Making US Schools Safe For Roaches and Ragweed
July 27, 2001
A Senate Bill Would Require Schools To Notify Parents Each Time They Use A Pesticide
CHURCHVILLE, Va.–For 40 years activists have filled our newspapers and news reports with claims that pesticides endanger children. Now the activists want to drag the schools into their fear campaign.
The effort is being led by the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, which seems to consider any use of chemicals to protect food and people as misuse.
A stealth amendment to the Senate education bill would make our schools safer for cockroaches, rats, hornets, mosquitoes, ragweed and poison ivy while aggravating the rising asthma problem among our children.
The Senate bill would require schools to notify parents each time they plan to use a pesticide and would prohibit the use of pesticides where children “congregate.” The anti-pesticide activists promoting this legislation say that it’s “responsible.”
But is it really responsible to terrify young mothers while putting their children at risk?
Safety-tested pesticides help keep our schools from becoming sinkholes of bacteria and diseases. Low-toxicity herbicides prevent schoolyards from becoming unusable thickets of ragweed and poison ivy. Pesticides are the schools’ first line of defense against the mosquito-borne threat of West Nile virus.
The pesticides used by schools have been approved by factors if a thousandfold by the Food and Drug Administration and state health departments. The personnel who apply them are professionally trained.
The authoritative Journal of Regulatory Toxicity and Pharmacology said in March 2000: “During the last 50 years…there is no known case of toxicity in children from the ingestion of food additives or pesticides that were used in conformity with established tolerances. Accidental exposures, intentional abuse, illegal use and exposure to applicators…explain the entire inventory of human toxicity to pesticides.”
Over a 4-year-period (1993-1996) the Government Accounting Office found that only 329 children were seen in health treatment centers because of toxic exposure to pesticides in schools. That’s out of 189 million student-years. Fifteen children were hospitalized and four were treated in intensive care units, but such severe exposure almost always involves kids mistakenly drinking something that should have been locked up.
During the same four years, the leading cause of hospitalization among children was asthma, and pesticides are one of the major ways we fight asthma.
Cockroach wastes deposited inside our sealed-up, energy-efficient homes and schools have been implicated as one of the major causes of asthma. A study by Johns Hopkins University found allergen levels fell by 77 percent to 91 percent in areas treated with insecticides.
Asthma killed more than 500 children between the ages of 5 and 14 in the period 1993-1996, and triggered more than a million trips to emergency rooms.
Why would the Senate want to focus on pesticide exposures (a minor school health problem) and move schools away from effective management of the large asthma problem?
Pesticides don’t even rank high in kid’s exposure to toxics. They come in ninth, behind such common dangers as household cleaners, cosmetics, plants, food, gasoline and alcohol.
Maryland already has a school pesticide notification law, passed in 1998. Dan LaHart, environmental issues manager for schools in Anne Arundel County, says the county rarely sprays for roaches anymore. Instead they use a hypodermic needle to inject a gel bait right into the crevices where roaches lurk. Before the act, it took a school less than an hour to respond to a roach siting. Now it takes about a week and mounds of paperwork.
A Virginia school board chairman, speaking for the National School Boards Association, said the requirement would cost his district’s taxpayers $400,000 a year. California Gov. Gray Davis recently vetoed a school pesticide notification bill.
It passed the Senate in one of those late night parliamentary moves for which Capitol Hill is famous. The Senate-House conference may knock it out.
Rep. Robert Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, chairs the Agriculture subcommittee on nutrition, says the provision “could lead to more incidents of West Nile virus, rat bites and bee stings.” He points out that it hasn’t been reviewed by either federal agencies or school representatives. Rep. John Boehner, Republican of Ohio and chair of the Education and Workforce committee, also strongly opposes the measure.
These Congressmen understand that the dose makes the poison–be it table salt or a modern pesticide.
DENNIS T. AVERY is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis. His views are not necessarily those of BridgeNews.
OPINION ARTICLES and letters to the editor are welcome. Send submissions to Sally Heinemann, editorial director, BridgeNews, 3 World Financial Center, 200 Vesey St., 28th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10281-1009. You may also call (212) 372-7510, fax (212) 372-2707 or send e-mail to opinion@bridge.com.
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
Posted in Commentary |