Why is the EPA still prostituting itself to industry?
An excellent deep dive by science writer Sharon Lerner shows it's business as usual at the agency that almost always defers to industry, even when human health and the environment are at stake
Last month, Sharon Lerner, an investigative reporter for The Intercept and one of the best science, health, and environmental journalists in the business, published a lengthy article with the ironic but sadly appropriate title “The Department of Yes: How Pesticide Companies Corrupted the EPA and Poisoned America.”
This is not entirely new ground, and many environmental writers, beginning with Rachel Carson in her classic book “The Silent Spring,” have covered the sad and often tragic stories of pesticides and other chemicals that were approved by government regulators and then turned out to be harmful to humans, the environment, or both.
In her piece, Lerner goes over many of these stories, focusing on the interaction between the EPA and the industries it is supposed to be regulating. There are many familiar chemical names discussed in her story, and many details of the way that industry pretty much led the EPA around by the nose in getting approval for each one: Chlorpyrifos, glyphosate, paraquat, bifenthrin, pelargonic acid, acetamiprid, flupyradifurone, and malathion.
It’s Lerner’s story, and I hope you will read it. But I must admit that her discussion of the last of these pesticides, malathion—an organophosphate insecticide used to control mosquitoes, fleas and ticks, fruit flies and other plant pests—really stopped me cold. Lerner tells readers that in February 2020, “a working group at the EPA classified malathion as ‘likely to be carcinogenic to humans’ based on evidence that mice and rats exposed to it developed liver tumors.”
As Lerner relates, one of the manufacturers of malathion, Cheminova, hired a company to reinterpret the evidence and then got the EPA to convene another meeting about malathion—this time excluding the EPA toxicologist who had led the original evaluation. At this meeting, Lerner writes, the dangers of malathion were downgraded to “suggestive evidence of carcinogenicity,” which allows it to stay on the market while the EPA continues to “evaluate” it.
Why did Lerner’s mention of malathion stop me cold? Because back in 1984, when I was just launching my career as a freelance investigative journalist, I wrote about malathion and its potential dangers. That was 37 years ago.
Malathion and me
In early 1984, I was wrapping up a three year stint at the ACLU of Southern California, where we had sued the Los Angeles Police Department for spying on peaceful political groups—something it had done for decades. The city ended up settling the case for $1.3 million for the plaintiffs and $1.3 million in attorneys’ fees, after a combination of discovery documents in the lawsuit and enterprising reporting by the Los Angeles Times revealed that the cops were spying not only on activists, but members of the City Council and the Police Commission.
As chief investigator, spokesperson, and amateur paralegal on the lawsuit, I walked away with a nice severance package from the ACLU and a small piece of the attorney’s fees—enough to keep me going for about six months. I realized that this was the one chance I had to fulfill my dream of being a real writer.
Just about then, California agricultural officials announced that they were going to spray malathion over the eastern stretches of Los Angeles, where fruit flies had been found in local citrus trees. For the protectors of California’s agricultural industry, which back then was worth $14 billion per year in 1984 dollars, this meant war, and malathion was their chief weapon. But just a little research told me that the jury was out on malathion’s safety. With the help of my old friend Marc Cooper, who was then news editor at the L.A. Weekly, I pitched a story on the topic, touting my bona fides as a recently minted masters degree recipient in biology from UCLA.
In that story, which ran in the March 30 - April 5, 1984 issue of the Weekly, I tried to be fair and balanced. But as I concluded even then, “A close look at the evidence reveals that claims for the pesticide’s safety are greatly overstated.” While the short-term effects of high doses of malathion exposure were well studied, long-term effects, including birth defects and cancer, were only in the early stages of being examined. I told readers that at least eight studies pointed to malathion as a possible mutagen, that is, a chemical that can cause DNA damage. I also cited a 1981 report in Science that malathion caused a statistically significant increase in liver cancer in rats and mice.
But as the helicopters got ready to take off from Compton Airport on their night time raid to spray the areas just west of downtown L.A. with malathion—including Echo Park, where I was then living—California agricultural officials, health officials, and industry reps were working overtime to assure residents that it was perfectly safe and that the actual doses of the chemical would be low. They did, however, tell us to keep our pets indoors overnight, and warned pregnant women to do the same, a contradiction that was not lost on anyone in our neighborhoods.
Five years later, in 1989, the so-called Medfly (Mediterranean fruit fly) was back. A few specimens had been trapped in pretty much the same locales, Elysian Park, Echo Park, and Silver Lake. By then I had been writing for the Los Angeles Times for a number of years, and I was well-known for my local investigative reporting, including on contamination of L.A.’s water supply by chemical pollutants. So the Times seemed happy to publish my commentary on the new aerial spraying campaign, entitled “Drops of Mistrust Cloud Malathion Spray.” By then there was new evidence, as I related:
“… study after study has shown that malathion is capable of causing a variety of types of genetic damage in both human and animal cells. For example, researchers at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo found that malathion, which is generally considered one of the weaker of its class of insecticides, was one of the most potent in causing disruption of the cycle of dividing cells.”
As for the possibility that malathion could cause problems for pregnant women and their babies:
“Epidemiological studies are notoriously insensitive to relatively small effects and are easily biased by other factors that can affect the analysis. Nevertheless, after carefully controlling for these errors, the researchers found a positive correlation between malathion exposure and stillbirths and a significant correlation between exposure and defects of the gastrointestinal tract in the newborn children.”
I concluded: “By making exaggerated claims for malathion’s safety and by misrepresenting the scientific evidence, our officials contribute heavily to the clouds of mistrust and anger that trail the helicopters each time they take to the air.”
I’m not sure whether I should be glad that the EPA is still evaluating the health effects of malathion all these decades later, or alarmed about all the people who have been exposed to the pesticide while the agency dithers and manufacturers continue to profit from selling it and other chemicals while scientific evidence continues to mount that they are harmful. Perhaps some of both.
I do have one memory from the aerial spraying over my home in 1984, however, which has stayed with me vividly all this time. The morning after the helicopters made their runs, I went for a walk in Elysian Park, which borders on Dodger Stadium. I was totally alone, but the droplets of malathion—or rather droplets of the liquid the pesticide had been dissolved in—were thick on the leaves of the trees and shrubs, and the smell of the chemical was pungent in the air.
They had told us it was safe for dogs and cats, but as I walked along, I spotted a chipmunk poking the upper half of its body out of a hole in the ground. The chipmunk was in the full state of having an attack of some kind, its body twitching and shaking violently, with a strange, open-mouthed look on its face I had never seen on an animal.
Of course, as an organophosphate, malathion is a nerve toxin, and there seemed little doubt to me that the chipmunk had been poisoned and probably was about to die. But I did not put that experience into the L.A. Weekly article, which I recall writing later that day. It was just an anecdotal observation, not “scientific,” not a randomized controlled trial, and I was concerned for the credibility of my reporting if I mentioned it at all.
I had a good excuse not to mention it, journalistically speaking. But for decades the EPA has had enough scientific evidence—including, as things stand currently, “suggestive evidence of carcinogenicity”—to know that it continues to risk public health by allowing industry to expose people to it.
What is the EPA’s excuse?
