Atrazine poisoning
Name(s):
Atrazine pollution
Nature
***.
Background
Atrazine is an herbicide, a white crystalline powder that when sprayed over cornfields very quickly displays its remarkable ability to kill the grasses and broadleaf weeds that make a corn farmer's life miserable, while leaving the corn itself alone.
Incidence
Atrazine has been showing up in the USA in supermarket corn, and in beef and milk. (Atrazine-treated corn is routinely fed to cattle.) And it has become one of the leading contaminants of drinking water. The chemical was found in 990 of 1,604 water samples drawn from streams, rivers, reservoirs and aquifers in the Midwest from 1989 to 1994. According to a 1997 estimate by the US Environmental Protection Agency, some corn farmers faced a 1 in 863 lifetime risk of developing cancer from atrazine. Nonfarmers in the Midwest faced a 1 in 20,747 risk, and a 1 in 13,850 risk if they used atrazine on their lawns. The EPA generally takes regulatory action when a chemical poses a lifetime cancer risk higher than one in a million.
Claim
1. The US government has classified atrazine as a possible human carcinogen. Some studies conclude that it can damage DNA and induce gene mutations. Other studies have linked the chemical to hormonal changes.
2. Atrazine is cheap. It is long-lasting and does not dissolve in water. You can even spray it in the rain. Farmers have taken to it the way toddlers take to candy.
3. How is it that an herbicide considered to be such a threat to human health that it is banned in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden manages to remain the most widely used pesticide of any kind in the USA?.
Broader
Type
(J) Problems under consideration