Photo:A father and son in a cotton field in El Campo, Texas. Chlorpyrifos is widely used on cotton. The EPA has acknowledged its legal obligation to protect children from pesticide drift.

MARCH 28, 2017

For half a century, U.S. staple foods such as corn, wheat, apples and citrus have been sprayed with chlorpyrifos, a dangerous pesticide that can damage the developing brains of children, causing reduced IQ, loss of working memory, and attention deficit disorders.

Earthjustice, among other groups, has for years pushed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban chlorpyrifos, as it is known to harm health, water and wildlife. The EPA is expected to make a decision March 31, under a court order deadline.

Here’s what you should know about chlorpyrifos and the ongoing struggle to keep this dangerous chemical away from our food, water, and wildlife:

What is chlorpyrifos?
Chlorpyrifos (pronounced: klawr-pir-uh-fos) is a neurotoxic pesticide widely used in U.S. agriculture. Generally sprayed on crops, it’s used to kill a variety of agricultural pests. It has a slightly skunky odor, similar to rotten eggs or garlic, and can be harmful if it is touched, inhaled, or eaten.

Chlorpyrifos is acutely toxic and associated with neurodevelopmental harms in children. Prenatal exposures to chlorpyrifos are associated with lower birth weight, reduced IQ, loss of working memory, attention disorders, and delayed motor development.

Acute poisoning suppresses the enzyme that regulates nerve impulses in the body and can cause convulsions, respiratory paralysis, and, in extreme cases, death. Chlorpyrifos is one of the pesticides most often linked to pesticide poisonings.

How are people exposed to chlorpyrifos?

People are exposed to chlorpyrifos through residues on food, drinking water contamination, and toxic spray drift from pesticide applications. Farmworkers are exposed to it from mixing, handling, and applying the pesticide; as well as from entering fields where chlorpyrifos was recently sprayed. Residential uses of chlorpyrifos ended in 2000 after EPA found unacceptable risks to kids.

Children often experience greater exposure to chlorpyrifos and other pesticides because they frequently put their hands in their mouths and, relative to adults, they eat more fruits and vegetables, and drink more water and juice for their weight.

Why do we need a ban?

A growing body of evidence shows that prenatal exposure to very low levels of chlorpyrifos—levels far lower than what EPA was previously using to establish safety standards—harms babies permanently. Peer-reviewed studies that have tracked real-world exposures of mothers and their children to chlorpyrifos have associated the pesticide with similar findings.

In November 2016, EPA released a revised human health risk assessment for chlorpyrifos that confirmed that there are no safe uses for the pesticide. EPA found that:

1.All food exposures exceed safe levels, with children ages 1–2 exposed to levels of chlorpyrifos that are 140 times what EPA deems safe.

2.There is no safe level of chlorpyrifos in drinking water.

3.Pesticide drift reaches unsafe levels at 300 feet from the field’s edge.

4.Chlorpyrifos is found at unsafe levels in the air at schools, homes, and communities in agricultural areas.

5.All workers who mix and apply chlorpyrifos are exposed to unsafe levels of the pesticide even with maximum personal protective equipment and engineering controls.

6.Field workers are allowed to re-enter fields within 1–5 days after pesticide spraying, but unsafe exposures continue on average 18 days after applications.

Farmworkers and people living in agricultural communities, particularly children, are disproportionately affected by this toxic pesticide. In addition to food exposures, they are more likely to have contaminated drinking water, and they are, quite literally, getting hit from all sides by drift exposures at school, daycare, on the playground, at work, and in their homes.

Which crops have chlorpyrifos on them?
Chlorpyrifos is used on a wide variety of crops including apples, oranges, strawberries, corn, wheat, citrus and other foods families and their children eat daily.
In fact, over half of all apples and broccoli in the U.S. are sprayed with chlorpyrifos. USDA’s Pesticide Data Program found chlorpyrifos residue on citrus and melons even after being washed and peeled. By volume, chlorpyrifos is most used on corn and soybeans, with over a million pounds applied annually to each crop.

What does the law require?

Following the release of a pivotal 1993 report by the National Academy of Sciences, Congress strengthened protections for children from pesticides. The NAS report criticized EPA for treating children like “little adults” by failing to address the unique susceptibility of children to pesticide exposures based on the foods they eat, their play, and sensitive stages of development.

The 1996 Food Quality Protect Act—passed unanimously in Congress—requires EPA to protect children from unsafe exposures to pesticides. The FQPA requires EPA to ensure with reasonable certainty that “no harm will result to infants and children from aggregate exposure” to pesticides. EPA cannot take industry costs into consideration when protecting children from harmful pesticides, because FQPA is a health-based standard.

If EPA cannot ensure that a pesticide won’t harm children, the law requires EPA to ban uses of the pesticide.

What are the current legal issues?

In 2007, Pesticide Action Network and Natural Resources Defense Council filed a petition with EPA seeking a chlorpyrifos ban based on the growing evidence of risks and harms.
Seven years later, following several lawsuits and delays, EPA had still not acted on the petition. In September 2014, on behalf of PAN and NRDC, Earthjustice filed a petition in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to compel EPA to act on the petition.

The following year, while calling EPA delays “egregious” and noting the agency sent a “litany of partial status reports, missed deadlines, and vague promises of future action,” the court ordered EPA to issue a final response to the petition by October 31, 2015.

That deadline was not met, and last August the court said EPA had to take final action on the petition by March 31 of this year. EPA’s own human health risk assessments show that there are no safe uses for chlorpyrifos. A ban of the pesticide must be issued.

A Timeline of Chlorpyrifos

World War II-era
The Nazis developed organophosphates during World War II as nerve gas agents. (Sarin gas is in this family of chemicals.) After the war, the chemical companies adapted the organophosphates to be used as pesticides, primarily as insecticides.

1965
Chlorpyrifos is an organophosphate pesticide first registered as an insecticide in the U.S. for both agricultural and residential uses, before Silent Spring and adoption of environmental and health standards in U.S. laws governing pesticide use.

1995
EPA orders DowElanco to pay $876,000, the largest fine up to that time, for violating a federal law requiring it to report human health problems from chlorpyrifos.

2000
Dow stops home uses of chlorpyrifos after EPA finds unacceptable risks to children who crawl on treated carpets or hug their pets after a flea bomb. Termiticide uses are also phased out.

2001 & 2006
EPA re-registers chlorpyrifos and the other organophosphates, purporting to bring them into compliance with health and environmental standards put in place after they were initially registered for use in the United States. EPA allowed risks of poisonings to workers to continue, ignored pesticide drift, and dismissed the growing evidence that prenatal exposures damage children’s brains.

2000s
Air monitoring detects chlorpyrifos at levels that exceed what EPA considered safe for children. California Air Resources Board monitoring finds chlorpyrifos at elementary schools and other sites near orange fields in Tulare County, California, at unsafe levels.

2007
On behalf of United Farm Workers and other farmworker advocates, Earthjustice and Farmworker Justice file a lawsuit challenging EPA’s re-registration of chlorpyrifos despite the harm to workers and from toxic drift.

Pesticide Action Network and Natural Resources Defense Council file petition seeking a ban on chlorpyrifos based on evidence of brain damage from prenatal exposures and toxic drift.

2009
On behalf of farmworkers and health advocates, Earthjustice files a petition asking EPA to protect children from pesticide drift.

2000s to the present
Centers for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research at Columbia, Berkeley, and Mt. Sinai study children exposed to CPR in utero and find statistically significant neurodevelopmental harm including reduced IQ, delayed development, loss of working memory, and attention deficit disorders. A 2012 study found chlorpyrifos exposure led to changes in the physical structure of the developing brain.

2011
EPA documents toxic drift from chlorpyrifos in its preliminary risk assessment, and EPA acknowledges its legal obligation to protect children from pesticide drift.

2012
EPA reaches an agreement with the chlorpyrifos registrants to put buffer zones around schools, day cares, homes, playfields, and other places occupied by people. The buffer zones vary in size from 10 feet for groundboom applications, 10–50 for airblast applications depending on the amount applied, and 10–100 for aerial spraying depending on the amount applied and the droplet size. In setting the buffer zones, EPA ignored direct drift onto people and inhalation exposures from groundboom and airblast spraying.

December 2014
EPA releases its revised human health risk assessment:

(1) acknowledging the extensive body of peer-reviewed science correlating chlorpyrifos exposure with brain damage to children and that the brain damage occurred at exposures far below EPA’s regulatory endpoint based on acute pesticide poisoning risks;

(2) finding acute poisoning risks of concern to workers from over 200 activities, including mixing and loading various pesticide formulations, airblast, aerial, and groundboom spraying, and re-entering fields after spraying to perform tasks like thinning, irrigating, and hand harvesting.

March–June, 2015
EPA represented that it was going to negotiate with the registrants to agree to mitigation or stopping activities that expose workers to excessive poisoning risks. By June 2015, those negotiations had stalled.

August 2015
Declaring it “necessary to end the EPA’s cycle of incomplete responses, missed deadlines, and unreasonable delay,” the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals orders EPA to act on the 2007 petition to ban chlorpyrifos by Halloween.

October 2015
EPA proposes to revoke all food tolerances based on drinking water contamination, but it holds open the possibility that it might be able to allow some uses to continue. EPA takes no action to stop nonfood uses or to protect workers from unacceptable risks. Publication date was 11/06/2015.

January 2016
More than 80,000 people submit comments on the proposal, urging EPA to ban all uses of chlorpyrifos, not just on food crops, and to start proceedings to stop uses that harm workers. Some of the comments submitted during public comment periods on chlorpyrifos: