Eight Remedies and Reflections
We should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill
our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what
other course is open to us.
—Rachel Carson,Silent Spring^1Necessary Policy Reforms
The newly discovered connections between pesticides and disease just begin to scratch
the surface of the potential impact of chemicals on public health. Tens of thousands
of industrial chemicals on the market have not been tested for developmental health
effects at low doses. No public health information exists for close to half of the high
production-volume pesticides. Moreover, where significant evidence of harm to public
health already exists, inadequate resources and legal authority often prevent regulatory
agencies from taking preventative actions.
In order to protect the public from toxic exposures, we must take firm steps to
remedy the ignorance about health effects of widely used pesticides and empower reg-
ulatory agencies to ensure that consumer products do not contain dangerous pesti-
cides. These steps include:
- Phasing out pesticides that persist in the environment, accumulate in organ-
isms, or for which evidence of potential harm to human health exists from
exposure. - Requiring pesticide manufacturers to develop analytical techniques to detect
the chemicals they produce, and relevant breakdown products, in the environ-
ment and organisms, and to submit these techniques to the state. Taxpayers
currently pay scientists to guess at what emerging pesticide threats may be pres-
ent in our environment and bodies and then develop the testing methods to
detect them. This causes significant delays in determining which pesticides
pose the greatest threat to public health.