Hard pesticides

In the early 1980 s, a program was instituted in New Zealand to replace hard pesticides with readily biodegradable natural products and biocontrol agents. These agents were to be developed to protect domestic and export markets, both timber and horticultural. A number of serious phytopathogens were addressed, one of which was... 

Pesticides that persist in the environment for a long time after application are called hard pesticides. Beginning in the 1960s, some of the harmful effects of such hard pesticides as DDT and the other chlorocarbon materials became known. DDT is a fat-soluble material and is therefore likely to collect in the fat, nerve, and brain tissues of animals. The concentration of DDT in tissues increases in animals high in the food chain. Thus, birds that eat poisoned insects accumulate large quantities of... 

Siddall s chapter in the ARI Proceedings is entitled Commercial Production of Insect Pheromones Problems and Prospects . This paper argues that industry in the USA is deterred from developing pheromones for insect control mainly because of the unrealistic and uncertain requirements of EPA — the very agency charged with the development of alternatives to hard pesticides. The participants in the ARI meeting resolved to request EPA to establish firm, realistic guidelines within one year. Siddall s chapter contains a number of recommendations that could form the basis for reasonable policy decisions. 

Despite the usual number of inaccurate statements inherent in popular writings, a recent article in Harper s magazine 676) points up the ironies involved in the attempts to introduce new procedures for insect control and the frustrations of scientists who have tried to deal with EPA. At the same time, the sympathetic observation is made that a bureaucratic agency, faced with an option to assume a risk and possibly incur the ire of the environmentalists or to do nothing, will do nothing. There surely are risks involved in all of the options to hard pesticides, but the article concludes that scientific evidence and common sense rank these risks as more acceptable than continued dependence on hard pesticides by default. 

ISI is available in hard copy and electronically at EPA s headquarters and regional Hbraries, and through the National Technical Information Service (NTIS). The electronic form may be installed on IBM PC-compatible computers or placed on local area networks, and mn under Microsoft WINDOWS or WordPerfect s Library program. The Macintosh version is no longer available. The 1993 update will include the ISI hardcopy, PC disks, and the PC system user manual. EPA also pubHshes ACCESS EPA, which provides sources of information, databases, and pubHcations within the EPA. Chapter 5 of that pubhcation includes important environmental databases in air and soHd waste, pesticides and toxic substances, water, and cross-program (110). EPA also provides databases accessible through EPA Hbraries, which describe the private EPA and commercial databases available to Hbrary users (111). 

Extension Toxicology Network, EXTOXNET, 2nd ed., available in hard copy and electronic form from Resource Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., 1994. Contains 139 pesticide information profiles (PIPs), 16 toxicology information briefs (TIBS), and other information on current issues in pesticide toxicology and environmental chemistry. 

This directory contains the USEPA Pesticide and Industrial Chemical Risk Analysis and Hazard Assessment system. Documentation for PIRANHA is contained in a MANUALS subdirectory enter PIRANHA C where C is a hard disk to receive the output files to run the sy stem. For efficient operation of PIRANHA, transfer the files from the CD-ROM to your hard disk, (it requires 28 MB). Data files are accessed from the CD-ROM when running PIRANHA. 

Analytical laboratories need an area where incoming samples can be sorted and recorded. The size of this is hard to overestimate. In addition, some laboratories need an area where samples can be prepared for analysis. A pesticide laboratory, for instance, may want to set aside a complete room for such work, since it is often quite messy. 

This far into a nitrosamine symposium it should hardly be necessary to point out that nitrosamines are technically just one of a group of Ji-nitroso compounds that also includes nitros-amides, nitrosocarbamates, nitrosoureas, etc. Or that nitrosa-table pesticides encompass all the categories just mentioned and more. Or that many diverse pesticides, including herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides have been converted to Ji-nitroso derivatives in the laboratory (a recent review contained a 3-page, probably incomplete, compilation), or that some of the Ji-nitroso compounds thus synthesized were determined to be carcinogenic in test animals or mutagenic in various assays. 

Hard evidence for the first category seems to be nonexistent. An educated guess on the potential hazards would combine residue technology [how much of a secondary amine (or amide, urea, carbamate, etc.) might a person consume or otherwise be exposed to ], nitrosation chemistry (what would be the yield of in vivo nitrosation of the pesticide thus consumed ), and toxicology (what would be the toxicological effect and potency of the nitroso compound thus formed ). Frequently, these questions, which simplify to, "What dose—eg., in mg/kg—of a pesticide-derived nitroso compound might a person be exposed to and what would be the result if he were " are not carefully considered. 

Mass balance cannot be strictly obtained in any open field study however, in field-scale groundwater studies, accounting for as much of the applied material as possible in order to interpret the results is particularly important. With the pesticide diluted over a large mass of soil and groundwater, concentrations in some samples may be low and hard to detect, but the total mass leaching may be large. 

Another consideration when planning field fortification levels for the matrices is the lowest level for fortification. The low-level fortification samples should be set high enough above the limit of quantitation (LOQ) of the analyte so as to ensure that inadvertent field contamination does not add to and does not drive up the field recovery of the low-fortification samples. Setting the low field fortification level too low will lead to unacceptably high levels of the analyte in low field spike matrix samples if inadvertent aerial drift or pesticide transport occurs in and around where the field fortification samples are located. Such inadvertent aerial drift or transport is extremely hard to avoid since wind shifts and temperature inversions commonly occur during mixer-loader/re-entry exposure studies. 

I m particularly interested in educating the medical profession. It is very hard for some doctors to accept that there are people who vomit blood, or have a convulsion, or a cardiovascular reaction to low levels of pesticide exposure. It s terribly disturbing to have people in positions of influence say there is nothing wrong with us, when that is so far from the truth. Last year the editor of a medical journal rejected information on the prevalence of MCS in Gulf War veterans because he didn t believe the illness existed. It s like saying the Holocaust didn t happen. 

Kenkel, P., Criswell, J.T., Cuperus, G., Noyes, R.T., Anderson, K., Fargo, W.S., Shelton, K., Morrison, W.P., and Adams, B. 1993. Current management practices and impact of pesticide loss in the hard red wheat post-harvest system. Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service Circular E-930. 

The flaws in the U.S. system, particularly in the Freedom of Information Act, are not easy to fix. Legislation now pending in Congress will resolve the procedural flaws. It will, for the first time in eight years, protect academic research, which has not been protected by the law since government has not considered it "commercial." Changes to specific laws like the Pesticides Act, FIFRA, have been so hard to effectuate that we see that TSCA and the other statutes will... 

On high toxicity sites even with a very small amount of material escaping from the site, may have extreme consequences. Military Agents are high toxicity compounds which are designed to be lethal in very very small quantities. They are also extremely stable and hard to destroy. A number of industrial chemicals, particularly pesticides also fall into this category. Chlorinated solvents, PCB s and some pesticides, herbicides, and biocides fall into this category. 

It s hard to overestimate the damage to the environment that has been wrought by agricultural intensification during the last half-century. Precious landscape features, such as prairies, wetlands, and old fencerows, have been destroyed on a massive scale. Overuse of fertilizers has polluted lakes and rivers, in many cases choking them almost to death through the proliferation of algal blooms and aquatic weeds. Pesticides are everywhere in... 

The risks associated with pesticides that are in use in organic farming have hardly been investigated. Most pesticides allowed in organic farming are of natural origin such as silicates or extracts of medicinal plants. As far as active ingredients are concerned, only three are permitted Rotenone, pyrethroids and copper. 

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