detections of pesticides generally reflect pesticide use in the monitoring area, though
some pesticides are carried far away from application sites and redeposited in areas
where they have never been used. More-persistent pesticides, such as DDT, can travel
in the upper atmosphere to the most remote locations on earth.^16
If water quality standards offer little comfort that levels of pesticides are not
causing health or ecological problems, the situation is less comforting still for air con-
tamination. There are essentially no standards to provide a benchmark of exposure,
and no regular programs to monitor pesticide levels in air, even if such standards
existed.
Airborne Pesticide Contamination Threatens Human Health
A report entitledSecondhand Pesticides: Airborne Pesticide Drift in California,by
Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), California Legal Rural Assis-
tance Foundation (CLRAF), and Pesticide Education Center (PEL), in May 2003,
revealed that several widely used pesticides were regularly found in air far from where
they were applied at concentrations that significantly exceed levels deemed ‘‘safe’’ by
regulatory agencies. The report demonstrated that current regulations ignore 80 to
95 percent of airborne movement of hazardous drift-prone pesticides, endangering
the health of many hundreds of thousands of Californians.
The report revealed that pesticides are not only an immediate poisoning hazard for
farmworkers and others directly exposed, but can adversely affect the health of people
far from fields through the air they breathe. The report found that four of the six
commonly used pesticides evaluated had concentrations in air at significant distances
from fields that greatly exceeded the ‘‘acceptable’’ short-term ‘‘reference exposure lev-
els’’ (RELs) for both children and adults. RELs are the concentrations of pesticides in
air below which the EPA or California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR)
considers adverse health effects unlikely. Ongoing background exposure to pesticides
in air in high pesticide use areas also poses considerable long-term health risks.
Near-field concentrations of chlorpyrifos and diazinon—both neurotoxic insecti-
cides that the EPA is phasing out for home use because of the hazards they pose to
children—exceeded the short-term child REL by 184 and thirty-nine times, respec-
tively. For the highly acutely toxic fumigant metam sodium, concentrations more
than 450 feet from the tested field exceeded the ‘‘acceptable’’ short-term child and
adult REL by sixty times. Over the long term, lifetime cancer risks from exposure to
average concentrations of the fumigant Telone in Kern County, California, measured
up to fifty-six per million, far in excess of the cancer risk of one in one million that
agencies generally consider the threshold for concern.
More than 90 percent of pesticides used in California are prone to drifting away
from where they are applied. Of the 188 million pounds of pesticides used in 2000,
34 percent were highly toxic to humans. These are capable of triggering asthma and
causing immediate poisoning and other respiratory illnesses, cancer, birth defects, ster-
ility, neurotoxicity, and/or damage to the developing child.
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