Learn all you can about pesticides before using them

Published 9:18 pm Saturday, September 10, 2016

I didn’t get to all I wanted to write last week about pesticides, especially pesticide safety.

For starters, it is true there has never been a death in the United States attributed by medical or government entities to the consumption of food from plants legally treated with pesticides. I know there are questions and skepticisms regarding the unknown or unproven about food and pesticides.

The testing and research continues and I hope always will.

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We do know there have been deaths here in Mississippi caused by unintentional misuse of pesticides. Two instances occurred when Restricted Use insecticide concentrates were stored in containers other than their originals with all the markings and warnings.

One case involved a Coca Cola bottle and the other a whiskey bottle.

The victims were not the ones who defied the law and common sense by putting the pesticides in the bottles; they were family members.

Another case involved the death of an elderly man who sprayed the inside of his house with an overly strong mixture of an insecticide in no way labeled, i.e. legal, for indoor use or for any homeowner-type use.

The federal law which dictates the manufacture, sale, and use of pesticides is FIFRA, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act of 1977 plus all the amendments and rewrites since ’77.

There were, of course, pesticide laws on the book prior to FIFRA. They just had different names and FIFRA superseded them.

The potential harm from any pesticide to humans has been measured for decades via lab animals such as rats, mice and guinea pigs. Nowadays there is commitment to move away from using animals for toxicity research. The standard for not only pesticides but all chemicals made for pharmacy, cleansing, all types of manufacturing and so forth has been the LD50 test, or Lethal Dose 50 percent.

This procedure measures how much of a product it takes to kill half a population of the test animals. Again, the world is moving away from LD50 but for now it provides the best comparative data available.

By looking at the data, we find there are some pesticides lower in toxicity to mammals like us than salt and aspirin.

And there are some fairly toxic ones, those being the ones requiring training, testing and licensing to purchase and use.

Like so many things we buy these days, pesticides come with way more information in small print than most of us want to read. The label on a pesticide product is a legal document though. If you misuse a pesticide, the law you broke is somewhere in the attached pamphlet.

The safety information is in the front of the brochure, right after the chemistry mumbo jumbo that spells out technically what is in the bottle. In addition to the label, which is available in larger print online, another document is required of pesticide registrations, that being the MSDS, the Material Safety Data Sheet. I suggest Googling the label and MSDS for all you want to know about a pesticide.

Terry Rector is a spokesman for the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District.