A Checkered Past

The EPA’s Erratic Effort to Monitor Pesticide Poisonings

By Jim Morris and M.B. Pell | July 30, 2008

“Pregnant lady & family sprayed by crop dusters. Wet faces. All sick: diarrhea, nausea, pains, memory loss . . .”

“Old lady experienced chest pain, dizziness, sore throat, headache, eye irritation . . .”

“Man mixed dip product according to label proportions. When he applied to cat, the cat began shaking, vomiting, and died.”

These are among the thousands of narratives that find their way to the Environmental Protection Agency every year. Some are pithy and alarming. Others are maddeningly vague.

All are part of the EPA’s incident-reporting system for pesticides.

If a pesticide manufacturer learns of an adverse effect linked to one of its products, it must, by law, notify the EPA. There are exceptions, but the aim is to collect every scrap of potentially relevant information.

Though individually they can be unreliable, such real-world reports give the EPA a way to identify dangerous products before they inflict too much harm on people, domestic animals, wildlife, plants, or waterways. Required under a 1978 amendment to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the data have figured into agency decisions to ban, restrict, or negotiate voluntary cancellations of products such as Dursban, a popular bug-killer tied to seizures and neurological problems, and Allercare, a dust mite powder and spray implicated in severe asthma attacks.

To a considerable extent, pesticide registrations and re-registrations are based on data from animal tests. While such tests can be predictive of effects in humans, they don’t always tell the whole story — hence the need for incident reports.

By the EPA’s own admission, the system is far from perfect. Manufacturers, after all, are asked to share information that could affect sales or even knock a product off the market. To get a more complete picture, the EPA collects data from other sources, notably the American Association of Poison Control Centers, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Pushed by inquiries from the Center for Public Integrity, the EPA has begun reviewing how incident data are collected and analyzed, according to Debra Edwards, director of the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs. An EPA working group will develop short- and long-term goals for improving the system.

The EPA’s attempts to monitor pesticide poisonings have a checkered past. Thirty years ago, it launched the Pesticide Incident Monitoring System, which relied on data not only from manufacturers, but also from poison control centers, health clinics, hospitals, and state and local agencies. But the system was exterminated by budget cuts in 1981. Its demise gave way to more than a decade of erratic reporting. Some companies flouted the requirements mandating that they report pesticide incidents that come to their attention by withholding reports they deemed implausible. Products like Dursban, a potent nerve poison, stayed on the market.

When Lynn Goldman became assistant administrator over the EPA’s Office of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances in 1993, she jump-started a stalled effort, begun during the George H.W. Bush administration, to upgrade the system. “I think that post-market surveillance is really important,” said Goldman, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins. “Even with all the [animal] testing we have on pesticides, we can’t be 100 percent certain of what the hazards are going to be.”

It took Goldman and her EPA colleagues four years to tighten reporting requirements; no longer could companies screen reports and decide, on a whim, to keep them from the agency.

Former EPA officials say industry representatives consistently pushed back and argued that the new rules would be burdensome and could unfairly condemn their products. Typical was the response of the Riverdale Chemical Company in Illinois, which wrote a letter to the agency in 1996: “We have, in the past, investigated complaints about product usage or product efficacy and have concluded that improper application has been the cause of customer complaints.”

At the time, however, the industry’s bargaining position was not particularly strong. A 1994 CBS News investigation had caught the maker of Dursban, DowElanco (now Dow AgroSciences), withholding hundreds of incident reports, many raised in lawsuits, and the EPA fined the company $876,000. The EPA lawyer who built the case against Dow, James Handley, told the Center that “there were probably lots of other non-compliers” with the law, but said he was never given the chance to pursue them.

Since the stricter reporting rule took effect in 1998, the EPA has gotten between 5,000 and 6,000 incident reports per year. Nothing approaching the DowElanco fine has been imposed since then.

Edwards said she believes most companies follow the law. “They may occasionally make a mistake,” she said, “but in view of how much the pesticide products are used, they have a good track record.” Skeptics remain, however. “Clearly there’s a strong conflict of interest if you’re making money from selling these chemicals,” argues Caroline Cox, research director at the Center for Environmental Health. “I think pesticide illnesses in general are really underreported, so this is just the tip of the iceberg.”