Are Pesticides Harming Children’s IQ and Behavior?

This mile­stone find­ing was just reported in sep­a­rate stud­ies, pub­lished simul­ta­ne­ously, from three lead­ing insti­tutes of envi­ron­men­tal health sci­ence, from New York to California. The insti­tutes all focused on pre­na­tal expo­sure to one immensely pop­u­lar kind of pes­ti­cides, called organophos­phates. Altogether, they have been fol­low­ing and test­ing about 1,000 preg­nant women and their chil­dren over more than a decade. In New York City, the fam­i­lies tracked by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and Mount Sinai School of Medicine were urban, but, it turned out, they used more of this pes­ti­cide inside their apart­ments to con­trol cock­roaches and other pests than all of New York State’s agri­cul­tural coun­ties. The School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, focused on farm­worker chil­dren in the fer­tile Salinas Valley, our country’s top vegetable-producing region.

Their research found that the higher the mother’s expo­sure to pes­ti­cides, the lower the child’s IQ score once the child reached school age. In the Berkeley study, for exam­ple, chil­dren with the high­est lev­els of pre­na­tal pes­ti­cide expo­sure tested 7 points lower than chil­dren exposed to the least. There was no thresh­old or base limit of expo­sure that did not pro­duce an effect. Even by age three, the chil­dren showed neu­rode­vel­op­men­tal prob­lems. Prenatal expo­sure was mea­sured by test­ing the mother’s blood and urine, or by test­ing the newborn’s umbil­i­cal cord blood.

These reports fur­ther sub­stan­ti­ate a report from Harvard University last year, indi­cat­ing that organophos­phate expo­sure, at lev­els com­mon among US chil­dren, may con­tribute to ADHD preva­lence.

Once upon a time, it was thought that the pla­centa served as a bar­rier pro­tect­ing the fetus from all harm. Now we know that many tox­ins cross the pla­centa in strength; and recent sci­ence has also dis­cov­ered that the embryo and fetus, whose bod­ily defense mech­a­nisms are unde­vel­oped, are par­tic­u­larly vulnerable.

Yet reg­u­la­tion of pes­ti­cides has been based on out­dated 1990s’ tests that looked only at how these chem­i­cals affect the body and mind of adults. Additionally, it has been dis­cov­ered that some peo­ple (mother and/or baby) have a genetic vari­a­tion that leaves them with a lower level of cer­tain pro­tec­tive enzymes. However, reg­u­la­tion remains a “one-size-fits-all” business.

Organophosphate pes­ti­cides are chem­i­cally sim­i­lar off­spring of the chem­i­cal war­fare agents Germany devel­oped in its pur­suit of nerve gas dur­ing World War II. They are chem­i­cally sim­i­lar to the chem­i­cals that Saddam Hussein used to kill thou­sands of Kurds.

This chem­i­cal class works by attack­ing a neu­ro­trans­mit­ter in the insect ner­vous sys­tem, get­ting the sys­tem so overex­cited that the insects die. But this same neu­ro­trans­mit­ter is found through­out the ani­mal king­dom, includ­ing in humans, where a chem­i­cal assault can impair the devel­op­ment of the brain’s pre­frontal cor­tex. The effect on the pre­na­tal or new­born human brain can be per­ma­nent struc­tural damage.

Thanks to the ear­lier dis­cov­ery by the three envi­ron­men­tal health cen­ters of this dan­ger, the EPA con­vinced Dow, the man­u­fac­turer of the most pop­u­lar organophos­phate, Dursban, to with­draw it from house­hold use in 2001. But Dow (though sued many hun­dreds of times by fam­i­lies of affected chil­dren) main­tains that the chem­i­cal fam­ily poses no threat, and it remains the most favored of all com­mer­cially used insec­ti­cides. US agribusi­ness, accord­ing to lat­est fig­ures, from 2007, uses 33 mil­lion pounds a year of organophos­phates, one-third of all the insec­ti­cides applied in this coun­try. That explains why traces of organophos­phates were found in the urine of 82 per­cent of Americans sam­pled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) a few years ago.

Defending this prod­uct against the dam­ag­ing find­ings of these three cur­rent stud­ies, the agribusi­ness trade orga­ni­za­tion CropLife America just put out this state­ment: “Organophosphate insec­ti­cides, along with all crop pro­tec­tion prod­ucts, are an impor­tant part of American agri­cul­ture and are vital tools for today’s mod­ern farm­ers. The safety of con­sumers and grow­ers alike is pro­tected every step of the way, from ini­tial prod­uct devel­op­ment to final use.” Indeed, con­ven­tional agribusi­ness depends on the vast use of pes­ti­cides along with other harm­ful tools such as the vast use of antibiotics.

Although the great­est dam­age from expo­sure to these tox­ins takes place while the baby is still in the womb, that doesn’t mean expo­sure after birth is safe. To the con­trary, pes­ti­cides have been shown to be harm­ful through­out child­hood (and even later in life, includ­ing among farm­work­ers). Exposed chil­dren may have dif­fi­cul­ties per­form­ing tasks that involve short-term mem­ory, and may show impaired men­tal devel­op­ment or per­va­sive men­tal, social and emo­tional prob­lems that last through­out their lives.

One of the sad­dest sto­ries of child­hood con­t­a­m­i­na­tion tells of the Ebling fam­ily, who, with their small son named A.J. and daugh­ter Christina, moved into a new apart­ment com­plex in Indiana that had been sprayed repeat­edly with Dursban mixed with another pes­ti­cide. Both were healthy, nor­mal chil­dren when the fam­ily moved in; soon they were con­vulsed by seizures, and today the now-teenage daugh­ter drools, slaps and bites, and has the capac­ity of a three-year-old, while the boy has an IQ of 44. They are one of the fam­i­lies suing Dow.

The story of organophos­phates is really the story of all pes­ti­cides. The equiv­a­lent of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Ontario, Canada, con­cludes that there are no pes­ti­cides less dan­ger­ous than oth­ers; they just have dif­fer­ent effects on health that take dif­fer­ent peri­ods to show up.

Parents can reduce their child’s expo­sure to pes­ti­cides, though it cer­tainly involves efforts on many fronts. In homes with pest prob­lems, seal­ing up any open­ings in base­boards and get­ting rid of food residue does the job and is more effec­tive and less costly than pes­ti­cides in con­trol­ling cock­roaches. Lawns, fre­quently doused with pes­ti­cides and other pow­er­ful tox­ins, can be green with nat­ural care.

Sadly, schools are often the scene of sur­pris­ingly heavy doses of pes­ti­cides, rou­tinely sprayed in school kitchens, cafe­te­rias, ath­letic fields, play­grounds and class­rooms, many times with­out noti­fy­ing par­ents in advance. But a strong par­ent move­ment is incre­men­tally bring­ing about change.

Above all, what you and your child eat is crit­i­cal. Nutritious food actu­ally builds a body’s defenses against harm; it can actu­ally turn on genes that pre­vent dis­eases. Nutritious is not, how­ever, the norm to many American fam­i­lies. Most con­ven­tional diets of fruits, veg­eta­bles and juices, and most wheat- or corn-based foods such as pasta, cereal or chips have been found to be both stripped of their nutri­ents, and, on top of that, rou­tinely doused with organophos­phates, weed­killers and other chemicals.

Healthful eat­ing should begin when a cou­ple is try­ing to con­ceive or, even bet­ter, at least a year before that. Dr. Alex Lu of Harvard University’s School of Public Health explains that pre­lim­i­nary data from ani­mal stud­ies show that the mother’s toxic expo­sure may cause genetic changes which may lie hid­den until they express them­selves in her child. So he con­cludes that the diet of women of child­bear­ing age is of prime importance.

Nutritious, chemical-free food remains crit­i­cal through preg­nancy and breast-feeding, and as the child grows up. If, how­ever, a fam­ily has come late in see­ing the value of chemical-free food, late is bet­ter than never.

A study from Dr. Lu in col­lab­o­ra­tion with researchers at the University of Washington found that an organic diet, when it is launched, can clear pes­ti­cides from a child’s body. Of course early expo­sure may have trig­gered some harm; but dam­age is cumu­la­tive, so halt­ing the expo­sure as soon as pos­si­ble min­i­mizes the toxic bur­den and offers “dra­matic and imme­di­ate pro­tec­tive effects,” the researchers conclude.

Resources

The three just-released stud­ies were all pub­lished in the jour­nal Environmental Health Perspectives and are avail­able online, http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov.

The report from Harvard researchers was pub­lished in 2010 in the jour­nal Pediatrics, under the title “Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Urinary Metabolites of Organophosphate Pesticides,” Maryse F. Bouchard, David C. Bellinger, Robert O. Wright, and Marc G. Weisskopf, http://pediatrics.aappublications.org.

Resources for fur­ther infor­ma­tion and help:

Beyond Pesticides, Inc., www.beyondpesticides.org, offers these prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion resources:
—a data­base of harm­ful effects of the 48 pes­ti­cides most com­monly used in schools, www.beyondpesticides.org/schools/publications/48 School Pesticides.pdf;
—a data­base of harm­ful health effects of the 30 com­monly used lawn pes­ti­cides, www.beyondpesticides.org/lawn/factsheets/30health.pdf;
—a chemical-by-chemical data­base on pes­ti­cide haz­ards, www.beyondpesticides.org/gateway/index.htm;
—a con­tin­u­ally updated, search­able Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database, with cita­tions to hun­dreds of sci­en­tific stud­ies that link health effects to pes­ti­cides, www.beyondpesticides.org/health/index.htm;
—a national direc­tory of less toxic pest con­trol com­pa­nies, www.beyondpesticides.org/safetysource.

Environmental Working Group pub­lishes a Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce, list­ing the 12 most con­t­a­m­i­nated and 15 clean­est fruits and veg­eta­bles, www.ewg.org/foodnews/.

Environment and Human Health, Inc., pub­lishes the book­let Risks from Lawn Care Pesticides, with advice about alter­na­tive green care, www.ehhi.org/reports/lcpesticides.

The Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides, www.pesticide.org, offers

—online fact sheets about pes­ti­cides, www.pesticide.org/get-the-facts/pesticide-factsheets;

—infor­ma­tion about the harm­ful use of pes­ti­cides in schools, www.pesticide.org/Our Work/healthy-schools-healthy-kids.

Pesticide Action Network, www.pesticideinfo.org, offers

—a chemical-by-chemical search­able data­base cov­er­ing tox­i­c­ity and reg­u­la­tory news, www.pesticideinfo.org/List_ChemicalsAlpha.jsp;

—a search­able data­base track­ing pes­ti­cides on meats, fruits and veg­eta­bles, and also pes­ti­cides that harm bees, www.whatsonmyfood.org.

More infor­ma­tion on pes­ti­cide residues can be found at www.whatsonmyfood.org.