Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the safety factor should be increased by a factor of ten, per-
haps increasing from 1,000 to 10,000.
Why must we experiment on animals? Because controlled
experiments are absolutely necessary for determining when
a pesticide
causes
health harms. In the real world, greater
exposure to pesticides may be correlated with poor health,
but the correlation may not be causation. Someone who
eats nonorganic food may also tend to eat fewer vegetables,
smoke, and rarely exercise. If those people are more likely to
develop cancer, was it the pesticides that caused it? Or was it
too few vegetables, or insufficient exercise? One cannot tell,
and so controlled experiments are necessary for determin-
ing what happens to an animal when pesticide use increases
but everything else stays the same. They are so necessary that
around 90 percent of toxicologists disagree with the statement
“Animal testing is not needed.”
This threshold mostly relates to the prevention of noncan-
cer health problems. If a pesticide is shown to cause cancer
in laboratory animals when given in high doses, the EPA will
assume there is no safe dosage, and the pesticide is denied reg-
istration. The EPA certainly is not lax when it comes to allow-
ing pesticides to be applied and generally will not approve a
pesticide if it increases people's risk of having cancer by even
one in one million.
Regulators don't just measure the potential harms to
humans but to the environmental as well. The EPA considers
a broad array of environmental impacts and even assesses the
potential harm to threatened and endangered species. When
the neonic class of pesticides was approved for use, it could
not have been anticipated that they might cause a collapse in
bee colonies. Later, when research determined they might be
partly responsible, the European Union placed a two-year ban
on their use, and the EPA is studying the situation to see if new
restrictions are desirable.
Pesticide regulation does not just take into account the
safety of a pesticide but its benefits also. A chemical can
