most closely examined pesticides in the marketplace.”
Whelan points out that many activists are not willing to accept this assessment and were able to cast doubts upon the issue with the EPA. As a result, last fall the EPA announced it would initiate a re-re-re-evaluation of atrazine and health. These activists will not be happy until the EPA bans this herbicide, which would then open the door for activists to attack more chemicals, claiming they are unsafe.
Finally, Whelan points to the media for “scaring” the public into thinking that these “chemicals” are unsafe and that the manner in which they are evaluated should be changed:
“Many of the recent media chemical scares, like the two hour “toxic” presentation on CNN, argue that a) there are tens of thousands of “chemicals” out there; and b) the current government policy, assuming these chemicals are safe until contrary evidence was presented, must be reversed so that a chemical is considered hazardous until it is “proven safe.” But how do you prove something to be safe? Its like trying to prove a negative it cant be done. The example of atrazine with decades of safe use, thousands of studies that found no harm to humans and years of getting a green light from EPA (which is not known for understating chemical risks) leaves us with the question: After all these evaluations and years of use, if atrazine doesnt meet the criteria for “safety,” what chemical possibly could?”