CONTAMINATED COMESTIBLES: The U.S. EPA has announced plans to phase the use of aldicarb, a toxic insecticide commonly used on food crops.Image: louisiana department of health and hospitals A farm chemical with an infamous history – causing the worst knownoutbreak of pesticide poisoning in North America – is being phased outunder an agreement announced Tuesday by the Environmental Protection Agency.ManufacturerBayer CropScience agreed to stop producing aldicarb, a highly toxicinsecticide used to kill pests on cotton and several food crops, by 2015in all world markets. Use on citrus and potatoes will be prohibitedafter next year.Tuesday’s announcement comes 25 years after ahighly publicized outbreak of aldicarb poisoning sickened more than2,000 people who had eaten California watermelons.New EPA documentsshow that babies and children under five can ingest levels of theinsecticide through food and water that exceed levels the agencyconsiders safe.“Aldicarb no longer meets our rigorous foodsafety standards and may pose unacceptable dietary risks, especially toinfants and young children,” the EPA said in announcing the agreement.For infants, consumption of aldicarb residue – mostly in potatoes, citrus and water – canreach 800 percent higher than the EPA’s level of concern for healtheffects
www.billigecanadagoose.org, while children between the ages of one and five can ingest 300percent more than the level of concern, according to an Aug. 4 EPA memo.In a statement
www.thomassaboring.de,Bayer CropScience said Tuesday that its decision to agree to phase outaldicarb came after EPA’s new report calculated the health risks tochildren.The company said it “respects the oversight authorityof the EPA and is cooperating with them” even though it “does not fullyagree” with the agency's new assessment. Bayer CropScience stressed thatthe analysis “does not mean that aldicarb poses an actual risk” toconsumers.One of the most acutely hazardous pesticides stillused in the United States, aldicarb is a carbamate insecticide that istaken up by roots and carried into the fruit of a plant. High levels ofaldicarb can have neurotoxic effects; it inhibits an enzyme thatcontrols the transmission of messages to nerves.“After thousandsof poisonings, it is mind-boggling that aldicarb is still in use,” saidSteve Scholl-Buckwald, managing director of the environmental groupPesticide Action Network North America. “The wheels just grind so, soslowly. It never should have been registered in the first place back in1970 and by the mid-1980s there was sufficient data to suggest it shouldhave been taken off the market.”On the Fourth of July in 1985
www.nikefreeschuh.com,three people who had eaten watermelon in Oakland, Calif.
www.canadagoosejackor.info, rapidly becameill with symptoms that included vomiting, diarrhea, muscle twitches andabnormally slow heart rates. At the same time, people in Oregon werefalling ill, too, and tests of watermelons found extremely high levelsof aldicarb, which was illegal to use on all melons.Californiaordered an immediate ban on watermelon sales, which meant hugequantities had to be destroyed in fields and at stores at the height ofthe season. How aldicarb got into watermelons remains unknown
www.abercrombienfitchfr.com, butexperts suspected that some melon farmers used low levels of itintentionally and illegally and that some also might have flowed offnearby cotton fields.That summer, a total of 1,350 cases of aldicarb poisoning fromwatermelon were reported in California, plus another 692 cases in eightother states and Canada, according to a reportby the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Seventeenpeople were hospitalized. Six deaths and two stillbirths were reportedin people who fell ill
www.pumapolska.info, but the pesticide was not listed as the cause ofdeath in coroner reports. Topics related articles：
