So for parents who’ve gone VOC-free on the paint, made the switch to organic foods, gotten pesticides and other toxic chemicals out of the house…  what about the other places the kids hang out all day long?  Like their school?  Child care center? 

While there is a concerted effort going on around the country to clean up hazardous pollutants in our schools, child care centers seem to be lagging behind.  I work at Toxic Free North Carolina, who just put out a new report (for which I can’t take any credit): Avoiding Big Risks for Small Kids, which takes a look at how child care centers are managing pests in our state – and reveals a less-than-heartening picture:

_ Most of the child care centers surveyed use old-fashioned, higher-risk practices like broadcast pesticide spraying inside the facilities.  Even when the center contracted with professionals, the survey found both widespread use of pesticides, and a troubling lack of safety precautions like warning signs or safety information provided about the chemicals being used. 

_ The survey also found very limited adoption of safer practices, such as Integrated Pest Management (IPM).  The US EPA (and plenty of other agencies) recommends IPM for schools, child care centers and other sensitive areas because it focuses on preventing pest problems and minimizing pesticide spraying.  In contrast with schools, at least in North Carolina where IPM in schools is required, child care centers have hardly begun to adopt this common-sense practice.  Less than 24% of child care providers in the NC survey reported using practices that qualify as IPM – but those who did also reported fewer serious pest problems.

So what can parents do about this?  The report comes with a list of five questions that parents can ask their child care providers to find out what they’re doing.  It also includes a resource for child care providers on how to contract for safer pest management in their facilities.  The bottom line is, start asking questions!  The report makes it clear that child care providers just don’t know enough about the hazards of mixing kids and pesticides – or that there is a better way.  It’s up to us parents to get them thinking about it.

This is great news, and a long time in coming. There’s just one catch: These new safety requirements aren’t going into effect for a while. Manufacturers get three years to change their practices. EPA has determined a final “release for shipment” date for the last batch of deadly pellets on June 4, 2011.

Three years … let’s see, three years times 10,000 poisonings a year … let me get my calculator … That means about 30,000 more sick kids before we clean this mess up. You’ve got to be kidding me.

It’s not like the manufacturers couldn’t see this coming. The EPA first issued restrictions on these pesticides in 1998, finding that in their current form, they posed an “unreasonable risk” to children, but rescinded the rules in 2001 after chemical companies balked.

In 2004, the Natural Resources Defense Council and West Harlem Environmental Action filed suit against the U.S. EPA for failing to protect children from rat poison. In 2005, a federal judge sided with the children’s advocates, and directed the EPA to make the manufacturers change their practices.

Ten years hence, EPA has finally issued the regulations. But why rush things? From EPA’s Final Risk Mitigation Decision:

The anticoagulants interfere with blood clotting, and death can result from excessive bleeding. Bromethalin is a nerve toxicant that causes respiratory distress. Cholecalciferol is vitamin D3, which in small dosages is needed for good health in most mammals, but in massive doses is toxic, especially to rodents. Zinc phosphide causes liberation of toxic phosphine gas in the stomach.

The second-generation anticoagulants are especially hazardous for several reasons. They are highly toxic, and they persist a long time in body tissues …

… not to mention that children who already suffer the multiple burdens of substandard housing and urban pollution are disproportionately exposed.

The EPA has been quibbling over the details of this change for more than ten years. What possible reason could there be for delaying this much-needed action any longer? It’s time to get candy-shaped rat poison off the market and out of the mouths of inner-city kids, without wasting another day to appease the manufacturers.

Home Depot announced this week that it would stop selling "traditional" lawn and garden pesticides in all its Canadian stores.

The reason? Consumers don’t want them anymore. People in Canada seem to have discovered that you don’t need to spread poisons around your yard in order to garden. Amazing! A huge part of that awakening is happening because of committed advocates, particularly from the public health community, that have helped lead hundreds of local by-laws in communities around Canada that have ended the use of "cosmetic" pesticides on lawns & gardens.

I am trying to imagine what it would be like to walk into the garden aisle in a big-box home improvement store without the noxious bags of granulated death … I think I like it.

The bell is tolling in Canada for lawn & garden pesticides. I hope we catch whatever they’ve got.

Nalgene made its decision in response to Health Canada’s announcement earlier this week that it would list bisphenol A as a toxicant. BPA is the estrogenic plastic additive that makes polycarbonate a dubious choice for food and beverage containers. Grist reported earlier this week that the National Institutes of Health is also expressing increased concern about the chemical, which has been at the center of a battle over industry influence over consumer safety standards.

Next stop on the BPA express: Wal-Mart says it will be dumping BPA from baby bottles later this year. The chemical is still widely used in baby bottles, the linings of steel cans used for canned food, water coolers, compact discs, and plenty of other consumer products.

At least the campers can gulp freely.

It’s estimated that 2 to 3 million farmworkers plant, tend, and harvest American crops every year. Many farmworkers in the U.S. are migrants who move from place to place following the harvest. Where I live, in North Carolina, migrant farmworkers are the majority. The average annual income for a farmworker in the United States is about $11,000, or about $16,000 for a farmworking family (though pay on the East Coast is lower than the national average). Farmworkers live in overcrowded housing and very few receive health care or unemployment benefits. Here in North Carolina, about half of our farmworkers cannot afford enough food for themselves and their families.

Farmworkers are also disproportionately exposed to hazardous pesticides on the job. A recent study in eastern North Carolina found multiple pesticide residues on the hands and in the urine of farmworker children. Last week the produce giant Ag-Mart settled for millions of dollars with the family of a boy, Carlitos Candelario, who was born with multiple severe birth defects, which his parents attribute to their hazardous working conditions in Ag-Mart’s tomato fields along the East Coast.

This week you can attend events to learn about the rich history and culture of farmworkers in the United States, and you can take action to support better working conditions for the people who harvest our food. When you sit down to your next meal, please also take a moment to give thanks for the hardworking hands who brought it to you.

Photo: Southernpixel

When we treat our wastewater to remove “biosolids” — a polite term for our human waste — all sorts of other things end up in the leftover sludge, including the drugs we take and the “personal care products” like lotion, shampoo, makeup, and cologne that we slather on our bodies, which have been absorbed through our skin and then excreted in our waste. The treated wastewater is usually discharged into the local river, and the sludge that’s been removed from it frequently becomes fertilizer for agricultural production.

Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey have found that the hungry earthworms who feed on this sludge in farm fields contain concentrated levels of our drugs and personal care products in their bodies. In fact, a USGS study published in February found that the compounds bioaccumulate in earthworms, meaning that the worms bear higher levels of these pollutants than the surrounding soil does. The USGS researchers note that worms could become monitoring species to help us determine the relative pollution levels in soil, but state that the pollution in these worms have “unknown effects” for wildlife (read the story in Science News).

“Unknown” maybe in that particular study, but researchers in the U.K. published a disturbing study about a week later that provides some insight into what happens to the polluted worms: Birds eat them.

This particular study examined European starlings in the wild, who like to forage in farm fields where fertilizer from sewage sludge has been applied, because the soil is rich in earthworms and other organisms who are busy feasting on the nutrients in the fertilizer. But they’re also feasting on the contaminants in the fertilizer, and those contaminants have an impact on the foraging birds (story in The New York Times).

The contaminants in sewage sludge can contain hormone-mimicking compounds that act like estrogen in the birds’ bodies. (Following the thread here? Those compounds are the drugs and personal care products that the USGS was examining in the earlier study.)

The U.K. researchers found that the contaminants boosted development in the part of the male birds’ brains that control their songs, making them sing longer and more complex songs. The researchers also found that female starlings preferred the long, complex songs of the contaminated male starlings.

The bad news is … they’re contaminated. The same endocrine-disrupting compounds in the male starlings that made them attractive as mates make them unfit as fathers, because the compounds suppress the birds’ immune systems and make them sick. While that might be good news for American birders who aren’t fond of invasive starlings, it’s rather bad news for birds everywhere who like to eat worms. While that fat earthworm might taste good and improve a male songbird’s chances of attracting a pretty lady bird, it could actually be crippling his chances of producing a healthy brood of babies.

This might seem like just a scientific curiosity if the same kinds of effects hadn’t also been noted in many other species, including fish, reptiles, and amphibians. Sort of makes you think twice about that nice body spray in your bathroom cabinet that’s supposed to make you more attractive to a mate, doesn’t it?