The world is focused on glyphosate, but another commonly used farm herbicide could be just as poisonous. Action Alert!
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is required to review pesticides and herbicides approved for use in the US every fifteen years. The agency just completed its updated environmental impact assessment of atrazine, the second most widely used herbicide.
Atrazine is a chlorine-based chemical just like DDT—the once-popular insecticide—and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl). It can persist in soil for twenty-two years. Lots of evidence shows the extent to which atrazine is contaminating our food supply, which is little surprise given that as much as 70 million pounds of the stuff is used by farmers each year, mostly on corn.
In its 500-page draft report, the EPA found that atrazine, which is produced by biotech giant Syngenta, can be dangerous to animals and fish—and leaves behind a troubling amount of residue. According to the report, atrazine exceeds the agency’s “levels of concern” for chronic risks to animals and fish by 198 times and 62 times, respectively. Despite the length of the report, the EPA found it convenient to omit all discussion of atrazine’s risk to humans, promising to return to that subject in the future.
What the EPA did report, however, vindicates the research of Tyrone Hayes, PhD, who found that atrazine exposure was chemically castrating male frogs. At the time, he was working for Novartis, which is now owned by Syngenta—which of course refused to publish his research. Hayes quit, obtained independent funding, and published the research, but was then the victim of what seemed clearly to be a smear campaign by Syngenta.
Atrazine does not typically kill animals outright, but has been shown to adversely affect their developmental, hormonal, and reproductive systems. In its draft report, the EPA also acknowledges that adverse effects on animals can occur at exposure levels much lower than previously thought.
Heavy atrazine use can cause dire consequences for plant life. The EPA found that atrazine runoff and spray drift reduces land-based plant biodiversity, among other problems.
The EPA is expected to release its assessment of atrazine’s impact on human health later this year. But the risk to farm children is already known to be particularly severe. One analysis of towns in the “corn belt” found that tap water in some communities contained fourteen times the legally allowed amount of atrazine. In some towns, infants reached their maximum lifetime safe dosage of atrazine in less than four months. This analysis was done in the late 1990s—and levels are almost certainly worse, since more and more of the stuff is being dumped on crops each year.
Beyond farm families, there is already plenty of evidence of the dangers of atrazine:
- An independent panel of scientists convened by the EPA in 2011 concluded that there is “suggestive evidence of [atrazine’s] carcinogenic potential” for ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, hairy-cell leukemia, and thyroid cancers, though it found “inadequate evidence” at this time to determine whether the chemical can cause prostate cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, esophageal cancer, or childhood cancers.
- Another study found that “higher concentrations of atrazine in drinking water” are associated with birth defects.
- Evidence also shows that atrazine could be making us fat. A rat study found that long-term treatment with low concentrations of atrazine induced insulin resistance and weight gain. Obesity was induced in the rats without changing food intake or physical activity, suggesting that atrazine lowered energy metabolism.
- Atrazine is also an endocrine disruptor, interfering with the hormones in the brain that trigger ovulation.
We shouldn’t wait for the EPA to produce another weighty and hard-to-understand report on whether atrazine poses human health problems. It clearly does, and decisive steps need to be taken to remove this product from the market.
Action Alert! Write to the EPA and tell the agency to revoke its approval of atrazine. Please send your message immediately.
Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health:
US Department of Monsanto (a.k.a. USDA)
MRIs: What Your Doctor May Not Warn You About
