By Friday, President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency
will have to make a momentous decision: whether to protect kids from a
widely used pesticide that's known to harm their brains—or protect the
interests of the chemical's maker, Dow AgroSciences.
The pesticide in question, chlorpyrifos, is a nasty piece of work.
It's an organophosphate, a class of bug killers that work by
"interrupting the electrochemical processes that nerves use to
communicate with muscles and other nerves," as the Pesticide Encyclopedia puts it. Chlorpyrifos is also an endocrine disrupter,
meaning it can cause "adverse developmental, reproductive,
neurological, and immune effects," according to the National Institutes
of Health.
Major studies from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the University of California-Davis, and Columbia University
have found strong evidence that low doses of chlorpyrifos inhibits
kids' brain development, including when exposure occurs in the womb,
with effects ranging from lower IQ to higher rates of autism. Several
studies—examples here, here, and here—have found it in the urine of kids who live near treated fields. In 2000, the EPA banned most home uses of the chemical, citing risks to children.
Stephanie Engel, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina
and a co-author of the Mount Sinai paper, says the evidence that
chlorpyrifos exposure causes harm is "compelling"—and is "much stronger"
even than the case against BPA (bisphenol A), the controversial plastic
additive. She says babies and fetuses are particularly susceptible to
damage from chlorpyrifos because they metabolize toxic chemicals more
slowly than adults do. And "many adults" are susceptible, too, because
they lack a gene that allows for metabolizing the chemical efficiently,
Engel adds.
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