Tuesday, January 3, 2017
The famous hair sample pesticide test: The enemy is us
The most persistent memes of the anti-farming,
anti-pesticide, anti-GMO movement of the past four years have been the
suggestions of “proofs” that Kauai farmers are exposing their neighbors to
dangerous levels of pesticides.
And one after another of those proofs has proven false, or
at least misleading.
One of the most misleading was a report that children were
being contaminated by agricultural pesticides—detected in hair samples.
It turns out that nobody really analyzed those hair sample
tests, and if they had, they’d find most of the contamination is from
consumer and residential, not agricultural, pesticides.
“We have met the enemy, and he is us,” said the comic strip
Pogo.
As the anti-agriculture forces ramp up in anticipation of
the Legislature, we dipped back into the Kauai JFF report—the state and county
funded joint fact finding group report, hundreds of pages long, that was issued
last summer.
One of the the most powerful and most widespread fear-causers
was a Kekaha mother’s report that she had her child’s hair tested, and found it
betrayed the presence of 36 pesticides. That mother released the test results for publication in the
JFF. They are part of its report.
You can find the JFF report at the Accord 3.0 website.
The hair tests themselves start an page 293 in the public comments.
Hair testing generally is as popular as it is notoriously inaccurate. It doesn’t correlate
well to actual exposure. See here. And here. And here.
So, sure, air sampling is an inexact science. But the famous
Kekaha child’s hair test got play throughout Hawai`i and in activist websites across the world. We found
it at infowars.com, naturalsociety.com, healthfreedoms.org, nutriunify.com,
beforeitsnews.com, checkoutthehealthyworld.com, one after another.
Most of these stories were reprints of the same piece, which
laid the blame at the feet of the seed companies, including Monsanto, which
does not have operations on Kaua`i.
It was not clear to me that anyone has done any analysis
whatsoever of the hair sample report, so I took a little time with it. It turns
out that most of the detected chemicals listed as the most dangerous are not
agricultural but home-use chemicals—consumer products. And those are also the ones
in the highest concentrations.
They’re the chemicals people use to kill fleas and ticks on
their pets, that they drip into dog and cat ears to kill ear mites, that are
used for roaches and ants, that people use in their gardens for weeds and insect
pests and molds.
The hair study was performed by a European lab called the Institute
of Health in Luxembourg. It made its own determination as to which chemicals to
call dangerous or controlled. It found ten chemicals in the Kauai hair tests that it lists
as "dangereux." The overwhelming majority are consumer products.
Here are the 10 on the detected and dangerous list.
TCPy, a
metabolyte of the controversial agricultural chemical chlorpyrifos
Bifenthrine, a
home-use insecticide, sold as Bifen
Cypemethrine, a
home use insecticide sold, among others, as Bayer Home Pest Control
Deltamethrine, a
home insecticide sold as Raid Max and D-Fense, and Bed Bug Dust Powder
2,4-D, an
herbicide used in home products as well as on farms.
Propiconazole, a
home use fungicide sold as Honor Guard PPZ
Thiabendazone, a
home use fungicide used on pets as Frontline Plus and Tresaderm
Oxadiazon, a home
use herbicide sold as Ronstar
Trifluraline, a
pre-emergent herbicide found at the level of detection
Propargite, a
miticide, which best I can determine is used mainly on fruit crops.
I will concede that there's a lot more analysis possible to do with this report, but also that given the problems with hair samples, it's not clear it's warranted. Nobody should make too much of this.
Hair testing is potentially very misleading. You
can’t tell if the chemicals got into the hair through the kids’ eating, or breathing, from
playing in an bug-bombed home, from playing with a flea-treated dog or cat,
from a neighbor tousling their hair after working in the garden, from sleeping in a bed treated for bed
bugs, or from playing in the yard or in the farm field next door. Even from a parent with pesticides on his hands washing a kid's hair.
The hair study--to the degree that it has value--confirms what the National Pesticides Information Center, and the EPA, and American Academy of
Pediatrics have found—that the most serious pesticide threat to children is
found in and around their homes.
The National Pesticides Information Center focuses on home pesticide use--not farming.
The EPA is similarly focused on the threat of home use and exposure at home.
And spend some time with the American Academy of Pediatrics report on pesticide exposure in children. It expresses concern over
agricultural use, but severe concern over home exposure.
Government inspectors keep track of our farmers' use of chemicals, but nobody's checking you and your neighbors. And if there is any danger, that's most likely where the danger is.
Remember the wisdom of Pogo.
© Jan TenBruggencate 2017
Posted by Jan T at 11:58 AM
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