Issues > January 2000 (#74-75) > Children's Food Safety and Pesticide Testing on Humans

Children's Food Safety and Pesticide Testing on Humans

Enacted in August 1996, the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) was the first law to acknowledge that infants and children need extra protection against pesticide exposures. "A toxin has much more devastating effects on a developing nervous system. The child's brain, because it's still growing, is much more vulnerable than an adult's brain," says Herbert Needleman, M.D., a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. "And because children play on floors and on the ground, put their hands in their mouth, and eat more fruits and vegetables per pound of body weight, they receive a greater overall exposure to pesticides."

Under FQPA, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is required to reevaluate the food residue limits for over 500 chemicals. FQPA also requires EPA to consider that exposures come from multiple sources: food, water, dirt, and pesticided home products like rugs. Where there is not sufficient evidence of a chemical's safety, EPA must employ a "10-Fold Safety Factor," reducing permitted residues by ten times to account for the extra vulnerability and exposure of children. The agency is allowed to set a more lenient reduction than ten "only if, on the basis of reliable data, such margin will be safe for infants and children."

In a controversial attempt to avoid ten-fold reductions by distinguishing between humans and laboratory test animals, chemical manufacturers, such as Dow, Bayer, Novartis, Amvac, and Cheminova, submitted data from tests conducted on humans -- either paid volunteers or prisoners. At a recent meeting, two EPA science advisory panels strongly recommended that human studies not be considered in setting pesticide standards.

Other roadblocks for FQPA: A new industry-supported bill, the "Regulatory Fairness and Openness Act," would mandate industry participation in EPA's decision-making process and block any ten-fold safety factor for children based on lack of sufficient data. And the American Farm Bureau Federation has filed a lawsuit attempting to stop EPA's "hasty rush to judgment" in assessing pesticides under FQPA. As of November 1999, the EPA had recommended the 10-Fold Safety Factor for 26 of 102 pesticides; for 54 chemicals, no extra protection was deemed necessary.