The EPA is Lying About Forever Chemicals in Pesticides

When The Media Says "Experts" They Mean Paid Corporate Shills (Part 32)

The EPA has not only lied about the presence of a class of chemicals known as PFAs, colloquially known as forever chemicals, in pesticides but they’ve tried to discredit research revealing the increasing prevalence of PFAs in pesticides.

A screening of 10 different insecticides used in a USDA cropping systems research greenhouse and nearby fields, whose lead investigator was an EPA research fellow, found significant “unknown” PFAS concentrations in 2 different insecticides with PFOs being the primary type which were found in 6 out of 10 tested insecticides commonly used to treat cotton. 6 different types of PFAs were found in tissue samples of corn, bean and peanut. In May of last year, the EPA pesticide office issued a press release claiming to have found no PFAs in the 10 suspected insecticides and claimed that PFAs might have leaked from the plastic containers the insecticides are stored in. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an environmental activist group of former EPA toxicologists, obtained product testing data from the EPA via FOIA request showing several PFAs in the tested insecticides and formally requested that they retract the fraudulent PFA report noting that the EPA has concealed the PFAs findings in two sets of samples.

EPA found PFAS in both pesticides sent to them and those independently obtained by the EPA. Despite this finding, EPA falsely stated in its public memo, “None of the 29 PFAS compounds, including PFOS, were detected in any of the samples above the method detection limits…”

Using public records requests of state and federal environmental agencies in the U.S. and Canada and combing through U.S. Geological Survey Data on 482 wadeable streams within the U.S. near crop fields, Donley and Colleagues, publishing in Environmental Health Perspectives, found that 14% of the 471 active ingredients (n = 66) approved for conventional pesticides met the OECD definition of PFAs and of the 54 active ingredients approved by the EPA for conventional pesticides over the past decade 16 met the EPA criteria for PFAs while 33 were classified as organofluorines, which the EPA does not consider PFAs unlike the OECD. One of the PFAs the EPA approved has a half-life range of 5-6 years and is likely to bio accumulate in the environment. A public records request to the EPA also revealed that they had registered 24 inert pesticide ingredients that met the PFA classification or were suspected of being PFAs with 11 being current. 8 of the 11 met the OECD definition with 4 being approved for use on crops without any legal limit on concentration.

This might explain why cancer cases are significantly elevated in states with the highest pesticide use. A population level study of the carcinogenicity of pesticide use across the U.S. that employed latent class analysis to measure patterns of pesticide use at the county level (n = 3,143), which were extracted from the U.S. The Geological Survey found that the counties most affected by pesticide use are concentrated in the midwest where pesticide use is associated with 21,000 additional cases of colon cancer and 3,800 additional cases of pancreatic cancer. Pesticide use patterns in the midwest and west coast were associated with 4,600 additional cases of leukemia and 7,600 additional cases of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The corn producing states of Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Missouri, Indiana, and Ohio consistently had the highest added risk for these cancers. The increased pancreatic cancer risk associated with pesticide use patterns is similar to the pancreatic cancer risk associated with smoking habits.

The main active chemicals in pesticides such as glyphosate, dicamba or atrazine may also be benign or minimally harmful in isolation and only carcinogenic when combined with their co-formulants and inert ingredients. A cell culture study found that technical glyphosate is not herbicidal or cytotoxic. They found that 14 of Glyphosate’s co-formulates were 3-358x more cytotoxic in human embryonic kidney cell lines than technical glyphosate (i.e. without co-formulates) or as the study’s authors put it ‘human embryonic cells are killed by glyphosate-based formulations (GBH) and the formulant family, but not by G (Glyphosate).’ These findings were mainly attributed to a family of formulants known as polyoxyethylenamines. Technical glyphosate was also found to be the weakest endocrine disruptor compared to formulations. The study also identified the presence of heavy metals in 11 Glyphosate based herbicide formulations and 22 pesticides overall including arsenic, chromium, cobalt, lead and nickel at up 80 parts per billion. This explains why the EPA does not find glyphosate based herbicides to be carcinogenic in its assessments of technical glyphosate and reaches a completely different conclusion than the IARC.

Anyone familiar with the EPA pesticide office knows that it is the most corporate captured Federal agency by a long shot. As I noted back in February, a District court had to force the EPA Pesticide Office to revoke the registration of a highly toxic and volatile pesticide that is much worse than RoundUp that they extended registration for across 3 presidential administrations and in defiance of a circuit court that had ordered them to vacate the registration four years prior. As I mentioned in (Part 11) last year, the EPA has been lying and suppressing evidence of the carcinogenicity of glyphosate based herbicides since 1991. This Pesticide Office not only gets much of their revenue through registration fees, they also rely on corporate funded science in registration decisions, and have maintained a decades long revolving door between management and industry: since 1974, seven out of the nine pesticide office directors have gone on to work for the pesticide companies they use to regulate, the other two went into retirement, and at least three of those former directors became industry attorneys.